“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.

"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.