August 12, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Book of Common Prayer Lectionary
Genesis 15:1-6 Look toward heaven and count the stars
Psalm 33 Exultate, justi. Rejoice, you just ones.
Hebrews 11: 1-2 (4-7) 8-16 They desire a better country; God has prepared a
city for them.
Luke 12:32-40 Bags that wax not old, purses that don't wear out
Revised Common Lectionary (trial use)
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 I will not listen to your prayers; your hands are full of
blood.
Psalm 50:1-8, 22-23 Deus deorum, The God of gods has spoken
or
Genesis 15:1-6 see above
Psalm 33:12-22 Happy the nation whose God is Adonai
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16 see above.
Luke 12:32-40 see above.
" 'Arcturus' is his other name--I'd rather call him 'Star' wrote Emily Dickinson, "It's very mean of Science To go and interefere!" But modern science has made us all breathless as Emily once again with its revelations of the immaculate conception of the galaxies, the unfinished symphony of the stars. In his lyrical little book, "The Soul of the Night" Chet Raymo writes "The night sky is the hunting ground of the mystic and the philosopher, the scientist and the theologian." Aeschylus and Huckleberry Finn both tell us of star-gazing. "I have marked the conclave of all the night's stars, those potentates blazing in the heavens", Aeschylus writes in Agamemnon. We don't think of Huckleberry Finn as a mystic, but Mark Twain remembers for him, how he and Jim drifted "down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it weren't often that we laughed". Van Gogh shared with us his glimpse of God in the "Starry Night" and Immanuel Kant bid us all look to "The Starry Heavens Above" as a compañera to the moral law within.
As children in Upper Michigan, we squealed with delight at the star showers in August and fell silent at the icy moving columns of the winter's Northern Lights, as we called Aurora Borealis. In cities, with our noisy neon nights, we are too much indoors and cannot see the starry sky, so Yahweh brought Abram outside under the vast night dome of the desert and said, 'Look toward heaven and count the stars.' He would still be counting, had he strictly obeyed the word of the Lord. "So shall your descendants be," the Lord said, before Abram had counted long. Now in our lifetime we can gloss that to read "THERE shall your descendants be," for they are already selling reservations for the Star Treks of the future. We will likely overpopulate spaceship earth and be urged to relocate. The divine invitation to pilgrimage is a standing one, and most of our religion has been discovered en route, by the wayside. Abraham moved only around the East, and the pilgrims closer to our time moved from Europe, Africa, and Asia to fulfill the promise. Abraham's descendants and ours will move around the Milky Way. The Itinerarium, the prayers for travellers, will doubtless still recall the journey of Abraham and Sarah and invoke them to accompany us when we do.
So many sacred stories are odysseys--and we know more of travel now, and find angels along the way, and not only at the ancient shrines of the oracles, the dusty pulpits of storied preachers, the tombs of the saints. We have all learned to consult the experience of our own lives and travels, and not to take the fables of our own tribes as the only ones there are. Wherever we go, we are in the ambience of theophany.
O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air--
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?
Not whre the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!--
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep tgheir ancient places;--
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangéd faces
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry; -- and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross.
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry,--clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!
So Francis Thompson tells us that the Kingdom of God is "no strange land,.'
and we can catch hold of Mother Heaven everywhere we are, by her hems.
God always gets there before we do, and makes a home for us. Most of us
have shared Abraham's experience at some time in our lives: "He set out
not knowing where he was going." He was an agnostic about the future, as
we all are--but no atheist to God, who urged him to set out, and so "he
looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and
builder is God." At seventeen I set out from home on the train, for Alma,
the little Presbyterian college in Michigan that was six hundred miles
away, and for a future I could not know, and I've been on the move ever
since. A few years after seminary I was sent to St. Andrew's, a mission in
Chicago's Black ghetto, and stayed thirty years in what I call a fit of
absent-mindedness, but 'though I did not move geographically, I was born
again, and again and again, in each new friendship, in each new
opportunity for change. Dr. Martin Luther King invited pastors to join him
in Hattiesburg, Mississipi in 1964 for a voters' registration drive, and I
went, and it changed my life, and continues to orient the compass for me.
"All experience is an arch," wrote Tennyson in Ulysses, "wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades forever and forever when we move." The route of our pilgrimage is unmapped, but its destination is certain. We are heirs of Sarah and Abraham, and heirs of promise. After them, all the rest of the Bible is the family history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And some unrecorded little religions in the jungle, which reflect our own as in a wallet-sized mirror. Tobias Schneebaum's astonishing little book "Keep the River on your Right" tells us of his brave Peruvian sojourn amongst cannibals, whom he found to be a gentle people except when it came to their menu of the fresh roasted flanks of their enemies. Is their lifestyle crazier than our northAmerican one, the nicest people (we think) on the planet, now that we are in charge of the jungle, and hang onto nuclear missiles and capitalist poison punishment as our discreet forms of serving up our enemies for supper?
Jesus bids us not to be afraid of the journey ahead of us. "Do not be afraid, little flock." Therein we hear that our travel is not a solo flight, the flight of the alone to the alone, for we go as a flock, with a shepherd. The Church is a Noah's Ark of covenant, with seating and "salva vidas" for all. And we go as heirs to a kingdom, to occupy a homeland, a better country, one that is described as heavenly, celestial, as an appropriate sphere for our star trek. "Be dressed for action", is the travel directive. When we have earth tremors in Managua, which are frequent, we are always told to go to bed with some clothes on, and not to lock ourselves too securely in the house. Have your "focos" your flash lights at the ready, and a canteen, and be ready to move on out. Pretend you're waiting up for the burglars. People, get ready. Which things are a parable.
"Provide for yourselves bags which wax not old", reads the Authorized version. One modern translation says "purses that never wear out." But I like BAGS. Nowadays, we know, that everyone has a BAG--a lifestyle, a hangup, a predicatment, a preoccupation. Marijuana used to be sold in five dollar BAGS, in the 60's and 70's when everything cost less, and before recreational drugs became perilous and precious. One's beliefs can be one's bag--the Christian Church is, for instance, our Bag. Provide for yourselves bags which wax not old. May our preoccupations, our concerns, be the kind that may not soon wear out. Oscar Wilde rightly prophesied that "it is dangerous to be too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly." If we attach ourselves too closely to the ideologies and trappings and wrappings of any age, we shall be found left with a a lot of old worn-out bags in the next. The Church must not ally itelf too intimately with the externals of any age or culture, and be caught aboard the Titantic of our time without a life raft. Daniel DeLeon, the American Socialist, wrote disapprovingly, but truly, when he noticed that "the Catholic Church. . . upheld feudalism, then monarchism, warning them of growing evils and possible revolutions. In the same manner, and under the same reservations, she now upholds capitalism; but above all things and forever she upholds the Catholic Church." Pope John Paul II has now begun to focus the Church's eyes, squinty with capitalist conjunctivitis, at the crimes of economic injustice. Archbishop Temple, Conrad Noel, and nowadays our brave little "Anglo Catholic Socialists" led by Ted Mellor, are calling us to a better way than the bargain basement bourgeois religion we have been peddled for so long.
The "Bag" of the Church is not to be found in the names we wear, but in the games we play. Ironically, our Bag may be our Purse. Christian Churches are not poor, and most of the poor people of the earth are not Christians. Most of the starving people of the planet are not baptized. Our laity in Anglicanism and the other Me First world religions are not the great unwashed, nor the unlettered, nor the unchurched. We have all the religion indeed that money can buy. Jesus' advice to the wealthy Christian Churches of the world today is still the same as his wrenching gospel in Galilee: "Sell your possessions and give alms."
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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