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Pentecost IX Proper 14B Aug 10 2003
H
o m i l y G r i t s
The Ninth
Sunday after Pentecost
Year B
Proper 14 - August 10, 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
Grant to us, Lord, we pray, the spirit to think and do always those
things that are right, that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you
be enabled to live according to your will; 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:
Deuteronomy 8:1-10 A land where you may eat bread without scarcity
Psalm 34 or 34: 1-8 Benedicam Dominum
Ephesians 4: (25-29) 30-5:2 Let them work honestly with their own hands
so as to have something to share with the needy
John 6: 37-51 On the last day of the festival, the great day. . . Jesus
cried out!
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33 Joab's armour-bearers surrounded Absalom and
struck him and killed him.
and Psalm 130 De profundis
or 1 Kings 19:4-8 Elijah went in the strength of that food forty days
and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.
and Psalm 34:1-8 Benedicam Dominum
Ephesians 4:25-5:2 Thieves must give up stealing
John 6:35, 41-51 Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and
mother we know?
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
Pour out upon us, O Lord, the spirit to think and do what is right, that
we, who cannot even exist without you, may have the strength to live
according to your will; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
(or)
O God, you see how busy we are with many things. Turn us to listen to
your teachings and lead us to choose the one thing which will not be
taken from us, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Psalm 23 Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
Jeremiah 23:1-6 Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of
my pasture!
Ephesians 2:13-22 He has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the
hostility between us.
Mark 6:30-34 Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a
while.
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary - 19th Sunday/Ordinary Time
I Kings 19:4-8 He went in the strength of that food forty days and forty
nights to Horeb the mount of God.
Psalm 33 Exultate, justi (Vulgate 32) Shout with joy to Yahweh, you
virtuous
Ephesians 4:30-5:2 Follow Christ, by loving as he loved you
John 6:41-52 This is the bread that comes down from heaven
¶ Sutta Nipata 119-21 (Buddhism)
"Whoever steals what is considered to belong to others, whether it be
situated in villages or the forest, is to be known as an outcast.
Whoever having contracted debts defaults when asked to pay, retorts, 'I
am not indebted to you,' is to be known as an outcast.
Whoever is desirous of stealing even a trifle and kills a person going
along the road in order to take it, is to be known as an outcast."
Three times a week now the mini-van from Tonalli, the women's cooperative
bakery in Managua, stops out front at seven in the morning and toots its
distinctive horn, bidding me from my bed to waddle to the gate and buy
fresh warm loaves of wondrously good whole grain breads. A big
handsome couple, well-bread and well-fed, urge their miracles of the
loaves on me. A few neighborhood naufragos sidle up close, knowing I'll
buy them a pico, a big triangle of sugary breakfast bread. And there's
wheat and rye and raisin, buttery croissants and Danish, almond torts
and cream cheese cakes, tres leches and Pio Quinto, a creamy dessert
named for some forgotten reason for the Pope who also authorized a Roman
missal long ago.
The dessert has outlived his liturgy. So we always have fresh bread now
for our own liturgy at Casa Ave Maria. This wasn't always to my taste.
When I was first enchanted with the Anglican religion, looking at it with
my long Presbyterian nose pressed to the window of the Episcopalian
bakery, I saw only the mystery and purity and magic of the Altar Bread,
the little thin fish food wafer that we all used to use (and many still
do) for Eucharist. We were told not to bite it, lest Jesus bleed, and to
let it dissolve on the tongue. It didn't look or taste like the bread
our mothers punched and baked into life in our childhood, and one
theologian has written that it always took more faith for him to believe
those little white wafers were really bread than to believe that they
were really the Body of Christ.
One of the great things about real bread is the smell of it. Find a
bakery one saint's day this week and go in and smell the bread. Usually
there's a "No Fumar" sign up so you can smell the bread instead of the
cigarettes. It's a wonderful smell, that poets have written about. And
only after you buy it, go ahead touch it: feel it, caress it, hold its
skin to your lips. Rupert Brooke, the Great Lover, sings of "the strong
crust of friendly bread" (1) It's strong enough to support you in your
pilgrimage this week, for Elijah went in the strength of that bread forty
days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God. Good bread, like
Jesus, says "Eat me. Taste me. Taste and see how gracious the Lord
is."
Saint Paul refers to Jesus as a "fragrant offering to God". I thought
there might be a connection to the cooked sacrifices of
our forbears here, and not to the incense used to cover up a bad job in
the kitchen, so I looked up the references in the Bible, and sure enough,
the fragrant offerings referred to, and to which Jesus himself is
compared, are the roast lamb of Exodus and
the pancakes frying in oil in Leviticus Chaper Two Verse Nine. Jesus is
likened by Paul to he fragrant smell of something good cookin'in the
stove, something savory sizzling on the grill. "Nothin' says you love
ém like something from the oven" sings one of my favorite commercials.
Jesus says, "I'm the best Bread, come down from Mother God's kitchen
range for you." But Jesus also says "You shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes out of Mother God's mouth." God is Momma
here, chewing up the crust a bit to soften it, before tenderly placing it
in the mouth of us infants. Jesus says, Be careful, we're taking about
different kinds of bread.
In summertime Chicago, there's a great festival of pan et
circenses--"bread and circuses"--food and entertainment, always offered
by the Roman Emperors, as well, and now called Taste of Chicago. The
city's wonderful lakefront is crowded with
dozens of kiosks offering food from every one of its many ethnic
communities, and the nights are filled with their music as well.
Food and entertainment have been used by tyrants, demagogues, garden
variety politicians, as well as ordinary restaurant owners, to attract
custom. Besides providing for this massive outdoor picnic, they offer
diversion, and they also distract the populace from their real needs,
take the minds of the masses off the possibility of political change.
"Barriga llena, corazon contento", as the Mexican proverb says: "Full
belly, happy heart." But Jesus warns us "You shall not live by bread
alone. You shall not live for the barriga alone." The overweight but
moral midget middle classes in the U.S.A. now seem to be so tamed, so
pacified, so intimidated by the National Security State in which they
live, so isolated from the planet's people, protected, cosseted and
corrupted, that they hardly notice their republic has been taken from
them in the grandest bait and switch trick in carnival history.
A fish can be fooled. I used to depend on that when I went fishing,
which I haven't done for years. I never cast my net in Galilee, but my
hook in Wagner Creek. . When I spent a few weeks in Michigan's Upper
Peninsula each summer, for years, I would buy a ten dollar license and a
ten dollar pole and catch three dollars worth of fish. There's more to
fishing than what you catch, so fish could always fool me with a few
hours entertainment, and one of the things about catching fish is that
you catch them by fooling them. You don't really feed them, unless you
are yourself a fool, you don't indeed intend for the night crawlers to
end up in the fish. You get something that wiggles, a real worm or a
cleverly designed artificial one, and you fool the fish. The fish
doesn't see anything but the wiggle, and his philosophy is "if it looks
like food, jump at it." Some folks are fooled by demagogues and
preachers, the same way. And they get caught on the hook. Some kinds of
fish are called suckers, because their mouths are all ready for fooling.
But Jesus tells us Don't be Fooled: Don't live by bait alone. Robert
Ferrar Capon, in his book Food For Thought, (2) says that man is the only
animal who eats with his head up, not down, so as to teach himself that
it is his head that most needs filling. The mouth, not the stomach, is
the principal organ to be filled: "Taste and see how gracious the Lord
is." Feed your head with this bread.
The Church's moral theologians have long taught that a parent who steals
bread from those who have more than they need, to feed starving children
commits no sin. No one has exclusive right to the use of the community's
Bread when it is the poor who are excluded from the table Capitalism
has always screwed the commandment of God "Thou shalt not steal" to be a
divine sanction for private property and the privatization of resources,
as even now it steals the oil of Iraq for Texas millionaires, and
condemns the children of Iraq to starve and wither away from the
depleted uranium the US used to reinforce its bombs there.
The commandment of God not to steal was let down from heaven to the
sacred writings of all religions, and always means that what is
forbidden is theft from the poor nations as well as from poor people.
"Whoever is desirous of stealing even a trifle and kills a person going
along the road in order to take it, is to be known as an outcast."--So
the Sutta Nipata of the Buddhists.
I see US soldiers killing poor Iraqis going along their own roads each
evening on the television news, to steal their country.
For this alone the Perishing Republic deserves to be known as an
outcast. A rogue state. . .
One of the slang terms in African American communities is "Bread" for
money, for it is the bread we trade to provide food, shelter, clothing,
for our families. It's that bread that Jesus means too when he says "I
am the Bread of Life." He means the currency of all human life, the
means whereby we trade our work, our sweat, our energies, for these
things, the way we put bread on the tables in our homes and in our
churches. "Oh, No!" say the neighbors--you can't be the Bread of Life,
for you're just Joseph and Mary's child, and Jesus says, "Oh, I'm that
too. But I'm bread from the meaning of life for all of life. The one
who trusts this already has a mouthful of the life of the fragrant and
friendly Loaf of Momma God's oven. This is not fly-by-night,
melt-in-the-evening wilderness manna. My flesh, my very life and
death, and my being raised up like bread is the Supper of the Lamb for
you. Your forbears ate manna in the wilderness, and died anyway. The
religion which is concerned only with satisfying the body's hunger won't
sustain you for the trip, but Jesus himself begins his Resurrected Life
among us by asking, "Children, do you have anything here to eat?" Jesus
is the one we're asking God for when we pray "Give us this day our daily
bread." The Letter to Ephesus says we are to be truth-tellers,
forgivers, putting on the table for each other the menu of kindness,
tenderness, forgiveness, and not the tough, old, dried out crust of
anger and bitterness and slander.
Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (3) remarks that if the human
race were to die out (more likely, kill itself off) that wheat---what
most of use for bread, would not survive us more than three years.
Places around in the wilderness, we can see wheat that has jumped the
farmer's fence and run wild in the gullies and ditches for years on end.
But its grains get smaller, it gets so that it can't be used anymore for
much in the way of feeding the multitudes. Most of us, in our
nourishment of each other, cannot survive for long as Bread for each
other, without the Truly Human One to tend our fields, to cultivate our
harvest, the One who has come down from heaven to use us for his Bread
that gives life to the world.
Father, we thank thee who hast planted
thy holy Name within our hearts.
Knowledge and faith and life immortal
Jesus thy Son to us imparts.
Thou, Lord, didst make all for thy pleasure,
didst give us food for all our days,
giving in Christ the Bread eternal;
thine is the power, be thine the praise.
Watch o'er thy Church, O Lord, in mercy
save it from evil, guard it still,
perfect it in thy love, unite it,
cleansed and conformed unto thy will.
As grain once scattered on the hill side
Is in this broken bread made one
So from all lands thy church be gathered
Into thy kingdom by thy Son. (4)
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) Rupert Brooke, "The Great Lover", from The Collected Poems of Rupert
Brooke, New York: Dodd, Mead I& Co.mcmxxvii. copyright 1915.
(2) Robert Farrar Capon, Food for Thought: 233 pages Harcourt; (May
1978) You might call Father Bob Capon a gastronomic theologian. My
favorite of his books is The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection,
reissued July 2002 in the Modern Library. Also see Party Spirit: Some
Entertaining Principles, and his Heart of Zen Cuisine: a 600 Year
Tradition of Vegetarian Cookery. Also, Capon on Cooking. You can find
them all from Amazon.Com or ABE books, and others, in and out of print.
These books are as delectable as all he Movable Feasts.
(3) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard. Perennial, reprinted Nov
1998 ISBN 0060953020
(4) Hymnal 1982, Hymn 302. Words, Greek ca. 110, trans. F. Bland Tucker
(1895-1984).