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Pentecost VII Proper 12B July 27 2003
H
o m i l y G r i t s
The
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
(July 24,
1783, Simon Bolivar born in Caracas)
Year B
Proper 12 - July 27, 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is
strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that,
with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal,
that we finally lose not the things eternal; 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:
2 Kings 2:1-15 The Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind
Psalm 114 In exitu Israel
Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were
called to the one hope of your calling.
Mark 6: 45-52 He came to them early in the morning, walking on the Sea.
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
2 Samuel 11:1-15 In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to
battle, David saw from the roof a woman bathing
and Psalm 14 Dixit insipiens or
2 Kings 4:42-44 Elisha said, 'Give to the people and let them eat.'
and Psalm 145:10-18 All your works praise you O Lord
Ephesians 3:14-21 I pray that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.
John 6:1-21 "Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?"
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
O God of glory, Father of love, peace comes from you alone. Send us as
peacemakers and witnesses to your kingdom, and fill our hearts with joy in
your promises of salvation; through your Son,Jesus Christ our Lord.
Psalm 143: 1-2, 5-8 I lift up my soul to you.
Ezekiel 2: 1-5 They shall know that there has been a prophet among them
2 Corintians 12: 7-10 A thorn was given me in the flesh
Mark 6: 1-6 "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?"
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary - 17th Sunday/Ordinary Time
2 Kings 4:42-44 as above, Revised Common Lectionary
Psalm 144 Benedictus Dominus (Vulgate 143)
Ephesians 4:1-6 There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism.
John 6:1-15 There is a small boy here with five barley loaves and two fish.
¶ From the Qurán, Surah "The Repast"- 5: 69:
Truly, those who have attained to faith in this Word, as well as those who
follow the Jewish faith, and the Sabians--the followers of John the
Baptist-- and the Christians--all who have faith in God and the final Day
and do righteous deeds--no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve.
At the end of the movie, "Being There", the amiable dingbat, Mr. Gardener,
who knows nothing but what he has seen on television--surely an
anticipation of Junior. Bush--and on the strength of that has become
President of the United States, finds himself alone in a park at the side
of a lagoon. He wants to get to the other side and so, to the surprise and
delight of all who see the film, he simply gets up his courage and walks
across the water. The air-head does have special powers, after all.
Clergy often joke that in seminary they slept through the course called
Walking on Water 101. Few laity expect tricks of that kind from us, but we
fantasize the effect it might have to make up for our failings. Walking on
Water and Flying Through the Air--Jesus did the one, Muhammad in his Night
Journey the other--are two of the commonest wish fulfillment dreams we have.
As we get older, we grow less adventuresome, even in our dreams, and I no
longer like to dream of flying or aquatic ambulation, and when I fly I
prefer a seat on the aisle in a wide bodied jet, where I don't have to look
out the port hole at the sky or the sea. For I have a long history of
walking on water in my dreams, and of featherless flight above the
upturned faces of friends and family. Mark tells a story today that sounds
like he's recounting to us his own sleepwalking on the sea. If we take
this story literally (instead of seriously) it's a problem for contemporary
people. In fact, most lectionaries for today snipped out this pericope and
gave us stories of Jesus feeding the crowds or of his conflict with
neighbors.
Even when miracles happen, we can now explain them. Few of us are
impressed by the story in this morning's news that a preacher in the town
of Forest, Ohio, in the course of the pastoral prayer, appealed for heaven
to endorse his call that the congregation repent. Suddenly lightning struck
the church steeple, travelled down the electrical wiring through the pulpit
microphone and obligingly hit the preacher himself. The service went on,
but it was found that the church caught fire, and damage was estimated at
twenty thousand dollars..
Dreams, Joseph Campbell says, are our private myths, just as myths are our
public dreams. A dream is laden with symbolic language about our waking
lives, messages to us about our experience, fears, hopes, the meaning of
the day-time lives we lead. They are even the ways we theologize, that is,
put into the most profound language we know, the praxis, the acting out of
our beliefs. Dreams are not messages from meaninglessness--that is
madness--but from God, that is from the ground of our being and
meaning. And some dreams are so common, so usual, their symbols so
frequent in the recollections of all of us, that they are our public
dreams, our myths. They become the content of our religious language, our
public worship, the rituals of our lives that dignify us and affirm our
humanity. They draw us closer to each other in a common quest for
spiritual and mental health in our life together, as one human race,
working on one human project.
Mark says he remembers this happened between three o'clock and six o'clock
in the morning. This is the fourth watch of the night, for he is using the
Roman method of dividing the night into four watches of three hours each,
starting at 6 p.m. when he day ended. The fourth watch of he night was
when Jesus came to the young Church, tossed about in its little boat, as it
made its way slowly for the wind was against them. The time of nightmares
and night stallions, of restless riding, rapid eye movements, thrown about
in the heaving seascape of the dream. The writer to the church at Ephesus
not many years later writes about his church, too, as "tossed to and fro,
carried about with every wind of teaching"-- the latest fad of philosophy,
the newest New Age charm or fundamentalist certainty, "by cunning of men,
by their craftiness in deceitful wiles." The symbolic language of a tiny
faithful folk in the midst of an ocean of opposition. But the writer to
the church at Ephesus doesn't blame the ocean so much as the frailty of the
passengers. "Children" he says are tossed about in this way. "We are to
grow up in every way into him who is the head" says the writer, so that we
won't be tossed about in our boat, no matter how little it is.
Mark says that Jesus was on the mountain praying, high above the sea, high
above the storm, high above the wind that was against them, when he saw
them making headway painfully on the dreamscape, and that he came to them
walking on the sea.
And they thought it was a ghost, and were terrified. Most of us, unless
we especially like to amuse ourselves with English ghost stories, would
find more terror in the sea's storms than in its midnight spectres. The
challenges that come to us in our dreams or in our daytimes frighten us,
and Jesus sometimes walks to us directly across the night terrors, through
the plague that stalks in the darkness, and the sickness that lays waste at
mid-day. Then here comes the Word to strengthen us: "Jesus got into the
boat with them and the wind ceased." That's the gospel today and
tonight. Jesus gets into the boat with us and all our winds cease. In
Mark's dream of the Risen Christ, of Jesus the Ghost Captain, he is in the
same boat with us, in solidarity with his friends, and goes with us at once
to familiar Gennesaret where we moor our boat. We recognize him, and once
again he begins to heal the sick and from everywhere we come again to
touch the fringe of his cloak and be healed.
I sometimes wake in the madrugada--the spooky and magical Spanish word for
the darkest part of the night--and a hell-full of foolish fears and trivial
terrors slips into bed with me. St John's Wort, paroxetine, melatonin,
chamomile tea, don't always forestall their coming. Little frets and big
frights gang up and rage about the tiny boat of my life, and I call upon
Jesus my Captain to get into the barco with me and throw them overboard. A
Jesus prayer saves me and my boat till the Light of Dawn: "Lord Jesus
Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner." Allah
Akbar! God is greater! So the wind ceases in the fourth watch of the
night. * Mark says they were astounded when the wind ceased, with Jesus in
the boat, "for they did not understand about the loaves." Say
what? What's that got to do with it? Is that a non sequitur, or what? A
frequent answer is that this is a nature miracle, the stilling of the sea,
just as was the fabulous increase in the loaves of bread is a "nature
miracle."
What they didn't understand, we are told, is that Jesus, like Mr. Gardener
in "Being There," was after all "quite a guy, that he had special powers,
and could do it all for us, as with a magic wand. Remember that in every
instance when Jesus was called upon to help, he riposted, "What resources
do you yourselves have?" "How many loaves do you have tucked away?" The
disciples always came to him, of course, saying "We can't do anything, we
have nothing, so send them away." Or, "our resources are too little, we
don't have enough to go around. All we have is a piece of this and a
short-end of that, and the wind is blowing the wrong way. It's too late in
the day or too early in the morning. It's a long way to shore. We're in a
helpless and hopeless place, and we're in a sea of roubles. We are in a
slough of despond." No doubt that's true. The neo-liberal theft of the
earth's resources and the Bush-whacking of the world has done a number on
us all. Yet Jesus says to us at our stumbling into the Twenty-first
century, "Take heart." And always asks, "How many loaves do YOU
have?" What are you able to come up with. I'm here for you, and I'm in
the boat with you, and on all the hillsides with you. Grow up and don't be
frightened, you're not niños, you're not kids anymore. There are enough
gifts to go around here; some I've sent as apostles, some prophets, some
evangelists (that doesn't mean hucksters) all so that you can grow to
maturity in personhood, so that the thing to understand about the loaves is
that it is your own resources that must be called upon if there is to be a
Feast of Life. It is your own resources of courage that must be called
upon in there is to be a stilling of the storms, and a safe harbor for our
little barco at journey's end.
Jesus says he's in the boat with us always, and we've got the mantle of the
prophets to enable us, so we can part the waters of the Red Sea or of the
rolling Jordan, for Moses and Elijah and Elisha are all with us in the boat
as well-- this is the Old Ship of the Old Zion. Paul is in the boat with
us, calling out hat we remember our own Baptism in waters that need not
frighten us, for they have given us life, and now we are o grow up and take
over the navigation, to chart our courses and find our way home.
Jospeh Campbell writes that neurosis might be defined as the failure to
come across the critical threshold of our adult "second birth"-- that
stimuli which should evoke in us thoughts and acts of responsibility evoke
instead fear, flight to protection, dependence on adult authority figures,
the blaming of others for failures-- that the first requirement of
adulthood is to take responsibility. This is what Jesus asks his disciples
to do. Fantasies that we need to walk on water or fly through the air,
are just that: dreams and fantasies. Did Jesus walk on the
water? That's the childish part. We must not believe that Jesus walked on
the water. We need to believe that Jesus is in the boat with us, that
this, the most wonderful, sweetest, strongest of human beings, is in the
boat with us. That Jesus is in solidarity with us and with our project for
a better life for all humankind and all animal kind and all plant
kind. That Jesus wants our boat to get to shore, and that he wants us to
understand about the loaves. Jesus is speaking when I say to you
today: "Take heart. It is I. have no fear." Because that's the gospel
in nine words.
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