Primate Grooming
(Proper 17C)
Homily Delivered 1
September 2019
8:00 a.m. Said and
10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of
Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
The Very Rev. Dr.
Anthony Hutchinson, SCP
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, “Don’t embarrass
yourselves. 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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