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Pentecost XI Proper 16B Aug 24 2003
H
o m i l y G r i t s
The
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Year B
Proper 16 - August 24, 2003
Aug 6 & Aug 9
- US destroyed the people of Nagasaki & Hiroshima
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
Grant, O merciful God, that your Church, being gathered together in unity
by your Holy Spirit, may show forth your power among all peoples, to the
glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns
with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-25 Put away the gods that your ancestors served
Psalm 16 Conserva me, Domine or 34:15-22 Oculi Jehovae ad justos
{Theodori Bezae}
Ephesians 5:21-33 Adapt yourselves to each other as you submit yourselves
to the Lord.
John 6:60-69 Lord, to whom shall we go: you have the words of eternal
life.
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
1 Kings 8:(1, 6, 10-11), 22-30, 41-43 But will God indeed dwell on the
earth?
and Psalm 84 Quam dilecta! How dear to me is your dwelling, O Lord of
hosts!
or Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18 It is the Lord our God who brought us and our
ancestors out of the house of slavery.
and Psalm 34:15-22 Oculi Jehovae ad justos {Theodori Bezae} The eyes of
the Lord are upon the just
Ephesians 6:10-20 Our struggle is against the rulers, the authorities,
the cosmic powers of this present darkness.
John 6:56-69 He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue
at Capernaum.
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
Gracious Father, your blessed Son came down from heaven to be the true
bread which gives life to the world. Give us this bread, that he may
live in us and we in him, Jesus Christ our Lord.
or
Almighty God, judge of us all, you have placed in our hands the wealth we
call our own. Give us such wisdom by your Spirit that our possessions
may not be a curse in our lives, but an instrument for blessing; through
your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Psalm 78:23-29, He provided for them food enough.
Exodus 16: 2-15 In the evening quails came up and covered the camp
Ephesians 4: 7-24 Each of us was given grace according the measure of
Chríst's gift
John 6:24-35 Because you ate your fill of the loaves
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary - 21st Sunday/Ordinary Time
Joshua 24:1-2, 15-18 as above, Revised Common Lectionary
Psalm 33 (Vulgate 32) Hymn to Providence - Exultate, justi - Let
justice-doers rejoice in the Lord
Ephesians 5:21-32 Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ
John 6:61-70 "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal
life."
¶ Islam
Qurán 90:8-17.
Have we not granted him two eyes, and a tongue, and two lips, and guided
him on the two high roads? Yet he has not assaulted the Steep! What
will make you realize what is the Steep? To free a slave, or to give
food at a time of hunger, to an orphan near of kin or a needy man in
misery; then to become one who believes, and to counsel each other to be
steadfast, and to counsel each other to be merciful.
When Nikos Kazantzakis's (1) novel "The Last Temptation of Christ" was
made into a film in 1988, I wore my clerical collar when I went to see
it in a Chicago theatre, to irk the fundamentalists whom I knew would be
picketing out front. I had read the Christian Science Monitor's
editorial the day before, which began "We haven't seen the film but" and
nevertheless went on to roundly condemn it for depicting "a vulnerable
Jesus, beset by sensual thoughts and particularly entertaining base
fantasies on the cross." The base fantasy that Jesus had on the cross
was that he might have got married to Mary Madalene and 'made an honest
woman of her,' made love to her, in a sweet and gentle way, and the
other fantasy was that he might have had a second marriage to Mary of
Bethany, and had lot of kids by her. The Christian Science Monitor's
"base fantasy" turns out to be ordinary white bread heterosexual
relationships and fulfillment in monogamy and boredom, and the whole
thing sounds like the life of a most members of the House of Bishops or
the House of Deputies. The point of the novel and the film is that this,
the fantasy of a life of tamed and domesticated passion, was "the last
temptation", and the one he resisted in favor of the cross and its role
in the struggle with evil, and the liberation of the human family from
the fear of death. A perfectly orthodox idea, expressed in a rather
novel way, but hardly nasty or pornographic. I wrote to the Monitor
wondering if their objection might be based on their own temptation to
equate temptation with sin, and the un-Christian Scientific depiction of
a vulnerable Jesus. Vulnerable means "capable of being wounded" -- of
bearing vulnera. Maybe even of being sick. Malicious animal
magnestism.
One of the best scenes in the film was the Wedding at Cana. You can see
why Jesus would want to get married, if this is the way they did it.
They were still partying after three days when the wine ran out! There
was wild singing and exotic dancing and dazzling costumes, and the bride
was tattooed and veiled with precious metals and stones, rings on her
fingers and bells on her toes, and she shall have music wherever she
goes, and the groom! The groom, as Beatrice Lilly hissed, was "very
hand-sssssome!" and was carried in standing straight up and elevated on
a litter, like the statue of a god. I expect they did some research and
that some weddings in Jesus time were like this. What is clear is the
vertical relationship depicted between husband and wife. Our own
weddings (with the folding back of the veil and the erotic kiss nowadays
substituted for the Sign of Peace) are instead shy hints at the
horizontal relationship to come. The groom in this movie doesn't even
walk on the same level with the bride, and she looks up at him as at a
deity. This is the relationship that the Letter to the Ephesians
addresses in the reading today. The apostolic successors to Paul wrote
this letter when it was assumed by all that marriage was just such a
relationship, but the apostolic writers had something new to add.
"Wives, go ahead and be subject to your husbands, but as to the Lord."
Monsignor Ronald Knox translates it: "As you stand in awe of Christ,
submit to each other's rights" and J.B. Phillips says "You wives must
learn to adapt yourselves to your husbands, as you submit yourselves to
the Lord." As the Church looks up to Christ as its head, so let the
wife be subject to her husband. That is an attempt by the writers to
make sense out of current marriage arrangements in the first century of
the new era of gospel time. It is part of the "household code"-- the
Emily Post/Amy Vanderbilt handbooks that Hellenistic Jews took over from
the Stoics in Greek society. All sorts of human relationships are
covered and the first churches tried to make sense of some of them by
giving them a Christian gloss and interpretation. The business of
marriage too got the attention of the churches in various cities and we
eventually began to see in the gospel the new relationships that women
and men will now have in Christ. The passage from Ephesians today
assumes the inequalities of society between wives and husbands, just as
even today the world's military forces and the War Churches assume
inequalities between women and men soldiers, Christians and Jews as real
believers and Muslims as false ones. But the early Church (as well as
"the churches") struggled to make compromises rather than surrenders, in
their societies in flux. Instead of the complete subjection of wives,
the writer says, "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ."
Not "out of respect for the secular customs." Marriage is not after all
the Sacrament of Subordination, as the recognition of ministry is the
Sacrament of Ordination. It is the Sacrament of Mutual Giving and
Receiving of each other in Love and Honor. Which is why Gays and Lesbians
can do it, and have done it for all of human history. The "subjection"
is not one-way, but mutual, and husbands are bidden to "love their wives
as Christ loved the Church--even so far as dying in her defense." Those
commitments don't specify the angle of the dangle of the genitalia.
These epistolary comments on marriage in the NT are the novel entries
into the old arrangement, wherein the woman was expected merely to obey,
and the husband had no duty whatever to "love" his wife, for he had no
duty to love anything he owned, but only to be responsible and use it
wisely. So while from our p unto de vista the attitude expressed in the
Household Codes with regard to relations between the sexes seems
hopelessly chauvinistic and out-dated, troglodyte and Cro-Magnon, yet for
its time it was revolutionary. It took the male off his perch, off the
place he was standing on a litter carried about above the seraglio, and
set him down next to his wife actually facing each other and holding
hands.
Just before the Soviet Union imploded, a group of us visited there with
Russian Orthodox leaders, and talked with them of current issues in
Church life, and ecumenical relationships. Someone asked them about
women's ordination, and the response was that in the Soviet Union women
were already equal, and could do all the things that men do, but that
with regard to priesthood, a woman could not be a priest except by
bearing children who, if they were males, could become priests. Women in
the Soviet Union drove buses and street cars, swept streets, flew
airplanes, yet there was no room for "babushkas" in the clergy. At the
Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, at what used to be the
Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan in what was then Leningrad but would soon
again be Saint Petersburg, we were told by the guide that all religions
express within themselves the societal relationships of the world they
live in and are a part of. So that the Icons and symbols of religion
always express the kind of society they come out of. Jesus as Shepherd
makes sense in pastoral societies, Jesus as King makes sense in a
monarchy, Jesus as Liberator in oppressed societies such as Latin America
and the Two Thirds World. I asked the guide, "If this is true then what
does the iconography of the Soviet Union tell us about this society?"
Everywhere there were large photos of male leaders, posters and buttons
and badges of grandly mustachioed and clumsily uniformed grandpas, and of
Pushkins and Tschaikowskys and Tolstoys and Krushchevs, but nowhere were
there any icons of women, no celebration of their accomplishments, no
raising up of their hopes or their historical gifts to us all, their
contributions or their victories. (Likewise in Iraq until recently:
only approved giant posters, paintings, and sculptures of the President
were allowed, except in restaurants and churches, where calendar art and
icons had other views of divinity.) In Russia, only in the churches,
only in the magnificent old churches where babushkas gathered in throngs,
did one see the glorious Icons of THEOTOKOS, The God-Bearer, the Mother
of God, Mary the Woman of Nazareth. And in the expressions "Mother
Russia" and "Motherland". The gospel continued after two thousand years
to be subversive, and more revolutionary than the once-revolutionary
society of the Soviet Union, by then tottering on its last wobbly legs
towards its collapse into neo-liberalism and the pockets of foreign
bankers. The icons of Theotokos don't often show their feminine faces in
Protestant Churches, and there isn't much but secular influence to move
those communities or their theologies towards the full inclusion of
women in heaven as it is in earth. Warner Sallman's head of Christ as a
bearded lady won't quite hack it. Women are still second class citizens
in bourgeois societies, whether post-communist or late capitalist,
whether Christian or atheist. . It is still the gospel which calls all
of us to grow up and be truly revolutionary. Just as the letter to the
Ephesians calls for new covenants and arrangements between the sexes, so
the other readings speak of new covenants, and about "an election."
Joshua gathers the tribes and says there's to be a General Convention to
choose a God for our nation. We're going to decide upon the
iconography of our society, what it is we intend to raise up, exalt for
worship, hold up for example, point to for a guide. Now the candidates
are many: there are the gods and images which we've inherited from our
past: the ones from "beyond the River" before we crossed over the mighty
river of Baptism into the promised land They've come tagging along
with us, and will want to hang onto power. Lame duck deities like
arrogant heterosexism, and closeted racism, unashamed and uncloseted
homophobia, rampant in recycled patriarchism, dusty old gods from the
Museum of Atheism and Religion that are now hardly recognizable, but
still peeping and squeaking with life. They are represented in the Church
by lame duck bishops and superannuated clergymales. (2) The gods of
secular culture dominate now, and we're so much in their shadow we don't
recognize their profiles. Any more than the Soviet guide at the dusty
museum had any idea that her culture had its own false gods, the gods of
male chauvinism and bearded boy privilege. They smiled down from posters
and pedestals, and still do. Joshua says, "What about the Lord, the
one who liberates us, the one who led us out of slavery, and preserves us
now, and fights for us? Anybody ready to vote for this One? You can't
split your ticket, and it's not a secret ballot. For this God is a
Jealous One, and if you split your ticket so you can serve other gods in
the local election, God will not forgive this. You will be witnesses
against yourselves.
Once when Jehovah's Witnesses came to my door they said, "Can we speak to
you briefly
about Jehovah?" I replied "By no means, We don't dare speak briefly
about Jehovah. Jehovah is a Jealous God and only wants to be spoken of
at great length. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God so
lightly, so briefly. Only a part of what he has to say to us is in this
Bible you have brought along and are such good students of. There's much
more about Jehovah in the Church's tradition and in our own reasonable
heads that didn't make it into anybody's books or Bibles. We will have
to speak at great length about Jehovah, or not at all. Our God is
revealed everywhere we look. Tell me now when you have a couple of
years off and we'll get started." Choose ye this day whom ye will
serve. As for me and my house we will serve Jehovah, on this side of the
River. .
In the gospel today Jesus says "I'm the bread that is alive, and gives
life. Are you ready for it? " One of the things I remember fondly
about Russia of course was the bread. It's a country that never forgot
bread, either in bakery shops or at Eucharist. Real bread there--three
or four kinds on the breakfast table--dark, sour ryes, pure white slices,
crusty rolls, and pancakes and dumplings and dough nuts, all of them
hollering "Taste me!" Jesus compares himself to bread, and he can't mean
Bimbo, the comically named air head air bread that's the Nicaraguan
version of Wonder. When Jesus said, "Taste me!" it shocked some of his
listeners, who nattered "cannibalistic! What an awful thing to say!"
Cannibalism is what came to their minds when Jesus said, "I am living
brad. Swallow me whole. Every thing I am and teach and believe and hope
for, go ahead and ingest." Si no te mata, te engorda. If it doesn't
kill you, it will fatten you Do you take offense? I'm not talking
about the flesh, he says, for my physical body is of no avail. Merely
knowing me, being acquainted with me as a historical or even mythical
person, is of no use. The Word that I speak gives spirit and life--and
this is what you need to swallow. Eat my life and make it part of you
and your life. Nourish yourself by my lifestyle and teaching, wash it
down with the blood of my self-giving and sharing and solidarity with
you. We have the same blood types, for I am humankind. . That is the
intimacy of the relationship I must have with you if you are to be my
compañero, my compañera, my alumno, my alumna, my blood brother and my
blood sister.
"After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went with
him." Jesus then turned to the Twelve, "What about you? Are you
leaving too?" And Peter still answers for all of us around the Table
this morning. "Lord, where would we go? To whom would we go? You have
for us the words of life in the new age. You have the bread of Mother
God's baking.
You have the liberation we came seeking. You have the nourishment we
need, the revolutionary Utopia we're headed for."
Choose you today whom you want to serve, whom you will follow, how you
will set the world's table and set its priorities as well. What icons
you will look to, and where it is and who it is you will find carrying
God in her arms to hand over to you as the Child who is your Friend.
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) Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) author of The Last Temptation of
Christ (1955), Zorba the Greek (1946, English trans. 1952), God's Pauper:
Saint Francis of Assisi (1956, Eng. trans. 1962, plays, and Report to
Greco, an autobiography (1961, Eng. trans. 1965).
(2) A curriculum rigor mortis would include the bishops who are holding
their breath and threatening to turn a darker shade of purple if the
Church moves on into the Human Future.
They have signed a warning to the Episcopal Church not to consecrate
Bishop-elect Gene Robinson. They are: Edward Salmon, Daniel Herzog,
John Howe, Betram Herlong, James Stanton, Fitzsimmons Allison, Stephen
Jecko, Maurice Benitez, Jack Iker, Alex Dickson, Andrew Fairfield, Alden
Hathaway, Robert Duncan, Hugo Pina-Lopez, Keith Ackerman, Clarence the
Pope, Terrence Kelshaw, Henry Scriven, Gethin Hughes, William Skilton,
John David Schofield, William Wantland. Peter Beckwith. Alas, poor dears
are serving the old gods from "Beyond the river" of Baptism, as Joshua
tells us today. As for me and my house, we will serve Jehovah.
The 24 (some assistant bishops, some retired, some re-treaded e.g.,
Clarence Pope, who is an ecclesiastical tourist, back and forth from
Roman obedience and Anglican disobedience, all of them from the Bobble
Belt. Gay rights activist and old friend Bill Kelley, from Chicago,
writes; "On looking at the list of signatory bishops, I see that it leans
heavily on assistant and retired bishops in order to pad itself out. In
general, it emanates from some in Tennessee, from South Carolina, from
Pittsburgh, from some in Florida, from some in Illinois, and from some in
Texas, with a scattering from elsewhere. I wonder how the signatory
bishops would like it if faced with the argument that our side has
remained with the church even as a minority, but their side threatens to
leave the church when it's on the verge of being a minority. What would
that say about their commitment to a catholic church?"