August 26, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Book of Common Prayer lectionary:
Isaiah 28:14-22 Your alianza with death will be annulled
Psalm 46 Deus noster refugium
Hebrews 12:18-19, 22-29 For indeed our God is a consuming fire
Luke 13:22-30 - Someone asked him, 'Will only a few be saved?'
Revised Common lectionary (trial use:)
Jeremiah 1:4-10 "I appoint you to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and
overthrow, to build and to plant."
Psalm 71:1-6 In te, Domine, speravi
or
Isaiah 58:9b-14 If you remove the yoke, offer your food, satisfy the needs
of the afflicted. . .
Psalm 103:1-8 Benedic, anima mea
Hebrews 12:18-29 See above
Luke 13:10-17 Bible thumpers put to shame
I like to tell everyone that the best people in the United States come eventually to Casa Ave Maria. Our guests--hundreds of them over the years--are the elect of God, the crème de la crème of Gringolandia. They are, even the octagenarians, enthusiasts for the world community, for a politics and religion that are generous and inclusive; they are not couch potatoes for sure. Many of them are sweet potatoes. This is not to say that they agree with me on all things. Some of them are sweet cream and some are crema agria! I am glad to see that yesterday's milk (if unpasteurized) turns to a delicious clabber, and so does not spoil. With a tortilla, it's one of my favorite breakfasts in the kingdom. Alas, I myself frequently don't agree with what I thought a while ago, and when it ripens it changes, but it isn't lost. We hope that by changing where people are actually standing, their "punto de vista" will also be changed. When you move, you get a different look at things. To invite pilgrims to look at the world through ThirdWorld Eyes is the project of a Visitation to our virtual Judea at the edge of Empire here in the Barrio named for Javier Cuadra, who at 21 years of age in 1979 was shot down by the Guardia Nacional. This was his father's house. In this house Javier invited friends to dance and sing and whisper about.Revolution. His name shall be here.
Another, more recent guest --a sweet potato-- recently wrote to me after his experience in Nicaragua for a fortnight: "I am, and remain, an unrepentant capitalist in my belief in the enormous power of business for bringing good to the greatest number of the people...and in that sense I suspect we may be living examples of the possibility of men of good heart to disagree!" Of course that's true, and disagreement on implementation of the Reign of God--if that is indeed only "the greatest good to the greatest number"-- shouldn't keep us from setting our hands in common to the task. That's utilitarianism, 'though, not the Kingdom of God, which is planned for all, and is universalist, if not unitarian. My own cup of the milk of human kindness has already clabbered here in Nicaragua, to an identification with the aspirations of those who can never hope to be venture capitalists or to put their hope, or articulate their belief in the "enormous power of business" to bring good to the earth's peoples. I have more confidence in Compañero Daniel Ortega, who is once again ahead in the polls for the November elections; I can't vote for him, being an extranjero, but I can pray for him. I take heart from the fact that he is ahead in the polls, and on the cover of Newsweek August 6th. I hope the desire of my heart is still good, indeed. And I'm an unrepentant Anglo Catholic Trotskyite, with belief in the enormous power of the people of the world to change the trajectory of history, to see through the lies of personal enrichment and class privilege that distract the world from its call to community, to oikoumene, to embrace others as sisters and brothers, and not to use others imstead as "consumers", "clients", "capital resources." Jesus declares "Many will try to enter and will not be able. . . saying 'Lord, open to us,'then in reply he will say to you, 'I do not know where you come from.' Then you will begin to say, 'We ate and drank with you, we invited you to our suppers, and you taught in our streets.' This is the upwardly mobile Jesus, so they thought, who it is true broke bread with the nameless poor, beggars, and lepers, but also accepted invitations to dine at the homes of Matthew the Republican, Nicodemus the Philosophical dilettante, Zaccheus the repentant tax cheat, Lazarus whom he called stinking from his rich man's tomb. To which of these---and which of them is us? will Jesus respond in that day with 'I do not know where you come from, go away and gnash your teeth. Make way for those from the east and west, from north and south, who come to eat in the Kingdom: for this is a kingdom of abundance, and the rich and well fed don't need it--it's for the poor. Some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last."
Franz J. Hinkelammert, in "The Ideological Weapons of Death: A Theological Critique of Capitalism" writes crystalline prose: "Within Christianity anyone who says the poor are identified with the crucifixion and the resurrection is implicitly stating that class structure and domination (which negates the right of every person to the means of life) are radically illegitimate. This amounts to a declaration that private property is illegitimate and therefore involves an anticapitalist option. If the means to life are tied to private property, the biblical predilection for the poor is hamstrung." Brother Franz sees that the refrain of capitalist religion "is always to accept the cross, never to overcome it. All of life becomes crucifixion, and salvation means replacing this life with another." Your pie shall be in the sky, by and by (meanwhile, you may look at the menu: that is the sum of all their revealed religion). He cites Thomas aKempis's morbidity about the cross, so central to decadent capitalist religion: " Behold everything dependeth upon the cross, and everything lieth in dying." Does this sound like Jesus? For us, Jesus is instead the Liberator, who endured the cross and despised its shame--he did not fall in love with his tormentors nor teach his followers submission to tyranny, nor find the cross a tricky toy for masochistic pleasure; he was not Saint Sebastian chained up by the top man.
I don't remember ever having had an argument with house guests about savage capitalism, indeed I don't offer to do arguments, except with the greengrocer, over the price of a guayabana or a zanahoria. I was trained to do old fashioned monologue sermons, delivered like Ukases from an elevated pulpit, vested for solemnity, and my idea of a dialogue sermon is to have everyone say something about the text which the lectionary designates, but not to change the subject. But I do of course remember my contentious explanations to guests of the mural in the patio, which depicts the Visitation of Maria to Isabel in the hill country of Nicaragua, when they were both pregnant with the gospel revolution and singing together the First of Gospel Songs, turning the world upside down. This usually involves telling about the lives (and in some cases the deaths) of the twelve women who accompany them in a rosary of solidarity around the walls of the patio, from Blanca Arauz, the wife of Agosto Cesar Sandino (a telegraph operator, she sent him news of where the yankee Marine invders were) to Dorothy Granada, a Northamerican nurse theologian of Mexican and Filipina ancestry, working in solidarity with the poor of the earth in Mulukuku. . "Will only this few be saved?" Twelve is a perfect number, and when multiplied enough times by itself is indeed the symbolic 144,000, all of the elect about the throne of God, whom the Russellites have already got enrolled in the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, tickets issued and Greyhound Bus Fare paid to Brooklyn for the Last Judgment. The Last Judgment is not so significant in my socialist theology as it is in capitalist wishful thinking where they believe they will have the best lawyers money can buy, and "cop a rap" . For me, the Triumph of the Revolution is closer, and will be itself a Judgment on the war criminals of history. (Better keep on moving, Henry Kissinger--there are warrants out for your arrest. We are receiving a kingdom, Henry, that unlike Chile, cannot be shaken by your buddy Pinochet. And our God is a consuming fire.)
The prophets, from Isaiah to Karl Marx, from Jeremiah to Jesus, tell us that our civilization's culture of and covenant with death shall be annulled, for it is sour and cannot be clabbered into something wholesome. Did any of them foresee the rise of the hope for participatory democracy (as distinct from bogus representative democracy, where rich people name themselves the representatives), the dominance of the liberal age (which, pusillanimous as it was, has had to change its name in U.S. politics and has become Somocista in Nicaragua, while still flying the red flag of Revolution), and finally the Arms Race which led to the impoverishment of the Socialist Bloc and the collapse of contemporary hopes for World Revolution or authentic people's democracies. Now we've got the globalization of the market, foreseen by John the Seer: "Then they will come to agreement and bestow their power and authority on the beast (Revelation 17:13) Moreover, it did not allow a man to buy or sell anything unless he was first marked with the name of the beast or with the number that stood for its name." (Rev. 13:17) In the mural at Casa Ave Maria, the two beasts of Revelation--the power of the market and the power of the military, lie strangled, defeated, and undone under the feet of Maria y Isabel, the tayacans -- the chieftains -- of the evangelical insurrection.
I have wondered for some time about the U.S. imperial hatred of Cuba--surely it cannot be that the restoration of ownership of several billions of dollars worth of natural resources of the island to the people who live there has eternally outraged the north American thieves who stole them long ago, and were forced by Fidel to give them up, like a junkyard dog his bone? No, it is like Nicaragua was in the 80's -- and apparently is simmering up to a new explosion ---it is the fatal and frightening lightning power of a good example. It cannot be permitted to continue with this witness to the freedom of societies to control their own destinies. Militant and Savage capitalism must destroy the dissenter and make invisible any alternative. Oliver Garza, the U.S. imperial Proconsul in Nicaragua, is scared into a case of permanent turista by the prospect of a Sandinista victory in the coming election. His eye is evil with fear and envy. Where does this evil come from? A recent epistle from Ted Mellor, the webmaster of the Anglican Left, seems pertinent:
"As to how all the structural, social evil that exists in the present order of things got started, I have no idea. Perhaps the great teachers of the early Church were right in saying that when some human being first said 'this is mine, you can't take it ', sin entered the world, and the song of the angels was exchanged for the raspings of some primitive Old Blue Eyes. (On one thing, incidentally, Augustine and Pelagius were in agreement: neither questioned for a minute the impropriety of private property.). . . . The fact is, however, that for the last several hundred years, at least, we have lived in an economic and political order that deliberately releases what is worst in us, that rewards and promotes competitive, aggressive, domineering, violent, acquisitive, selfish behavior and discourages or even punishes friendship, altruism, love, fidelity, courage, intelligence, invention, curiosity, and forethought. If anyone thinks I exaggerate, I invite you to compare the annual compensation of a business executive who has just thrown 5,000 people out of work with that of a worker in a day care center, that of a credit card company sucking up usury from the exigencies of the poor with that of a nurse or a teacher, that of a landlord collecting extortionate rent for doing nothing but holding a piece of paper that says he's entitled to with that of the minimum wage immigrants who do the important work of keeping the building clean and the facilities in working condition. What an effect this distortion of values, inculcated in us since childhood, has on all of us! How hard it is to choose the Yetzer ha-Tov!" *
*{The New Jewish Encyclopedia (Bridger, Wolk, et.al.) reports that "Yetzer Ha-Ra" is the Hebrew term for 'evil inclination.' According to Jewish tradition man is born with two inclination, the inclination or the impulse to do the right (Yetzer ha-Tov), and the inclination to do wrong (Yetzer ha-Ra). Man has the free will to choose between the two opposing inclinations. The rabbis taught that it was the duty of every person to acquire the knowledge and the character for developing the Yetzer-ha-Tov. Devotion to the study of Torah was the best way to achieve this goal. However, the significance of the so-called evil inclination was recognized; without it, the rabbis say, there would be no passion, no marrying, no ambition, no building of cities, no civilization. Intrinsically the Yetzer ha-Ra is not necessarily bad. The manner in which a man responds to it determines its ethical value." }
This "Original Sin" is rather hackneyed after all.
Perhaps it is too simply limned for us in the epistle of St. James. "One is tempted by one's own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death." And in the first letter of Paul to Timothy: "If we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains." It's not worth it. Augustine was sure it was from Adam the fault and corruption of the nature of every human, and Pelagius (a nicer man, and classier) said No--it's Adam's bad example. (They both meant Eve, really).
Jesus today replies to the question, "Lord, are there few that be saved?" by saying "Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter it, and shall not be able." Nevertheless, the poet Robert Herrick remind us of Matthew, 11: 12, which allows for gate-crashers into the Kingdom: "From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force."
To Heaven.
Open thy gates
To him, who weeping waits
And might come in,
But that held back by sin.
Let mercy be
So kind, to set me free,
And I will strait
Come in, or force the gate.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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