Homily: The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost [September 24, 2017] Trinity, Santa Barbara

            The great Leonard Cohen—singer, songwriter, poet--died at age 82 last year on November 7, one day before the presidential election. Whether it was out of grief at his passing or terror of the election results, I spent most of November re-listening to the Leonard Cohen songs I have loved all my adult life. In the bleak days of November 2016 and beyond, I have found his particular combination of biblical allusion, Zen practice, and mordant wit somehow deeply comforting. 

One of my favorite of Leonard Cohen’s songs is “Everybody Knows”, released in the dystopian late Cold War Iran-Contra year 1988. When introducing “Everybody Knows”, Cohen said, "Here's a terrible new song. Yes, it embodies all my darkest thoughts...”

Here is one verse that’s suitable for reading aloud in church:

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long-stem rose
Everybody knows

            Something about this song captures the double-whammy of our shared human senses of feeling both guilty and aggrieved at the same time. It’s not only that we’re often selfish and self-serving; it’s also that we’re enraged that there are others in the world who are better at being selfish and self-serving than we are.

            A sense of the doubleness of our moral dilemma emerges in today’s gospel reading as well (Matthew 20: 1-16), the tale Jesus tells we conventionally call the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. A landowner hires laborers at five different times during the day: early and mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon, late afternoon. When it is time to pay up, the last receive their wages first. And when the first—those who had “borne the burden in the heat of the day”—come to collect their pay, they receive the same pay as everybody else. The first laborers are understandably angry: the landowner has treated the long-timers and the newcomers equally. When they complain, the landowner replies, “I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Are you envious because I am generous?”

Those who write biblical commentaries will say first that this parable is really about the equality of Jews (those who have been faithful for centuries) and gentiles (those who have just recently joined up) in the church. While I’m sure there is some truth in this analysis, I don’t find the longtimer/newcomer tension the most interesting aspect of the story. To my mind, the parable of the laborers in the vineyard tells us many things about ourselves, most importantly something about the layers of self-deception which keep us from seeing ourselves and others clearly. We all manage somehow to feel both guilty and aggrieved. We all talk into our pockets. We all want a box of chocolates and a long-stemmed rose.

It is not an accident that Jesus uses the idea of money here to reveal and diagnose our spiritual problem. Money is the medium our culture has invented to represent value. As the poet Wallace Stevens said, “Money is a kind of poetry.” These vineyard workers are upset about their wages because their wages represent their time, and time (and remember, “Time is money”) is something we value. The landowner messes with the workers’ usual equations by assigning the same value to differing stretches of time: 3, 6, 9, 12 hours all receive the same pay. Hey, I gave you more of my valuable time. Don’t I deserve more than those others? Everyone thinks they have good reason to feel aggrieved.

I thought about this parable and the paradox it embodies earlier this year when I read a provocative op-ed piece in the New York Times [Richard V. Reeves, “Stop Pretending You’re Not Rich”, New York Times, 6/10/17] by Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution. It was called, “Stop Pretending You’re Not Rich”, and it was one of the few things I’ve read recently that made me stop and re-examine my own social and economic situation in relation to others. Like many fellow progressives, I have bought into the 1% versus 99% language used to describe economic inequality. But Reeves’s point is that the true measure of wealth disparity in America is not between the top 1 and the bottom 99 but rather between the top 20 and bottom the 80. As he says,

This favored fifth at the top of the income distribution . . . has been separating from the 80 percent below. Collectively, this top fifth has seen a $4 trillion-plus increase in pretax income since 1979, compared to just over $3 trillion for everyone else. Some of those gains went to the top 1 percent. But most went to the 19 percent just beneath them.

Reeves goes on:

The rhetoric of “We are the 99 percent” has in fact been dangerously self-serving, allowing people with healthy . . . incomes to convince themselves that they are somehow in the same economic boat as ordinary Americans, and that it is just the so-called super rich who are to blame for inequality.

Youch! If Reeves is right (and I think he is), I have a perceptual problem. Here I have been spending all that energy blaming Bezos, Gates, Buffett, and Zuckerberg (the 1%) and their superwealth and imagining myself in the same boat with those who are really up against it (the 99%). My perceptual problem turns then into a moral problem. It turns out that I really have more in common with the fat cats than I’d like to imagine. And not only that: as one of the top 20% I can continue to reap the benefits of affluence and still complain about not being in the heady reaches of the top 1%. As Reeves concludes,

There’s a kind of class double-think going on here. On the one hand, upper-middle-class Americans believe they are operating in a meritocracy (a belief that allows them to feel entitled to their winnings); on the other hand, they constantly engage in antimeritocratic behavior in order to give their own children a leg up. . . . For the upper middle classes, regardless of their professed political preferences, zoning, wealth, tax deductions and educational opportunity reinforce one another in a virtuous cycle.

Thus, like the laborers in the vineyard, I manage to have it both ways: I am guilty and aggrieved. I benefit from all kinds of generosity which I confuse with my own achievement. As the late great Ann Richards once said of the first President Bush, “He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple.” As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, (1 Corinthians 4:7) “What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” As my friend Harvey Guthrie says, “We’re all on cosmic welfare.”

            Jesus’s use of the symbols of money and time in this parable points us to a profound truth about ourselves. Whether we’re in the one percent, the top 20 percent, we are all recipients of enormous cosmic and social generosity. This is not a story only about the longevity of church membership. It is a story about our awareness of our own privilege and our need to extend that privilege to others. As long as we allow ourselves to claim a false solidarity with the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed we will continue to do more to advance our own interests than to help realize theirs. As a white, straight, relatively affluent male, it is always tempting for me to put myself in the same discriminatory boat with people of color, women, gays and lesbians, and the poor. As a follower of Jesus, my job is not to claim membership in the community of the oppressed. My job is to make common cause with them and work together to undo the structures of oppression that have given me the leg up that I think I so richly deserve.

            Going through life feeling both guilty and aggrieved is not an attractive stance toward life. We are all the recipients of so much more generosity on the part of others and God than we usually acknowledge. It is easy to find yourself born on third base and think you hit a triple. It is easier still to lament that the triple should have been a home run. In our gospel for this morning, Jesus invites us to see ourselves and others in a new way. All of us have been given so much more than we could have earned on our own. We should not confuse our own good fortune with moral worth.

            In Leonard Cohen’s words, each of us wants a box of chocolates and a long-stemmed rose. In God’s economy, we cannot hoard life’s blessings to ourselves. In God’s economy, we must strive to make chocolates and roses available to all. Very few of us are the super-rich; very few are the real poor. Affluent or struggling as we may be, we are called to do what we can to extend our unacknowledged privileges to those who have few or none.

It is no accident that Jesus begins his Beatitudes by saying, “Blessed are the poor.” God’s justice is broader and more expansive than any so-called fairness you and I could concoct. We need to stop fooling ourselves, finding shelter in self-serving ideas of fairness. This is the way Jesus’s universe works: we all--the innocent and the guilty—finally deserve and receive the same reward. Are we willing to work to make our world like Jesus’s? Or will we remain envious because God is generous? Amen.

Homily: The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost [September 10, 2017] Trinity, Santa Barbara

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            I will turn 68 later this month—don’t worry, to aid in your birthday shopping, I’ll place a full list of my sizes in Parish Notes—and earlier this year I celebrated 40 years of priestly ministry. On the whole, these make a couple of nice milestones. As happy as I am in my personal and professional life, I am sad to say that, as I look back over my life and ministry, I have never experienced a national mood as distressing and depressing as the one we’re in right now.

            That’s not to say living in America has always been smooth sailing. The tensions over the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War were significant, and the ongoing struggles for gender and sexual orientation equality have taken their toll on all of us. But something about this moment feels different. America has always been torn between two competing visions of our national purpose—one expansive and communitarian, the other narrow and individualistic—but we now have a president who seems intent not only on systematically undoing the expansive policies of his predecessor but also on inflaming the nation and world in the process. It has gotten so bad that I’m not sure both sides of our national divide could agree on the weather outside or even the time of day.

            After a seemingly endless stream of presidential enormities, this week saw the administration’s “rescinding” the DACA (“Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals”) program. Around 800,000 undocumented young Americans brought to this country as children are now at risk of being deported to countries they’ve never seen. America is the only home they know. The bad news here is not only the ugliness of this action. The worse news is that millions of otherwise rational Americans think ending DACA is a good idea.

            As followers of Jesus, how do we make our way through such a national time of enmity, distrust, and bad faith? How do we deal with a president who violates virtually every norm of Christian faith and practice? We are dealing here with real wounds, real injuries, real betrayals—again, not the kinds of problems easily or swiftly resolved. In today’s gospel [Matthew 18: 15-20], Jesus tells us this:

If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector

Jesus is speaking to us here not as a nation or a family but as a church. It is not very likely I could get an appointment with the president to tell him my concerns face to face, so I doubt I can follow Jesus’s prescription to the letter. But the principle seems a sound one: speak directly to the offender, bring others in to help you out, take it public if there is no response. Robert Mueller, I hope you’re listening.

You and I live in a society where neither side can trust or even engage the other. We are dealing with leaders who disregard or betray Christian and humane values at every turn. How do we make our way through this time with integrity?

When I served as dean of a seminary I taught a course on the theology of Shakespeare’s late plays. The older I get, the more I find that Shakespeare has an answer for almost every serious question we can pose. The play that comes to mind is Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale, a play that is neither a comedy (though it plays like one) nor a tragedy (though it feels like one) but a romance—a genre somewhere in between the two. It concerns a king named Leontes who becomes so insanely jealous of his wife Hermione that his violent and erratic behavior leads to the death of their son, the loss of their daughter, and what appears to be the death of Hermione herself. This is a play in which people do unspeakably bad things to each other, and those actions have tragic—or near tragic consequences.

            Yet all is not lost. The end of the play brings not only life; it brings forgiveness—real forgiveness for real wrongs enacted—and with it the possibility of a new community built now, in W.H. Auden’s words, “on trust instead of threats.”

            If I am not under the illusion that I could arrange a sit-down with the president, I’m certainly sure that I have no magic up my sleeve that would turn his heart of stone into a heart of flesh. So I am not really interested in attempting reconciliation with the 45th president of the United States, a man who has said he has no need of confession. But I am interested in how we can, together, restore our national community to life.

I don’t know about you, but I have let the 45^th President of the United States and his shrinking base of aggrieved followers take up far too much space in my mental world. If I am going to be open to any kind of reconciliation or renewal, I need not only to stop obsessing about both his obstreperous tweets and his cruel and heartless actions. I need to turn my attention instead to those injured and at risk from his words and his policies. I need to make common cause with those who are in literal, material, spiritual danger: undocumented immigrants, especially the dreamers; the poor, especially those without healthcare or housing; people of color, especially those menaced by white supremacist groups blasphemously calling themselves Christian; the LGBT community, especially right now the transgender soldiers who seek only to serve their country; and of course the millions of women and children and all who are regularly placed in jeopardy by the callous policies regarding reproductive rights and education put forth by this White House and Congress.

You and I in the Christian community are called to work toward reconciliation with those whose values and actions violate and betray the values of compassion, justice, and peace—the values of Jesus. Real life is not a situation comedy. We do not reconcile with people by getting into a group hug with them. We reconcile with them when they repent—literally “turn around” and behave justly and nobly. But we do not, we cannot, wait around for them to change.  We begin by making common cause with those who really are in jeopardy. As followers of Jesus, our job is not to make peace with oppressors.  It is to make common cause with the oppressed. Solidarity must come first. Reconciliation will come in God’s own time. Right now, we have our own work to do.

There are plenty of urgent tasks to choose from, but president’s heartless, cruel, and mendacious ending of DACA calls for a response from the entire faith community now. We need to respond with words first, but shortly thereafter with actions. And making our church and community a sanctuary for those in danger of deportation seems like me the clearest and most obvious place to start. There are already many dedicated people in Santa Barbara at work on the sanctuary movement, many of them in this parish. I believe it is time for Trinity Church to build on this individual and work and to step in, as an entire parish community, to the ecumenical and interfaith work of standing with and for those in this community at risk of deportation. I believe it is time for us to give (yes) our dollars, but also our time, our energy, and maybe even our church space to serve as a support and sanctuary for the dreamers, their families, and all undocumented people who live and work in this city.

Today is “Welcome Back” Sunday. It is the day when our full range of parish ministries and programs swings back into life. What better way is there for us to come back to church than to get back to work? It is not enough for us to think good thoughts on behalf of the oppressed. It is not enough even for us personally to confront intolerance, bigotry, and oppression. We must do that together as church. We must corporately stand with and for those who are up against it. We must publicly speak to those who would oppress and abuse them.

We are all, in a sense, like Hermione—the dead or near-dead heroine of The Winter’s Tale.  We are so stupefied by the cruelty on display in Washington that we’re almost as good as dead. We desperately crave new life. But there is no ingenious dramatic ending that will give it to us. Instead, there are the hearts and hands and minds of people like you and me who want to follow Jesus and serve those he would serve in this place and moment. Together we can do this. Together we can join with people of faith and good will to help strengthen a sanctuary movement here that will serve as love’s counterforce to this administration’s callous malevolence. Then perhaps we will get their attention. The outcome is not in our hands. We may never reconcile with those who want to deport our friends and children. But as we draw closer to the undocumented, we can do something greater. We can, together, build a new community built on trust instead of threats. And that, I believe, is what Jesus is calling us right here and right now, in this place and in this time, together to do. Amen.