"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.