First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

John 1

“Can Anything Good Come out of Washington?”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

January 18, 2009

A senate seat came open and a governor was given the opportunity to fill it. He sought counsel from people of influence in his state. They concocted a scheme to provide not only political advantage but also financial gain. When their machinations were revealed, it became clear that they sought to choose a person who was neither a threat nor a gain, but a place-filler.

I have to say that Frank Capra must be bemused and confused from his repose in heaven knowing that his film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, was being played out in real life. It seems a bit surreal that today’s Illinois politics are the stuff of a 1930s reform movie. But that is what it seems to be. And while we have all been a bit intrigued by the developments of Governor Blagojevich and the wiles of Illinois politics made transparent, I am not sure if I really batted an eye. Are you surprised? Are you shocked? A political appointment might be given to the highest bidder? Not quite the stuff of fantasy.

When Frank Capra made Mr. Smith Goes to Washington it’s release was delayed. 1939 was a time where people felt a movie about government corruption was not the best- world events and such. Ultimately, it was released. It made Jimmy Stewart a star and earned 11 academy award nominations. Stewart gave a great performance and the scenes of him walking around the Lincoln memorial listening to a young boy read the Gettysburg address with the aid of his grandfather is stirring. You could see Stewart’s signature expressions of sincerity and playfulness on full display. But mostly what you could see was Frank Capra.

Capra was a patriot, a believer in America. During the years of WWII he offered one movie for the public, but eight for the soldiers. Granted the war movies were propaganda, but they were also a transparent glimpse upon the man. He wanted to help America. He believed in us.

While the context of his movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, is being repeated, it is doubtful if the script will be kept to the letter. Capra’s movie has Jefferson Smith, a youth worker and patriot of Montana, the son of a reforming newspaper editor who was killed by the barons of the mining industry, Capra has Jeff Smith take on the powers that be and win. After being framed and made to look like a criminal by a powerful robber baron, Jeff Smith almost runs away, but then, he hears his heart, or Jean Arthur, and what it says is, fight for what is right. Roland Burris of Illinois will fill Barack Obama’s seat, and even though it sounds cynical, I’m not convinced he will take on the senate in a filibuster to expose the political machine that controls his state. As their attorney general for many years he made his peace with them long ago.

Man that sounds harsh. I don’t know the man, but I am sure he has stepped into the cauldron of Chicago politics and made decisions that were, let us say, complicated. Just to say the word Chicago is to conjure images of Daley and a political machine; and these images are not my imagination; they are real, and real corrupt. Maybe a way to back off the ledge here is to say that politics is the power to decide, and the power to decide is often garnered by compromise and convolution and pacts that are not the intent of any self-respecting leader. They are the cost of doing business, the grease in the grooves, the way things work. And that is what Frank Capra wanted you to say.

His movies were to lull you unto a bit ease, a moment where you say, that it is the way it is; and then he leads you into a kind of confession, although you don’t know you are confessing. We are just being realistic, grown ups in a political world. And then he has you. All of sudden you hear your voice, of course a governor would sell a senate seat, and it sounds really bad.

There are moments of my youth that I regret. Not a lot, but there are some moments where my character was built by seeing it in a lesser light. Yet, I want to say the moment I felt the lowest was when I made a classmate, Glen, feel naïve. We were juniors in high school in Mr. Huston’s history class discussing the attack on Pearl Harbor and what President Roosevelt knew or didn’t know about the act of aggression. Glen stated quite clearly that any speculation about foreknowledge was an affront to the office of President. An American President would not knowingly allow the Japanese the element of surprise if he knew it.

I am not sure what I said; mostly what I remember was the look on his face. I was persuasive, and clear, and I made his assumptions look silly. I offered the classic argument that Roosevelt sacrificed Pearl Harbor so he could gain congressional approval to enter WWII without opposition or political fallout. It was a hard decision in a bad place that led to something good. Such is the office of the presidency. The longer I spoke the less light there was in Glen’s face. By the end something that was good was gone.

Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington always reminds of that moment of youthful misdeed. His movies were meant to put the light back into Glen’s face. Film after film was meant to say, being cynical never makes the world better. And wherever he is, last I heard he was an air force officer, wherever he is, I hope he’s watched Frank Capra a lot.

Being cynical, which if taken in small doses like arsenic or quinine, is a good thing. It is. We need to do due diligence; we need to question motives and even second-guess the ones who lead us. But when we don’t trust anyone over 40 or if we believe that government is just corrupt, or if we just assume the worst to feel sophisticated and savvy, we deserve the ills that find us. Patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel claims, but not all patriots are scoundrels. They’re not. Not everything that is gold glitters.

The more I have been involved in local missions, the more I have traveled the world and dealt with people of power, the more I have sought to form alliances that would leverage change, the more I have become convinced that real change is not the stuff of my will, my determination, even my persuasive powers. It is ever the stuff of hope and faith and love. I have a strange view, a kind of modern Puritanism that the politics of power is really theological as faith hope and love are the works of God; we are just the place of their manifestation. And that my life, my family, my sins and deeds well done, my ethics and philosophy, my grasp of history and the course of culture and what is of greatest value to all, while they may achieve a profound level, they are not the truth. The truth is what abides in me, finds me, takes hold of me. My hold is slender, fleeting at best.

When Jesus left Jerusalem and went home he found Philip and called him. Philip, excited and exuberant, comes to Nathaniel and says, “We found the Christ. Jesus, the son of Joseph, of Nazareth.” And then in a line that drips of irony and cynicism and wit, Nathaniel says, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

Nathaniel should be a protestant patron saint. (We don’t have patron saints, although there is one for lost things and while I shouldn’t, I am willing to set up a shrine or wear a medal or something as I am trying to write something right now and that means I am lost most of the time- let alone my things.) As Protestants we shouldn’t be venerating saints, but Nathaniel should have some sort of exemption. He’s the patron saint of cynicism and sarcasm and wit. Now there is a saint I can pray to.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Can anything good come out of Washington? That should bend our cynical bones a bit. The exchange that follows between Nathaniel and Jesus is intriguing because it goads a question about us. We are pretty savvy, cynical, grown up, sophisticated lot. We read papers and books and enjoy provocative cinema. We travel and reflect and try to think before we speak. We measure our responses given the context and the weigh the demands before us with wisdom and pragmatism. I know it sounds like a bit of boasting, but I have to say that is who you are.

This is an assumption, yes, but it seems as if that is who Nathaniel was as well. He’s a cool customer, a man of the world, a man of the city. Bethsaida is a section of Jerusalem. He’s not a country bumpkin, a person from Nazareth, a red state. He’s an educated guy. He’s also the first person after John the Baptist to testify about Jesus. And John the Baptist ate bugs and lived out in the bush so what does that say? But Nathaniel says, you are the one. He believes and his cynicism and wit and sophistication evaporate. He looks like the biggest simpleton believer. Even Jesus mocks him. What because I knew what you said by a fig tree you think I am the messiah? Oh Nathaniel you will see much more than that. And then he makes a reference to Bethel and Jacob and his dream of heaven and earth commingling.

It’s Jesus’ mockery that uncovers us, reveals us. Nathaniel, our patron saint of cynicism, trips over himself to believe; he just blurts it out: I believe. And so it is with us. We want to believe. We want to be people who hope and trust and die fighting for the good cause. We don’t need to be heroes, we just want to say, one more time into the breach. We want to be true and right and just and good and well what God intended us to be. Jesus wasn’t the Christ to make something out of us we don’t like or don’t care for; salvation is not when we say, who is that? Not me. Jesus came to save us from the cynicism we cling to because hope is embarrassing and too precious to wear on our sleeve. Nathaniel is our poster child- the proto-Protestant- because he shows how much we want to believe no matter the cost. Just so long as you know it’s us, the cynical ones; you know, Jacob and is his lot.

In an attempt to be informed of all opinions and perspectives I have started to read the Huffington Post. I have to admit my first foray was to see what she and her website was making of President-elect Obama’s choice of an invocator. Rick Warren is someone I admire, which I figured would just torque off the liberal commentators and their lot to no end. And it did. Rick Warren, they said, supported Proposition 8, which made it a constitutional amendment to the State of California that a legal marriage was between a man and a woman. Thus no gay marriage. (Now before I proceed I have to just express my dismay that California did this; this is not the California of my youth. Wyoming, yes; California, no.) Thus Warren was painted as a bigot who sought to deny the civil rights of gay and lesbian folk and thus an affront to the manifold of liberal causes and freedom fighters. Does Obama know who elected him? That is a question being asked frequently.

In my first foray into the Huffington Post I found a column from the songwriter and gutsy singer Melissa Etheridge. Now, Etheridge is a kind of Janis Joplin of our time which means she is a gritty, loud, bluesy rocker; she is also a lesbian who is in her second marriage with a woman, or committed relationship, or monogamous situation; she is a woman who has struggled with breast cancer and is raising a family and all the while really rocks. Her column started in predictable fashion: what was Obama thinking? This guy is a bigot. I thought you were our guy.

As fate or luck or truth would have it, in her frustration and feelings of betrayal, she discovered that she was slated to sing at a conference that very week where Rick Warren was the keynote speaker. She was ready to cancel. This was not cool. Not right.

Her article describing her response begins, “This is a message for my brothers and sisters who have fought so long and so hard for gay rights and liberty. We have spent a long time climbing up this mountain, looking at the impossible, changing a thousand year-old paradigm. We have asked for the right to love the human of our choice, and to be protected equally under the laws of this great country.” And then she described her shock of being thrust together with a person who was eroding her faith, challenging the hope she had proffered in the new president.

And then in a bold move, she made an overture. She said can anything good come of the church? Her people told his people, can we talk? She writes “I told my manager to reach out to Pastor Warren and say ‘In the spirit of unity I would like to talk to him.’ They gave him my phone number. On the day of the conference I received a call from Pastor Rick, and before I could say anything, he told me what a fan he was. He had most of my albums from the very first one. What? This didn't sound like a gay hater, much less a preacher. He explained in very thoughtful words that as a Christian he believed in equal rights for everyone. He believed every loving relationship should have equal protection.”

The bottom line is that Melissa Etheridge sang at the event and suggested to those who seek similar dreams as she does that they help out at churches before they just write them off. But what I found so moving, so lovely, in her column was Nathaniel and his readiness, his hope, his soul that was dying to believe. Her cynicism was clear from her column. We elected someone hoping he was different; but he is just the same as everyone else. He could have chosen anyone to pray, but he chooses a gay hating bigot. Figures!

And then Nathaniel emerges. Not the cynical Nathaniel- the real Nathaniel. All it took was one phone call, one meeting and she was willing to put cynicism aside. Gone was the voice of anger and in its place is one who wants to hope and love and believe (and sing). Here is the Nathaniel who is dying for something to believe; the one who can’t wait to follow and trust and die for what is right and good and just. You see America didn’t create this: we have just been blessed with a beautiful place to see it, live it.

Sometimes the stars have to align before you see the future. I’ve never really liked the holiday for Dr. King. I love his writings, his esprit de corps, his cadence. (As an orator I am just in awe of a man whose voice was as a great as his message). But the timing is all wrong. The kids just had a holiday; and in Watertown this is the season of snow days, so a holiday is not really all that coveted. But driving with little Dave the other day he shared with me the speech of Dr. King and what it meant to him and then the stars lined up. This is the weekend before the inauguration of the first African American president. That is a good time to pause in honor of Dr. King and those who still dream his dreams.

Here’s the thing: I know you and I know me. We want to believe, to hope, to love. These things are precious in our sight. And we believe in and hope for and love America as the place in which we are blessed with the manifestation of grace and truth and justice. Not just for us, but for all. For all. We struggle with the cynicism and the fear and the reluctance of those who must be held accountable. But mostly we just hope and believe and love. We do. And we are dying to do these things. We are. And so it’s good that tomorrow we can rest and reflect and dream. We have a dream. We do. Someday we will see it. Amen.