Over a year ago, before the sheltering made us all so tense, and before the eruption of protesting over the continued racial injustice in our country made everybody on edge, the administration of SUNY New Paltz was put upon by the student body to change the names of some of the buildings and streets on their campus. And one of the ones they wanted gone was Huguenot Street because, they said, the Huguenots owned slaves. That may or may not have been their intended purpose, but I suspect that at least why they wanted the name gone was because the kids couldn’t spell Huguenot anymore. However, you have to know this about the Huguenots to know how short-sighted that was.  

The Huguenots were a group of French Protestants who grew in numbers during the 16th and 17th centuries. They were so severely persecuted by the French Catholic hierarchy and the clergy who assisted them, that there were many bloody massacres of Huguenot people in France. They scattered to other countries in Europe, but couldn’t find a safe haven and finally came to colonial America while this area of the country was still in the possession of the Dutch. They settled in New Paltz and, ironically - just down the road here on Rt. 209, just outside of Port Jervis - in a little hamlet that is still named Huguenot. They were a group of, what we call generically, separatists. So were the Pilgrims.  

There’s an old chestnut from the teaching profession about a teacher who asked his or her class to write an essay about Abraham Lincoln. One kid handed in a paper that began “Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin that he helped his father build.”

Now, the kid’s heart was in the right place, but he was so enamored with the myth of Abraham Lincoln that he kind of mixed things up and made it seem that Abe was so eager to help his Dad, that he helped him build the log cabin before he was born.

Sometimes, what happens after an event, or after a story is told overshadows the original information or the original story. It prevents us from seeing the story as it began. That’s why I read the long version of today’s Gospel. Because Matthew took a parable of Jesus’ and used it as a teaching tool thirty years after Jesus spoke the words. And the difference is the difference between a parable and an allegory.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …” and the quote ends, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Most people know that those are the words on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Fewer people know that that’s the second stanza of a long poem called “The New Colossus.” And not too many people know who wrote it.

Her name was Emma Lazarus. Emma Lazarus was a Jewish woman who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century. But unlike many other Jewish people of her time, she was not an immigrant. Her family was here for about fifty years before the Revolutionary War. They were not poor; they left Europe to avoid persecution both from Catholics and from Protestants. They came here and they did well for themselves. Her family was wealthy, she was homeschooled, she spoke several languages fluently, and she had a massive career as a writer of essays, criticism, poetry, and novels. And she hobnobbed with some of the other famous writers of her time – Thoreau, Emerson, Henry James – they all knew each other. Among her friends was a woman named Rose Hawthorne Lathrop. If you hear the Hawthorne in there that tells you that there’s a connection there to another famous writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

This bag weighs a ton. Worst day ever. My parents will kill me. I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse. I’m drowning in tears.  

Those are common things we hear all the time, but they’re exaggerations. There’s a Greek word for them. It’s called hyperbole (two Greek words – hupér, meaning above and beyond, and bolus, the target or the goal), so it’s an overreaching.  

How ‘bout this? I’ve told you a thousand times to stop exaggerating.  That’s hyperbole about hyperbole.  

There’s also another Greek word that we need to know for today’s Gospel, and that’s anachronism (from two Greek words - ana and khronos - beyond or before the time). From khronos you get English words like chronicle. I tell you that because Jesus, very frequently in His conversations and His teaching, used both hyperbole and anachronism. And there’s an anachronism in today’s Gospel that you really need to notice.

Terror! Terror on every side. That pretty much sums up what we have seen over the last quarter of a year. The only thing that moved the Coronavirus story off the front pages of the newspapers and the lead story on the evening news was an equally important and frightful event – an eruption of demonstrations about racial justice the like of which we have not seen since the late 1960s. I’d like to tell you two stories - the first is kind of innocent, the second maybe not so much. When I was in grammar school, our neighborhood was made up of all Caucasian people. There were Italians, Irish, Polish, Germans, a smattering of French and English, but we all looked somewhat alike. We kids called each other in conversation by those ugly names that each of those ethnic groups has in street slang. But we didn’t mean anything by it. We all got along well together.

Our churches were suddenly shut down in the middle of Lent, and all of a sudden, instead of the things we planned to give up for Lent, we gave up the way we were used to living, both in our private lives and in our life as a parish. It became a true Lent of tremendous drastic abstinence. Many of us entered into our own Gethsemane, where we cried out to a seemingly absent God, “If it is your will, let this cup pass me by.” But it didn't. So many of us then found ourselves - like Jesus on the night before he died - alone, seemingly abandoned or forced to abandon, those who we loved and things that we loved. And so it was a kind of crucifixion. And there were those, sadly, who like the women watching the crucifixion from afar, were only able to wave up at windows to loved ones in a nursing home or hospital, unable to touch, unable to speak. And we were entombed, all of us, in our own homes.