The Final Prophet

Morning.

Hear now the word of the true and living God.

Mark 6, starting in verse 14.

King Herod heard of it, for Jesus' name had been had become known.

Some said John the Baptist has been raised from the dead.

That is why these miraculous powers are at work in him.

But others said he is Elijah, and others said, He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.

But when Herod heard of it, he said, John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.

For it was Herod who had sent and seized John and bound him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, because he had married her.

For John had been saying to Herod, It is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife.

And Herodias had a grudge against him and wanted to put him to death, but she could not.

For Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he kept him safe.

When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed, and yet he heard him gladly.

But an opportunity came when Herod, on his birthday, gave a banquet for his nobles and military commanders and the leading men of Galilee.

For when Herodias's daughter came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests, and the king said to the girl, Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it to you.

And he vowed to her, Whatever you ask me, I will give you up to half of my kingdom.

And she went out and said to her mother, For what should I ask?

And she said, The head of John the Baptist.

And she came in immediately with haste to the king and asked, saying, I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.

And the king was exceedingly sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests, he did not want to break his word to her.

And immediately the king sent an executioner with orders to bring John's head.

He went and beheaded him in the prison, and brought his head on a platter and gave it to the girl, and the girl gave it to her mother.

When his disciples heard of it, they came and took his body and laid it in a tomb.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Uh did everybody have a good Thanksgiving?

Good.

Did anybody have a particularly bad one, like a dramatic one?

Oh, you laughed.

Yeah, those things happen sometimes.

Uh isn't it wild how when you get families together, uh uh emotions that you thought had gone dormant, you realize are easily resurrected.

Um so before I get into today's sermon, um, and we'll we'll pray and move into the text for today, I've got a couple of announcements.

Uh we've got a members meeting coming up on December 12th.

So mark your calendars right after church.

If you are a member here, then come to the members meeting, December 12th.

Uh also, uh, we are doing a toy drive setup.

I think that we should have a picture.

Um and we'll uh have uh boxes out front that you can drop toys in um and uh participate in them.

Buy toys.

You can go on Amazon during my sermon uh and buy a couple toys.

Um and uh also our Christmas Eve service, we're having we'll have a Christmas Eve candlelight service at 4:30.

Now, Christmas Eve is on a Friday, Christmas is on a Saturday, and the next day is a Sunday.

We won't have church that Sunday.

Sorry, I I want to be with my family.

Um so uh yeah, that's what we're so just so you can mark your calendars.

Uh all right, now let's get in and let's talk about what's really on everyone's minds today.

Let's talk about masks.

All right, so everybody who's masked lineup together and everybody who isn't, um go to the other side of the room.

Okay, so here's the deal.

The elders met together on Saturday to discuss what we're going to do uh with regards to the current mask mandate that came down.

And we had a policy throughout the uh initial stages of the pandemic before we had a vaccine and such to um it enforce uh within our own walls the particulars of the mandate.

Now, this time we are taking a uh different approach to the mask mandate.

Here's our priority as the elders of our church.

Our priority is to not make this a dividing line issue among the people in our church.

So, what do we have a unique opportunity to do in the church?

Uh, it isn't to solidify your particular perspective on masks.

There are two sides to this shit to this issue.

It's pretty binary.

It's on or it isn't.

So the two sides to this issue have solidified in ways uh throughout this process that have become convictions in many people's hearts and minds.

Uh the convictions have differing weights of uh of proportion in each of your hearts.

And that's the type of thing that as a church we are not in the position to discern the validity of.

So that means that we've entered a new type of category in our faith, a category which our faith provides for, which is the category of Christian liberty and convictions.

Now you stand before the Lord with regards to the decision that you make with this, and each of you stand before the Lord with regards to the particular conviction that you have arrived at here.

And so, with this diversity of opinions, what do we require of one another?

We require love of one another, respect of one another, we require a not labeling or considering the defining feature of somebody's life or faith, their particular position on whether or not to wear a mask.

So this is a uh I told Zach before I was making this announcement.

Um, I was like, are you ready to see a tightrope walk this morning?

Uh because that's a bit of what I feel like we're doing up here.

You know, the the position is we're we're we're asked as an organization to hang up some signs.

I will do that.

Uh we haven't yet, uh, but give us a week.

It's only been a couple of days, and it was Thanksgiving, right?

Um and here's a a driving factor behind this decision.

The the elders of the church are given one main tool to enact church discipline.

And that tool is removal from the body of worship.

And so when we're asked to remove people from the body of worship for particular issues of sin, what that is what that statement then would be making is this is such a close, defining feature of our faith that we will take such a stand as to remove somebody from the table of fellowship.

We will not remove somebody from the table of fellowship for a differing opinion on this issue.

That's the main point.

And so what do we have to demonstrate here?

There's well, you know, uh we're north, about as northwest Denver as you can possibly be.

And the way that the that the mass dividing line falls is pretty geographical.

Uh Sheridan is a is a clear dividing line.

I I joke, and I'll joke now, and we'll see if it works as a joke, that uh on the east side of Sheridan, we do whatever Michael Barbaro tells us to do.

Does everybody get that reference from the daily?

And on the uh west side of Sheridan, we do whatever Ben Shapiro tells us to do.

So we've got uh, and here's the thing, we've we've in in the church, it is i it there's this temptation to say that your particular stance on this issue is so clear, so self-evident, so obvious, that this ought to be a defining factor of your faith in the same way as to say, I'm I'm a Protestant, I'm not a Catholic.

Uh in the same way as to say, I believe that uh Christ is the only way to salvation, and that's by grace alone, through faith alone.

We're not going to raise this to that level of an issue, which means that as Christians, we're calling you as a church to operate in a category that is not being promoted anywhere in culture.

We're asking you to seek unity in something greater and to trust that you each have differing convictions before the Lord.

Our job in the church as disciple makers, you know, there's this impression of disciple making, which is like we have we have the Christian-shaped cookie cutter.

And people come in all sorts of different lumps of dough, and our job is to get you to fit and compress or to be cut out into the shape of this Christian-shaped cookie cutter.

And so we all come into the church like a factory, and then we all walk out the same shape.

Uh, that is not what the process of disciple making is.

The process of disciple making is that you stand before the Lord.

And our intention is to equip you with the wisdom and the scriptural and the biblical principles and the gospel so that by the Spirit's work in you, you are more and more conformed into his image.

And so, what do we get to have as a church?

We get to have this strange community, a strange community full of people with differing opinions on something that the culture says is the most important thing you can have an opinion about.

We're going to say we will be united in spite of that.

You know, people want people desperately all over the place, they want real community.

Real community.

Authentic community.

We say stuff like that all the time.

We want authentic community.

You know what authentic community is?

It starts to happen right about when you get offended by each other.

Right on the other side of that, we begin to have authentic community.

And the temptation is wouldn't it be so much easier if we just made everybody think the same things?

Yeah, it might feel easier for a while.

But you know what starts to what the church starts to look like?

I didn't plan on giving a sermon, sorry.

Um, but to a man with a hammer.

Yeah.

Um here's what here's what the church then begins to look like when we're seeking a unity like this.

Do you remember Thanksgiving?

You were sitting around a table full of a bunch of people you didn't choose, who you're you're barely like, who offend you in all sorts of ways, because you're so close to them.

And yet you have to figure out a way to still be united.

The church begins to look like a family.

So that's what we're gonna try and do.

Um we're gonna give it a shot.

Uh and by the Spirit, we we we we hope that he will attend this.

Okay.

Sound good?

So be nice to each other.

Let's pray.

Holy Father, you are a good king, a Lord of Lords, a King of Kings.

Lord, it is to you our hearts that we bow.

Lord, we pray that all we do, that in our hearts we would seek to honor you and love you and care for you.

Lord, you are a great God, a great king above all gods.

And yet you make your dwelling place among people like us.

Lord, I pray that above all in this moment you would join us in the wrestling.

Lord, that we wouldn't feel like a type of people who need to develop the answers, and then we can come to you.

Lord, how I have wrestled and wished I could provide the right answer.

I felt such an inadequacy to not be able to.

Lord, we pray that you would meet us in that.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

This Sunday is all about hope.

Now, hope is an interesting sort of topic because hope means things aren't good right now.

You don't have hope when everything's uh in alignment, because hope means we think it will be good, but it's also simultaneously a declaration that right now it isn't.

In this picture of hope, we we see in John the Baptist's story what a person formed in character by a resolute hope really looks like.

And that's what we're looking to see in John the Baptist's story, in this Sunday of Advent, where we think about hope.

What does resolute hope in a person's life look like?

And we see it here in John the Baptist.

In John the Baptist's story, we see this picture of our discipleship under Christ that always holds together these two things that are inseparable, suffering and glory.

Those are never separate from each other.

They're always brought together, these two aspects of our discipleship under Christ, suffering and glory.

And we see those perfectly captured in the story of John the Baptist.

So we're going to look at the rumors that John the Baptist gets caught up in.

We're going to look at the relational triangles that John the Baptist gets caught up in, and then we're going to look at what his hope looks like in the midst of that.

So the first thing that we're going to look at is rumors, the best Fleetwood Mac album.

Mark 6, 14 through 15.

King Herod heard of it, for Jesus' name had become known.

Some said, John the Baptist has been raised from the dead.

That is why these miraculous powers are at work in him.

But others said, He is Elijah, and others said, He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.

And he sent out the twelve apostles to bear witness to the kingdom of God, and he gave them authority to cast out demons and to heal people.

And before they're ready, when they're wildly inadequate to such a task, they go out into the surrounding villages of Galilee and they proclaim the name of Jesus.

And this pack of strays is effective.

It really works until rumors about Jesus begin to make their way up to the highest realms of society, all the way up to King Herod.

Now he calls himself a king.

He's really a Tetrarch, which means he's like a quarter of a king.

But if you were to talk to him and if you were under him, he was a king.

King was enough.

He had that type of authority in the region of Galilee.

And this rumor makes it up.

And the question that's driving this rumor is who is this Jesus?

Who's granting authority?

Who's healing people?

Who's teaching with authority?

Who is this Jesus that's moving through the world?

And so that type of uh wondering becomes a category hunt.

Okay, we've got all this strange data of Jesus.

He's prophesying, he's speaking with authority, he is uh uh uh doing these signs and wonders and miracles.

Okay, what categories do we have for that sort of thing?

So some say this is John the Baptist, he's been raised from the dead.

Because John the Baptist's ministry and Jesus' ministry, they seem to be kind of flowing into one another.

So one idea, John the Baptist raised from the dead.

Another idea, this is Elijah.

You know how Elijah just came down and was picked up by the chariots of fire?

Dun dun dun dun dun dun and was taken up into heaven.

This is him finally coming back.

This is the second Elijah that we've been promised.

Uh or others said he's he's just another prophet, like all the prophets of old.

You know, we've read these stories.

Our parents have told them to us of these stories of these prophets of old that performed miracles and that spoke with authority.

They were able to say, Thus saith the Lord.

Maybe he's one of those.

Now, this rumor makes it all the way up to King Herod.

And Herod says this, but when Herod heard of it, he said, John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.

Now, this shows us something about exposure to Jesus and trying to find the right category to describe who Jesus is.

It shows us that whenever we're trying to discover who is this Jesus who we're talking about, it always ends up being a form of self-reflection.

You can't engage with who, with the question, who is Jesus really, without discovering and seeing unfolded before you the implications for yourself of what the answer to that question might be.

And we see it happening here with King Herod.

As the story of Jesus moves, this conviction rises up in his own heart, saying, I think you know which one makes the most sense to me?

This is John the Baptist, whom I beheaded.

He feels his own sin exposed as he wrestles with this question of who is Jesus.

And his own sin gets exposed and he ties it in directly into his own story.

Now, King Herod and John the Baptist, they are these perfect opposites of each other.

And Mark dovetails into the story of what happens when they when the unstoppable force meets an immovable object, to quote the Joker.

They what we see is that one of them, John the Baptist, is dead set on seeking the glory of God.

And King Herod is also seeking glory, but he's seeking his own glory.

And what happens when those two circumstances come together?

That's what we get to see as this unfolds.

And it exposes both of their hearts.

Okay, now let's start to see how this takes place.

And it takes place through these relational triangles.

Mark 6, 17 through 18.

For it was Herod who had sent and seized John and bound him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, because he had married her.

For whoops, lost my spot.

Because he had married her, for John had been saying to Herod, it is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife.

Okay, so we see where the conflict is.

The conflict is between King Herod and his current wife Herodias.

Now, the Herod family is like the most dramatic.

And though but it's what I imagine the family dynamics to be like.

It's absurd, just murder and uh marrying siblings and taking each other's spouses.

And so this is one of the symptoms of that uh sort of sort of dynamic of the the rule of uh King Herod, Antipas.

Now, what happens here is uh Herod sees his brother Philip's wife, and he takes her for himself.

That's Herodias.

So this is an unlawful thing to do.

So John had been saying to Herod, it is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife.

You're doing the wrong thing here.

This is not a lawful thing for you to be doing.

So we see the conflict between Herod, Herodias, and John the Baptist's proclamation that it is unlawful for you to have your brother's wife.

Now, what does he mean it's unlawful?

You know, if the king does it, doesn't that make it not illegal?

It's from Frost Nixon.

Leviticus 18, 6, 16.

This is what it says.

You shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife.

It is your brother's nakedness.

So John the Baptist is appealing to Levitical law, God's law, and telling his Roman ruler, it is not lawful for you to be living this way.

Now, our evangelical radar should be going up, right?

Because how well trained are we to say, look, if you're if you're not, if you don't consider yourself a Christian, then we're not gonna hold you to something that you don't even proclaim for yourself.

You see, we subconsciously, I think, I think this kind of drifted into evangelicalism, where we think of God's law as something that only matters to us insofar as we opt into it.

But that is not the case with God's law.

God's law matters for all of us.

Isn't this the heart of the gospel?

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

We all, 100% of humanity, stands condemned before the law of God, whether you decide to opt into it or not, you as a human creature stand before your creator accountable to him.

Now, John the Baptist understood this.

And so for him to have looked at Herod and to have said something like, you know, he he doesn't really believe in this anyway.

And so what right do I have to make known to him this sort of moral claim?

This doesn't seem to matter in his life, is the same thing as saying to Herod, God's coming judgment onto you doesn't matter to me.

I will give you no warning.

I will speak about God's law as though it's something that we hold in our hands and control just by our own opting into it, rather than something that you stand under and need to repent in order to become right with God again.

To tell John, don't bring this up.

He hasn't opted into this, is to tell John, you need to treat Herod as though he as a person doesn't matter.

Do you see the connection?

John wasn't willing to do that.

So John warned him appropriately, effectively, to Herod.

Now, the whole world is and so what that means is that that John is saying, hey, I bet there's some guilt and shame feelings with regard to this, you know, taking your brother's wife for yourself.

And what John is saying is those guilt and shame feelings are real.

It's legitimate.

You ought to feel ashamed because you're acting unlawfully before God.

Now the whole world is shilling out ways to deal with our guilt and our shame.

There's there's whole industries and entire coping mechanisms that we all have that are geared towards this reality of how is it that we deal with these feelings of guilt and shame.

And one of the main strategies that is being promoted in our culture is to say the guilt and shame aren't the problem.

The problem is that you feel guilt and shame at all.

That's the problem.

The problem is you you shouldn't have any feelings of guilt.

You shouldn't have any feelings of shame.

There's no place for that in a person's life.

If you do have feelings of guilt and shame, there's some sort of misunderstanding or some sort of cultural oppression or religious oppression that your worldview has taken on.

And it is your job to liberate yourself from that feeling of guilt and shame.

Now, you'll notice this is just a shell game because all we've done is taken us and we've moved one step further back and said the only things to feel guilt and shame about are feelings of guilt and shame.

So now we just have a bunch of people who feel ashamed whenever they feel ashamed.

Uh, and feel guilty whenever they feel guilty.

Instead, the gospel says, Don't you see that you are right.

That guilt and shame, you don't need to feel guilt and shame about your guilt and shame.

Rather, you can stand honestly before the Lord, and you can trust that he meets you right there, in the midst of your guilt and shame.

Not despite them, right, right in them.

That is the very place where God expresses most deeply his love towards you.

So when we when we avoid at all costs those places in our hearts, we're also avoiding at all costs the very place where Jesus most clearly demonstrates his love towards us.

It's what the cross means.

It means that in our guilt and shame, he meets us and demonstrates his love towards us.

This is where we see that sort of union of suffering and glory.

That there's an invitation in Christ to move into the suffering of your own guilt and shame and trust that even in there there is glory, there is freedom, there's an offer of real forgiveness, not a shell game with your guilt and shame, but an atonement.

So John the Baptist was unwilling to write off King Herod.

Instead, he spoke to him as someone who mattered before the Lord.

If only we were so courageous.

Mark 6, 19 through 20, as the story goes on, and Herodias had a grudge against him.

That's John the Baptist.

Herodias is Herod's wife, which is convenient for naming purposes.

Herodias had a grudge against him and wanted to put him to death, but she could not.

For Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he kept him safe.

The verse goes on to say that King Herod was glad when he heard John the Baptist speak.

So this is where John the Baptist enters what is called an emotional triangle between Herodias and Herod.

Now, what is an emotional triangle?

Edwin Friedman defines an emotional triangle as this: when any two parts of a system become uncomfortable with one another, they will triangle in or focus upon a third person or issue as a way of stabilizing their own relationship with one another.

Would you like me to say that again?

Now reflect on Thanksgiving dinner.

When I I want our church to be a dysfunctional family, welcome.

When any two parts of a system, uh when any two parts of a system become uncomfortable with one another, they will triangle in or focus upon a third person or issue as a way of stabilizing their own relationship with one another.

This is what gossip is.

We don't know each other that well.

You know, we're still workinging working things out, we're figuring out where we stand with each other.

If we talk about this other person, we can stabilize with one another.

See, that's why gossip is so miserable and destructive.

And then whatever tension might be in this relationship between us face to face can get resolved by putting it on this third person or issue.

So, what is the tension in King Herod and Herodias's marriage?

You know, Herod seems to not really mind that I'm Herodias now.

Herod seems to not really mind these things that John the Baptist says.

In fact, he kind of seems glad when he hears John the Baptist preaching.

But John the Baptist says that we shouldn't be married, which means he is a threat to us.

See, we've got an issue, Herod and I.

We've we're a strange marriage here.

We both know we shouldn't have done this, but we did, we did do it.

And so who's the problem?

Who can I focus on as the problem?

John the Baptist.

The one who's naming the problem.

Well, let's make him the problem in this situation.

And so, how do they stabilize their marriage, the issue between themselves?

They focus in on John the Baptist.

And they make him the issue of the relationship.

So Herodias has a grudge, wants him put to death.

Herod thinks I can deal with this in some sort of a way that just involves John the Baptist and see if I can get both of the things that I want at the same time.

So he puts John the Baptist in jail.

Herodias is not satisfied with that.

She wants him dead.

Because if John the Baptist is the problem, then once he's gone, the problem will be gone.

Now, now that we know about emotional triangles, where's the problem with that thinking?

John the Baptist isn't where the problem is.

The problem is within their marriage.

And so what happens?

John the Baptist gets put to death, the story of Jesus starts to spread, and what happens to King Herod?

He feels haunted by John the Baptist.

It comes up again.

This very same problem.

Why does it resurrect so easily?

Because it was never dealt with in the first place.

So John the Baptist, just by seeking the Lord, gets caught up into this world of Herodian intrigue and emotional triangulation.

This is the risk of being a Christian.

How wonderful it would be.

If we could simply proclaim the Lord in a sort of anonymity.

How wonderful it would be if we could proclaim the Lord in a way that would just stay as a groundswell that wouldn't make it up into the room of the king.

But ours is a proclamation of a king.

And so kings seem to hear about that sort of thing.

Ours is a proclamation that involves the whole of life.

And so it causes all sorts of disruptions just by seeking the Lord.

John the Baptist is a picture of this.

This is and ought to be our expectation as Christians.

We are entering into a suffering like John the Baptist.

This is where the glory is in our faith.

Next, we see this come to a critical point, and at this critical point, we see the hope.

Thanksgiving, birthdays.

As a pastor, what's great, and I mean this, is you get front row seats to these sorts of things in people's lives.

It's a really unique role because you we get to see this at the level of a family, which is so often where these dynamics materialize, is at the level of the family.

And that that's a that's a wonderful, it's a wonderful position in in society because we get to be involved with the places where these things tend to flare up, which is at deaths and marriages and baby dedications and infant baptisms and you know all of these places where these things tend to flare up in families.

We get to kind of be there.

Uh which is a wonderful thing.

I'm just uh you can see, I don't know what why I just like that part about the job.

So it comes up at a birthday party.

And also it should be, I hope that's helpful because you may think, why does this stuff always seem to have why are holidays so hard?

Why is it so hard at these birthdays?

Why does it flare up around this time of year with our family and stuff?

Well, because that's what it's like.

That's where these emotions get get triggered.

This is the pattern of humanity.

This is the ordinary course of human existence.

Welcome.

So it's Herod's birthday.

Emperor's birthdays were national holidays in uh the Roman Empire.

And everybody would get the day off and go boating.

Herod, they weren't national holidays for Tetrarchs.

It wasn't a thing for somebody that low on the authority totem pole, but it's very like Herod to throw himself a very large birthday party and to sort of ape the imperial tradition.

He invites all of the most powerful families of Galilee.

Uh, he invites his nobles and his military leaders.

This is the who's who of Galilee.

And it reaches this critical moment when Herodias's daughter, now it's said it's Herodias' daughter, which likely points to the fact that this isn't Herod's daughter, which means that it's probably his brother Philip's daughter.

Okay, this is a tough dynamic to navigate.

She gives a performance of a dance for the guests of the party.

People must have loved it.

It must have been a wonderful dance because uh Herod is so impressed at the end that he makes this offer to Herodias' daughter, and he uses this expression which we see before in the book of Esther.

It must have been a thing that kings say, which is, anything you want, uh Herodias' daughter, up to half of my kingdom I will give you.

And he makes this oath and this vow before the whole crowd that's there.

Now Herodias' daughter, young girl, probably, you know, a little frazzled from just having danced, goes to her mother and says, What should I ask for?

Herodias sees the moment.

Herod is pinned against the crowd.

Because what does Herod seek above all else?

His own glory.

We can trust him to act in that way.

So, what you go and ask for is John the Baptist's head on a platter because he's pinned against the crowd and he's gonna seek his own glory, and I'm going to be able to remove the problem from our marriage, thus securing my position of authority in this family.

This is like this is Lady Macbeth stuff, you know?

We don't need Shakespeare, we've got the Bible.

And so Herod, uh uh uh so she goes before.

I'll read the text, 24 to 25.

She went out and said to her mother, for what should I ask?

And she said, The head of John the Baptist.

And she came in immediately with haste to the king and asked, saying, I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.

And Herod is pinned.

Remember that John the Baptist is already in prison because Herod made that half step.

And in Mark 6, 26, it says, And the king was exceedingly sorry because of his oaths and his guests.

He did not want to break his word to her.

What we can recognize here is that it is not as though John the Baptist is a man who lived by principles, and Herod wasn't.

They were both principled men.

They just had different aims with their principles.

You can see that whenever your principles, whenever your aim is not primarily the glory of God, then whatever you're aiming at will become distorted and twisted into a terror when you serve it.

So Herod's principles look like this.

The king is exceedingly sorry.

Why?

Because of his oath that he made, and it's more fun over there.

I know you're thinking it.

Because they're practicing for the Christmas Eve service.

It'll be it'll be wonderful.

The king was exceeding they're going and telling it on the mountain.

The king was exceedingly sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests, he did not want to break his word to her.

So his his values have become so distorted that he actually thinks a foolish offer like this is something like generosity.

That's how distorted his own mind is.

And he actually thinks following through with a request that is so heinous in his own mind, he considers it a demonstration of his own integrity.

Do you see how his values had become so distorted downstream that when you aren't aiming at God and you just aim at your own glory, you can actually consider in your own mind that something as heinous as beheading an innocent man is an act of integrity?

It's incredibly dangerous to not aim at the Lord.

Anything that you make ultimate other than the Lord will devour you.

It will.

King Herod and King Jesus throw very different feasts.

So John is beheaded, and the last verse that we see is this, Mark 6, 29.

When his disciples heard of it, they came and took his body and laid it in a tomb.

John, why did you pick this fight?

Don't you see?

It amounted to nothing.

King Herod, Herodias, still living unlawfully, in fact, perhaps more entrenched than they were.

Before.

All you had to do was say, this one we're just not gonna play.

All you had to do was was just back away.

John, why didn't you just back away?

Look at where it ended.

You're just dead for no reason.

Buried in a tomb.

Isn't it foolish?

You know, there are about a million uh great stories that we tell with a character like John, where it ends like this.

One of my favorites from the past couple of years is a movie called A Hidden Life.

Have any of y'all seen that?

It's by Terence Malik.

He's like the only good Christian filmmaker, so you should all see it.

I'm serious.

He's like the only good Christian filmmaker.

So you so you should go see it.

Um it's like three hours, so it's a bit of a slog, but it's called A Hidden Life, and it's about a man who was uh drafted by the Austrian army uh to go serve with the Nazis.

And he refuses.

And so he's locked in prison, and then he's taken through trials, and uh I'll I'll give away the ending, but it's an inevitable ending.

Uh and he uh is taken through all these trials and he keeps just saying no.

It's conversation after conversation with people in his family saying, You don't understand how hard you're making this for us.

Would you just consider us?

Saying, I can't violate uh my conscience in this.

How completely ineffective this is?

And he's a Christian man.

And he says, I can't, uh I'm given this choice between serving Hitler or serving Jesus.

How can I, how can I not choose Jesus?

And what ends up is he's killed.

Do you know the effect that it has?

I don't.

It was a hidden life.

Why did John the Baptist live like that?

John the Baptist's story ends buried in a tomb.

But his ministry, as we saw in the beginning of this, it continues on with Jesus.

In fact, it's fulfilled with Jesus.

Jesus gets caught up in the political dynamics, just like John the Baptist does.

King Herod is even involved.

Him and Pontius Pilate become friends because of Jesus.

I wonder how that relationship worked.

They had issues between each other, and then they were resolved with Jesus.

Yeah.

And likewise, Pontius Pilate, he bows to the crowd.

And in his bow to the crowd, Jesus is sacrificed, and he is taken by Joseph of Arimathea, and he's put in a tomb.

But three days later, Jesus comes back to life.

Why did John the Baptist hope?

When he was facing a death, when he was facing something that looked like this will most certainly absolutely accomplish nothing, why did he continue to seek the glory of God rather than his own glory and move into the suffering and death that it entailed?

Because he was looking into the resurrection of Jesus.

It might not have happened yet, but if you trust in the Lord, you will not be put to shame.

Because not even death, not even death can crush our hope.

Hope has been fixed by the resurrection of Christ.

Because in Christ, he was brought down into death.

The absolute hopelessness, the most ultimate picture of what it would look like for evil to win, was shown.

And what was the reality of that picture?

Death was conquered.

Death itself.

Sin was atoned for.

Our shame was removed, not hidden by ourselves as we convince ourselves that it was foolish to feel shameful anyway.

No, actually removed, where we need to do no double talk, no trickery of our own minds to convince us to not be ashamed.

Instead, we can look like John the Baptist to Jesus.

We look to Jesus.

And that makes us this insane type of people who, in the midst of chaos, in a world where everyone dies, we hope because there's a greater glory coming.

That we could join in a suffering like John the Baptist because of the hope that we know is realized on the other side of it.

That is why we hope.

In the midst of suffering, in the midst of death, we Christians have this strange thing where we can continue to hope because of the resurrection.

All right, let's take any questions.

I always assumed that Herod's brother had died, and that's why he took his wife.

I'm guessing that is not the case.

Yeah, it's not the case.

Yeah.

This is all recorded by Josephus, the um uh Jewish historian who was like wrote all these histories.

And so it's really interesting because in he's he's a Jewish historian, you know, he was writing as a historian, but he records these stories.

So it was really fun because I got to read them through this.

I have Josephus's complete works, if you'd like to borrow them.

Um I rarely read it.

But this was a time where it was like, oh, this is referenced in Josephus, and so I got to look it up and you read this story, and oh man, the the Herod family.

Oh, that was a lot.

Um and yeah, he wasn't alive.

Excuse me, he he he was still alive, Philip was.

And um it records John the Baptist's beheading.

Josephus records it, uh, tells us the particular castle like uh place that John the Baptist was uh beheaded at, which the scriptures don't share that information.

So that's that's cool.

I mean, you know.

Extra biblical evidence.

All right, let's move into communion.

First Corinthians 11, 23 and following says, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

When you proclaim someone's death, it's not usually an announcement of their future coming.

But don't you see that as a Christian, you are able to proclaim a hope, not by ignoring all of the terror in the world, but right as you're seeing it, right as you're experiencing it.

So we proclaim our Lord's death until he comes, which means that even in the face of death, we have hope.

This is part of our season of Advent.

My hope for you is that as you come and partake today, if you're a Christian, you're welcome to the table.

If if you're not a Christian, then you wouldn't want to make that proclamation anyway, right?

But we'd welcome you to become a Christian, even today.

It is as simple as saying, Lord, in you we will hope.

We'll trust in your resurrection in spite of this.

I pray that if there is suffering in your life, that you have met with an avoidance, that you have met by playing a shell game to try and move around and hide the shame.

I pray that you would show it to Christ.

And you would trust him to comfort you there.

I promise you, he really does.

Let's pray.

Father, pray that you would bless this meal, that you would come into our hearts, that we might know you more completely.

And Lord, that you would open the hearts of our church, that we might receive the comfort that you so desire to give to us, and that we might live with a resolute hope because of your resurrection that changes the whole world.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.