April 29, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Acts 9:1-19a Conversion of St. Paul
or Jeremiah 32:36-41 The Law of Return
Psalm 33 Exultate, justi
Revelation 5:6-14 Dignus es: Worthy is the Lamb to receive power and
wealth
John 21:1-14 A hundred and fifty three fish
The Word of God today is full of visions and dreams, and the oracles vary from a fish story to an epileptic seizure and the greatest conversion in history; the cast of characters include a prosecuting attorney and twenty-four presbyters prostrate before the Lamb. The voices heard invite us to breakfast on the beach and to join in singing songs newer even than the ones in the Hymnal 1982, with descants for many angels, myriads and thousands of them, singing Dignus Es -- Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered to receive "power and wealth, wisdom, might, honor, glory and blessing."
Wait a minute. "Wisdom, might, honor, glory and blessing" are perfectly OK religious words, and we are used to singing those in a hymn; we can find those words throughout the Hymnal 1940. They are common to Common Prayer. And they have become words that have lost some of their bite, like kids raised on Twinkies. But I couldn't find "power and wealth" in the text of "Dignus Es" that is given in the Hymnal 1940, nor in the text of "A Song to the Lamb" in the office for Morning Prayer. These words are indeed those of a "New Song" which we're not accustomed to hearing in church, any more than we are accustomed to hearing "Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise ye wretched of the earth!" set to Anglican chant.
"Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive POWER and WEALTH" is the way that curtain opened before it was liturgically snipped and snapped shut, to reopen with acceptable religious words. But the words keep bogarting their way back into our worship. And the Apocalypse of John, a revolutionary document indeed, has them in its opening hymn, Dignus Es. When Stokeley Carmichael in the New York Review of Books a generation ago first used the phrase "Black Power" he was using two tabu words, tabu because used together. For "Power" and "Wealth" are both tabu words for the poor to roll around in their mouths at any time. At a Congress on Urban Ministry back in 1986 in Chicago, I heard a young black preacher named Lemuel Tucker from Jackson, Mississippi, talk about power and wealth. Blacks, along with Hispanics and Women, had by then been enfranchised in most of the United States, and could sing of their accomplishments in the areas of voting, public accomodations, the right to spend money ." But what they hadn't achieved, Tucker preached, and still cant' sing about, is much in the way of POWER and WEALTH.
Wealth means not a big income--Michael Jordan after a career of miracle moves on and off the basketball court has a big income; epicene and swivel hipped Michael Jackson has a big income; even the not-quite-so-swift Reverend Jesse Jackson has a big income--bigger to be sure than what I get from the Church Pension Fund each month after a lifetime of service in a poor mission church--but none of us has any power or wealth. We don't own the means of producing income--we don't own factories, or mines, or agribusinesses, or coffee plantations in Kenya, or pineapple farms in the Philippines, or oil wells in Saudi Arabia. That is what is called wealth--the kind of ownership that makes it possible for you not to have to work ever again. When you've got income only, you haven't got wealth. That's why the poor lost the War on Poverty--the other side had the weapons in that war, and it always only let the poor have increments of income, and always kept the poor from power and from wealth.
The way the capitalist system works is to keep power and wealth in the hands of the rich, the plutocrats. (Pluto= the planet farthest from the sun, and the god of the dead; ploutos= wealth.) It arranges that the rest of humankind shall have incomes only--incomes which are dependent upon the success of the rich and the very rich, and so underclasses remain there, with a few percolating up as surrogate successes, like lottery winners, who are pointed to as models. But the masses are never permitted to participate in the ownership of Wealth and Power. So the poor are taught that they are not "lucky" enough, and live only through the success of rich heroes--Blacks through rich blacks, women through a few rich women. Why didn't you make it, like they did? Most quickly become servants to and voices for the system, and distance themselves from the aspirations of the poor for Power and Wealth, although some honors and glories and even a blessing may be allowed them on certain public occasions.
Ah, but the Bible has another vision. The Bible's vision is that the Risen One of Galilee, the Jesus we know is the Chosen One, the wounded one of the upper room whom Saul the Prosecutor met on the Damascus road, his friend the Lamb, as John calls him, this little Lamb of a person--this decent, kind, loving, caring, generous human being, this warm fuzzy of a rabbi--has become a formidable one indeed--"I saw a Lamb standing as though it had been slain, with seven horns and seven eyes which are the seven spirits of God, sent out in all the earth, and he went and took the scroll from the right hand of the one who was seated on the throne, and when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty four presbyters fell down before the lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints, and they sang a new song, saying "Worth art Thou to take the Scroll and open its seals, for thou wast slain, and by the blood didst ransom the human race for God, from every tribe and language and people and nation and has made them a Kingdom, and priests to our God, and they shall rule on the earth."
Now the Revelation to John says that Jesus is the one who transfers ownership rights in the human race from those who have owned the human community as if it were property, as if it were an iron mine in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, or a diamond mine in South Africa, and Jesus has bought us out of our status as chattel, as the capitalist's assets, and has made us kings and queens and priests--government leaders and religious leaders. Our nationality and our tribalism and our language differences are sub-ordinated now, and those things which the mighty and powerful in the earth have used to divide the human community are now used by Jesus the Chosen to unite the human community. "Worthy art thou to take the scroll and open its seals. . . for thou wast slain and by thy blood didst ransom the human race out of tribe and tongue and people and nation, and has made them a kingdom of priests--a government of worshippers to our God. And so there's a new national anthem, not about bombs bursting in air over Iraq, Libya, Palestine, but about the Lamb who is our Leader, who is the only one Worthy to have Power and Wealth, and to have the people of God fall down and worship him instead of the capitalist system. The four and twenty elders prostrate means the church's leadership acknowledges Jesus as the one who has called into being a community to rule in the earth. The presbyters no longer fall down and give obeisance to J. P. Morgan, on his private train with the entire house of bishops, on his way to the General Convention.
Now Peter was a businessman. Indeed, he was a petty capitalist--he had a fishing business, he owned the means of production, he had boats and he had nets. He didn't yet, that morning on the lake, have any fish that day. But he did have wealth--he had the means of making a living. But his wealth alone was not doing him a great deal of good. Back in Galilee after the fracaso of his adventure with the rabbi from Nazareth, back there with his old cronies--Thomas the Look-Alike, Nathanel form Cana, the thundering loudmouth sons of Zebedee, and maybe Andrew and Philip, he was back in business. "I'm going fishing," says Simon Peter. But they caught nothing, all night, fishing. As the sun came up they saw a stranger on the beach, asking, "Catch anything? No? Try the other side." Try to change your luck by listening to me, the Stranger on the Beach at sunrise. And so they do, and they haul in one of the great catches of the gospels--too many to handle, and John declares, "It's him again!"
Peter ralizes he's been netted along with the fish, for there he is, stripped naked (they weren't really streamers, they just didn't wear their clothes to work--it meant they wanted to keep them clean from the smell of dead fish, and didn't want them tangled in the nets, or in the way). Peter remembers that Jesus had called him away from his money-making in the fishing business, and had told him a couple of years ago, "Follow me and I will have you catching folks, liberating human beings from a sea of troubles." And here he was back, stripped, caught in the act of business as usual, caught in his birthday suit, caught without his baptismal robe, at the task of adding his muscle and skill to his boat and his net, adding labor to capital, to earn a living. Jesus says, well come along and bring the fish that my blessing has brought your nets, bring them along and let us all have some breakfast. "I'll cook, and you bring the fish." So Simon Peter brings a net with one hundred fifty three large fish. Now Origen, writing in Egypt a couple of hundred years later, and having access to the largest library of the ancient world, in Alexandria, says that the one hundred fifty three large fish meant the different ethnic groups that were catalogued in the anthropology of the time. So maybe that's what 153 meant. That Peter's net was meant to bring in all the human comunity--to gather everybody for the eucharist on the beach with the stranger who called him away from venture capitalism to sharing the wealth. Sharing the wealth, and the income from the wealth, and bringing their nets to the one who is worthy to receive power and wealth.
Come and have breakfast, Jesus said, and took the bread and gave it to them, and so with the IXTHUS-- with Jesus Christ Son of God Savior. Which is what the word FISH means in the Greek anagram. Come and have your IXTHUS for breakfast, and do so by bringing your nets and your fish--your wealth and your income--to the common table to share. The redistribution of wealth includes the redistribution of the eucharist--the IXTHUS is shared, instead of being the privileged religion of the privileged.
The gospel promises an integral salvation--the whole of the human being, the whole of human life, is to be liberated, redirected, clothed, fed, strengthened, given health, vision, and wealth. It is in this that Giles Fletcher finds the "The Excellency of Christ":
He is a path, if any be misled;
He is a robe, if any naked be;
If any chance to hunger, he is bread;
If any be a bondman, he is free;
If any be but weak, how strong is he!
To dead men life he is, to sick men health;
To blind men sight, and to the needy wealth;
A pleasure without loss, a treasure without stealth.
But there's a counter-revolutionary down the road, down there on the Damascus road. Indeed, after 2000 years there are still counter-revolutionaries, "contras", down the road for us, breathing threats and murder against disciples. Saul was one of them, and he had arrest warrants, and he had church backing--the high priests of selfishness and nationalist religion, and Saul had the authority to attack disciples. But on his way he was knocked off his ride, and a voice and a light and a vision blinded him. He had to be led out of a grand mal seizure to Damascus, and couldn't see and wouldn't eat or drink. But he was turned around, he was con-verted (not proselytized) and he was chosen for internationalism. He was turned from Rambo, bent on vengeance, into Paul, on his way to write First Corinthians chapter thirteen. From Israeli Zionism, hurling hate at Palestinian settlers, he was turned into a Lamb, with a thorn in his flesh, a gospel on his lips, and was baptized and filled with Spirit and then "took food and was strengthened." The one who had offered Peter breakfast on the beach now also welcomed Paul to break the bread of life in all the known world.
Jesus is here this morning as he was on the beach at Tiberias, where the modern ferries ply the choppy crossing to Capernaum, and he is here with bread and the meal come IXTHUS, the great Fish of the Son of God who is our SOTER, our Saviour, our Liberator. We will all eat from his hand, as he comes to this table, to which he bids us bring our aspirations and our gifts, our hunger, our thirst. Jesus bids us break the fast, break the chains, and assures us that our nets won't break: we will have a great draught of IXTHUS, and are worthy to receive wealth and power, and wisdom, and might and honor and glory and blessing. For he says "Eat and be strengthened," for you are a Kingdom and priests to our God and you shall rule in the earth.
Albert Schweitzer was one of many in human history who, like Peter the Rock, Thomas the Doubter, Nathanel from Cana, and the Dunder and Blitzen sons of Zebedee, Andrew, Philip, and two millenia of others--including ourselves, who along the way have met this Stranger on the Strand one sunny morning of our lives. Schweitzer wrote this immmortal paragraph for us to remember the occasion:
"He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: 'Follow thou me!' and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is."
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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