R is for Risky, which is what preaching is, based as it is on an itinerant, hillbilly rabbi, Jesus.

6. Still, any perceptive listener sees through that facade, knowing full well that the whole elaborate edifice of my preacherly authority teeters finally on one itinerate, hillbilly rabbi and our taking his Word for it. But then, that being so and he being who he is, preaching does allocate value with an authority which even politicians emulate: "as one having exousia" (Greek for "authority"), so Matthew's gospel describes him, "not as the scribes."

7. In fact, where else in the political sector do you find an authority which, like this authority invoked by Christian preaching, can rouse people to sing as radically as they do or just to keep coming out for their weekly Sunday morning Eucharistic caucuses as they do? Oscar Wilde said his one objection to socialism is that it would take too many evenings. Christians may feel the same way about Sunday mornings, especially the preaching, yet they come. That is a tribute to some rather extraordinary authority. Few politicians could match it.

8. On the other hand, where else except among fanatics like Jim Jones and the Ayatollah Khomeini can you find an authority like Jesus attracting sane and sober sophisticates to follow him, cross and all? On second thought, most politicians would probably adjure such authority, so closely does it verge on blasphemy and so likely is it to backfire. Yet that does constitute the authority, and the hazard, which Christian preaching may not evade if it faces up to its political calling, that is, to allocate value authoritatively.

9. So preaching is political not merely when it addresses "controversial social issues" (gay rights, nuclear freeze, abortion), but whenever it openly admits it is being political and then proceeds to be so, by allocating value authoritatively. Such preaching has a way of creating its own controversial social issues, willy nilly. For example, such preaching may tempt the hearers to draw unfavorable comparisons between the preacher and his authority, on the one hand, and the authority of the "scribes" and the rest of the religious-political establishment, on the other. That is controversial. Or such preaching may attract to the preacher the sort of riff-raff who will scarcely enhance his parish programs: a leper who needs healing, a centurion with a sick slave, Simon Peter's mother-in-law, a paralytic on a stretcher. At least that is the dubious catch which one sermon netted--"the Sermon on the Mount," as Augustine called it. It netted its own first-class "controversial social issues," all because it allocated value authoritatively, with exousia.

10. Recall just that one excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount which provides this week's gospel reading, and note how the preacher allocates value to his hearers--or, as we shall see, allocates the most drastic dis-value to them.

    Arlo Cairo: a gracious scribe

11. Dis-value, yes, in spite of the fact that the hearers were as Matthew identifies them, Jesus' own "disciples." They were not pagans or outsiders to the Jesus movement but loyalists, partisans, collaborators. On top of that, I gather they were poor. The potential for political exploitation by the preacher could have been immense, given their obvious need of such desperate necessities as food and clothing. How tempting it could have been to play upon self-pity, all the more because of their known sympathies.

12. Instead, what this preacher identifies is their worry, their worry over food and clothing and survival, and scores them for that. He scores them because their worry is de-humanizing (reducing them to less than grass of the field and birds of the air), futile, life-shortening, ethnically inferior (like the Goyim), and asking for more trouble than they've already got. But worse than that, their worry is unbelief and, worst of all, hatred against God and servitude to another master.

13. Their materialism, which a political demagogue might have exploited, this preacher excoriates. Still, not for a moment does he deny the reality of their material needs. "Your heavenly Father knows you have need of them." What he does do is re-prioritize those needs, dethrones them, thus relieving the hearers' servile dependence on them: "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then (in due order) all these things shall be yours as well."

14. We sometimes say, a bit too spiritually, that the theme of the Gospel of Matthew is the kingdom of heaven. What it really is is the kingdom of heaven coming upon the earth. Because the Son of Man had the authority first of all to forgive sin and to forgive it "upon the earth," he also had authority to cure a sinner's very earthly polio. "All these things shall be yours as well." The value being allocated is quite as material as it is spiritual.

15. Some of the hearers of that Sermon on the Mount (not a bad percentage for a first sermon) caught the political promise in its down-to-earth message. If "life," even their life, the life of chronic worriers, is, as the preacher said, more important than food and drink; if even their bodies, the bodies of disbelievers, oligopistoi, are more than raiment; if even they, Mammon-loving God-haters, are of more value than Solomon's glory, then what?

16. Well, then anyone who can re-allocate value the way this preacher does must surely find also their bodies valuable enough to cleanse their leprosy, to heal their slaves and their mothers-in-law. In fact, they wouldn't be surprised if he were to show concern even for "what they shall eat and what they shall drink." Before it's all over, he'll probably be saying, "Take and eat," "Take and drink." We've heard political promises before, but never like this.

17. That could get him into trouble, him and them: such earthing of heaven, such re-allocating of value, such political preaching. But then, politics, mixing in the politia, never is risk-free.