Primate Grooming (Proper
17C)
Homily Delivered 1 September 2013
8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland
(Oregon)
The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson
God, give us hearts to love and feel,
Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of
flesh. Amen
When I first
joined the U.S. Diplomatic service, a very wise mentor told me before my first
overseas assignment the following:
Tony,
always remember to respect the niceties of hierarchy and rank. You will run into Ambassadors and Department
of State under-Secretaries who, as products of the 60s, like to think of
themselves as ‘just plain folks.’ Trying
to convince themselves that they are as egalitarian and informal as they wish
they actually were, they will say, “Don’t use ‘Mr. Ambassador’ or ‘Madame
Secretary’ with me. Just call me by my
first name.” Don’t you believe it for
one minute, and never follow that
advice, no matter how often or vehemently expressed. Use “Sir” or “Ma’am,” always stand when an
Ambassador or the President enters the room, and use first names only when you
truly have become a hierarch’s friend and then, only away from the office.
I thought that
maybe he was being a little extreme, and old fashioned, until I ran into the
very situation that had led him to that conclusion: an Ambassador who indeed insisted
that his senior embassy staff not rise when he entered the room at “Country
Team” meetings. Everyone continued to
rise, despite the Ambassador’s protestations, until one newly arrived Peace
Corps Director took him at his word and remained seated, all alone. The Ambassador gave a look of barely
concealed contempt to the newcomer, sat down, and then said, in all apparent
gentleness, “I hope you look after that leg, Mr. Country Director. What is it, a soccer injury? I wouldn’t want to have to curtail you for
medical reasons.” There had been no
soccer injury.
Social
hierarchies, the niceties of rank and position—all of these things are part of
how we organize our community life.
Here in Ashland, Arts and New Age Center of the Rogue Valley, State of
Jefferson, Casual West Coast satellite equidistant from Portlandia and the
People’s Republic of Berkeley, many of us tend to want to pooh-pooh such
concerns. And they are easy to dismiss,
I admit.
But we do so at
our peril, because what we are talking about here is deeper than mere convention
or social tradition. We are talking primate
grooming, the thinking great ape’s method of picking lice off the shoulders of
our Silverbacks and allowing the Matriarchs full run of the kinship group. Social hierarchy would seem to be part an
instinctual artifact of our evolution as a species. It is foolish to disregard such things and
pretend that they do not exist.
Standing between a bear and her cubs is dangerous, and all the more so
when try to overcome the bear’s dismay by pretending the cubs aren’t
there.
The problem, of
course, is that the rules for social interaction and rank grow out of and seek
to order power relationships, deep feelings and subconscious motivations. Judith Martin, long-time writer of The Washington Post’s “Miss Manners”
column, notes that manners and etiquette are aimed at easing social
interaction, keeping calm in the public realm, and enforcing—through shame or
embarrassment—the norms that preserve a façade of peace and civility over what
otherwise would merely be a brutish and rude life. In keeping our conflicts somewhat
constrained, and in maintaining each other’s dignity, or at least the
appearance of it, in giving each other ways to save face, politeness demands at
times gentle insincerity. As Miss Manner
says, “Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.” And respect for rank means that we must be
willing to refer to some people as “our superiors” even when they may not be
worthy of the title.
The difficulty,
of course, comes when we confuse manners and politeness with ethics. This not only messes up manners, but cheapens
ethics. The idea is expressed well,
again, by Judith Martin when she discusses the tradition of having chaperons
for unmarried young people: “Chaperons,
even in their days of glory, were almost never able to enforce morality; what
they did was force immorality to remain discreet. That is no small contribution.”
The Gospel
reading today tells us of Jesus’ take on social hierarchies, manners, and
dinner party etiquette. He is invited to
a banquet. Where generally the attention
of a banquet is on the host and the guest of honor, everyone here is looking at Jesus to see how he’ll behave. In the verses of this story that the
Lectionary omits, they have set Jesus up by bringing in a man with edema whom
Jesus heals.
When Jesus is a
dinner guest, people watch. He has a reputation for telling shocking stories
with twist endings, of challenging the accepted order, and of breaking rules
such as the Sabbath. They want to see if
he is going to commit a faux pas, figuratively leave something unpleasant in
the punch bowl. Inviting a wild man to dinner can provide its
amusements, and that seems in part to be what’s happening here.
But Jesus
himself is watching the watchers, and he observes their primate grooming behaviors. He notices people jockeying for good table
positions, working the room for social and professional advantage. Then he quotes a truism found in the Book of
Proverbs,
“Do not put yourself forward …
or stand in the place of the great;
for it is better to be told, "Come up here,"
than to be put lower in the presence
of a noble” (Proverbs 25:6-7).
Better, says Jesus, to be seen as a non-assuming person
worthy of being lifted up among the great, than to be seen a grasping wannabe
who must be put in his place. He adds,
“For those who exalt themselves will be brought low, and those who make
themselves low will be lifted high.”
Putting on airs inevitably brings humiliating deflation; a
self-deprecating low profile will attract praise and honor from others. As Miss Manners expresses it, “It’s far more
impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.”
If that is all, then we are just talking about a truism, a
strategy for getting ahead in the game of using rank and manners to manipulate
others, to exploit them. It is part of
the practical wisdom of those on the make, of those who go along to get
along.
But Jesus knows the difference between good manners and good
ethics. He talks about our motives for
throwing parties in an effort to get at the underlying truth of what makes manners,
like Law, either good or harmful:
“You invite people so you can put them in your debt, so you
can get things out of them. That’s
wrong. You need to invite people who can
never repay you. You need to invite
people who need the meal and the companionship, not those whom you need to
build your own network.”
Here and in the Gospel readings we have seen in the last few
weeks, Jesus tries to describe the perceptions and values of someone who
welcomes God’s Reign, of God come fully in charge, right here, right now.
Last week and the week before, he said our approach to
written rules and God’s Law—when to apply it rigorously and when to apply it
loosely or even ignore it--must depend on whether our actions help those who
need help, or simply use them for our purposes.
Manipulative behavior is not Kingdom behavior. Manipulative legal interpretation is not
Kingdom legal interpretation.
Manipulative manners and social relations are not the manners and
society of the Kingdom.
“Manipulation” comes from the word manus, Latin for hand. It
means handling people so they do what
you want. You treat them as instruments,
a means to an end. Welcoming God’s
Reign rules out manipulating. We must become
servants, handmaids, not handlers. Manners, rank, and social
interaction, if they allow us to help and serve others, are good. Used instrumentally merely to exploit others,
they must be seen as what they are: hypocrisy.
The Greek word “hypocrite” simply means “actor.” Jesus regularly calls his opponents hypocrites,
saying they are just pretending to
serve God in order to manipulate others.
They pretend they are better than they are in order to continue being
the way they are. There is a big
difference between that and pretending to be better than you think you are in
order actually to become better. “Fake it
till you make it,” means pretend you are better than you believe you are so
that you can actually become a better person. To my mind, this is not
“hypocrisy,” but rather simply one tool of trying to respond to God’s call.
So it is with the social insincerities of good manners. If we use them to manipulate others, bad on
us. If we use them to help affirm and
give dignity, good. Jesus expects his
disciples to “be as smart as snakes but harmless as doves.” He wants street smarts and a benevolent heart. He
expects us to have good manners and adept social interaction, never merely to
advance our own interests, but always to welcome the Kingdom by serving
others.
Jesus says that in the Kingdom, the social order will be
turned upside down: the first will be last, the last first, the poor shall be
exalted and the mighty brought low. He teaches us to first become a servant of
all, and not strive to be a leader, of someone to be served. We must be handmaids, not handlers.
This week, I want us all to take some time to think about
how we manipulate others, how we use them, how instrumentally we think of
them. We all do it. In mediation and prayer, let us identify at
least one specific relationship that we have where we manipulate, and then let
us think of ways that we can turn the relationship into an occasion of our own
service to the other person.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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