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Pentecost 4 Proper 9-B, July 6, 2003
H o m i l y G r i t s
The
Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Year B Proper 9 - July 6, 2003
Commemoration: John Huss, 1415
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup
- permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
O God, you have taught us to keep all your commandments by loving you and
our neighbor: Grant us the grace of your Holy Spirit, that we may be
devoted to you with our whole heart, and united to one another with pure
affection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Ezekiel 2:1-7 I am sending you to the people of Israel, a nation of
rebels
Psalm 123 Ad te levavi oculos meos To you I lift up my eyes
2 Corinthians 12:2-10 Caught up into Paradise
Mark 6:1-6 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10 David made a covenant with them at Hebron before the
Lord
and Psalm 48 Magnus Dominus - Great is the Lord
or Ezekiel 2:1-5 as above BCP
and Psalm 123 as above BCP
2 Corinthians 12:2-10 as above
Mark 6:1-13 as above BCP
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
God, our maker and redeemer, you have made us a new company of priests
to bear witness to the Gospel. Enable us to be faithful to our calling to
make known your promises to all the world; through you Son, Jesus Christ
our Lord.
Psalm 92:1-5 (6-10) 11-14 The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree
Ezekiel 17:22-24 Under it every kind of bird will live
2 Corinthians 5:1-10 We have a building from God, a house not made with
hands
Mark 4: 26-34 The kingdom is as if someone should scatter seed, it is
like a mustard seed -- with many such parables he spoke the word to them.
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary - 14th Sunday/Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 2:2-5 as above RCL & BCP
Psalm 122 as above (Ps.. 123)
2 Corinthians 12:7-10 as above RCL & BCP
Mark 6:1-6 as above RCL & BCP
Shine, Perishing Republic
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily
thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and
the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit
rots to make earth.
Out of the mother;--and through the spring exultances, ripeness and
decadence; and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it
stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine,
perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the
thickening center: corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet
there are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--they say,
God, when he walked the earth.
Robinson Jeffers wrote this in 1924. (1)
On Friday, people in the U.S.of A. celebrated a Revolution, which was the
overthrowing of foreign hegemony by force of arms. Citizens of a
perishing republic--now become subjects of their ascending imperial
state--nevertheless still wave what was once their revolutionary banner,
they still shoot off magnificent fireworks displays, and children still
shoot off their little fingers with little firecrackers, to remind
themselves of the fact that their Revolution was made by muskets,
cannons, "bombs bursting in air which gave proof through the night that
their flag was still there." Some will even still remember the
African heroes of the Revolution, our Crispus Attucks, and Peter Salem
and Salem Poor, among the first Blacks to fight at Bunker Hill in 1775.
Some will recall Prince Whipple and Oliver Cronwell (a Black man who
borrowed the name from the Lord Protector of an earlier Revolution), who
crossed the Delaware with General George Washington to attack the British
and the German mercenaries in Trenton. All of these were praised as
Revolutionaries here and cursed as rebels in London. They nevertheless
all took part in the agenda of the white male property owners who later
only remembered themselves, and no Blacks, as the Foudning Fathers of an
American businessman's constitution. They think of Almighty God as the
chief Founding Father of their nation: Francis Scott key, an
Episcopalian organist, wrote the national anthem "May the
heaven-rescued land praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a
nation!" The Britons, of course at the same time were singing an earlier
version of "My Country 'Tiz of Thee" to the same tune--"God Save The
King!" Our shining and perishing republic has not been willing in our
own epoch to sing up political Revolutions, and our news media decline to
report the stirrings of "unrest. " It seems only our admiration for
Ernesto "Che" Guevara as a cultic icon for T shirt sales grows with our
distance from the Cuban revolution.
Some of us still remember Gabriel Prosser who led a slave rebellion in
1800, after which he and fifteen companions were hanged by the neck.
Denmark Vesey and thirty six of his slave companions were hanged in 1822
for a "conspiracy to rebellion" Nat Turner had the greatness of the
"slave rebellions" thrust upon him in 1831, and was hanged by the neck
until dead, 'though his memory was not hanged with him. "In 1859, John
Brown was hanged with federal complicity, for attempting to do by
small-scale violence what Linolcn would do by large-scale violence
several years later--end slavery." So writes Howard Zinn in A People's
History of the United States. (2) Zinn remembers that in 1876--a hundred
years after the Declaration of Independence--whites and blacks both
expressed their disillusionment. "A Negro Declaration of Independence"
was published. And on July 4 German socialists in Chicago declared, "The
present system has enabled capitalists to make laws in their own
interests to the injury and oppression of the workers. It has made the
name Democracy, for which our forefathers fought and died, a mockery and
a shadow, by giving to property an unproportionate amount of
representation and control over Legislation. . . we solemnly publish
and declare that we are absolved from all allegiances to the existing
political parties of this country, and that as free and independent
producers we shall endeavor to acquire the full power to make our own
laws, manage our own production, and govern ourselves, acknowledging no
rights without duties, no duties without rights. And for the support of
this declaration, with a firm reliance on the assistance and cooperation
of all workingmen, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our means,
and our sacred honor."
In the fall of 1885, Albert Parsons and August Spies, Chicago anarchist
leaders of the International Working People's Association, in the face of
police oppression, called on the wage-earning class to arm itself. On May
3, 1886, when police fired into a crowd of strikers at the McCormick
Harvester Works, they killed four and wounded many, Spies printed a
circular in English and German which called for "Revenge! Workingmen to
Arms! You have for years endured the most abject humiliations. . . you
have worked yourself to death. . . your Children you have sacrificed to
the factory lord--in short you have been miserable and obedient slaves
all these years. Why? To satisfy the insatiable greed, to fill the
coffers of your lazy thieving master? When you ask them now to lessen
your burdens, he sends his bloodhounds out to shoot you, kill you! To
arms we call you, to arms!" The Haymarket Square was filled with 3,0000
people on May 4, and a quiet meeting was held. A detachment of 180
police arrived and ordered the crowd to disperse. The crowd had
dwindled to a few hundred, and someone--likely a police agent
provocateur--threw a bomb that killed seven police and wounded 66. The
police fired into the crowd, killed several and wounded 200. This event
is now remembered as the Haymarket Riot, for which eight anarchists were
sentenced to death, though none of them had been at Haymarket that day,
except one who was speaking when the bomb exploded. George Bernard Shaw
said at the time, "If the world must lose eight of its people, it can
better afford to lose the eight members of the Illinois Supreme Court."
Four of the anarchists were hanged, and Louis Lingg, a 21 year old
carpenter, blew himself up in his cell with a dynamite tube in he mouth.
An early suicide warrior. .
You will perhaps have noticed that the Haymarket is not called a
Revolution, nor are their martyrs called Revolutionaries. Their acts
were criminalized as sedition and rebellion, and they were executed for
capital crimes. Rebellion is the word for a revolution that we don't
like, that doesn't serve our own purposes, that the establishment puts
down, or that fails or falters.
It depends on who writes the history--so that in the North of the United
States of America to this day the Confederacy is called a Rebellion, and
its soldiers were called Johnny Reb. The Revolt of the Chinese against
foreign intervention in 1900 is to us the "Boxer Rebellion" but the
Chinese called it I Ho Chuan, or "Justice Harmony Fists". The American
Revolution was likewise called a Rebellion by the King of England. We
should all listen carefully to the words we use about our own history,
and the words we use about other people's history. It is the way to take
over the past, and occupy it for the future. Only if we are in charge of
our own words and our own story will we have an enabling and empowering
history. Propaganda is a way of corrupting history to make it a weapon
of mass deception. So Ronald Regan referred to the miserable gang of
Contra mercenary bandits in Nicaragua as "Freedom Fighters", and the
international war criminals George W. Bush and Tony Blair talk of their
storm trooper oil bandits as "Liberators of Iraq."
This week the U.S. celebrates its Revolution of 1776. . On July 14,
France celebrates Bastille Day, 1789, symbol of its own Revolution, and
on July 19, Nicaragua celebrates her own Sandinista Revolution of 1979.
Nicaragua is a country of four million people, about the population of
the colonies when they took up arms against England. In the first reading
today, Ezekiel denounced the people of Israel themselves as "rebels",
back in July of 593 before the Common Era. He declared God sent him to
preach to a nation of "rebels" and he preaches to a nation already in
Exile, a people who had abandoned their own national revolution, that
their God had called them to, and had become rebels instead, with their
own agenda, their own private concerns above that of the common wealth.
We do recognize that a Revolutonary is one who has been part of the
people's history, self-image, myth, part of a grand design and
purpose. And we tend to think that a rebel is one who goes off on an
adventure , who had a private trip to take, as James Dean showed us in
Rebel Without a Cause. Today we hear about three Revolutionaries who
were treated as mere rebels in their own epoch. We don't remember
Ezekiel now as a rebel, but a Revolutionary, and we don't remember Paul
of Tarsus now as a rebel, but as a Revolutionary. And we don't remember
Jesus now as a rebel, but as a Revolutionary. When Ezekiel was given his
commission as a Revolutionary, God told him that it was the nation that
was in rebellion and that only Ezekiel had remained truly Revolutonary.
"Do not be afraid of them, ' though briers and thorns are with you and
you sit upon scorpions, be not afraid of their words--(their lies, their
propaganda, their media management). So Ezkiel was told "Don't be upset
by the way they look at you. It is they who are a rebellious house, and
you shall speak my words to them, for they are the rebellious house."
Ezekiel claimed to be a true charismatic, not like those false prophets
who were only patriotic Holy Rollers, but Ezekiel said the Spirit told
him to stand on his own feet--no "falling out", as if it were enough to
be in ecstasy--"beside oneself"--to be in God.
Paul came along to Corinth, where there were charismatics with their
private agenda religion and he said he had the Spirit, too, but his
private religious experiences with Christ were so intense that he
referred to them in the third person, "I know a man in Christ," he said,
speaking of himself, but doing so modestly and announcing that "on my own
behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses." Private religion,
mystical trances, all are very well, but unless they are in the service
of the community's Revolution, what good are they to others? "I refrain
from talking about these things, so that no one may think more of me than
what they see or hear." What you see is what you get! It's Paul's
revolutionary message that counts, not his ecstasies. This same Paul,
privileged as a Roman citizen, blessed by God with ecstasies, was
beheaded in 64 of the Common Era, by the Emperor Nero who had already
murdered his own mother and his wife, burned the city of Rome and blamed
it on the Christians.
Jesus was our greatest Revolutonary, but he was also thought of as a
Rebel in his own time. "Where did this guy get all this?" they asked
about him in Nazareth, when he went to the synagogue and taught his own
community. "Is not this the carpenter?" They privatized and diminished
his message, reduced it to the context of their own narrow views, and
wanted to pull him down a peg. Jesus sees that his status as a
Revolutionary messenger will not be honored in those familiar streets,
and is familiar with the proverb that names him a Prophet without honor
at home. Jesus lived a revolutionary project, the Kingdom of God, which
was arriving in him, as a vanguard, and in his disciples, but he saw that
at home, amongst his kinfolk even, amongst neighbors who pigeon-holed him
as a nobody, a nonentity, a know-nothing teknon -- a mere handyman -- who
had reduced him to what he did for a living; he could have no message,
do no mighty work.
Let us keep our Feasts of Revolution and of Revolutionaries. Ezekiel,
Paul, Jesus, and all the Founding Mothers and Fathers, who are all part
of that Revolution which is the restoration of true human community. The
Revolutionary holidays of July are as good a time as any to pray the
revolutionary's "Thy Kingdom Come! Your Revolution begin on earth as now
in heaven! Hasta la victoria siempre."
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 3rd series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
(1) The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th edition, W.W. Norton & Co., New
York and London, "Shine, perishing republic" copyright 1956 by Robinson
Jeffers (1887-1963), from The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.
Copyright 1963 by Steuben Glass, Jefferson Literary Properties.
(2) Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present.
Harper Collins 20th anniversary edition, 1999. Copyright Howard Zinn.
ISBN 0-06-019448-0