10.30.11; Rev. David Williams
I’ve never been particularly good at tooting my own horn, and that’s something of a problem.
As I look out at the world, and at the people who seem to shimmer and beam from the airbrushed pages of the magazines in the checkout aisle, it’s clear that social success and own-horn-honking go hand in hand. And if people hear how amazing you are, surely, surely, the joy and fame and acclaim that everyone seems to aspire to in our culture will be yours. In fact, there’s an entire industry dedicated to helping people proclaim to the world just how amazing they are.
I spent some time perusing the Public Relations Society of America’s web presence this week, in hopes of getting a few pointers. The PRSA, in case you haven’t heard of it, is the association of people who professionally toot the horns of other people. These are the folks who make sure that we know, against a background of swelling, patriotic music, that the People of America’s Oil and Natural Gas Industry are working hard to bring Americans the American energy we need, right here in America.
These are the people who arranged the multi-city book tour for reality tv personality Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s novel A Shore Thing, an exciting and imaginative romp through the cultural wonderland that is New Jersey. I can’t speak for the book itself, but let me tell you: the reviews for the book on Amazon are really worth reading.
These are the people who recently got the word out that Can’t-Touch-This 1990s rapper M.C. Hammer is launching a search engine to compete with Google. It’s called WireDoo. Really. It’s in “pre-Beta,” in pretty much the same way my career as the world’s premiere professional interpretive dancer is in “pre-Beta.” I do not envy M.C. Hammer’s publicist.
What I found at the PRSA’s site were all kinds of conferences and webinars about how to generate buzz and how to stir interest in whatever it is you’re pitching. This might come in handy in promoting my own recently self-published book, which rests proudly at number #280,279 on Amazon’s Kindle Store, precisely Two Hundred Fifty Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty Seven positions behind Snooki’s magnum opus.
Self-promotion has become a central value in our culture of consumer celebrity, in which even everyday folks find themselves chasing the retweet on twitter or the repost on Facebook.
If you don’t do it, if you don’t pitch and spin and try to stir buzz, you don’t exist.
This is a value that prangs awkwardly against the ethic laid out in Matthew’s Gospel today. For the past several weeks, we’ve heard Matthew’s Gospel recount some of the challenges that Jesus faced from the Pharisees. Pharisees, as you’ll recall, were among Jesus of Nazareth’s primary opponents, but for reasons that are a bit different than those we typically think of when we hear the word Pharisee.
Someone who is a “Pharisee” is typically assumed to be a self-righteous hypocrite, the sort of person who claims to the purveyor of all things right and true and pure, and yet manages to be a totally unpleasant human being. The term Pharisee, though, does not refer to hypocrisy. That word derives from the Hebrew term perusim, which means “the ones set apart.” These were the ones who defied the Greco-Roman cultural ethics of their day, and who were at least making the effort to define their identity in terms of the demands of Torah and covenant. Because of this, they were the ones closest to Jesus. Unlike the Sadducees, who ruled over the temple didn’t mingle with their inferiors, the Pharisees were interested in getting out and changing their communities for the better.
Which, quite frankly, is why Jesus begins this section of scripture by telling his listeners that there was nothing wrong with what the Pharisees had to say. When he says that they “sit at Moses’ Seat,” he’s indicating that they are attentive to the teachings of Torah, which tradition held had been passed on down from Moses. The issue for Jesus, however, was not that there was anything wrong with the covenant law. He makes a point of specifically honoring the teachings of the Pharisees. But where he gets a little less accepting is with those who taught it but had no desire to actually live out their teachings.
Instead, what mattered to the Pharisees Jesus condemned was the pride of place and honor that came from being regarded as a teacher. In being set apart, they didn’t take that as a sign of additional responsibility. It was, instead, a sign of just how wonderful they were. The “being viewed by everyone as wonderful” became the priority, and the justice and grace of the covenant became secondary, and with that inversion of priorities, suddenly what should have been a blessing to the community became a curse.
Instead of focusing on living out the covenant, they focused on the trappings of being viewed as special. The focus became not what they were doing, but the social rewards, on the success, on the appearance. The goal became being famous for the purposes of being famous, and for a sense of just how useless that is, I would ask you to do a mental google for the word Kardashian.
In place of that, Jesus instructs his listeners that they shouldn’t let themselves focus on titles, or on the things that bring worldly acclaim. Instead, they are to strive to serve others, and to be humble.
We have trouble with this. How can we jibe what it takes to succeed in our culture with Christ’s relentless focus on humility and servanthood? Honestly, it’s not an easy connection to make, but there are a couple of things we need to take away from this difficult mix of teachings.
First, the command to not seek and yearn for titles and importance is not a suggestion that everyone has the same gifts, or that there are none in a community worth following or learning from. We’re not all the same, and movements that try to live as if all of us are the same have an tendency to collapse in on themselves, or chase their tails in endless circles. The Occupy movement appears on the verge of learning this lesson yet again.
But turning particular gifts to the service of the community is a different thing than expecting the community to shower you with accolades. The joy of teaching, for example, does not come in having an obedient and deferential student. It comes when that student suddenly lights up with understanding, as they grasp a concept for the first time. It’s not the title. It’s the expression of the gift.
Second, avoiding self-promotion and self-righteousness is not the same thing as not talking about one’s faith and living out one’s faith. Jesus was not telling us that we should be shrinking violets in the expression and living out of our walk along the Way. Among the oldline denominations...and that’s us, the Methodists, the Episcopalians, and the like...there’s an almost compulsive drive to not talk about faith, and to not talk about the impact that the Nazarene has had on our day to day lives.
It often feels inadequately humble, overly aggressive, and conjures up in our minds images of some loud red-faced guy in an ill-fitting suit, bellowing Hellfire and Brimstone through a megaphone at passing students on some college campus, while glazed-eyed followers hand out tracts.
But the way Jesus-followers live, both individually and in community, is something that should not be a place of complete silence. It’s worth speaking of, and living out, in such a way that others will not be completely oblivious of its existence. If we’re utterly silent, so self-effacingly humble that our faith and it’s fruits are functionally invisible, then we’re not fulfilling the call of our faith.
So yeah, maybe we’re not great at self-promotion. Given how deeply our culture has become consumed by that drive, perhaps it’s not a bad thing to be bad at. But that’s no excuse for us to be stifled in our joyous expression of the fundamental goodness of what the Gospel teachings. It’s no excuse for us to hold back in reaching out into the world with both hands and voices, changing it for the better and proclaiming grace, love and justice to a world that needs to both hear those things and see them lived out.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN
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