I'm
probably one of the very few people in America who loves Elaine May's 1987
movie Ishtar, one of the great box office flops of all time. It’s
a comedy starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman about two loser songwriters
adrift in the Middle East. The film is
full of the terrible songs they write, and here are the lyrics to my all-time
favorite among them:
Telling the truth can be dangerous
business;
Honest and popular don't go hand in
hand.
If you admit that you play the
accordion,
No one will hire you in a rock 'n' roll
band.
Truer
words were ne'er spoke. "Telling
the truth can be dangerous business."
Or, as Jesus tells us today, "Prophets are not without honor,
except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own
house." [Mark 6] We seem only to want to hear the truth when it flatters
us. And we don't particularly like it
when people tell us what we really don't want to hear.
A
perhaps more high-toned example than Ishtar is Shakespeare’s King Lear, a tragedy with a famous opening
scene: the aging King announces his decision to retire and split his realm
three ways among his daughters, giving the largest share to the daughter who
can answer this question best: “Which
of you shall we say doth love us most?”
The
first two daughters, Regan and Goneril, are practiced bureaucratic infighters, and
they outdo each other in fulsome expressions of love for the old man. When it comes time for Cordelia, the third
daughter, to speak, she declines to answer this crazy question, saying:
Unhappy that I am, I
cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more nor less.
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more nor less.
We
all know what happens. Lear becomes
enraged, and disowns Cordelia saying: “thy truth, then, be thy dower.”
[King Lear, Act I Scene I] She is banished from the kingdom and
disinherited to boot.
Whenever I read or see King
Lear, I remember what Jonathan Lear [no relation], a philosophy professor
at the University of Chicago, said about it.
Jonathan Lear is also a Freudian psychoanalyst, and he writes
intriguingly about the connections between philosophy and psychology. In his book Open Minded Lear tells the
story of a dream he used to have about his name—Lear—and
its connection to the Shakespeare play.
He realized that in his dreams he was not King Lear so much as he was
Cordelia, the daughter who refused to tell the king what he wanted to
hear. Jonathan Lear’s flash of insight came when he realized that
Cordelia’s problem
was his problem too. Here is what he
says:
To identify with Cordelia is to want to be blunt,
to avoid embellishment, flattery, or hypocrisy-and to want to be loved for
doing just that. This is not a set of desires which get satisfied
often. By and large, people prefer to be flattered. They find it hard to recognize love in a blunt appraisal; and they find
it even harder to reciprocate such love. Cordelia's strategy is not the route to massive popularity. -- Jonathan
Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, p. 3
We want to tell the
truth, and we want to be loved for doing it.
That was Cordelia’s
problem. That was Jonathan Lear’s problem. In going home to
Nazareth and preaching in the synagogue, that may have been Jesus’s problem.
I can’t speak for
you, but I realize that often it’s my
problem, too.
Yesterday was the
Fourth of July--Independence Day--and we're gathered this morning both to
celebrate America and to think theologically about it. Like King Lear, Nations and empires—from
ancient Rome to 19th century Britain, to 21st century
America--are better at praising themselves than they are at opening up to
judgment. We love our boosters more than
we do our critics. Jesus's journey to
his hometown synagogue and that congregation's rejection of him raise some
important questions for us about what it means for religious people to tell (or
hear) the truth. Telling the truth can,
indeed, be dangerous business. Sometimes
prophets can feel like the accordion player who showed up at a heavy metal
concert.
Of course, truth-tellers
often make things hard on themselves. On occasion, we wrap ourselves in the
slogan, "speaking truth to power", a phrase I have never liked. Here is what the great progressive
intellectual Noam Chomsky says about “speaking truth to power”:
I don’t agree with
the slogan [“speak truth to power”]. First of all, you don’t have to speak truth to power,
because they know it already. And secondly, you don’t speak truth to anybody, that’s too arrogant. What you do is join with people
and try to find the truth, so you listen to them and tell them what you think
and so on, and you try to encourage people to think for themselves. [Noam
Chomsky]
So
what is a prophet, or a prophetic community, to do? We want to speak the truth, we want to hold
power accountable, and we want, if possible, to avoid being crushed. Many of
the people we call saints today were those who stood up for Christianity
against the oppressive claims of empire.
They were martyrs—literally “witnesses”—to
the truth of the Gospel, and they did indeed speak truth to power. So martyrdom—witness—is
an ancient and honorable tradition in Christianity. And there are times when we need to risk
martyrdom in the service of what is right.
But I’ve been
around the movement world a long time, and a lot of what we call prophecy is
simply self-dramatization. There is
another ancient tradition, a more pragmatic one, a tradition that counsels
working with power to achieve good ends. Of course, there are times when
imperial power is intractable, when you have to speak. But there are also times
to work with power to bring about a good result for everybody. The trick, of course, is to be able to tell
the difference.
Today's
Epistle from the Letter to the Hebrews [Hebrews 11:8-16] is one of my very
favorite passages in scripture. The
writer lists all the great patriarchs and matriarchs who lived their lives in
faith and died without seeing God's promises fulfilled. He concludes with these words:
All of these
died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.
They confessed that they were strangers
and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking
a homeland. If they had been thinking of
the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they
desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called
their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them. [Hebrews
11]
Like
our Israelite forbears, we contemporary Christians also "desire a better
country". We know that we are
"strangers and foreigners here on earth". We too seek a homeland. Christians will always be caught in the gap between
the country we desire and the country we have.
Christianity is always countercultural in every era and civilization. Gospel
values can never be perfectly realized in any earthly nation state. Even as
great as we may think America is, it will always fall short of our longings for
the divine standard. Like the Israel of
Bible times, America will espouse values to which it cannot always live
up. As great as our accomplishments may
be, the list of our shortcomings is long.
We are deluding ourselves if we think it can ever be otherwise.
And
so God sends us truth-tellers, call them prophets or idealists, who dare to
speak what we often do not wish to hear.
Sometimes they're Civil Rights demonstrators, sometimes anti-war
activists. Sometimes they advocate for
the homeless and the poor. Sometimes
they blow whistles and expose secrecy or wrongdoing in high places.
Jonathan
Lear was right: if we want to be blunt, to avoid embellishment, flattery, or
hypocrisy, then we're probably not going to be loved for doing so. Noam Chomsky was right: power already knows
the truth, and they don’t need to hear it from you. We
need to talk not to but with each other to find a new truth. Jesus was rejected
in his hometown, but many who denied him eventually became his followers. His truth-telling always served God’s
greater purpose of love.
On
this Independence Day weekend, let us rededicate ourselves to building that
heavenly country that we continue to want America to be. Let us acknowledge that we will inevitably
fall short of the better country God holds out to us as the divine standard.
But let us never give up trying to make it real for ourselves, our households,
our communities, and all the special recipients of God’s
care: the poor, the sick, the oppressed,
the lonely, the lost. And let us continue
to give thanks for the prophets, the truth-tellers, the blunt talkers who help
us identify and close up the distance between God’s hope for us and the lived reality
of how things are.
Honest and popular don't go hand in hand.
If you admit that you play the accordion,
No one will hire you in a rock 'n' roll band.
So then: Power knows the
truth. God’s better country awaits. If we persist in talking respectfully
with each other in truth and in love, one day we just might find an accordion somewhere
out there in the mosh pit. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment