January 21, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Nehemiah 8:2-10 Reading Scripture as a community.
Psalm 113 - Laudate, pueri
I Corinthins 12:12-27 You are the body of Christ
Luke 4:14-21 He began to say, "This scripture. . ."
I did not watch the TV proceedings on January 20, 1989 when George Herbert Walter Bush was inaugurated as 41st imperator of the republic. Then, as now, I had a January cold and didn't think I needed several hours of watching the rich grind the faces of the poor, now more obviously so than it was then. "People are not expecting great things," said Andrew Kohut at the time--he was president of the Gallup Opinion Harvesting company. The people were desperately hoping for signs of Bush's competence, said Kohut. Like his progenitor, little Boots has not promised much to any but the rich, and may not be able to keep even those promises. They will repeat the orgy of self-centered and self-promoting capitalism, the stretch limousines and fancy-dress balls, a hundred thousand of the oligarchy will descend upon the capitol for the inauguration. They will be driven past the rows of homeless, huddled on gratings, asleep on park benches. Denunciatory placards will make them feel a thrill in their noblesse oblige costumes of contempt for the poor. The newspapers will use the euphemism, "unrest" to describe others, who will not sleep through these blasphemies. Capitalist newspapers speak of outrage and anger merely as this "unrest," a kind of willful insomnia. Leftovers from the gluttonous banquets will be sent to the city's homeless, with appropriate publicity. The press will pay the devout attention it always does to sports and entertainment.
By an ironic serendipidity, the Word of God speaks today of inaugurations. Luke tells us of the inauguration of Jesus, elected by the dove descending, immersed in the radicalism of John's baptism, a public act of solidarity with the people of God coming to radical change. Jesus is back from his days of fasting and introspection, of getting his agenda in order. It was not to be business as usual, it was not to be compromise and horse-trading, power games or bread from stones, pinnacles of privilege or grandiose visions of greatness. He comes back home to the synagogue--the parish church--of his youth, and takes up the old Bible from the pulpit in the midst of his own people, and looks into it for his inaugural address. John Dominic Crossan and others argue that Jesus was probably an illiterate Galilean peasant, and if he knew the Scriptures, it was by rote. A long time ago when I was dean of Chicago's west deanery I met while waiting in line to get my driver's license, a Black preacher named Zee Brooks, who could not read or write and had to learn how to answer the driver's test by memorizing answers.
But he could preach, and his wife would read out verses of the Bible to him and he would preach up a pentecost each Sunday, ringing the changes on each word of Scripture that was read to him. The Scriptures were interwoven into all his speech and talk. As dean, I arranged for him to use one of our huge unoccupied Episcopal church buildings on Sunday afternoons--St. Timothy's-- a gothic barn marooned like the engulfed cathedral in a sea of inner city slums. And he filled it with choirs and singing, call and response Bible reading, and his own preliterate preaching to the hundreds of folks who thronged there for hours on the weekends. During Pastor "Z's" preaching, old ladies in his flock would yell "Help Him Lord!" and "Help Him Jesus!" And he got the help they prayed for. And I got Bishop Montgomery to go and visit this church, housed in one of his his redundant parishes. They had a pentecost of joy together, too, in this pastoral visitation.
So whether reading, or by rote, Jesus landed like an extraterretrial in Nazareth, and opened the Scriptures to them. It was not private devotional, for as Article Twenty affirms, it is the Church which is the witness and keeper of Holy Writ and into whose common hands is placed common prayer and common Bible, and as we are taught in the Catechism, "We understand the meaning of the Bible by the help of the Holy Spirit, who guides the Church in the true interpretation of the scriptures." The Bible is the Church's book, and no part of it is for private interpretation, any more than a cookbook can be used apart from a kitchen and remote from a dining room.
Luke says that Jesus had a reputation by the time he got back home--a reputation for teaching, although he had been a carpenter, and a carpenter's son. A Teknon, actually--an artisan handyman. If he was perhaps a literate layman, as it seems, he would have been entitled to stand up, unroll the scroll and read the lections appointed in the synagogue. George Herbert Walker Bush was on the vestry of his parish, where he said he was raised on the Book of Common Prayer and the Boy Scout Oath. But the Shrub has found his two left feet in the larger room of Methodism. He claims to be born again. He knows the law well enough, inside and out, and has sent 156 folks to capitalist punishment under its Texas strictures. "If a man knows the law, he knows his duty," says Michael in Oscar Wilde's play, "Vera, or the Nihilists." "True,"replies Peter, "if a man knows the law there is nothing illegal he cannot do when he likes: that is why folk become lawyers. That is about all they are good for."
Jesus is handed the scroll, Luke says, and it is Isaiah's turn to be read; there was a lectionary, a course reading, just as we ourselves use, and so he finds the place in the 62nd chapter at the 58th verse where it is written: "The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me, sent me to bring the good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to prisoners, new sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
Jesus' inaugural address is based on this text, and he claims that it was written for him, about him; indeed, for all of us, and about all of us, to inaugurate our ministries. For Jesus appropriates for himself and the cabinet he is about to form all the expectations of the prophets for an anointed liberator. We don't have his notes, his homily grits, but Luke says "he won the approval of all and they were astonished by the gracious words that came from his lips." The expectations of the ages were fulfilled that day, right there and then in Nazareth. He told them that right now liberty is proclaimed to all poor people, those in jail and those in sickbeds, the blind and the lame, and the downtrodden. Finally, a Jubilee Yar--the year of the Lord's favor.
Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15 tell us about the Jubilee. Set at every seven years and every fifty years, they are years when no business as usual can be done, when slaves must be given their freedom, when families can return to lands lost in litigation, where farmland and field get a sabbath of rest, for there can be no planting or harvesting; debts are to be cancelled, there's to be a moratorium on marketing and the commoditizing of life. The Jubilee Year is to be a fore-taste and celebration of the Socialism of th Kingdom of Heaven, the proto Marxism of Messiah. Liberation, retoration, health restored, jails unlocked, land returned: a whole array of social justice revolutions. There isn't a word in Jesus'inaugural address about anything BUT social justice issues: there's no talk about the sanctity of private property, the glory of the free market, nor the duty to pray three times a day or to avoid eating ham hocks or lobster tails. Nothing about swift and certain hanging for capital offenses. Nothing that you might expect from a religious leader. It's all about how society is to be changed--how there's to be a kinder, gentler society.
The difference between the inauguration in Washington D.C. this week and the one in Nazareth is that Jesus has a social justice program, not just campaign rhetoric rehashed and refried to disguise its politics of vengeance. Instead, It's a Jubilee year, Jesus says: Let's Do It.
OUr first reading too is the story of an inauguration. After the people returned from exile, there needed to be a restoration of the foundations of their faith. The land was re-settled, and Ezra the priest assembled the people to hear the TORAH read out publicly as the foundation of the restored society. The inauguration of a new beginning, in which the church and the people were to be ruled by a rule of law, and not of men. No more whimsicial Willie Rehnquist and his Alice in Wonderland mad queen decrees. So Ezra reads and there is simultaneous translation into the language of the people--from Hebrew to Aramaic, so that veryone may be clear what the law actually is, and their resonse is to weep when they hear the law. I'm sure most northamericans would weep if we were to hear read out our Bill of Rights once a year on the 4th of July, or the Declaration of Independence. If we were to hear the words of the documents upon which our socitey claims to base itself. The Pledge of Allegiance and George Bush's Boy Scout Oath seem to have replaced the oracles of our national project.
What made the people weep to hear Torah read? It was surely the distance they had fallen in their captivity, into ignorance, and the great cleavage between what the Bible called them to be and what they saw in fact their life to be in national apostasy, as John Keble called it in the 19th century English church in his Assize sermon.
But Ezra asked them not to mourn or weep, but to begin instead to celebrate recovery: "Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine" and send a doggy bag to those who didn't get here--for this day is holy to the Lord. Ezra called the poeple to see that the Restoration which was being inaugurated was the celebration of a new day, this day, not the harking back in nostalgia to an innocent past, but the embracing of new opportunities that restoration of Torah would mean for everyone.
Paul says that the real miracle of the church is not in the spectacular show-off abilities of a few, who can speak in the tongues of angels. The new society of which the EKKLESIA, the called out people of God is the Paradigm and Pattern is an inclusive society--one body, with Jews, Greks, Slaves, Free, people of all ethnicities and of all classes, now made over into a racially inclusive and class-less society, sexually inclusive too.
We look around us and see that this certainly is not true of denominational life in the churches, which are consumer-oriented corporations, marketing agreeable brands of religion for various levels and recombinations of clientele. We don't yet know our way out of this morrass. Paul says that the Sign of the unified society is mutual care, "God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the inferior part, that there may no discord in the body, but that the members have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together. If one member is honored, all rejoice." Care, mutual care is the hallmark of liberated society. This we have not seen in the era of American Empire--for each has pursued a private agenda, each is called to apply the principles of venture capitalism in every aspect of life. Torah is avoided, and Gospel is giggled at. Are we to blame only the string of capitalist running pups that have been our presidents in the U.S. for the last half century? Reagan was asked why he did not go to church, and replied that it was not safe for him and it was a nuisance to others. We should ask them all instead, "Why DO they go to church? How dare they go to church?" Annie Dillard wrote of her fear when attending church that God might actually appear one day in response to all the requests and the destruction would be horrendous, as panic and flight began.
We can see that Jesus does come to us, and with us, to church, and has still his finger at that place in the scroll where he can reach the verse in Isaiah where it is written: Let the oppressed go free. I knew that the Reverend Zee Brooks could preach on that text. I know Jesus must have read it with a glance at the Roman occupation army. "Let the oppressed go free" is still Jesus'text.
Can we look to George the Second, inaugurated now, for a kindlier, gentler nation? He is but a mirror image of the people who put him there, and so we have the option of weeping and fasting or wallowing and feasting at this inauguration. But we have inaugurated Jesus today as our Liberator, and it is his politics and his religion we are called upon to announce beginning today -- to make our churches subversive cells where good news is told, where the truth is honored, where a class-less society is proclaimed, without millionaire skyboxes on Pennsylvania avenue. Let us weep for the chasm we see between Bush and the Basilea Tou Theou, between our dream and this reality.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
Please sign my guestbook and
view it.
Statistics courtesy of WebCounter.