July 12 sermon notes Eph. 1, Mark 6:14

July 12-Eph. 1, Mark 6:14-

Holy and the unholy, the sacred and the profane Uzzah and the holiness of the ark Jesus radically changes the idea of holiness. The holy has an element of danger to it, as a holy dynamite What is not to be touched, now touches and is touched.Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ” ― Annie Dillard

God lavished us with gifts"In Christ" every experience is reframed, from our most bracing joys and cherished achievements to our besetting temptations, our most anguished regrets, and our most wounding losses. "In Christ" we are joined to the power and presence of God. "In Christ" we are knit to others . An "in Christ" community has to reckon with the fact that it will be perceived at times as more a threat than a blessing. John’s truth telling gets him killed. God's election of Christ, and God's choice for all of us, in him. Christ is the one who represents all humanity; thus in choosing Christ, God pursues humanity -- all of us -- with relentless love.   (Sally Brown) see Barth

Herod was really a tetrarch a ruler of a district, a fourth. He nagged an emperor so much to become a king that he was exiled to France. The conjugal activities of Herod and his wife are notorious. Already married, he married his niece, already married to one of her own uncles. She was married, but he never divorced her, so she lived as a bigamist.Salome, her daughter, is a little girl in the text.We hear nothing of the reaction of the guests at the dance, only Herod’s vow, one as full of death of Jephthah's vow years before.  The drive shafts of corrupted politics torque this birthday party. Everywhere greed and fear whisper: in Herod’s ear,John is in a dungeon.. When repentance is preached to this world’s princes, do not expect them to relinquish their power, however conflicted some may be. The righteous die for reasons both valorous and vapid. “[A]s the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time” (Ecclesiastes 9:12 KJV). The girl dances, not the siren of the imagination, but a girl. Herod’s banquet is only the first of two in Mark 6. Jesus hosts the second, in the middle of nowhere for thousands of nobodies with nothing to offer save five loaves and two fish. At that feast greed and fear have no place. There all are fed to the full, with leftovers beyond comprehension (6:30-44).clifton Black--Mark HoffmannI also love the observation in Mark 6:20 that Herod was "perplexed" by John. He liked to listen to John, but he didn't know what to make of him. Then he gets perplexed again at his birthday party.Banquet in the face of hard times. We get exercised over Grafton not having live music and open yet another bar t downtown, but seem blank in seeking new businesses here. Why were we not seeking the national cyber center instead of North St. louis? I never noticed before that Herod  is wondering if Jesus is the resurrected John the Baptist.John’s disciple shave the courage to bury him, but most of the disciples of Jesus abandon him.