James Henry Leigh Hunt, better known to almost everybody as Leigh Hunt, was a poet, an essayist, and a playwright in the 19th century. He was in that same circle of literary figures as Shelly, Wordsworth, and all of those people we were forced to study in high school. Like most people in England in the 19th century, he was serenely confident in the superiority of all things British. The sun never set on Her Majesty’s empire. And also, like most people in Europe during the 19th century, he had a tremendous fascination with all things Egyptian, Arabian, and Middle Eastern. And because of their unspoken assumptions about the world, they never really took seriously the faith of Muslim people, whom they would have called Mohammedans back in the 19th century, but they liked to fantasize about them. Leigh Hunt was also probably an Anglican Divine, a pastor. He never got a parish of his own, and drifted away from church things, but we can be fairly certain that he had a much better knowledge of both the Old and New Testament than you and I have. That was just typical of people at that time.

And so he writes a poem based on his enchantment with things Middle Eastern, but he also based it on an assumption that’s probably correct. And that is, across the spectrum of religious faith, at least the major known faiths at that time – Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, Presbyterianism, Lutheranism, the Baptist churches, Judaism, and Islam, – all people reverence and hold as God’s word the two great commandments, which we just heard in today’s Gospel. So he creates a character for his poem. The character’s name is Abou Ben Adhem. Abou is what he thinks is a common Arabian name. But Ben means “son of;” then he chooses “son of” Adhem (Adam). He wants us to identify with this person as like you and me, descended from the first human being. And this is what he writes:

Since this gospel always occurs right before Election Day, a lot of preachers seize upon the opportunity to turn their homily into a political diatribe of one sort or another - separation of church and state, and what it requires of a good Catholic. But the fact is that this has nothing to do with the separation of church and state. If you said to Jesus, “We live in a country where we have separation of church and state,” He wouldn’t know what you were talking about. It would not compute in any way. There’s two expressions that come down to us in history from the French Renaissance, just before the French Revolution. One of them is l’etat, c’est moi - I am the state. From the time of Jesus to the beginning of the nineteenth century, that was the way things went. The entire political economy was tied up in the person of the ruler. Some countries had parliaments, but they really weren’t all that effective. The other expression is un roi, une foi - one king, one faith. Whatever the king says your religion is, that’s what it is. That’s one reason why the separation of church and state was incorporated into the first amendment of the constitution. Because the framers of the constitution recognized that either they themselves, or their direct ancestors, had come to America to escape from un roi, une foi, from being persecuted because they wanted to follow a different faith journey than the faith journey of the dominant power in their country.

So then what is this gospel all about? I said there were three clues. The first is in Matthew’s introduction. He starts off by saying the Pharisees, who were the religious teachers of Judaism - the interpreters of the law - the Pharisees wanted to trap Jesus, so they went off with the Herodians. Now, this is a really bad marriage, Pharisees and Herodians. Who were the Herodians? The Herodians were the followers, or the entourage, of King Herod, the Antipas family. All the Herods were half Jews. One of their direct ancestors was a pagan. So they were thought of as somehow unworthy to be called Jews. Then they did the unthinkable, they made an alliance with Rome, for political expediency. They got Rome to agree that the Jews could practice their religion freely - the only ethnic group in the empire allowed that privilege - as long as they continued to pay tax to the emperor. And, because this deal upset those who were deeply involved in the Jewish faith, they despised Herod. So this is an interesting combination, that the representatives of high-church Judaism would make common cause with the followers of Herod.

I recently read a novel called Damascus, about the life of St. Paul and other Christians, some of them martyrs during the 1st century. I didn’t care much for the book, by Christos Tsiolkas, but I did appreciate how he brought to life what if was like to live in the 1st century, what it was like to be a Christian back then. It was a tough slog in many ways, and the novelists graphic descriptions of the terrible conditions in which everybody, Christian and non-Christian, lived, the terrible things they endured, almost blistered my mind. I asked you to listen, during the second reading, for some of the vices, or character flaws, that St. Paul exhibits in that very brief passage.

I once had a friend who would give you the shirt off his back, almost literally. I remember one time, I needed money in a hurry. I told him my sad story. He opened his wallet and gave me a thousand dollars. Without blinking an eye, without making any arrangements to get it back. But he could not accept anything from anybody graciously. He simply did not know how to say thank you, or to show any appreciation. This is a wonderful man in many ways, but that one character flaw turned many people off from him, because they didn’t understand.

Reality TV. Reality TV is both the salvation and the destruction of the television industry. When many of us were growing up, for most of the day, all you could see on most channels was a test pattern. Then, when the kids got home from school, children’s programing began, followed by the evening news, followed by prime time scripted programs – comedies, dramas – and then the evening news, and then a sign-off, and a test pattern appeared again. But when we went to 24/7 programming, it became much more expensive to run television stations. Only the big three were really able to provide fresh programming all day and all evening long, because the cost of a scripted program was enormous – way over $1,000,000 per episode. And so, those stations needed to sell a $1,000,000 worth of advertising for each program just to break even. And the goal of the major broadcasting companies was not to just break even, they needed to make a substantial profit for their investors and for themselves. So in the early 1990’s they came up with a brilliant idea. Reality TV.

Because it only cost a fraction of what it cost to produce a scripted program. You didn’t have to pay those enormous salaries to the big-name stars, all you had to pay people on the screen was the daily minimum for someone who appeared on a talk show. Back in 1970’s, the daily minimum was about $79. So even given the cost of inflation, it didn’t cost much, say, to have a cook demonstrating how to bake something, or a carpenter, how to fix something, or some people fishing, how to find fish in deep water. So it’s simple to do. Instead of having five cameras on a set, you had one guy walking around with a camera on his shoulder.