Party Animal Jesus (Proper 17C)
Homily Delivered 28 August 2016
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 was a junior foreign service
officer serving at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, I remember the first time I was
asked to draft a cable to Washington arguing for a policy direction. It had to do with how we were to manage
certain exchange programs and public policy positions in the aftermath of the
Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989. I
argued for an unremarkable, obvious course of action, and made reference in the
draft several times to “the moral course of action,” and “doing the right
thing.” It bounced back to my desk
almost immediately, with scrawled corrections and edits in red in the
margins. The Minister Counselor for
Public Affairs had written in his distinctive and careful Yale cursive, “If
possible, never argue a policy position from morality. It encourages disagreement
in your readers. Instead, appeal to the
national interest, stated and already agreed upon policy goals, or basic
utilitarian enhancing the good for the greatest number.” Then, throughout the cable, again and again,
he had drawn red lines through any reference to the moral, the good, and the
right, and replaced them with appeals to the U.S. national interest, pragmatic
effects on our programs in the future, or language cribbed from statements of
the President or Secretary of State of that time. It was a moment when I felt I had been
initiated into the fraternity of government policy advisors, who never would
stoop to appealing to the right or moral, but always couch things in terms of
interests, goals, and instrumentalities.
Later in my career, I found myself initiating younger officers into the
same circle. It was only after I left
government service that I wondered if I had lost something in the process.
Today’s Gospel is about our
motivations and intentions in our social interactions and hierarchies, and in a
real way questions the whole utilitarian, instrumental project. The reading tells of Jesus being 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. 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.
Inviting a wild man to dinner can provide its amusements, and that seems
in part to be what’s happening here.
Jesus himself is somewhat of a party
animal. He says that Kingdom of God is a
banquet, a big party, and says that God is indiscriminate in his
invitations. His critics say he is
constantly spending his time with whores, drunks, and money-grubbing
traitors. They see that Jesus is a party
animal, and they don’t like it.
Jesus is an observer of social behavior,
even at this dinner party. 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 Judith
Martin 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 utilitarian 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 effective social moves, good
manners and right 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 the Kingdom is a big
party. And we must party on and enjoy it
for the sake of it in itself if we are to have any place at the table. And that means welcoming others, especially
those who need a party the most. In the
Kingdom, manipulation will cease. 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 invite 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 meditation 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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