"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.

A Marriage Made in Heaven?

Homily for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost   24 July 2016
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector

Hosea 1:2-10 (God stretches matchmaking norms)

“Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom.”

Hosea 1:2

You’ve probably seen the ads: “Christian and single? Ready for love? Find God’s match for you.”

That’s the hook ChristianMingle.com uses to attract single individuals ─ primarily evangelicals, I’m guessing ─ to use their dating services. ChristianMingle.com’s product? If you’re in the market: software, online assessments, and a database of thousands of photos and profiles to help you find “The One.” That is, “The One” God has destined ─ we presume, since time immemorial ─ for you to marry.

Now, before you take up the pitchforks and torches, a disclaimer: This isn’t a plug for ChristianMingle.com. It isn’t a Rotten Tomato for ChristianMingle.com or any other cyber-alternate to the bar scene. If you found the perfect spouse through ChristianMingle.com, more power to you. Love, love, love. If you think it might be the solution to your search for companionship, knock yourself out.

But I’m stuck on the bordering-on-arranged-marriage premise: “Find God’s match for you … The One.”

Now, if we think God’s will is all about specific life choices ─ discerning somehow the precise Google Maps route God has already charted for how each of us gets from Point A to Point B and beyond ─ what are we to make of what appears to be God’s will for Hosea when it comes to finding God’s perfect match for him ─ finding and marrying and having kids with The One?

That is, is it God’s will that Hosea marry a prostitute? Because that’s exactly what God seems to want. “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom,” God demands, “and have children of whoredom.”

I can’t remember the last time I used “whoredom” in a sentence, can you? So connecting it with finding The One is just baffling. Why would that even be an option?

Picture this: It’s roughly the middle of the eighth-century BCE, long, long after King David and Solomon. Their kingdom is now divided in two, north and south. Israel in the north, hotbed of paganism ─ specifically, Ba’al worship. And Judah to the south, grounded in the worship of God.

Hosea’s vocation? Prophet. Now, remember, prophets aren’t fortune tellers. They’re truth tellers. “If you people keep turning your back on the dream God has for you,” the prophets say, “be prepared to stew in your own juices!” Simple cause-and-effect. Basic truth-telling.

The focus of Hosea’s commission? To re-introduce the northerners (the people of Israel) to their first love, the God of their ancestors.

To impress upon Hosea what’s at stake, God tells him to marry not just any prostitute, but Gomer. Gomer, who probably isn’t a street-corner hooker hailing down traffic, but a Ba’al-temple-sponsored prostitute.

Leaving us to ask, “Is Gomer God’s match for Hosea and vice-versa?”

Not exactly. We’re in a teaching moment, where nothing succeeds like excess. And nothing is as excessive as metaphor. It’s all metaphor here and not Ba’alMingle.com.

Truth-in-advertising: There are any number of interpretations about what is going on here. One way is to look at Hosea as a stand-in for Israel as God dreams it can be: faithful to God alone. And Gomer, the prostitute gone Ba’al-istic? Israel as it is: a people who have forsaken fidelity to God in order to practice the highly-popular Ba’al religion ─ a fertility religion … primarily, fertility in agriculture, the economic base in the north.

That means: The seed-to-bumper-crop fertility of the soil drives the economy. And what drives that fertility? The “sex lives of plants.” Sex. It’s always on the mind of the fertility god Ba’al.

To take these drives to their logical conclusion, Ba’alism is a ball! Its liturgy offers sex with temple-sponsored prostitutes, mimicking the wide-ranging randiness of Ba’al.

And, in its exploitation of women, it runs smack up against God’s will that all be treated as neighbor.

Hosea’s “marriage,” then, to Gomer: It’s God’s way of saying that, if Hosea isn’t successful in dismantling the steamy worship of Ba’al, the metaphorical offspring of his liaisons with the metaphorical Gomer will be:

Jezreel. Named after a horrifyingly bloody massacre in the Jezreel Valley.

Lo-ruhámah. “Not pitied.”

Lo-ámmi. “Not my people.”

Fabulous names for kids. May as well call them Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels.

God’s point here, through Hosea: “Israel, keep it up. That’s right, keep it up. Make a mockery of what has been your heirloom relationship with God — a relationship that values all persons as neighbor ─ and here’s what’s going to happen:

“You will be attacked by war-mongering Assyria. As at Jezreel, your blood will soak the earth, your towns and cities turned to rubble, your remaining people carried off into exile.

“No one will come to your rescue.

“God’s relationship with you will be severed.”

Grim.

And we are left to conclude that ─ metaphor being what it is in Hosea’s case ─ when we pray, “Thy will be done,” perhaps God’s will isn’t the sort of thing that is as specific as the plotlines of our lives, as if life were a board game … a cosmic version of The Game of Life, in which God has determined all the rolls of the dice, plotted out all the moves, the decisions, the prizes, the consequences: career, spouse, college (or no college), college major, job move. Because, where does it end? Picking the right daily special off the menu?

Meaning: God’s will isn’t as complex or manipulative as that. I doubt that God cares what daily special we pick … as long as it’s healthy and leaves a minimal carbon footprint! Similarly, God doesn’t have The One, the perfect and sole someone, out there for each of us to discover, as ChristianMingle’s advertising would have us believe.

Because, if that’s the way God’s will works, what happens when you make a choice contrary to that specific “will”? Let’s say, you marry the “wrong” person. Does that make God edgy? And, as if that weren’t enough, how do you ever pick up the thread of God’s alternate reality? Keep marrying and divorcing until you get back on track? Anyone who’s a fan of science fiction knows that only time travel can fix bad decisions and their infinitely-multiplying fallout. Getting the funding to invent time travel? We can’t even fix bridges!

And yet, we pray, “Thy will be done.” We pray it a lot, pointing to the fact that all the time, energy, and sweat we invest in prayer speaks volumes about us and what we consider to be truly important … and how we understand real need ─ the needs of our neighbors and our own needs, often the simple need to hear and say the comfortable words prayer offers.

And when done right ─ not following the board game/God-as-manipulator route, but exchanging being comforted for exercising comfort ─ our prayers track Jesus’ own pattern of measuring our needs and our neighbors’ needs against God’s needs. What, then, emerges? A relationship with God that is shaped in word and application by the very contours of God’s will, God’s dream.

Why else in the same breath would we bother to pray, as Jesus teaches us, “Thy kingdom come”?

The point: According to Jesus’ own advice on how to pray and how he acted in real time, what God wants ─ what God needs ─ is our participation in God's project of shared abundance:

Daily bread: sufficient and affordable food for absolutely everyone.

Tangible justice, what all are owed (like the elimination of racial profiling so that, like all lives, Black Lives will matter equally).

Meaningful work and a just minimum wage.

Universal and unlimited access to healthcare, learning, and opportunity.

What God’s shared abundance doesn’t look like? Walls. There are no walls in God’s will.

Praying, then, “Thy will be done”: Its first step looks like a litany written by Rebecca Sutton, Program Coordinator of Global Women’s Exchange:

Pray for those who are hungry.
Pray harder for those who will not feed them.

Pray for those who struggle each week to pay their bills.
Pray harder for the wealthy who do not care.

Pray for those who are homeless.
Pray harder for those who deny them shelter.

Pray for the sick and lonely.
Pray harder for those who will not give them comfort.

Pray for those oppressed by unjust wages.
Pray harder for those who exploit them.

Pray for those who bear the yoke of prejudice.
Pray harder for those who discriminate against them.

Pray for those whose basic needs are denied.
Pray harder for public officials who cater to the greedy and ignore those bound unjustly.

Pray for those who cry out for dignity.
Pray harder for those who will not listen.

Bottomline: Pray that God’s will be done. Then do the hard work that will make God’s “kingdom come.” Because ─ as God imagines it ─ that’s a match!

Amen.

Splitting Hairs

Homily for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost  10 July 2016

The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector

Luke 10:25-37 (Jesus resets the boundaries of a lawyer's neighborhood)

“And who is my neighbor?”  Luke 10:29b

In politics, splitting hairs is always in season. No more so than in this election cycle.

Example: To avoid guilt-by-association and electoral suicide, you can claim the contradictory “Of course, I support the presumptive nominee. I just don’t endorse him.”

Or take a six-pointed star and attendant attack ad, lifted ─ by one of the campaigns ─ from a blatantly white-supremacist site. In context, is it a Star of David, pitched to anti-Semitic voters? Or ─ ignoring altogether the tweet’s provenance ─ is it a sheriff’s badge? And then, too, sometimes a star ─ improbably in this case ─ is just a star. Well, then, what is it? Splitting hairs.

Of course, the hair-splitting bar was set pretty high when a former President was charged with lying to Congress. His tortured defense? “Depends what ‘is’ is.”

But today, not from CNN’s sunny Anderson Cooper … not from Fox’s perennially petulant Bill O’Reilly … or my favorite, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow … but from Luke the Evangelist, no less, we have an exercise in hairsplitting that has the most-hairsplitting of politicians beat. It involves Jesus and a lawyer whose business card boasts, “No hair too thin to split.”

The good news is, the lawyer discovers that Jesus operates under a different motto: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

And that’s what triggers the lawyer’s challenge, “And who is my neighbor?”

A case of honest curiosity? You must be kidding. It’s hairsplitting. Because, sure, the lawyer agrees in principle that God’s Law requires you to love your neighbor.

(Truth-in-advertising: Jesus didn’t invent this stuff. Moses did. In the Law, the Torah.)

But the lawyer wants Jesus to answer the question: “When it comes to loving my neighbor, just how far am I required to go?”

Depends on what “neighbor” is.

Because when you dig a bit deeper into the lawyer’s question (“And who is my neighbor?”) what you've really got is outrageously lawyerly-but-logical hairsplitting. His line of questioning reads as, “Let’s say my neighbor is defined as someone ‘close’ to me. Can we agree on that, Jesus? My neighbor is someone who lives near me. Just how near, then, is ‘near’? One block? Two blocks?

“Or is my neighbor people just like me? Are people I wouldn’t dream of getting close to my neighbor? I mean, is the dishonest tax collector my neighbor? Is the trigger-happy Roman soldier my neighbor? What about an untouchable leper? Just how do you define ‘neighbor,’ Jesus?”

But Jesus has little patience for splitting hairs. So, he reframes the question ─ for a moment, away from the “neighbor” part of “love your neighbor” to the “love” part. “What you’re really asking,” Jesus determines (in so many words), “isn’t a definition of ‘neighbor.’ You’re asking, ‘What are the limits of love?’”

Or, “Who ─ specifically, who ─ is not my neighbor?”

And to help the lawyer answer that one, Jesus weaves the most hard-hitting parable of his entire career ─ perhaps the most hard-hitting parable of all time: “A man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers….”

And ─ spoiler alert! ─ you just can’t walk away from this parable with a prayer of splitting hairs!

Because we learn the inconvenient truth of what we’ve always suspected: We’re in the story. And at one time or another we play all the roles: the victim in the ditch … the religious elites whose default is to ignore him … the rescuer, who, from the victim’s point of view, is the most improbable neighbor of all, a “good” Samaritan.

And because we’re all in the story, Jesus’ point is that we’re all neighbors. That’s because we learn from the parable that Jesus lives in a neighborhood that doesn’t even have the kind of fences that make good neighbors. In Jesus’ grasp of economics, walls ─ between people or running the full length of a border ─ come at a price too high to pay.

That also means Jesus lives in a neighborhood that can’t afford the costs ─ the human costs ─ of systemic racism that makes inevitable the violence we’ve witnessed in our neighborhoods this past week:

Alton Sterling. Killed ─ execution-style ─ by police Tuesday while he was selling CDs outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Philando Castile. Killed by police the next day ─ at close range ─ during a routine traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota.

And then, Dallas, Thursday evening. A peaceful ‘Black Lives Matter’ protest. Twelve police officers ─ protecting and working with the protesters ─ 12 police and two civilians gunned down. Of the police, five murdered in cold blood by sniper Micah Javier Johnson acting out his own racist rage against white police officers.

Tracking how we got to this point ─ and acknowledging the violence in many minority communities ─ New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow suggests, with uncommonly clear eyes, its inevitability:

Our American “ghettos” were created by policy and design. These areas of concentrated poverty became fertile ground for crime and violence. Municipalities used heavy police forces to try to cap that violence. Too often, aggressive policing began to feel like oppressive policing.

Relationships between communities and cops became strained.

A small number of criminals poisoned police beliefs about whole communities. And a small number of dishonorable officers poisoned communities’ beliefs about entire police forces.

And then, too often, the unimaginable happened.

And we are left to conclude:

The way those Baton Rouge police acted, they broadcast: “Alton Sterling is not my neighbor.”

The murderous Falcon Heights police officer weighed in unambiguously: “Philando Castile is not my neighbor.”

With each round, each bullet, Michael Javier Johnson left no doubt: “The white police officer is not my neighbor.”

This isn’t news, then: We have to get out of this mess. We have to move forward, if we are to survive and fulfil the promise of our professed liberating impulses. But the way forward will remain unattainable as long as we in our communities ─ and those of us who claim to follow Jesus ─ engage in the kind of corrosive hairsplitting Jesus abhors: “Who is not my neighbor?”

That means, as some rightly suggest, we take appropriate steps in criminal justice and police training, in schools and in public conversations, in the moral formation of all our citizenry, so that each of us experiences what we each deserve:  to be treated as neighbor by neighbor.

In practical terms and at its most basic, that means ─ as Charles Blow suggests ─ for each and all to make it home safe each day or night to be with the people we love.

Now, that would look like Jesus’ neighborhood … a neighborhood filled with people all of us at one time or another have placed beyond the limits of our love because of age, physical limitations, income, race, sexual orientation, gender, intellect, profession, religion.

Bottomline: With the horrifying gunshots of Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, and Dallas still ringing in our ears … before the next shots split the air … Jesus demands that each of us answer the most consequential question of all time: “Who is not our neighbor?”

Dead Silence

Homily for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Luke 8:26-39)   19 June 2016

The Rev'd John R. Clarke, Rector

Our God comes and does not keep silence.

Psalm 50:3a

You would think the Gerasa City Council would pass a resolution declaring it “Jesus of Nazareth Day.” After all, he rids the town of its resident lunatic fringe, “The Wild Man of Gerasa.”

Yes, you would think. And you would be wrong. Not even a Key to the City. Zip. Zero. Nada.

Because Jesus scares the, well, living bejeezus out of the people of Gerasa.

How come? He appears to drive demons out of the Wild Man. Next, he lets the now free-range demons possess a mega-herd of hogs, whereupon, like lemmings ─ in a panic ─ the herd stampedes into the nearest available body of water. And there goes the lucrative Gerasa pork bellies commodities market.

The upshot? Like a herd gone-rogue themselves, the Gerasenes panic. In their frenzy they drive Jesus out of town on a rail, proving once more, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Now, whether you believe the Wild Man of Gerasa was actually possessed by demons or you think that’s all shorthand for schizophrenia or some other personality disorder, the fact remains: Jesus has just done the people of Gerasa ─ and, obviously, the man ─ a great service: from un-bathed, buck-naked, Jack-Nicholson-at-his-most-manic-type menace to virtual Chair of the Chamber of Commerce.

With results like that, what’s to be afraid of?

Well, in one fell swoop, Jesus shuts down the local economy. Run the numbers. If he hangs around and keeps this up, the Gerasene Dow Jones? Kaput!

And when you exercise power like that ─ whether it’s over demons or psychosis or the economy ─ you kind of weird people out. When’s the next shoe going to drop?

Read: The Gerasenes wish Jesus had never set foot in their town. They wish Jesus had never taken on the “legion” of demons in the Wild Man or triggered the hog herd’s suicidal forced-march to the sea. They wish they had silenced Jesus before he could disrupt their town.

Problem: It’s not in Jesus’ nature to be silenced. It’s Jesus’ mission to be loud, confrontational, disruptive … because Jesus knows that in the face of forces that imperil human flourishing, like whatever was going on with the Wild Man of Gerasa, silence = death.

Unfortunately, in driving Jesus out of town, all the Gerasenes hear is the fear pounding in their ears.

But does that make the Gerasenes bad people? Not necessarily. They’re probably a lot like Mrs. Turpin in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation.”

[Note: I have edited portions of the short story quoted here out of homiletical expediency.]

Mrs. Turpin considers herself a good person. A pig famer in the rural South of the 1950s, she describes herself this way: “When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got ─ a little of everything, and a good disposition besides ─ I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is! Thank you, Jesus. Thank you.”

And this is the way “it” is, according to Mrs. Turpin: On the bottom are most blacks. Next to them ─ not above, but on a par with them ─ are white-trash. Then above them are home owners. Above them are the home-and-land owners. And at the top of the social heap are people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land ─ people like Mrs. Turpin and her husband Claud.

One day, she takes Claud to the doctor. In the waiting room, judging another woman sitting there to be her peer ─ a woman accompanied by her puffy-faced, Ivy League-educated daughter ─ Mrs. Turpin speechifies about how hard it is to be such a fine woman in a world of the less fortunate. She then launches into a racist rant about how hard it is to get good help these days.

On and on it goes. The woman’s daughter gives Mrs. Turpin one dirty look after another, until red-faced, the young woman goes postal. Without warning, she hurls the book she’s been reading at Mrs. Turpin, clipping her right above the eye!

Well, the waiting room erupts and the girl is quickly subdued. But not before getting up real close ─ face-to-face close ─ with Mrs. Turpin.

Eyeball-to-eyeball, the girl hisses, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog!”

That rattles Mrs. Turpin. But ─ good church person that she is ─ she can’t shake off the idea that this is somehow a revelation from God.

It troubles her and nags her, until one evening out by the pig-pen, she cracks. She shakes her fist at God and shouts, “There will always be folks at the top and folks on the bottom! So, go on. Call me a hog from hell!”

A garbled echo (“hog from hell”) returns to her. Taking that to be God’s answer, she roars, “Who do you think you are?”

No sooner than the words are out of her mouth, Mrs. Turpin looks up and sees a streak in the dusk-approaching sky. And upon it, “a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven.

“There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black people in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.

“And bringing up the tail end of the procession was a tribe of people Mrs. Turpin recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.

“She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignituh, accountable as they always had been for good orduh and common sense and respectable behaviuh. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even these virtues were being burned away.”

. . . . .

Now, a week ago today, we all awoke to news of the slaughter in Orlando. Unprecedented carnage: 49 dead from the LGBT community, the gunman himself, 53 more injured at his hand.

What is now becoming a meme in our country, the perpetrator was a seriously-disturbed young man. It’s not clear now that he was a committed jihadist, as first thought. But what’s clear is: he was deranged. A deranged person with a gun. A deranged person who could purchase a gun capable of shooting over 20 rounds in nine seconds (the civilian version of a military weapon designed to take as many lives as possible in a short amount of time).

As with this ─ it can be argued ─ preventable-slaughter meme, the reaction was equally predictable. Calls for prayer. Moments of silence declared.

But with one of the most visible moments of silence ─ the one called for by House Speaker Paul Ryan ─ just as the moment of silence ended and he attempted to resume the business of the House, the most extraordinary thing happened: Members of the Opposition ─ refusing to be silenced by business-as-usual ─ stood up and shouted over the Speaker: “Where’s the bill! Where’s the bill!” Meaning: the bill to consider sensible gun-control legislation, shot down by NRA-backed members of the House and their colleagues.

That eruption was followed by Christopher Murphy’s 15-hour filibuster in the Senate. Of course, he ─ and his colleagues ─ were anything but silent; they fought silence. They sought to force the majority leader into at least allowing the Senate to debate measures to tighten the nation’s gun laws. And they succeeded.

Of course this organized and just refusal to keep silent ─ or to tolerate silence ─ in the face of attempts to keep the rounds of ammo firing on innocents has not gone over well. And we’re still hearing from a lot of people who would feel right at home in Gerasa, where Jesus was silenced by being driven out of town.

And these Gerasenes of our own, the ones we’re hearing from ─ pundits, preachers, and politicos ─ maybe even some of our neighbors ─ the fear pounding in their ears ─ they’re certain of one thing. They’ve always known they would be marching ahead of LGBT folks (people like me and so many in our parish family) … and the other always “less-than” in their eyes: progressives, African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, and the non-violent, the peacemakers, the refusing-to-be-armed.

Like Mrs. Turpin, they’ve always known ─ they know ─ there will always be folks on top and folks on the bottom. And they’re on top: the right kind of people who “always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right” … counting on the folks on the bottom to go along. To be docile. To be content with “our prayers” and “moments of silence” to remember the slaughtered, as we await the next mass shooting … while the guns sales go “ca-ching!”

But they will not have the last word, not this time. Because the vocal and restless, life-giving and life-loving God is in our midst, not to be driven out. Silence will not be the last word.

Ask reluctant Mrs. Turpin, as her “revelation” came to a close:

“At length, she made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up. But what she heard were the voices of the souls ─ the hordes of white-trash, the bands of black people, the battalions of freaks and lunatics, all marching ahead of folks like her and Claud ─ souls shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs ─ climbing upward into the starry field and shouting ‘Hallelujah!’”

Amen.

"Peter Principle"

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter   24 April 2016

The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector-Designate

What God has called clean, you must not call profane.    Acts 11:9b

My hunch is, it’s a question few ─ if any ─ of us have ever thought about. But it’s the kind of question that bugs the heck out of rogue economist Steven Leavitt.

So, what do you think? Given the choices ─ a gun … or a swimming pool, which is more dangerous?

Well, let’s see. Take the parents of eight-year-old Molly, Leavitt suggests. Her two best friends ─ Amy and Imani ─ each live nearby. Molly’s parents know that Amy’s parents keep a gun in their house. So they forbid Molly to play there.

They do let Molly spend a lot of time at Imani’s house. It has a swimming pool in the backyard.

The parents think, in terms of protecting Molly, it’s a smart choice: guns … swimming pool. The gun is more dangerous. It’s a no-brainer … until you run the numbers. According to the data, the parents’ choice isn’t smart at all.

That’s because, in a given year, there’s one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. In a country with 6 million pools, this means that ─ tragically ─ roughly 550 children under the age of 10 drown each year.

What about guns? What’s the data on that score? In a country with an estimated 300 million guns, every year one child is killed by a gun for every million-plus guns. And, of course, that’s tragic, too.

Now, I’m a proponent of gun control ─ and this isn’t a homily about gun control ─ but the point for Molly’s parents here is that the likelihood of death by a swimming pool (1 in 11,000) vs. death by gun (1in a million-plus) isn’t even close. Molly is roughly 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool accident at Imani’s house than in gunplay at Amy’s.

As risk consultant Peter Sandman says, “The basic reality is that the risks that scare people, and the risks that kill people are very different.”

To make good choices, then, the challenge is getting the right information.

And that’s Leavitt’s argument. According to the conventional wisdom, because the world is riddled with obfuscation, complications, and downright deceit, it’s pretty impossible to get to the bottom of anything.

But the conventional wisdom is wrong, according to Leavitt. The world isn’t impenetrable and unknowable at all … if, as Leavitt suggests, you ask the right questions … if you learn a new way of looking … if you learn to see through all the clutter.

And this is certainly Peter’s experience.

When we first encounter Peter in our reading from Acts, what does Peter think the question is? He thinks it’s: “How are you going to keep the Church pure?”

That’s because, before his vision ─ the one about the massive sheet coming down from heaven bursting-at-the-seams with all sorts of non-Kosher goodies for the guilt-free taking ─ Peter, like the rest of the leaders of the fledgling Church, thinks that the Church is an exclusive club. Only Jewish people who choose to follow Jesus need apply.

But that intensely-narrow focus hits a speed bump when non-Jews ─ Gentiles ─ start getting the mind-boggling idea that Jesus got the whole God-humanity, humanity-God, love-love-love thing right. Following their own instincts, they choose to follow Jesus, too.

This triggers migraines, because the Jewish Christians ask, “Is a Gentile Christian even a thing?” If so, the Jewish Christians get bumped off their “God made us Number One” pedestal. And there goes the conventional wisdom.

So, their take is: How are you going to keep the Church pure? Answer: Some people are better than others. That’s just the way it is. Keep out those profane Gentiles!

Peter agrees … until God whacks him up one side of the head with that vision. The vision demolishes the conventional wisdom with God’s message: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane!”

That’s God’s progressive starting point for “church” … for everything.

Score? Purists: 0   Progressives: 1

And then God whacks Peter up the other side of the head … when Peter sees with his own eyes that the very same Spirit that has filled the Jewish discoverers of Jesus now fills the Gentile seekers as well.

Read: “If it quacks like a duck, chances are!”

Purists: 0   Progressives: 2

This is revolutionary. As revolutionary ─ in its day ─ as ordaining people of color … and then women … and then gay people … and then transgender persons as priests.

As revolutionary ─ in its day ─ as marrying (in church!) a mixed-race couple … a same-sex couple.

Meaning: As Peter learned, the question “How are you going to keep the Church pure ─ or society pure ─ or the country pure?” It’s the wrong question … because reality always intrudes. And, as New York Times blogger Timothy Egan puts it, “Reality is always a problem for purists.”

In other words, the right question is: “Calling neighbors different from us second-class citizens, unclean, less-than? … when God ─ who created us, each and all ─ has called them first-class, clean, equal-to? Who do we think we are?” Because God, obviously, isn’t a purist.

As 19c theologian and hymn-writer Frederick William Faber suggested:

We make God’s love too narrow
by false limits of our own,
and we magnify God’s strictness
with a zeal God will not own.

So, that’s why I’m gobsmacked that data-deficient demagogues of a purist stripe dare ask, “How are you going to keep the restrooms ─ the locker rooms ─ the showers of our communities ─ pure?”

Their answer? “Keep transgender people out. Keep out persons who identify with a gender other than the gender they were assigned at birth.”

Now, just about any follower of Jesus worth their salt would be conditioned by now to ask, “Is anyone being hurt by allowing transgender persons to use the facilities of their choice, by allowing them to be comfortable in their own skin?” I mean, that’s what the “love-your-neighbor-as-yourself” stuff is all about. Meaning, does the proposal under discussion hurt my neighbor ─ especially my less-powerful neighbor, such as children?

To arrive at the right answer, Steven Leavitt would suggest: Get the right information. Run the numbers. And I’d add, “Use the mind God gave you!” ... because factoid: Not one scrap of credible data says that transgender persons’ tinkle-venue choices have harmed even one child. And there have been no rapes. No assaults.

Now, the lengthening rap sheet of rapes, assaults, and murders of our transgender neighbors at the hands of fatally-insecure people? That’s another story. Haven’t seen the politically-opportunistic potty purists talk about that much. Haven’t seen them do what Jesus would do: bring bills before their legislatures to protect those victims, real victims.

Are those transgender people too second-class, perhaps … too unclean … too less-than for the “We the People” crowd, who ─ hat-tip to journalist Frank Bruni here ─ broadcast three goals in this manufactured kerfuffle: scare people … pit neighbor against neighbor … make us believe that some of us are better than others.

So, I’ve got to tell you, as a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts … well, I go to a lot of events. We ─ in this diocese ─ are flush with transgender persons, flush with transgender priests. And we share a lot of common spaces, if you get my drift. Do I look traumatized to you?

Bottomline: I don’t think bathrooms are on God’s mind. But I’d put money on it: people being unjustly targeted, discriminated against, beaten up, and much, much worse … are. They are on God’s mind. God made them. God made them ─ all of us! ─ clean.

Who are we to call them ─ who are we to treat them ─ anything less than “neighbor”?

Amen.