"Pants on Fire!"

“If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”                Luke 16:31

I’m worried about the brothers. Yes, it’s the five brothers I’m worried about. And their pants.

That’s because, like their deceased sibling doing a slow burn somewhere beyond the sunset, they’ve bought wholesale into a gold-plated lie. And there’s no one in sight prepared to shout, “Pants on fire!”

That’s “pants on fire,” as in the schoolyard taunt “Liar! Liar! Pants on fire!” … and more recently, Pulitzer Prize-winning, nonpartisan PolitiFact’s ranking of claims made by politicians ─ rankings ranging from “True” to “Pants on Fire!”

Check out PolitiFact.com. Their researchers are working overtime this election cycle to assess what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls the competing “moral universes” occupied by the two principal candidates.

Now, they both rate “Pants on Fire!” rankings many times over. But one, who will go nameless, is nothing less than a raging conflagration. Kiss those broad-in-the-beam, fancy-pants good-bye!

And yet, the PolitiFact fact-checkers would be working no less furiously in rating the moral universe shared by the gazillionaire and his equally-cash-flush siblings in “The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus.”

But let’s call the latter “Laz,” so as not to confuse him with Jesus’ well-heeled best friend Lazarus, the one he raised from the dead.

So, what’s the “Pants on Fire!” lie? And why should we care?

Picture this: Reversals.

You have two avatars of the ways of the world. There’s a no-name plutocrat. And then there’s Laz, the quintessential, not-a-pot-to-pee-in pauper.

The data? Trappings: The rich man is decked out in linen, the finest imported clothes money can buy. Laz, dumped in a pustulent heap just outside the gates of the rich man’s McMansion, is clothed ─ not in linen, but lesions.

Diet: It’s a non-stop banquet up in the McMansion. Outside, Laz is desperate for an occasional scrap, if only the rich bloke would stop ignoring him.

And that’s a huge problem that speaks volumes about the gazillionaire’s moral universe ─ a moral universe driven by a lie: “God blesses with wealth. God curses with poverty. Ergo, you can’t be too rich.”

But riches or no riches, death doesn’t discriminate. And one day death deep-sixes both the moneyman and Laz. Where do they end up? Reversal. The rich man is dumped in what we would call Hell, to suffer the torments Laz experienced in life.

And Laz is escorted to far more felicitous digs than even the rich man enjoyed in life. Laz ends up in Father Abraham’s lap ─ what we would call Heaven.

In death, as in life: yawning chasm … with a dash of karma.

Complication: Some (of a more literalist bent) suggest that Jesus is charting here the geography of the afterlife: Heaven … Hell. Reality check. This is a parable, not National Geographic. The point is the reversal in the two main characters’ fortunes. Standard storytelling stuff. Just ask Charles Dickens.

Result? When the rich guy gets a-load of Laz enjoying a silver-lined eternity, he channels Joseph Campbell: “Regrets are illuminations come too late.”

If that weren’t bad enough, he gets salt rubbed in his festering wounds … not once, but twice. Father Abraham shoots down his modest request for Laz to leap the gulf stretching between their new circumstances just to moisten his parched lips.

And when the rich man suggests that Abraham send Laz back from the dead to alert his gilt-edged siblings with a shout-out to Lost in Space (“Warning! Warning! Danger! Danger!”), Abraham’s response? “No can do.”

By now you might be wondering, “What is the name of the Montgomery Burns knock-off?”

We don’t know. This is Jesus’ stab at a short story. It’s fiction. So, it’s not as though the poor-excuse-for-a-human-being really lived. But many have tried to pin a name on him to avoid “The Parable of Laz and … What’s-His-Name.”

A few arbitrary names have been suggested, but the one that has stuck is Dives. (Wow your friends at cocktail parties with the Brit pronunciation: Dī-vēz.) But a tag like that doesn’t really work, because Dives-as-proper-name is the result of a bit of confusion. In the Latin version of the parable ─ the Latin version holding sway in the Middle Ages ─ ‘rich man’ = dives. So, some thought that was really his name: Dives, as in the ballad, Dives and Lazarus.

Fact is: In no other parable does Jesus provide a character’s name, suggesting that Jesus intentionally leaves the gazillionaire anonymous, while he intentionally names the beggar Lazarus.

Why?

Jesus has made his name by pointing out a grim reality: In the real world, the over-compensated one percent generate brand. They make sure their names monopolize the skyline from Caesarea to Jerusalem … from Manhattan to Vegas, lit up in yuuuuge gold letters, while the victims of their greed go unnamed in the anonymous shadows below.

That means, highlighting the economics at the heart of the parable, Jesus engineers another reversal: the obscenely-wealthy, larger-than-life person (stand-in for the one percent) goes unnamed … while the invisible, pauperized person (stand-in for the remaining 99 percent) gets a name.

Giving the rich bloke a name, then, is to miss the point … because Jesus here is showing his hand: God rigs the system. God rigs the system in favor of the 99 percent that have always merited a name in God’s book. Standing in for them all? Laz ─ or Lazarus ─ whose name means “God is my help.” Coincidence? We think not!

But what about those five surviving siblings I’m so worried about, the rich guy’s clueless brothers? With Abraham denying Laz safe conduct back to the Land of the Living, who will save the siblings from their brother’s fate? Who will save them from themselves with the alert, “Your ‘you-can’t-be-too-rich’ moral universe? God’s ranking: ‘Pants on Fire!’”

And we are left to wonder, Will the siblings never pay attention to facts laid out by Moses and the prophets, as Father Abraham suggests?

That’s Moses, who says in Deuteronomy, “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’”

And the prophets. Take Jeremiah: “Scoundrels are found among my people, says the Lord. They take over the goods of others. Like fowlers, they set a trap; they catch human beings. Like a cage full of birds, their houses are full of treachery; therefore they have become great and rich, indulging in gluttony. They do not defend the rights of the needy.”

It doesn’t get any more straightforward than that.

But do the gazillionaire’s gilded siblings ever get it? We don’t know. We don’t have to know … because the parable is open-ended, pointing to the moral universe Jesus invites us to occupy, one that captures the guiding principles of Moses and the prophets paraphrased as “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Problem is: In this election cycle, we are witnessing unprecedented, gob-smacking affronts to that principle. We are awash in lies ─ about poor people … about immigrants … about African-Americans, Muslims, gay people, and so many of our other neighbors … passed off as fact ─ data-free “fact” ─ over and over again.

For example, when you hear a candidate say, as a candidate did this past week, “[Black people] are worse off than ever before. Ever, ever, ever!” … when you hear something so patently false like that, there should be alarms going off in your head … pounding, excruciating alarms:

Worse off than slavery? … worse off than mob lynchings? … worse off than segregation? … worse off than being clubbed, beaten, set upon by attack dogs?

I mean, you can’t be an aware follower of Jesus ─ active, engaged, voting ─ and let a comment like that wash over you without saying, “Hey, wait a minute! What about history? What about facts? What about, ‘Hey, you’re pants are on fire!”

Or when a friend or an acquaintance, maybe a co-worker, even a parishioner, says ─ as did a rep ─ a white rep ─ from one of the campaigns a few days ago: “There was no racism in this country before [January 20, 2009].”

Wha’?!

“If you’re black,” she continued, “and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault.”

Wha’?!!

Now, look. That may have come from the mouth of someone who claims to be Christian … but it is not a Christian remark. It’s not a Christian remark because it’s not based in facts. It a lie … a verifiable, “Pants-on-Fire!” lie.

Consequently, Jesus’ “Parable of the Rich Man and Laz” compels us not to let a lie like this ─ and remarks like it ─ stand. Because such a freewheeling relationship with the truth doesn’t represent what we stand for. It’s alien to the moral universe Jesus invites each of us to occupy.

Bottomline: Whether or not we’ll shout “Pants on Fire!” when we witness these lies ─ in conversation with our friends and others face-to-face or online ─ depends on the degree to which we believe Jesus commissions each of us to stand for fact-based truths and opinions in real time, all the time.

The good news is that if we take to doing our own homework … and take a shine to facts … if we cotton up to shouting “Pants on Fire!” … think of all the friends we’ll save ─ perhaps, even ourselves ─ from ever having to sit on the hot seat!

Amen.

“Cooking the Books for Christ”

Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost  18 September 2016
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector

Luke 16:1-13 (Jesus goes soft on crime. Sort of.)

“Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth.”  Luke 16:9a

Contradicting all the press releases, all the punditry, all the caught-in-the-random-act-of-kindness paparazzi shots … contradicting all we know must be true for two millennia now, does the heart of a criminal after all beat in Jesus’ breast? Because who but a criminal would boast, “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth”?

And our role model, according to Jesus? An embezzling manager ─ a chief operating officer ─ who bilks his boss out of megabucks. And then, to cover his tracks post-audit, generates instant assets by cutting a cents-on-the-dollar payback deal with his boss’s debtors.

So, in commending the embezzler, is Jesus channeling street-smart and jagged-headed Bart Simpson, who famously said, “Inside every hardened criminal beats the heart of a ten-year-old boy”?

In other words, do we finally learn the truth: that inside Jesus ─ inside this too-good-to-be-true, goody-two-shoes Galilean ─ “beats the heart of a ten-year-old boy”?

Or is Jesus (wink, wink) just pulling our leg?

It depends on how much you know about “tricksters.” They’re in a class of con-artistry all their own. Factoid: Stories about tricksters enliven folklore from the Bible to Uncle Remus’s Br’er Rabbit to Stewie on Family Guy.

Let’s take a quintessential trickster Jesus’ audience would be familiar with: the Bible’s Jacob. His dirty tricks? First, he dupes his older twin Esau out of his inheritance. He then tops that scheme off by cheating Esau out of their blind father’s blessing (a financially-beneficial “favored son” status). How? By doing an impersonation of his impossibly butch brother.

No one can deny it: Jacob commits blatant fraud. But do people condemn his duplicity? No, they channel their inner Bart Simpson: “Don’t have a cow, man!” … because one takeaway from trickster Jacob’s rap sheet is: “In a pinch, we should all be so clever.”

It’s like an actual trickster story that was making the rounds in Jesus’ day. I’d be surprised if Jesus wasn’t familiar with it:

Once upon a time, there was a petty thief who was caught red-handed. He’s tried, found guilty, and sentenced to be hanged. He’s “dead man walking.”

On the way to the gallows, he tells his jailer that he knows a secret. “I can place a magical pomegranate seed in the ground,” he claims, “and through a secret taught to me by my sainted father (may he rest in peace!), I can make the magical pomegranate seed grow and bear ripe fruit … overnight! What a shame it would be for the secret to die with me. Before you hang me, perhaps I should share it with the king.”

And so, the jailer passes word along to the king. And with much ceremony the king and all his court process to the gallows. The condemned man is waiting for them.

In front of them all, he digs a hole in the ground. Then he holds up an ordinary pomegranate seed. “For the magic to work,” the thief says, “this seed must be planted by someone who has never stolen anything in his life. I’ve been caught red-handed, so obviously I can’t do it. Do I have any volunteers? Anyone? Don’t be shy.”

Crickets.

He turns to the king’s chief of staff, who stutters: “W-w-w-ell, once I committed a ‘youthful indiscretion.’ I kept something that didn’t belong to me … quite by accident, of course.”

The thief turns to the king’s treasurer. His reaction? “Well, you have to realize that I deal with money all the time. It’s only fair to assume that in a moment of distraction, I may have entered some incorrect figures into the balance sheet that may have benefited me in the long run … quite by accident, of course.”

At last, it’s the king’s turn: “Well, uh, once, if I recall correctly,” he clears his throat, “I ‘borrowed’ a teensy-weensy diamond-studded necklace of my father’s. And, gosh, come to think of it, I guess I forgot to return it … quite by accident, of course.”

The thief then addresses the whole court. “You ― every one of you ― have all the money and power in the world you could possibly want. And yet you can’t plant the magical pomegranate seed … while I ― who have stolen a little because I was starving ― am to be hanged!”

This impresses the king. He rewards the thief’s cleverness by pardoning him.

So, is the Parable of the Dishonest Manager a “trickster story”? In this case, does it accentuate the positives of cleverness … while it papers over the crime of embezzlement?

That’s my take, because, like the thief in the Story of the Magical Pomegranate Seed, the dishonest manager in the parable ― who’s also in a pinch ― is rewarded for being clever.

Meaning: He’s cooked the books of his boss’s distribution business and lined his own pockets with embezzled cash. The boss catches him red-handed and is just about to kick his kiester to the curb. With the fat in the fire, what does the manager do? He’s a trickster! He snatches job security from the jaws of insolvency!

And he does that by exercising what we would today call seychel. It’s in the trickster job description. It’s Yiddish for ‘wisdom.’ But it’s more than that. It’s ingenuity, creativity.

So, the dishonest manager-trickster goes into seychel mode.

He calls into his office the vendors who owe the boss big time. He pulls up the records of their debts. But with a double-click of his mouse [click-click!], the manager offers instant pay-now-or-weep later discounts. Result? Instant cash for the boss.

To the vendor who owes major stocks of olive oil, the trickster-manager says, “Now you owe only 50 percent.” To the one owing wheat, 80 percent.

50 percent … 80 percent. The numbers: arbitrary? … or shrewd?

Answer: shrewd. Olive oil is a less stable commodity than wheat. Basically, the wheeler-dealer is saying to the first debtor, “If I have to wait to move 100 percent of the olive oil you owe, it might spoil. What have you got on hand? 50 percent? 50 percent it is.”

To the second debtor: “Wheat. Stable, stores better. No need to glut the market. Ship it in 24 hours, and I’ll give you a 20 percent discount.”

As Jesus says, the manager may be dishonest … but he acts shrewdly.

And because the manager restructures their loans at bargain-basement rates, the debtors are now indebted … to him! In fact, they’re all quite chummy, in the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” economy of first-century Palestine.

How will this help?

The manager gambles on one thing: that when he’s fired and his backside hits the pavement, his new-found “friends” will reciprocate on the deals he cut them. And they will then support him in the style to which he would like to become accustomed.

Now, perhaps I speak just for myself, but deep down — on some level — I think we envy brazen tricksters like the dishonest manager. We may not like them, but I mean, Bart Simpson! They pull off stunts we would never dare, but daydream about.

We envy them because even if they lack morals, they do have chutzpah! Take the boss. When he finds out about the deals the dishonest manager has negotiated, he has to give him credit: “Fellah, whatever else of mine you’ve got, you’ve got chutzpah!”

So, by praising the dishonest manager, is Jesus making a virtue of dishonesty? No.

Is he making a virtue of the dishonest manager’s seychel — his turn-on-a-dime creativity — and the unabashed gall to pull it off? Absolutely!

That’s because Jesus ― our boss ― would like good reasons to give us credit for being as shrewd, quick, clever, creative, and brazen about the crises threatening God’s kingdom as the dishonest manager was in responding to his crisis.

In other words, we’re in a pinch — we, the people of God, and all our neighbors. And given what we could be doing ― now, we’re doing a lot! ― but given what we could be doing ― through our taxes, our gifts to this parish … through our deanery and diocese … through our votes, and what we spend our time on ― we’re barely chipping away at the things God sees as critically important, like:

People hurting, losing more and more of the little they have and suffering at the hands of those who live by the market, and not by the heart.

In other words, people being treated as commodities and statistics, and not as our neighbors.

In light of all this, Jesus says, “Be like the dishonest manager. Not in cheating, but in urgency. Switch into crisis management mode! Triage!”

… because life ─ as Jesus lived it ─ isn’t a “let come what may” enterprise. It is about seychel: being shrewd and gutsy … using use whatever we’ve got on hand now to pull the fat out of the fire for legions of our neighbors-in-harm’s way.

That means: as long as there is one crisis anywhere that puts God’s kingdom of each-being-neighbor-to-the-other in jeopardy … just like the dishonest manager, we may as well all be caught red-handed.

And the only way out of that mess is raw … no-holds-barred … step-up-to-the-plate once and for all … creativity-packed chutzpah.

Or, as trickster Bart Simpson would never in a gazillion years say to Homer, “Go ahead, man, make my day. Have a cow!”

Amen.

"Marked for Life"

Homily for the Feast of the Holy Cross       11 September 2016
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector

“When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we remember your death, Lord Jesus.”

They may trigger regret. They seldom fail to garner attention. They may even snag a date or torpedo a job interview. But it is the design and mechanics ─ the essential forget-me-not nature ─ of tattoos that makes them prone to permanence.

Result? Despite even the sagging ravages of age, tattoos succeed where memory fails.

That’s why tattoos are now “in” with a growing number of younger family members of Holocaust survivors, particularly survivors of Auschwitz. Their tattoo of choice? Not the garish or menacing inking of the biker set. Instead, numbers. Six digits.

For example, after a trip to Poland, 20s-something Israeli Eli Sagir had tattooed on her left forearm 157622. The tattoo’s meaning? And why her left forearm?

That is the same tattoo ─ the number 157622 ─ her grandfather has permanently inked on his left forearm. Not by choice or vanity, but courtesy of the Nazi slave-labor machine at Auschwitz, the machine that no longer considered him and others like him persons, but numbers. As Primo Levi states in his memoir, Survival in Auschwitz, the Nazis used numeric tattoos to advance the “demolition of [the person].”

But why the same tattoo ─ her grandfather’s tattoo ─ for Eli Sagir? “I did it to remind my generation,” she says. “I want to tell them my grandfather’s story and the Holocaust story.” The tattoo accomplishes that by generating questions and sparking conversations. It is, after all, not your everyday tattoo.

In other words, Eli’s skins says, “Never forget” because the numeric tattoo is a marker, a warning beacon: a permanent and visible memorial to her grandfather’s suffering and the suffering of so many other Jews and minorities at a time when hate went, for too long a season, unchecked.

In that same spirit of memory and memorial, ours is a dual observance today.

Today we mark the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 … that clear September day profaned when Al Qaeda terrorists flew two passenger- and fuel-laden planes into the twin World Trade Center Towers in Manhattan … another into the Pentagon … and a fourth (Flight 93), prevented from reaching its Washington, D.C. target by heroic passengers, who struggled with the hijackers and caused the plane to crash in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Then, too, we observe the Feast of the Holy Cross, recalling that day in 335 CE, when what was acclaimed to be the True Cross, discovered roughly 20 years earlier by the Empress Helena, was placed in the just-completed Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Now, are we dealing with the True (the really, really, accept-no-substitutes, true) Cross Jesus died on a little over three centuries before that celebration in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre?

Frankly, I’m skeptical. At best, neutral. We can’t prove that it was the True Cross. Can’t prove that it wasn’t. It’s just not verifiable, although quite vivid stories ─ some would say, tall tales ─ of its miraculous, life-restoring properties were used at the time to bolster notions of its authenticity.

To take a more jaded route: I think, in its day, calling the cross we’re dealing with here the “True Cross” may have been driven more by religious enthusiasm, wishful thinking, and pilgrim (read: tourist) economics, than by corroborable evidence.

But all the excitement, the pageantry, and general hoopla around this “True Cross”? I think it speaks to the issue Eli Sagir’s tattoo raises: How do you prevent memory loss generations far-removed from the original, pivotal event?

Or, how do you create “ballast against the drift toward amnesia” in the wake of history-altering events like the Holocaust or Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination in Dallas, Martin Luther King’s martyrdom, or 9/11?

That’s a concern of art-restitution lawyer Corinne Herschovitz. Her mission is to return Nazi-looted art to their original owners and institutions. Advocating “ballast against the drift toward amnesia,” Herschovitz invokes what French historians call lieux de mémoire (“places of memory”). “As we lose eyewitnesses,” she explains, “we turn to recorded first-hand accounts and locations to bear witness to the horrors of the past.”

And yet, if you’re a fourth-century Christian, aware that a yawning gulf exists between lived memory and time-warped memory, how do you create the “ballast” of what really happened on Good Friday?

You search for the missing “place of memory,” the True Cross. The True Cross that has the ability to transport you, like a wormhole through time, to the original event to ensure that what Jesus did on the cross ─ and what was done to Jesus ─ would be as fresh today as the day the cross was lifted high on Calvary.

Leading us to consider: Most, if not all, of us who witnessed the attacks 15 years ago today believe that 9/11 matters. No one alive today ─ even those who have no personal memories of 9/11 ─ can escape its globe-rattling ripples. How, then, do we ─ not just as US citizens, but as followers of Jesus Christ ─ “never forget” 9/11 … we who believe that God could be discovered ─ present, suffering, urging on, holding on ─ not only in Jesus’ suffering and death but also in the smoldering carnage of 9/11?

The answer looks a lot like the plea Willie Loman’s wife Linda makes in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” Recap: Time and technology have overtaken Willie’s career. His son Biff rejects him as a loser. But Linda rises to Willie’s defense: “Your father is a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid.”

We tell, then, our attention-grabbing stories. And we consecrate our hallowed places of memory, like Ground Zero in Manhattan … because attention must be paid. Real people ─ our neighbors ─ fell to earth that day, thousands pulverized in rubble. Real heroes were made and many died that day. Real families, loved ones, and colleagues were left to mourn. Legions of the injured still suffer. Dreams of security died that day. Trust in our leaders to tell us the truth to justify war was lost, starting that day.

And there is this inescapable fact: We ─ here ─ have chosen to be people interwoven into Jesus’ story … the story that climaxes in the disaster of his cross. And we have consecrated this community as a place of memory … because memory’s impulse infuses our DNA when we say at each Eucharist, sometimes using different words: “When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we remember your death, Lord Jesus.”

Bottomline: I don’t think there’s equivalence between what Eli Sagir’s grandfather experienced at Auschwitz and our experiences as witnesses to the events of 9/11. But perhaps, if ─ by sharing our stories … by consecrating our places of memory … by sharing space ─ here ─ with God, present also on 9/11 … and by remembering, as we will do today, Jesus’ death on the cross in its first-hand, sobering void ─ perhaps we will succeed in creating for those who come after us “ballast against the drift toward amnesia.”

Perhaps, then, we will assume ─ in some measure, some day ─ the grandfather’s posture when he was first shown Eli’s facsimile of his own Auschwitz tattoo. He bent over and kissed the familiar numbers … 1-5-7-6-2-2 … in one defiant gesture: “Never, never forget.”

Amen.