River Road Church, Baptist

Dr. Cecil E. Sherman

June 27, 2003

“The Price of Telling the Truth”

Mark 6:14-29

The story of the dying of John the Baptist is a sorry tale.   Bad people put good people in prison and then in the most unlikely arrangement, it becomes an opportunity for John the Baptist to be killed.

It all begins when people are wondering who Jesus is.   Who is this fellow beginning to make a name for himself and people beginning to talk about him?   His disciples go out, do wonderful things, people come back, who is he?   How do you explain this man?   One of the explanations was, he is John the Baptist come back to life.   This idea particularly appealed to the man who was called king over Galilee and Perea, a small district of what we would call Palestine.   Interesting fellow; comes from a family that’s more interesting still, until this day books are written about the Herod Clan.   One of them came out a few years ago; most entangled, conflictive, murderous, bunch of thugs you ever saw.   Herod the Great built the temple that was present in Jesus time.   Any time anybody threatened him, he had them killed, including several of his children, causing the Jews to say you have a better chance of living if you’re Herod’s pig than you do if you’re Herod’s son.   We’re talking about pretty rough people.

This story has some interesting people in it and it’s about truth telling.   Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, king over this small district, had the job for 43 years.   We’re not talking about a short term, and he had a half brother that lived in Rome, named Herod Philip.   On occasion, Herod Antipas goes to Rome, visits this fellow, is smitten by his wife, there comes an affair, and then he persuades her to leave Herod Philip and go with him back to Galilee and live with him as his wife.   It was this that caused John the Baptist to speak up and say, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.”   Now, specifically, Leviticus 18:16 reads, “You shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother’s wife.   It is your brother’s nakedness.”   For this, the king put John the Baptist in prison.   Most people hold that the prison was Machaerus, a fortress some five, six miles east of the Dead Sea, in truly a God-forsaken place.   You go to the Holy Land today, you go down to Masada from Jerusalem, they will point to the east, there are the ruins of Machaerus; a place where Herod wintered and where John the Baptist was killed.

Now the second character in this is Herodias, first Philip’s wife and now Herod Antipas’ wife.   When John said her union to Herod Antipas was a sinful thing, Herodias did not feel shame, she said in affect, “How dare you!”   She was not ashamed, she was angry.   So the test says, “Herodias had a grudge against him.”   Meaning John the Baptist.   Sounds like a soap opera doesn’t it?   And she was waiting for her chance to get at John the Baptist.   Now she had it not in her power to kill him, but she had persuaded her husband to lock him up.   Interestingly, her husband found John the Baptist fascinating and from time to time would bring him out of his chains and have him speak to him.   And it toyed with a little flame in Herod Antipas’ conscience and he was all at once disturbed and fascinated by it.   So, when people were trying to figure out who Jesus is, Herod Antipas, who had ordered John killed, probably in his guilt, reasoned that Jesus might be John the Baptist reincarnated.

Salome was Herodias’s daughter by an earlier marriage.   Her dance was out of character for a king’s daughter, it should have been performed by a prostitute.   So get the picture; the king had a birthday party, courtiers and officers invited, wine flows freely, and a girl is called upon to dance.   She must have put on quite a show.   The king was expansive.   The king said, “Anything you want.”   She didn’t answer.   She went to talk to her mother and Salome asked Herodias, “What shall I ask?”   She said, “For the head of John the Baptist on a platter.”   Now folks that put a chill on any party.   And it happened as she asked.   She had a grudge, she got a chance, and she took it.   John the Baptist is dead.  

What he did was intemperate and true.  

We live in an age of spin-doctors.   We wonder if we’re told the truth by media, politicians.   We have reason to wonder.   So we have become skeptical, a bit cynical about truth.   We have a hard time with it.   When you hear a story like this, you realize this isn’t new.   Stuff like this has been happening for a long time.   Now, if I were speaking to a class of preachers, I might ask at this point, what have you learned from John the Baptist’s experience?   You see, you’re conflicted too.   All at once you want the references on our future pastor to tell the truth, but you don’t want the pastor who comes to be too rough about what he says.   So we want it straight over here, but we want it smooth over there.   Tricky business isn’t it?   That happened a long time ago.

Let me tell you a story that happened a while ago, but compared to John the Baptist is quite recent.   Once there was a man named William Whitsett.   Born in Tennessee, went to Union College, Jackson, Tennessee, then became a scout, then a chaplain in the Confederate Army, survives that war, comes to the University of Virginia, gets a degree in History, goes to Southern Seminary, finishes, goes to Leipzig first, then Berlin, and studies further; his field is Church History.   He goes back to Georgia, becomes pastor of First Baptist Church, Albany and in 1872, he becomes a Church History teacher at Southern Seminary just about the time it moved to Louisville.   He taught there from 1872 to 1895 when he was made president of the school.   But about that time, some people began to scratch around in the things that Whitsey had written and found that in 1885, ten years previous, he had written an article that says, ‘there is no historical evidence that the River Road Church Baptist came straight in unbroken succession from the First Baptist Church of Jerusalem.’   This came as a shock.   You mean we don’t go back and back and back and they’re Baptist and Baptist and Baptist and Baptist and Baptist?   No.   He said the historical evidence says early in the 17 th century, out of the English-Puritan movement, there came a group called Baptists and prior to that, there is no record of anybody doing baptism as we do, much less wearing the name that we wear.   The editor of the Western Recorder, a Baptist paper in Kentucky, Baptist and Reflector, a Baptist paper in Tennessee, and Texas Baptist Standard, they crawled all over Whitsett.   They put so much pressure on the trustees of Southern, until in 1899, four years after he took the job, he was forced to resign.   He comes to the University of Richmond, teaches Philosophy and Religion until he dies in 1911. This is immediately close to this church, because our former pastor is now reading the diaries of William Whitsett.   Whitsett requested that they be closed for 100 years and slowly, each year is uncovering and Jim is working that and probably will come out with a book and we fund it.  

Why did he get fired?   Actually, he was forced to resign for telling the truth.   Telling the truth can shorten your career with John the Baptist, with William Whitsey; telling the truth is priceless.   What’s a part of all this?   What does the text tell us?   The three quick ideas I want you to hear, number one John had a standard, he had a measure for truth, it is not lawful.   Truth wasn’t just whatever he wanted it to be, he had something that normalized truth, and it was more than a subjective opinion of John.   Fundamentalism has made it difficult for us to work scripture as John worked it.   Fundamentalism has made almost a joke of scripture in some places.   But the risk we run is subjectivism.   The pressures of culture come to bear on the way we interpret any standard for truth.   We need to be careful.   Too much rigidity and you miss the mark altogether and in your desire to do truth, you become a Pharisee, a caricature of truth doing.   On the other hand, you give away standard altogether.   Truth has to a point of reference.

The second observation; it takes courage to say the truth.   Truth apart from courage is silence.   Lots of people have had the sense to figure out the truth, not nearly as many have had the courage to do it, or say it.   There’s a person who’s got the nerve to tell the truth!   Now, lots of times truth telling does not take nerve, but the times that are memorable, it does and when that happens, too many gets nerves, not nerve.   John had an awful lot of courage.

Third observation; John refused the rationalizations that would compromise truth.   He knew it was not good for his health to criticize the sex life of a king.   I suspect that he had all the good sense that any of you has.   Watch your step!   You know you’re getting close to the edge.   Discretion is the better part of valor.   Mind your manners.   He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.   Actually, he who fights and runs away comes nearer learning how to run than learning how to fight.  

I had a student in the class Daniel Bagby and I just finished, who’s wrestling with a difficult, ethical issue in his small church in south side Virginia.   This is the first time this person has ever been really called upon to speak to culture and speak a word of judgment.   And the class turned and turned and turned.   If you duck on this one, does this become a pattern for the next time and the next time?   Do you back off, shave truth, or just leave it unspoken?   Now, truth telling requires a good bit of resistance to the rationalizations that talk you out of being forthright.   We live in a society that manages news, elevates style over truth, and thinks its not good manners to be straightforward.   In the scripture, in the book of Hebrews, God is described as the God who cannot laugh.   If worship makes you more like the God you worship, the affect of worship ought to be an ascending capacity to truth and an enormous resistance to laugh.   Jesus said, let your conversation be simply yes, no.   You don’t have to say, so help me God, just, you’re not any more truthful on a witness stand in a court than you are in conversation in the parking lot.   You simply come to tell the truth.   Now, I didn’t say anything any of you didn’t know.   But the reason you come to church, is to get little breaks to go ahead and do what you know is right.   We need to be truth tellers and if there’s a price, well there’s always been a price.   Let us be known as people who tell the truth.

Now, a “bracket” in closing; truth can be brutal and misused.   I have not pursued that idea.   Of course I’m not going in that direction, but that’s not where our witness lies.   This is to our aid; it is not to make our communication rough or uncaring.

CES; Lisa King, mt