Nobbling the Hobgoblins (2):
The Hobgoblin of Snobbery:
nobbling Hyacinth Buckét
a sermon by Bob Faser
St. Andrew’s Uniting Church, Bacchus Marsh, Vic.
9th October 2011

Hyacinth Buckét is our second “hobgoblin”.

If you’ve seen the TV programme “Keeping up Appearances”, you’re familiar with Hyacinth Buckét. In the series, Hyacinth managed to terrorise her husband Richard, infantilise her adult son Sheridan, and turn her next door neighbours Elizabeth and Emerson into nervous wrecks.

While Hyacinth was highly offended by the coarseness of the appearance and lifestyle of her sisters Rose and Daisy, and Daisy’s husband Onslow, they were more amused than anything by Hyacinth’s snobbery and pretentiousness.

Hyacinth saw herself as being a noted hostess, renowned for her “candlelight suppers”. But her prospective guests viewed an invitation to any of these evenings in roughly the same light as the prospect of an afternoon in the dentist’s chair. She wanted to hobnob with the elite – preferably with the titled - but military officers and their wives would do – or failing that, the local MP or mayor – or even the vicar in a pinch.

Hyacinth created her own fiction about herself and her family:
• Her father – a fairly unremarkable older man – was “one of the great minds of his generation”.
• Her rather unstable (and economically dependent) son was a misunderstood intellectual with a sensitive, artistic temperament.

Ultimately, Hyacinth’s fictionalising of her background can be seen in her transformation of her married surname from the honest, non-nonsense “Bucket” to the more francophone “Buckét”.

Hyacinth exemplified the title of the series in which her character appeared: “Keeping up Appearances”. If Hyacinth’s life was about anything, it was about “keeping up appearances”, even when the appearances that were kept up had little to do with reality.

In a real way, there’s a lot of Hyacinth in each of us. We all try to “keep up appearances”.

It’s a bit like the children’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes. In this story, almost everyone was being fooled by their vanity.
• The Emperor was told by a con-man posing as a tailor that his new “clothes” were made of a special cloth that could only be seen by those who were of particularly refined tastes. The Emperor didn’t let on that he couldn’t see them himself.
• The courtiers and the crowds were told the same thing by the con-man. They, too, didn’t let on that they couldn’t see the Emperor’s new “clothes”.

The crowds, and the courtiers, and the Emperor himself all were engaged in self-deception. They didn’t want to admit that their tastes were insufficiently “refined” to see the Emperor’s new “clothes”, so they all allowed themselves to be conned, in the interests of “keeping u0p appearances”.

It took a small child, one who hadn’t yet developed a sense of personal vanity to ask the Emperor that crucial question: “Uh, pardon me, Your Majesty, but why aren’t you wearing any clothes?”

In a real way, there’s a lot of Hyacinth in each of us. We all try to “keep up appearances”.

I’m told that when people are responding to public opinion surveys, many of us try to make ourselves look good and exaggerate our better points.
• Many people make more money in their answers to surveys than they do in real life.
• Many people weigh less in their answers to surveys than they do in real life.
• Many people get more exercise, read more, attend public worship more often, and watch much less TV in their answers to surveys than they do in real life.
• If the survey is a political poll, some people are a bit more left-of-centre in their answers to surveys than they are when they step into the ballot box.

Like Hyacinth, many of us are very concerned about “keeping up appearances”.

Similarly, in the western United States, there’s a saying about a person who has gone to great trouble to cultivate a certain “cowboy look” in their dress, appearance, and speech, even if they’ve never had any experience of working with actual livestock. They say that such a person is “all hat and no cattle”.

This happens in our faith as well. There are people who are “all hat and no cattle” in their faith.
• They may talk about their faith a lot.
• They may have very clear opinions about what is “correct” belief and “correct” behaviour for a person of faith.
• They may be very willing to speak about the inadequacies of other people’s faith and practice.
• In many ways, they come across as being much more “religious” than you or I.

But, when it comes to putting their faith into practice in the midst of the real world, they are just as confused as you or I.

Throughout Jesus’ parables, we are challenged to a greater level of authenticity in our practice of our faith. For example, the tax collector who was honest about his faults (as numerous as his faults were) made far better use of his time in the temple than did the community leader who merely catalogued his virtues (as numerous as his virtues were).

The Scots poet Robert Burns wrote about such a person as that community leader in his poem “Holy Willie’s Prayer”. It was about a very rigid elder in a Scottish kirk, who loved to point out the shortcomings of others, even though he himself was a bigot, a drunkard, a lecher, and highly dishonest in his own business dealings. In terms of his own faith, he was “all hat and no cattle”.

But this is not merely a problem for fictional characters like Hyacinth or Burns’s “Holy Willie”. It is also an issue for you and I. We also need to strive to make sure that our actions are consistent with the faith we profess, and that this is shown in the way we treat each other … and in the way we treat people in our wider community … and our wider world. Otherwise, we run the danger of becoming “all hat and no cattle” in our own faith, merely “keeping up appearances” for the sake of “keeping up appearances”.

In another one of his poems, Robert Burns said:

And would that God the giftie gie us
To see ourselves as others see us.

May God give us this gift,
• so that we approach our faith as the people we really are, rather than as some fictionalised self that has no grounding in reality,
• so that we may not be “all hat and no cattle” in our practice of our faith,
• so that our faith may be a matter of more than just “keeping up appearances”,
• so that we can nobble this further hobgoblin we call Hyacinth Buckét.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Next week’s sermon in this series is: “The Hobgoblin of Bigotry: nobbling Alf Garnett.”