Homily
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
“You shall not oppress an alien, says the Lord, “for I am compassionate.” Rather, you shall love the stranger, for you were once strangers yourself.
And yet it’s so hard. Is there anything harder than loving the person who is different from me. For they can make me angry, afraid and confused by what they say and do. It makes no sense to me. It’s like they're speaking a different language (and sometimes they are). To be honest, we sometimes just wish they would just go away and leave us alone.
That’s true of all the strangers, including the ones who don’t look like me or act like me. As it was true of Adams and Jefferson.
John Adams was 20 years old with a fresh bachelor’s degree from Harvard when he arrived in Worcester in 1751. The young and impudent fellow was brilliant and set out, with no lack of ambition, to become, in his words, “a great man.” He eventually leaned toward the law as a profession, writing that he found in most clergymen “the pretended sanctity of absolute dunces.”
So, two years later, he began reading law under Worcester lawyer James Putnam. He was then admitted to the bar, was instrumental in the American revolution and became President of the United States. But the important part is that he came to Worcester.
The year Adams came to the Worcester a fourteen year old Thomas Jefferson was burying his father in far away Virginia, where he would attend William and Mary College and an enthusiastic scholar, not at first in the law, but in philosophy and the natural sciences. He did later acquire a law degree, but as something of a second thought.
Both men were brilliant, but the similarities seem to end there. One was tall, the other short and stout, one was elegant from cosmopolitan Virginia, while the other was a rough hewn farmer from Quincy, known for his bluntness.
But even more, our second and third Presidents embraced significantly different visions of governance and were frequently on the opposite ends of the political spectrum. The differences were never more evident than in the election of 1800 during which slander and personal attacks were the order of the day.
Jefferson was accused of greater loyalties to France than the United States. One politician was quoted as saying “he will leave nothing unattempted to overturn the Government of this Country.” (the politician was George Washington.
On the other hand, Adams was accused of being more British than American and with another prominent politician (the one about whom Lyn Manuel Miranda wrote a musical) of possessing “great and intrinsic defects in his character, which made him unfit to be [President].”
And when Jefferson won, after the contested election was deadlocked for weeks, the second and third Presidents of our country stopped talking to each other.
But then a remarkable thing happened in the last years of their life, when at the instigation of a common friend, Adams and Jefferson began to write to each other, indeed opening a floodgate of correspondence, what would become some 158 letters, beginning with Adams writing that despite the fact that they disagreed on almost every political issue of the day “I always loved Jefferson, and still love him.”1 “You and I,” Adams continued, “ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”2
Jefferson replied on a variety of topics in an extraordinary exchange, once writing that like the various religious sects of the new nation, the two old frenimies were as different as could be, but were united, he suggested, by ‘the Principles of Christianity and the Principles of American Liberty.’3
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And what do we have to learn from these two great men? Why do I tell you their story. Because they teach me that what lasts, in the end, are not all the accomplishments, the brilliant ideas or triumphs. What lasts…the only thing that really lasts is, in the words of our patron, “faith, hope and love…and the greatest of these is love.”
For what makes Jefferson and Adams truly great is not the role they played in government, or the titles they achieved, but the fact that they sought to love the ones who were so different from them, so alien and so strange. The ones who made them angry. The ones they could not understand.
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Well, that was the third and fourth Presidential elections in our nation’s history. And with just a little over a week to go before the the fifty-ninth Presidential election, most people have probably made up their minds, which means most people know who they are NOT going to vote for. That other one.
Which makes it all the more wonderful that Jesus reminds us to today to pray for the alien, the one we find strangest, the one not like ourselves.
And all the more challenging when Saint Paul says to us:
Put away anger, fury, malice and slander….
Put on heartfelt compassion,
kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience,
bear with one another
forgive one another, as the Lord has forgiven you.
Over all these put on love,
and let the peace of Christ control your hearts.
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1 - Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), 3:639–40.
2 - JA to TJ, 28 June 1813, Cappon, 2:338–40, in Gordon S. Wood. Friends Divided.
3 - JA to TJ, 15 July 1813, Cappon, 2:358, in Gordon S. Wood. Friends Divided.
4 - Cf. Colossians 13: 8-15
