Opening Day Homily 2017: On the Road to a Shining City

 

Welcome back, Gentlemen, and for those of you here for the first time, welcome to St. Albans. We are delighted you’re here. [1]

This morning let’s be poets, dreamers. And like so many poets, before us let’s imagine a shining city atop a hill. It’s easy to do that here. The road might be like Massachusetts Avenue winding up from what was once, literally, a swamp. It climbs to Mount St. Alban, and to this Cathedral Close, and I may add, to this Cathedral’s dream of a better place, a shining city. In absolutely no way do I say this is a better place, not better than a church in Anacostia, a school in Shaw, or the Open City down the hill across from the Shoreham. But here, let us accept, it is our calling to have faith and to dream.

As I said, poets before us have imagined this road. They’ve made it a test of sorts and often lined both sides with ditches. Sometimes we fail a test or two and fall in, and sometimes we choose to fall in and wallow in the ditch’s mud. So why keep climbing? Why? Because you have vision. You see a shining city on the hill. Well tell us, Headmaster, what’s in the city? I don’t know. I have no earthly idea. I’m pretty confident the streets are not lined with gold or with college acceptances, it isn’t built on the backs of slaves, it has no building honoring the emperor as God. I do know something, however. I know something about the journey up. Your teachers and parents know something about it. You know something about it. Pray God we agree that the effort to climb is worth it. That’s the first step.

What’s step #2? It happens early in life when you have an elemental ah-ha moment. You realize that I am I, or I am (pardon the grammar) me. Got it? Then you spy your fellow travelers. They are not-me. Correct? They are like you—look, they’re human—but they’re different—look, he’s shorter than I am but that other guy is quicker. Look, she’s a different race than me. Look, her ancestors are from Ghana, and his ancestors are from Mexico and Spain; mine are from Ireland and England, and hers from China. But then the ah-ha moment comes. They are I’s, all of them. They are also I’s. They have governing minds looking at me. And when they look at me, you know what, they see a not-me. Ah-ha.

So what happens next, when the other steps follow. Your phone is purified. I’m sorry, Headmaster, what did you say? Well, since we pray to our phones, head bent over the screen, Our Father, hallowed be my Smartphone, your phone on this road is purified. A series of text messages arrive from an unknown source:

Ding #1: In everything, do to others what you want them to do to you.

Ding #2: Blessed is he who prefers his brother to himself.

Ding #3: What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.

Enough, I say. All this “be-good” stuff, ugh, on my phone—it’s my life line. But another comes:

Ding #4: One should seek for others what one seeks for one’s self.

Time for a decision, Gentleman. A part of you doesn’t like all this brother- and sisterhood stuff and quite frankly would rather have the road all to yourself. With that thought, you find yourself in a ditch. How did that happen? What is this, a tornado to Oz or Westworld or the Land of Always Winter? Beside you in the ditch, there’s a guy who says he’d rather enslave an entire population, rather decide that a person of a certain race should work for you, serve you, be abused by you, make you money off the sweat of his back and the death of his people. You know enough about American history to realize just how wrong and unjust that is. You try to scramble up out of the ditch but another man pulls you down. Around his arm he wears a swastika and says there’s a conspiracy in the world. It’s the Jews, he says. They are going to replace us. You’ve studied your world history and know that the people who swore allegiance to that Nazi flag and their allies killed up to seventy million people and five to six million Jews simply because they were Jews. This is shameful you say. It’s not a word you like, but you use it. It is shameful.

The ditch fills with water and worms. You hear your phone sound.

Ding #5: Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness.

You have another insight. There are not-me’s who cannot accept the other not-me’s in the world, including me, and the only choice left to them is hatred. They don’t want the others, or want to use them, or can’t share any of the world’s goods with them and sometimes even enslave or kill them. You, on the other hand, might struggle to love all those not-me’s, but you want justice and you want to get along and you mount that road again.

Gentlemen, if you think poetic visions like this one have no relation to reality, I ask you to turn to Houston. Total strangers, in a society increasingly isolated by our phones and non-stop media, rescued each other. Reached out, literally. Suddenly, safety was more important than material possessions, human beings than buildings. And you know what? Race, gender, class, and religion did not matter. In this massive and multicultural city, we understood that, yes, helping others the way you would wish to be helped can actually happen in the daily, real world.

Thank you, everyone, for indulging me my extended metaphor of the road to the shining city. I leave you on that road. Outside our school in this great city I can’t predict what all of us will face this year. But here, Gentlemen, begin with the small things—at doorways, at lunch, at games, in the classrooms, and on your phones. Care for each other. Doing the small things gives you the courage to go big—stand up for honesty and truth-telling and giving, call out racism and homophobia and misogyny, speak about the fascination of religion. You are called to this school to care for each other and take that caring into the world around us.

Oh look, there’s another text: What profits a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?

           
God be with you. Amen.

[1] Add soul to the metaphor.