“No Longer Ravaged”
24
November 2017
Solemnity
of Christ the King
Homily
preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland,
Oregon
The
Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
8:00
a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
There are many ideals taught in seminaries about homiletics:
the word of God, properly preached, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the
comfortable. A minister must never
prostitute the pulpit for partisan political purposes, but must always make the
word of God live and breathe for people, and this means making sure they know what
God is calling us to in our common life, in policy, and in our societal
processes. Sometimes this can sound
like partisan politics, especially to the comfortable one afflicted by the
word.
I had two experiences when I worked for the State Department
that underscored for me the difference between partisan politics, however
tarted up with pious and heartfelt appeals to higher values, and living one’s
faith even in the public realm.
I worked in press relations for much of my career, and
became a go-to press center manager for overseas Presidential trips for Bill
Clinton’s White House. It was heady
stuff: always looking for the right
still photo and video framing of the President’s words and actions, always
seeking to cultivate the media reps to try to get as sympathetic coverage as we
might hope for, and planning and arranging the scenarios to put the President’s
work and contributions in their best light.
While other embassy colleagues were trying to arrange working meetings
with high level leaders from the host country, the circles I traveled in saw
everything through the lens of how things might look to the camera. Where my Embassy political and commercial
colleagues always referred to foreign dignitaries and common people by name,
title, and role, my media management colleagues called them “props” just as we
called print media reps “pens,” radio ones “voices,” and video ones “faces.”
I remember the moment I decided I could no longer in good
conscience work press for President Clinton.
When the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam were bombed, the
air force brought back the bodies of the U.S. personnel killed. Colleagues at State who knew them were invited
to attend the welcoming ceremony at Andrews.
When we arrived, we were driven to a small hangar off to the side rather
one of the capacious ones in the center of the base. The small hangar was overcrowded, hot, and
chaotic. I understood: the media team
had not wanted the images of the President talking to a half-filled building,
and so they had insisted on crowding the bereaved, including family members, into
a confined space that while uncomfortable for us “props” provided a proper
“cut-away” view accentuating the President’s importance. There he was, front and center on the dais, 4
meters away from us, with the 13 flag-draped coffins in between. It was the morning after key sordid details
about Monica Lewinski had appeared front page in the Washington Post. He was peddling as fast as he could to get
out of the ditch he had thrown himself into. The First Lady was late in arriving, so initially Secretary Albright sat to his side. As we waited for the press to finish hooking
things up and for things to start, the President began to chat with the
Secretary. She must have said some mild
witticism, because there, in full view of the bereaved families on the other
side of the coffins, Mr. Clinton began laughing. But then, as part of the white screen
balance, the live light on TV camera One came on and he knew his image was
live. His smile turned down into a
frown, and he reached deftly into his suit pocket and fetched a handkerchief,
with which he wiped imaginary tears from his eyes. I was only a few feet away and saw it
clearly, and was sickened. I never traveled
for him again, despite pressure on my bosses from the White House Travel
Office.
I don’t think I’m telling any secrets here to say that I am
a liberal democrat and a socialist. I agreed with Bill
Clinton’s policies generally, and thought he was a good President. But Clinton’s taking advantage of that
intern, his lack of any integrity beyond what showed to his audience or could
be argued by his attorney, all this raised profound questions for me. To see this in front of the families of
colleagues and friends killed in their service to the nation hurt me
deeply.
Fast forward a few years: when George W. Bush became
President, I assumed he was as ignorant and misinformed as his mispronounced
words and naïve appeals to evangelical Christianity made him appear. I was doing more senior analysis work on East
Asia at the time, and was privy to many things that never make it into the
media. I was told that his
hail-fellow-well-met image as a West Texas frat boy was an image he had
cultivated after losing two elections run as an Ivy-league scion of the
Kennebunkport Bushes. On one occasion
when I prepared a briefing for the President on a complex and highly sensitive
subject, I was surprised to have him ask the single most astute question only a
careful and informed reader could have formed from the dense and heavily footnoted
15 page paper. A few months later, an
American missionary who had been held hostage by terrorists in the Philippines
was freed in a bloody operation that left two of his fellow captives dead. He was returned to the U.S. and was waiting
at LAX to change planes to rejoin his family.
The President was headed to East Asia on a long trip. Air Force One happened to stop at LAX at the
same time. President Bush asked if he
could meet privately with the traumatized missionary, who agreed. They met for a couple of hours. The President consoled the man, listened to
his stories, and then prayed with him.
All in private. The story was
never leaked to the press because the President had given clear orders that he
did not want the story reported. He did
it because he thought it was the right thing, and it would not have been the
right thing if he had tried to make political hay out of it by publicizing what
needed to be private. Here was a President with whom I disagreed on
nearly all major policy issues, but who earned my respect and love by trying to
do what he saw was the right thing.
I tell these stories not to drop names. I was a very minor, low-level player in
both. But they formed me, and lie behind
my take on the issue of politics and religion today, and how I understand what
is appropriate or inappropriate to preach. Partisan politics is by nature a struggle of
our side vs. their side. The great
temptation is always to see no redeeming virtues in your opponents and no sins
or abusive behavior in your own people.
Partisan advantage is sown and grown in part by exclusion of others and
by lying, whether by silence of inconvenient truths or by wholesale
fabrication. And call me cynical, but
all kings, all politicians, all leaders and adherents of party—political or
otherwise—suffer from these failings in one degree or another. But we are still called to transcend these
our failings.
Today is the Feast of Christ the King. It celebrates the idea that human governments
and sovereigns—all human governments and sovereigns—are flawed and tend toward
corruption. Celebrating Christ as the
true sovereign is not a call for theocracy or rule by clerics. It is a call to follow Jesus even as we live
amidst the hurly-burly of partisan politics.
The Hebrew scripture lesson today speaks of God coming to serve as a
shepherd for the peoples, and not just one who will find the lost and bring
back the wandering, but also a hero who will set things right (that’s what the
word mishpat or judgment means). “Therefore, thus says the Lord God… I myself
will set things right between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you
pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your
horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they
shall no longer be ravaged; and I will set things right between sheep and
sheep” (Ezekiel 34:22). No longer
ravaged—that is the day we hope for. The
Gospel is Jesus’ version of the scene of setting things right: on the final
day, when judgment comes, he will divide the sheep and the goat kids previously
intermingled in this messy, chaotic flock.
Jesus’ sole criterion of dividing them is how you treated the least of
these, my brothers and sisters. The only
thing that matters is how we treated the most vulnerable, the most in
need. The fat sheep who have butted and
pushed the skinny sheep are actually those who refused to practice basic human
kindness and empathy.
I am a priest, set apart to preach Jesus’s call to us, and this
call can be a comfort or an affliction, depending on us. It is a call that has personal dimensions to
be sure. Of necessity it has political
and social implications as well. But
this call is for all, regardless of party and ideology. If we serve the poor, the hungry, the
thirsty, the imprisoned, the sick, those unable to stand up for themselves and
make their own way, the foreigner in our midst, and the abandoned, we serve
Jesus himself, no matter what our tribe or beliefs. If we turn a cold, stony heart to them, we
turn our backs on Jesus himself, regardless of our high-minded justifications,
effective and cynical spin-doctoring, or alternate fact tweets. If we
do it to the least of these our sisters and brothers, we do it to him.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment