"Monstrous Manners"

Homily for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost  28 August 2016
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector

Luke 14:1, 7-14 (Jesus eviscerates pecking-order politics)

When you are invited to a wedding banquet, go and sit down at the lowest place.   Luke 14:10a

The voice-over introduces one of the most popular episodes of one of the most popular TV series ever: “Maple Street, USA. A late summer afternoon in the last calm and reflective moment ... before the monsters came.”

The voice-over: Rod Serling. The show: The Twilight Zone. The episode: ‘The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.’

Cut to late summer. A day like today. Maple Street is teeming with children at play. Neighbors chat. A shadow passes overhead. A loud roar. A flash of light.

Later — after dark — cars, radios TVs, lights, and appliances stop working. The residents of Maple Street gather outside to figure out what’s going on. One of them, Pete Van Horn, volunteers to go on a scouting mission to surrounding neighborhoods.

Then the scapegoating begins.

Neighbor turns against neighbor. Hysteria builds and builds until the residents of Maple Street spy a shadowy figure walking towards them. Charlie, the neighborhood loudmouth, pegs the shadow for an alien “monster.” With one shotgun blast he takes it down.

Turns out to be the returning Pete Van Horn.

Suddenly, lights flash on and off up and down the street. Lawn mowers and cars start up spontaneously. And Maple Street erupts into a mob feeding frenzy.

Cut to a nearby hilltop and the silhouettes of two quite non-human aliens, observing.

The first alien speaks. “Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers. Throw them into darkness for a few hours. And then you just sit back and watch the pattern.”

The second alien asks, “And the pattern is always the same?”

The answer? “With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find. It’s themselves. And all we need do is sit back ... and watch.”

Switch channels.

In the wake of murderous jihadist attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, and Orlando, an imam and his companion are shot ─ execution style ─ outside a Queens mosque.

A Hawthorne, California, Islamic Center is vandalized. The graffiti spray-painted on its walls? “Jesus is the way.”

Officials in an Atlanta suburb put on hold a Muslim community’s plans to build a mosque and cemetery. That's a mosque and cemetery across the street from a Baptist church and cemetery. A grammatically-challenged, anti-mosque protester weighs in: “As a United States citizen, we don't need people that don’t want to go by our laws.”

Keep flipping channels.

And silhouetted before a flat-screen TV somewhere in the back-streets of Raqqah, Syria, ISIS mastermind Abu Badr Al-Baghdadi turns to one of his lieutenants and says, “Understand the procedure now? All we need do is sit back ... and watch.”

In other words, just as the Twilight Zone episode leaves us to decide whether the monsters in the episode’s title are the not-of-this-world aliens or the residents of Maple Street, so we might ask if those threatening our security more are the alien-appearing, not-our-kind-dear neighbors in our midst … or the fired-up vigilantes who routinely scapegoat the “most dangerous enemy they can find”: enemies like Muslim-Americans, undocumented immigrants, and queer folk like so many of us.

Because beyond the shadow of a doubt, those doing the scapegoating are playing right into the hands of the ISIS High Command. Or, if you want, Putin. Or the spreading contagion of white supremacists: the “Alt Right” ─ the “Alternative Right.” But don’t be fooled. The antiseptic name is just a cover. Scratch the surface of the Alt Right, and you get Klansmen, Holocaust deniers, White Nationalists, and neo-Nazis.

Of course, scapegoating has always made for political — and religious — sport.

But for all the foaming-at-the-mouth “Make America Great at Scapegoating Again” sloganeering … for all the “Restore the Honor of Christian America” ─ whatever that means — blather, I wonder: Would Jesus join the fray? Would Jesus scapegoat his Muslim-American neighbors … his immigrant neighbors … his queer and transgender neighbors?

The answer is simple: No. At least judging from Jesus’ remarks at a Sabbath meal thrown in his honor by a well-connected and apparently well-intentioned Pharisee. It includes a lot of other Pharisees. Looking at the guest list, Jesus is in the minority. Jesus is the minority.

The first course? Suspicion. Or is it curiosity? Because the Pharisees watch Jesus’ every move. Luke says, “They were watching him closely.”

Turns out Jesus was giving them more than the once-over, too. Like, who was jockeying to sit where. That piques Jesus’ curiosity because, with the Pharisees — sunrise, sunset — it’s about retaining ritual purity. That is, not coming into physical contact with anything or anyone considered remotely unclean by Pharisee standards. And this goes way beyond pork!

In dining situations, a pecking-order etiquette results: The closer you are to the host, the purer you are in his eyes. You truly are “holier than thou” — or at least holier than the person seated next to you farther down the line from the host.

And Jesus’ favorite people: the “poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind”? Conventional wisdom says they wouldn’t be that way if they hadn’t sinned. It’s all their fault, conventional wisdom says.

Jesus disagrees. And yet, a seat for them at the Pharisee’s table? Don’t even think it. Because to the host, the sick and the poor and all the rest? They’re the sort of people who keep the nation from being as upright — and uptight — as God and the Patriarchs (read: the Founding Fathers) ordained it to be.

Bottomline: The poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. To “true patriots” like the Pharisees, these unclean people are subversives. They deserve to be scapegoated.

But back to the sort of people who do make the cut. There’s a complication. The most important guests arrive fashionably late. That’s a social convention. So, if you arrive early and take a place closer to the host than you would otherwise merit, you’ve committed a major gaffe.

Even Jesus knows this. Channeling Miss Manners, he notes that you’re going to get bumped. But not one place and everyone else in turn down the line. Too labor-intensive. No, you get bumped all the way down to the last place.

But is that such a bad thing? Not the getting bumped, but the last place — the least holy, the least pure, the least true-religion, the least “patriotic” place?

Obviously not … in Jesus’ Book of Etiquette. Because Jesus is known to settle for even less than last place. Actually, he doesn’t settle for it, he makes a beeline for it. Because what does he say later in Luke? “Who is greater: the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.”

As they say in the sci-fi biz: “One step beyond.” One step beyond last place.

So it looks like Jesus not only doesn’t condone scapegoating, he’s sitting with the scapegoats … all those subversives who are accused of making Maple Street — and Main Street — such a dangerous place.

Now, speaking of scapegoats, back to our Muslim-American neighbors.

Question: Does Islam make all Muslims terrorists?

It is true that the Islamic world is disproportionately turbulent. And that 9/11 brought that turbulence here.

It is true that, according to New York Times columnist Nicholas Krystof, some mullahs “cite the Quran to incite murder.”

But to say that Islam makes all Muslims terrorists is to spout a fallacy: that all religions are monolithic. Seen one adherent, seen them all. That’s a fallacy because in every religion there are parties, there are sects, there are varying degrees of observance. Some Jews eat bacon. Don’t ask me how I know, but many Mormons don’t wear the magic underwear. And quite a few self-identified Christians don’t go to church every week, if you can imagine such a thing.

And in every religion there are extremists. It’s tragic. But it’s a fact.

For example, history proves that some of the most shocking brutality in the Middle East has been justified by the Bible, not the Quran.

Take the Crusaders. In one massacre, they slaughtered so many men, women, and children in parts of Jerusalem that a Christian eyewitness — Fulcher of Chartres — described one neighborhood as “ankle-deep in blood.”

And while burning Jerusalem’s Jews alive, Crusaders sang “Adoramus te, Christe” (“Christ, we adore you”). Note: In this episode, Muslims weren’t burning the Jews. Christians were.

So, our hands — our Christian hands — aren’t clean either.

Of course, that was then. This is now. But in the long memory of Middle East politics, the 12^th century was just yesterday.

And even more recently, for much of American history, New York Times journalist Nicholas Krystof points out, “demagogues have manipulated irrational fears toward people of minority religious beliefs, particularly Catholics and Jews." Today’s Crusaders, he warns, “are promoting a similar paranoid intolerance.”

So — for all that — would I prefer seeing every house of worship in America topped with a cross, packed to the gills, and flying the Rainbow Pride flag … just under the Episcopal Church banner (because I think being an Episcopalian is absolutely the best way to be in the world)? You bet!

Would I prefer not seeing the dome and minaret of a mosque as I travel down Tremont Street in Roxbury? Honestly? Probably.

Would I prefer not driving in the shadow of the gilded angel Moroni atop the Mormon Temple on Route 2 in Lexington? Yes. Mormons ─ nice people. But I think they’re peddling heresy with a hefty helping of homophobia.

But my preferences aren’t reality. Because — beyond all the benefits of diversity — for followers of Jesus Christ, there are five facts on the ground, whether we like it or not.

Fact: We don’t get to choose the neighbors God sends our way to love.

Fact: Jesus was a minority.

Fact: Jesus taught that we have to be willing to be a minority ourselves.

Fact: Jesus protects minorities.

Fact: So does the US Constitution.

The price, then, of living in a vibrant and stable democracy — living the dream of the Founders — is living next to people we may not agree with and may not even like.

The price of being a follower of Jesus Christ is not operating under the assumption that the best seat at the table is being reserved for you or me.

The alternative to accepting that reality? A shattered and blood-spattered late summer’s night on Maple Street that fades into Rod Serling’s epilogue:

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, and prejudices to be found only in the minds of humans.

For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy. And the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own … for the children … and the children yet unborn.

And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined … to the Twilight Zone.

Amen.

“Hatching Trouble”

Homily for the Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin (Transferred)  14 August 2016
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector

Luke 1:46-55 (Mary of Nazareth doesn’t mince words)

“I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful one-hundred percent!”

Yes, it’s a shout-out to Dr. Seuss: “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful one-hundred percent!” The mantra of Horton, the faithful egg-hatching elephant in (what else?) Horton Hatches the Egg.

Pointing to the Question of the Day: Do words count?

Or, just when ─ under what conditions ─ can be we casual about the words we say? Specifically, the really important words. Words with weight, substance, and consequences. The words to which we attach belief and, more than that, conviction. Words we stand by and stand for.

According to Horton ─ who is conned by the irresponsible Mayzie to sit on her egg while she takes a short “break” (meaning forever!) in Palm Beach ─ the answer is “never.” We can never treat lightly the weightier words we say.

That’s because, as Horton knows, not only do words matter, but the convictions, values, and beliefs behind the words matter. The person standing by the words matters. Because, in a world where our word is our bond, we are what we say.

That’s why, on this Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin, we center our celebration on her words ─ the very weighty words spoken by her when she rushes to tell her cousin Elizabeth that Israel’s centuries-long long wait for a Savior is over: Mary ─ miraculously ─ will give birth to the Messiah.

Long before the Apostles’ Creed … longer by far than the Nicene Creed … the words Mary speaks ─ what we call the Magnificat, but what is, in fact, Mary’s Creed ─ the words spell out for us what she believes God will accomplish ─ decisively ─ through the person her son will become. Specifically:

The monopoly of the arrogant with attitude? Busted.

Corrupt Wall Street-types earning a fast buck off the backs of the poor better prepare to get a taste of their own medicine. God will make trickle-down economics history.

The wheelers-and-dealers’ neighbors ─ the very people the moneyed manipulators have looked-over, left-behind, and locked out ─ will finally experience justice: what they are owed as persons made in the image of God. Gold-plated grifters, kiss those off-shore tax shelters good-bye!

Bottomline: Mary is saying, “I believe God has a bias for our neighbors who have been dealt a lousy hand. Not only do I believe it. I ─ Mary of Nazareth ─ believe it. And I endorse this message.”

Like affixing a wax seal to her Creed, Mary makes sure her words matter. Mary matters. Her words are Mary.

And tough words they are … because Mary is a tough woman. She stands by her words. How do we know? She doesn’t come back the next day to backtrack: “I was just joking!”

She’s not joking, because Mary is on a journey: a faith-filled journey that leads her to stand by Jesus at his cross … a journey that takes her even beyond the outpouring of God’s Spirit at Pentecost to witness her Creed’s words bearing fruit: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” (Acts 2:44-45)

Pushing each of us to ask, “How reliable ─ how faithful ─ are we as communicators of each of those planks in Mary’s platform … those radioactive, revolutionary initiatives that she believes to her very core?” Do we commit to Mary’s Creed of Good News daily, repeatedly, consistently by advocating, protesting, challenging … voting! … and sometimes refusing to budge?

… like Rosa Parks. Could we possibly be like her? I know, big shoes. But look how she describes that December day in 1955 on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to a white passenger and stand for the remainder of the journey:

“People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired,” Parks recorded many years later. “But that isn't true…. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

“When [the bus driver] saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up. And I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, ‘You may do that.’”

I suppose Parks could have given up her seat even if she believed it was hers by right. But she ─ the real person with real convictions in that all-too-real situation ─ believed to her very core it was hers by right. She spoke up. And she refused to budge.

Of her subsequent arrest, Parks said, “I only knew that, as I was being arrested, that it was the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind.”

Talk about bringing “down the powerful from their thrones!” All for the sake of a considerably downscale seat, a bus seat. And all through the power of words ─ Good News words ─ spoken from Rosa Parks’ very soul. And made visible for all time by standing her ground.

Proving what the Virgin Mary showed: Each of us ─ our words matter. Our words are us. And each of us matters … prompting us to pledge without reservation:

“I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. Faithful? One-hundred percent!”

Amen.

"Trumping Wealth"

Homily for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost  31 July 2016
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector

Luke 12:13-21 (Jesus’ TED Talk on Wealth Management)

The land of a rich man produced abundantly.   Luke 12:16a

Had the episode not been so tragic, the headline might have seemed overblown: “A Shopping Guernica Captures the Moment.”

In a shout-out to Picasso’s blistering indictment of the Blitzkrieg unleashed on the village of Guernica in April 1937, this slaughter occurred on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving 2008.

In the freezing dawn at a Long Island Walmart, 2,000 shoppers trampled underfoot a store employee who stood between them and the bargains they were feverishly determined to snatch up. These shoppers, terrified they would walk away empty-handed, threw themselves headlong into the feeding frenzy, apparently oblivious to the man who lay dying under their feet.

What drove them to such extremes? Black Friday, the cash-bonanza marketing gimmick that ─ according to Peter S. Goodman of The New York Times ─ creates a “sense of shortage amid abundance, an anxiety that one must act now or miss out.”

There’s a name for a marketing gimmick like Black Friday: “manufactured scarcity.”

Now, it’s ironic that the farmer in today's Gospel, of all people, succumbs to the gimmick of manufactured scarcity. Ironic that he acts out of a sense of shortage amid his abundance.

What’s that all about?

The farmer has just stumbled upon a windfall. It’s been a record-breaking harvest. His grain storage facilities are bursting at the seams. Actually, he’s running out of space altogether.

His solution? Head to the market and unload the surplus? Wrong!

Enlarge his storage capacity? Right!

And then do nothing … except, “relax, eat, drink, be merry.” Or as Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch Gospel puts it: “Recline, dine, wine, and shine!”

The perfect retirement. We should all live so long and so well … well-off, that is. Because the farmer doesn’t. No sooner is the expansion deal sealed with the contractor, the man gets dinged by death.

That’s got to hurt! But aside from the death factor, was expanding storage capacity such a bad strategy?

Well, chances are the farmer isn’t alone in reaping a bumper crop. His neighbors have probably been equally successful, maybe even more. Let’s say they all flood the market. Upshot? Grain prices tank. Supply and demand.

To maximize profits in the long run, the farmer reasons, “Better to store the surplus for the time-being.” Maybe next year or the year after ─ when crops might fail, supplies shrink, and demand goes up ─ maybe then he’ll get an optimum ROI (return on his investment) ─ an ROI that will more than cover the cost of the new storage facility amortized over a few years.

Whatever the farmer’s motives ─ the way Jesus tells the story ─ we can’t escape the nagging suspicion that the farmer’s motives are rooted in foreboding ─ a foreboding (but false) sense of scarcity amid abundance … the fear that security is fleeting … always just beyond his grasp.

It appears, too, the farmer has another fear: fear of others, fear of less-well-off neighbors. These neighbors might destabilize the farmer’s security. They might make demands on him, invoking the “love your neighbor as yourself” imperative that has the unsettling knack of forcing us to tap resources today we might be holding on to for a rainy day. There goes security. Here comes scarcity.

So, to cover his assets, as it were, the farmer chooses isolation. He chooses to go solo. And he begins to look a bit like Hello Dolly’s Horace Vandergelder. “And on those cold winter nights,” Dolly Levi baits Horace, “you can snuggle up to your cash register. It’s a little lumpy, but it rings!”

So, how isolated is the farmer?

Here’s a clue: his “it’s all about me” language. That is, Jesus presents a relatively short parable — compared to others, like “The Prodigal Son” — but the man in this brief parable refers to himself 11 times: most glaringly, “I alone can fix it.” Oh, wait, he doesn’t say that. I must be thinking of another narcissist on a similar, forced march to disaster.

But the farmer does say, “I will do this … I will pull down my barns … I will build … I will store … my grain … my goods … my soul.” And that’s just a sample.

The result? There is no “we” … no “our” … not even “them,” “theirs,” or “yours” in the man’s sparsely-populated universe.

Does that matter?

You bet!

The data we have for that part of the world at that time suggest that 90 percent of the man’s neighbors — and probably most of his workers — live at the level of bare subsistence. That means everywhere he looks, the farmer can’t avoid witnessing rampant destitution, homelessness, unemployment and underemployment, and their negative consequences: health crises, class resentment, and social unrest.

In other words, for his neighbors-on-the-edge, there isn’t a false sense of scarcity, there’s real scarcity grinding against the farmer’s obscene abundance.

That’s why God calls the man a fool … not just because he’s clueless about the itching, fickle finger of fate (“This very night your life is being demanded of you!”), but because he creates a false sense of personal scarcity while ignoring real scarcity all around him.

And this is where the parable pivots: How do you avoid the negative-for-neighbor consequences … or at least reduce them, without let-up, until they are history?

Put another way, what could the farmer have done to turn those neighbor-negative consequences into neighbor-positive benefits?

As suggested, he could have brought his surplus goods to market and kept food prices reasonable. Or offered them to his struggling neighbors at below-market rates. Or given them away altogether.

Meaning: He could have manufactured abundance for his neighbors. He could even have been like Jason Trigg.

At 28, Jason Trigg believes he has taken Wall Street by storm. That’s because he is chasing after money ─ as much money as he can possibly get his hands on.

What’s his plan? He writes software for a high-frequency trading firm. What’s “high-frequency trading”? Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading

And Jason is very good at what he does. He turns a lot of other people’s money into even more money. For a person his age, Jason is raking-in money hand-over-fist.

Complication: Like the farmer in the parable ─ by his own admission ─ Jason doesn’t know what to do with it all. “I wouldn’t know how to spend a large amount of money,” he says. “But I plan to make more, as much as I possibly can!”

Does that make Jason Trigg a Wall Street monster? Or, to temper that a bit, does that make Jason as clueless as the farmer in the parable? Hardly.

Why? It’s his strategy. Unlike the farmer, Jason has a neighbor-centric business plan to use the bulk of the money he makes. He reasons, “The more I make, the more good I can do.” It’s a strategy called “earning to give.”

And what is the good Jason does? It’s primarily through the Against Malaria Foundation, similar to The Episcopal Church’s “Nets for Life” program.

Like Nets for Life, the Against Malaria Foundation estimates that a $2,500 donation can save one life. That means, a person like Jason, by making certain lifestyle choices ─ choosing, for example, to live on $30,000 a year ─ can afford to give away the rest to the foundation. The result? Jason figures he saves over 20 lives a year.

The point, using another example: While some ─ comparatively few ─ go to far-flung regions of the world to dig wells to generate drinkable water, others ─ more people ─ unabashedly pursuing higher and higher salaries, while committed to living on a modest, fixed income ─ might have greater impact by providing the cash to ensure more wells are dug.

Which is better? Dig one well? Or give to dig multiple wells?

Which is better? That’s the wrong question! The right question? Which is more realistic for a person in your situation … with your gifts, income, and calling (which likely is not a calling to dig wells for the rest of your earning-potential life)? Which is better?

Put another way: Outside, perhaps, a career in healthcare, related research, or public safety, how many of us can say we save 20 lives a year … or even one? Provide drinkable water to scores of villages … or even one?

We know the rich-but-foolish farmer’s answers: Not even one. No, not one. Not a whiff of earning-to-give. Foolish, indeed!

And chances are, learning of his sudden death, a smattering of the curious played out a scene closely resembling the funeral for, in his time, one of the wealthiest and ostentatiously wealthy persons in the world: Aristotle Onassis.

One of the mourners turned to another and asked, “How much did he leave?”

The reply? “Everything. He left … everything.”

Amen.