Tuesday, February 22, 2011, Epiphany 8A
Matthew 6:24-34

If John Adams suffered a shortcoming as a diplomat in Europe during the American Revolution, it was his unwillingness to dissemble. When the American Congress commissioned him to pursue financial support and national recognition from the capitols of Europe, he charged on, often to the chagrin of America's French sponsors and his more courtly, reticent counterpart in Paris, Benjamin Franklin. The French court considered Adams a hopeless provincial. What you saw is what you got. Still believed in God for pity's sake! Yet for all the sophistication and power of Versailles in 1781- regarding those powdered gentlemen manipulating Europe under the cool, self-possessed gaze over their little pasty Enlightenment smiles - their estate would all be gone in eight years as French mobs replaced a king with the Corsican Bonaparte, soon Emperor of Europe, chopping off heads and torturing anybody who might wish to object. So much for sophistication.

We pray, amid the current clamor on the streets in the Muslim world, that it will come to something. Something otherwise. Not more sophistication in the use of bullets and retribution.

But like Solomon we give ourselves airs - in church, synagogue, mosque, the state - our circles of influence however construed, right down to the very ethos of our way of being with others.We practice manipulating the names of God, if it suits our purpose, and get caught rehearsing in front of the mirror. Alas, there stands the uninvited stranger. Oops. 'Would you please knock before you come in?' Sorry, there is no royal prerogative for privacy, sir - uh -whose image are we looking at? Whose possessions are we guarding? Whose right are we protecting? All this stuff for which we spin a thousand catchy phrases to convince – whom? And we call this knowledge?

Jesus pretty much tags it. We've forgotten what to worry about. And not. Trapped in the old language games of the double agent, too ingenious by half, who cannot recall, for the life of him, his first commission.

Why do we make it so hard?