by David G. Duggan ©
Special to Virtueonline
January 27, 2025
At the risk of offending some, I'm wading into the controversy surrounding the “sermon on the mount” [St Alban’s-the highest point in the District] which the Episcopal bishop of Washington “preached” at the National Cathedral the day after Trump’s inauguration.
Held since 1933 after FDR’s first inaugural, the liturgy is billed as a “Service of Prayer for the Nation.” Interfaith leaders, rabbis, a Vedanta teacher, an imam, a Muslim cantor, a Native American chief, a Buddhist reverend and a Sikh president joined with Christian ministers to offer prayers and scripture readings. Curiously, no Roman Catholic cleric was robed for the ceremony: a not perhaps well-understood ban prohibits Catholic clergy vesting at any religious facility other than one consecrated to the Roman Catholic faith. Two Roman Catholic clerics gave the book-end prayers at the inauguration: New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan and retired Brooklyn pastor Fr. Frank Mann. Eastern Orthodox priests and bishops seem to have been zilched out of both ceremonies.
But the media have been focusing on the Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde’s “sermon” midway through last Tuesday’s service. I put “sermon” in quotes because it was not in any meaningful sense a sermon, a word which comes from Latin and Greek words meaning “conversation.” Typically, a sermon (or its shorter version, homily) explicates a text of scripture, tries to reconcile different accounts of the same event, exhorts the congregation to examine their own lives. They are neither indictment nor accusation, neither moralizing nor pontificating. By this measure, Budde’s message was a lamentation verging on a diatribe. It was a claim of a moral superiority over the man sworn to uphold the law, nothing more but nothing less.
It started out well enough: a paean to “unity that fosters community across diversity,” “[t]hat enables ... communities... to genuinely care for each other.” It alludes to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount where He “exhorts us to love, not only our neighbors but our enemies... [t]o forgive others as God forgives us.” No argument there, but she failed when she proposed three “foundations of unity”: 1) “honoring the inherent dignity of every human being”; “honesty in both private conversation and public discourse”; and 3) “humility.” With a passing reference to Solzhenitsyn’s prison-inspired conclusion that the line between good and evil crosses every human heart, she contended that humility ties the other two into unity: because we are all fallible, we need to see the beam in our own eyes before picking the speck out of our neighbors’. Except she wasn’t that eloquent.
The problem is that you will search scripture in vain for any requirement that we “honor the dignity of every human being.” Whole tribes are slain, Goliath and Holofernes beheaded, Pharaoh’s charioteers drowned in the Red Sea. And while honesty is desirable, scripture is replete with deceptions which accomplish God’s purpose (Jacob and Esau over Isaac’s birthright, Lot’s daughters, Abraham’s passing off Sarah as his sister). And humility: if everyone humbled himself, who would lead? But the message went off the rails when she told the president to “have mercy upon the people in our country. And we’re scared now.” She gave the laundry list of outliers and disadvantaged: “gay, lesbian and transgendered children,” and the office-cleaners, crop-pickers and meat packers as those who fear. With references to “our God” (is there another one?) she begged for mercy for the “stranger for we were all once strangers in this land.” If this was a reference to Deut. 26: 5-11, the prayer of consecration of the first fruits of the earth, then it is devoid of context. But she didn’t tie that plea into an ancient Hebrew message of compassion and welcome.
Some of Ms. Budde’s defenders (and there are many) have described her “sermon” as “telling truth to power” in the mode of John the Baptist’s condemning Herod for marrying his brother’s wife (Mark 6:18). We all know how that turned out. But Ms. Budde is not the “scolder in chief” and her message was scarcely unifying, nor humble: it was defiant. And for a Biblical example of effectively telling truth to power see Nathan’s rebuke of David for stealing Uriah’s wife Bathsheeba at 2 Samuel 12:1-14.
“Be not afraid,” Jesus said (Luke 12:32). Fear is not a Christian virtue; in fact it is its opposite. Ms. Budde forgot this fundamental lesson and for that reason, she rightly deserves the opprobrium which she has received from all quarters for her intemperate remarks.
댓글