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Pentecost VI Proper 11B July 20 2003
H o m i l y G r i t s
The Sixth
Sunday after Pentecost
Year B
Proper 11 - July 20, 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before
we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and
mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not,
and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your son
Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Isaiah 57: 14b-21 I have seen their ways but I will heal them
Psalm 22: 22-30 Deus, Deus meus - My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?
Ephesians 2: 11-22 That he might create in himself one new humanity, thus
making peace.
Mark 6: 30-44 Twelve baskets full of broken pieces
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
2 Samuel 7:1-14a and "I have been moving about in a tent and a
tabernacle."
Psalm 89:20-37 I have found David my servant
or Jeremiah 23:1-6 Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep
of my pasture.
Psalm 23 Dominus regit me. The Lord is my shepherd
Ephesians 2:11-22 as above BCP
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56 as above BCP
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
O God you have prepared for those who love you joys beyond
understanding. Pour into our hearts such love for you that, loving you
above all things, we may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we
can desire; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Psalm 30 You restored me to health
Lamentations 3: 22-33 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases
2 Corinthians 8:1-9, 13-14 Their abundant joy and their extreme poverty
have overflowed in a wealth of generosity.
Mark 5: 21-24a, 35-43 "Talitha cum!"
or Mark 5:24b-34 There was a woman who had been suffering from
hemorrhages for twelve years
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary - 16th Sunday/Ordinary Time
Jeremiah 23:1-6 - Revised Common lectionary, as above
Psalm 22 BCP lectionary, as above
Ephesians 2:13-18 In his flesh he has made both groups one
Mark 6:30-34 Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a
while.
The world seems to clamor briefly and insistently at the Church's doors
in these exciting days, with cascading floods of electronic mail,
especially as the General Convention descends like a Mother Ship for its
triennial visitation amongst us, this year called upon to invite or
disinvite gentle Gene Robinson to bring along his joyous gay sexuality
into episcopacy. It is always a wonderfully varied circus and
distracting carnival, with its specialty banquets, jamborees,
sentimental reunions, parliamentary procedures, cloakroom intrigues, love
affairs, hissy fits, and committee boredom. We are grateful that
somehow it seems always to bubble and squeak in the Church's guts rather
than catch fire and explode or tear apart the Body limb from limb. This
year we are especially threatened that half the primates of the Communion
may jump ship and swim for a distant homophobic shore, or bail out of
our gay friendly Church by whatever vines they can hang onto for
canonical swings to Afric's sunny strand. In spite of threats to leave,
every sideshow freak always shows up at Convention, and in a Church such
as ours, rather than a Sect, such as theirs, we have learned to be roomy,
to accomodate, to show hospitality, to live in uneasy peace, to make
Eucharist together. Some will always walk, or more likely slither away.
Adios, y que te vaya bien. Goodbye, and go well!
In 1988, just before I went to the General Convention in Detroit, I got a
letter from a layman in a Chicago church who identified himself as a
member of a group called Jews For Jesus. It's a group of fundamentalist
Christian proselytes from Judaism, who keep their Jewish identity and
believe they are called to evangelize Jews to become Christians so that
they can be "saved". They think all Jews must accept Jesus as their
personal Savior or they will "go to hell." My correspondent pointed out
that there would be some legislation at General Convention concerning
Jewish-Christian relations, and that he hoped I would be in favor of a
strong program of evangelizing the Jews. His name was Mendelsohn, the
great name in music that one is predisposed to honor, but I never met him
or heard him play the piano. The Convention did in fact adopt some
sensible rules for our Church's relationship with the Jewish community,
but did just the opposite of what the correspondent wanted, for it called
for mutual respect, and for the church to learn from its Jewish roots and
to respect our sisters and brothers of the Mother Faith, who share with
us the Biblical covenants and the promise and hope for the Reign of God
in history and who like us and the Muslims as well wait for the
Messianic age, the Day of Resurrection, and the Light of Dawn. Not a
word about converting the Jews to Jesus.
The New Testament doesn't tell us to convert Jews to creedal faith in
Christ Jesus. In fact it says the opposite: it says that it is we who
have already been changed, who have been brought into the messianic
covenants, and that our separation has been ended: "Remember that at one
time you Gentiles were separated from Christ, alienated from the
commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no
hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once
were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is
our eirene, our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the
dividing wall of hostility." To claim that Jews now need to be
"converted" is to build a new wall of hostility, like the one the Zionist
state has itself put up around the trespass of their settlements in the
West Bank. . Jesus, our Jewish Friend, our Jewish brother, our
Jewish Lord, our Jewish Liberator, has opened up the way for all of us
"peoples"-- Africans and African Americans, Englishmen, Germans, Swedes,
Poles, Irish, Lithuanians, Italians, to become fellow citizens with the
saints, and members of the household of God. But our liberating myths
must revise themselves to share a vision of Promised Land for all, and
not merely an artificial Eretz Israel for a Diaspora gone two thousand
years ago. .
The Church early on made some treacherous deals with the Roman Empire,
to the shame of its teachers and at the expense of our Jewish sisters and
brothers in the Covenants and the Promises. As early as its "New
Testament" writings it began to blame Jews for the death of the Jewish
Jesus, to ingratiate itself with the Roman government, which in fact had
executed his capital punishment "under Pontius Pilate." The imperial
authorities preferred to hear the anti-Jewish version rather than to hear
the earliest testimony of Mark's gospel, that Jesus had been crucified by
the Empire as a revolutionary. The Church was henceforth privileged, the
Jews henceforth demonized: historically, this is in broad strokes what
happened, and it led to the establishment of the Church by the Emperor
Constantine, who took its cross and made it a sign of imperial conquest.
In Hoc Signo Vinces. For the Jews the Way of this Cross led by
swastika-crooked paths to Auschwitz. Treblinka, Buchenwald, and the
Holocaust of six million in Europe sixty years ago.
It is especially important for Christians to learn the truth of our
Church's complicity in the destruction of European Jewry,
which ought to be for us as horrible a realization as our imperial
Gentile murder of Jesus, the Messiah of us all. With the rise of the
militarist mentality of the Zionist State of the Israelis , and the
phenomenon of these formerly oppressed peoples of the Diaspora gathered
into a vengeful and land-grabbing political system to oust the people of
Palestine, the world is aghast at
the horrible irony of these things. The oppressed have become
oppressors, and so the world is in convulsions that threaten now the
survival of civilizations who cite Scripture as we slay our spiritual
siblings. As we have learned to distinguish between the Nazis and the
German people (except for Silvio Berlusconi, the short Italian with the
short memory), and we have learned to distinguish between the Japanese
people and the politics of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,"
so we read history wrongly if we do not see imperialism at work now in
the eagerness of the U.S. to have Japanese troops come to occupy Iraq in
the name of unwanted Yankee hegemony there.
If our myths are to continue to be salvific for us, if they are to have
power to shape and give a healthy and wholesome and holy direction to our
common life, they must first of all be read honestly. The New Testament
teaching about the Church's relationship with the Jewish covenant is
quite simply that we are, because of Jesus our Jew, allowed into that
mythic structure, which the writer to the Ephesians calls a "holy
temple"-- we are joined together and grow together into a Holy Temple in
the common Lord. "Temple" was a Jewish place of worship, and in Jesus
the Jew we are mystically grafted into it, pasted into it, to be a real
dwelling place of God. Paul elsewhere uses the metaphor of grafts into a
tree, to describe Church and Covenant.
Peace, "Shalom" is the gift that Isaiah speaks of when he speaks of
building up the community, and the promise of God's spirit is to all who
are contrite and humble, says Isaiah. "Peace to the far off and the
near" and "the far off" means us Gentiles, and the :"near" means the
Jews. We are all covenanted with God in spite of our faithlessness. So
there are two feedings of the multitudes in Mark's gospel: the one we
have today, for our gospel reading, in which just after the execution of
the Baptist, the apostles rejoin Jesus and meet with thousands from
Jewish villages, and their five loaves and two fishes are enough for all,
with twelve baskets full left, one for each of all the tribes of Israel,
and five thousand are fed. Two chapters later Jesus is in Gentile
territory, the Decapolis--the Ten Gentile Towns--and there's another
setting of the table. Here Jesus does not say "they are like sheep
without a shepherd" for that was a Jewish metaphor, for a Jewish king, a
Jewish messiah needed there. Here, with Gentiles he says, "I feel sorry.
.. they are hungry and will collapse on their way." A different message
for a different context. And Jesus now is asked "how is anybody going to
eat in such a deserted place?" That deserted place is of course the
Gentile world, our own world, which Jesus comes to visit from Judaism,
and says, "How many loaves have you?" Seven, we say. Seven is the
number of the Gentiles, as Twelve is the number of the Jews. Seven they
say and Jesus takes the seven loaves and thanks God for them and when
it's over there are seven baskets full. Just as at the first feeding
there were twelve, enough for all the tribes, so now in this second
sitting at the banquet, we Gentiles are fed after the people of the
covenants and promises. And we too get to eat as much as we want and
still there are seven baskets full of broken pieces left over for us to
feed all the Gentiles that shall ever be. And it is four thousand who
are fed. So while there are successive feedings, there is the same Lord,
the same food, the same abundance, and the numerology is a way of
telling us what the context also tells us.
Now and again Public Television presents "Shoah", the long movie of
interviews with Holocaust survivors and with German and Polish people who
were still alive and wanted to talk about their part in the death camps
in the 1940's. These almost weekly TV reminders of the Holocaust and of
the crimes against Judaism and Jews must keep us vigilant as well to see
how wrong Israel is now in its politics in Palestine, as we watched its
subservient counterinsurgency role in the U.S.sponsored mischief in
Central America in earlier decades.
The journalist Anthony Loewenstein* writes that "Both Israelis and
Palestinians have been guilty of unpardonable crimes against one another,
but for the US, Palestinian acts are always 'terrorism', while Israelis
are 'conducting incursions' or 'rooting out militants'. This hypocrisy
must end. A full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza should,
hopefully, see the establishment of a vibrant, independent Palestinian
state living in peace alongside a secure Israel." Vibrancy,
independence, security, and peace, an increasing number of us believe,
will not come to the Holy Land until the various dreamed-of projects for
theocratic states and racist boundaries for Arab bantustans, gigantic
U.S. budgets for ruling the world, are abandoned and swept into the
dust-bin of history. One democratic state in Palestine, with
citizenship, liberty, and justice for all, more closely approaches the
commonwealth of God than two puppet national security states battling it
out until the edge of doom.
The Word of God invites us into the Jewish faith and the Jewish hope, but
it is not a 19th century Zionist fantasy or a fundamentalist nightmare
that will fullfill the hopes of Jews or the hopes of Gentiles. We need
to be converted to the covenants and promises of God, and it is not our
Jewish sisters and brothers who need to be converted to our short-sighted
"Christian" plans to rule a new Christendom from Washington DC, with a
Zionist entity as our Middle East manager. All of us--Jewish, Christian,
Muslim, need to hear the gospel of peace, preached by Jewish prophets,
Christian apostles, and the Muslim Prophet of Mecca: that God's project
is new human being, a new humanity, so making peace and bringing
hostility to an end.
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
* Antony Loewenstein is a journalist with Fairfax Internet This was
posted to the Internet on Friday, July 4, 2003.