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Pentecost X Proper 15B Aug 17 2003
H
o m i l y G r i t s
The Tenth
Sunday after Pentecost
Year B
Proper 15 - August 17, 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 )
Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for
sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive
thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and to follow daily in the
blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our
Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and
for ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Proverbs 9:1-6 Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars
Psalm 147 or 34: 9-14 Laudate Dominum
Ephesians 5:15-20 Be careful how you live, not as unwise people but as
wise
John 6:53-59 The one who eats this bread will live for ever.
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14 Give your servant an understanding mind to
govern your people.
Psalm 111 Confitebor tibi
or Proverbs 9:1-6 above, BCP
Psalm 34:9-14 Laudate Dominum
Ephesians 5:15-20 as above, BCP
John 6:51-58 as above, BCP
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
O God, your ears are open always to the prayers of your servants. Open
our hearts and minds to you, that we may live in harmony with your will
and receive the gifts of your Spirit; through your Son, Jesus Christ our
Lord.
Psalm 145 The eyes of all wait upon you O Lord.
Exodus 24:3-11 Moses set up twelve pillars, corresponding to he twelve
tribes of Israel
Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16 One God and father of all
John 6:1-15 "Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?"
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary - 20th Sunday/Ordinary Time
Proverbs 9:1-6 As above, BCP
Psalm 33 (Vulgate 32) Hymn to providence
Ephesians 5:15-20 as above, BCP
John 6:52-59 as above, BCP
¶ Jelaluddin Rumi, (1207-1273) founder of the "Whirling Dervishes".
A certain person came to the Friend's door and knocked. "Who's there?"
"It's me." The Friend answered, "Go away. There's no place for raw meat
at this table." The individual went wandering for a year. Nothing but
the fire of separation can change hypocrisy and ego. The person returned
completely cooked, walked up and down in front of the Friend's house,
gently knocked. "Who is it?" "You." "Please come in, my Self. There's
no place in this house for two."
[ translated by and copyright by Coleman Barks with Reynold A.
Nicholson.] *
+ + +
The accusation of cannibalism has haunted the Christian Church from the
beginning. Early on, outsiders spread horrid rumors that Christian
assemblies gathered to eat human flesh. Even the historian Tacitus, who
does not believe Nero's charge that the Christians set fire to Rome, says
those "who are commonly called Christians" are "a class hated for their
abominations", for they were accused of atheism--not believing in the
gods of the State--and of infanticide, cannibalism, and incest. (1)
Today few Christians are guilty of infanticide, cannibalism, or incest,
and few are accused of atheism, for most believe ardently in the gods of
their State, salute its flag, march in lockstep to join its war against
Islam and the wretched of the earth. The Reformation's horror of the
doctrine of transubstantiation arose from the idea that it meant
Catholics claimed to be really (and not merely symbolically) eating the
meat and drinking the red blood of Jesus. Anglicans, following their
founding Queen, (we've had many since, not all royal) declared, "'Twas
God the word that spake it, He took the Bread and Brake it; And what the
word did make it, That I believe, and take it." (2) Anglicans have no
problem accepting metaphor, and never have. No one, after all, ardently
defends any doctrine of the Real Absence. Even the barest "memorial"
eucharistic theology translates the Greek anamnesis, to mean re-member,
re-embody, and not amnesia, to forget. All Eucharists are efficacious,
for they depend on Jesus' own gifts and the Word, and not our canon law,
thank God. (Validity is another matter, and is the language of law, and
narrow limits, not of Love or Poetry.) The last thing Jesus did at the
Lord's last supper with his friends, according to Mark, was to sing a
hymn with them before they went out into the night. They none of them
signed oaths of conformity nor fixed signatures to the Formula of
Concord, the Westminster Confession, or the Thirty Nine Articles. All
our Anglican theology is metaphor, poetry our song, the Maypole our flag
pole, and it takes a while, but we manage ultimately to coax along the
tin-eared and the klutz. The vexatious among us have been
fundamentalists, who hate poetry and eschew real musical instruments in
favor of electronic devices, doggerel and wooden rhymes. The poets are
our favorite theologians, and since David and Jonathan or Rumi and
Shams, all Lovers and Dervishes are God's favorite singers and dancers.
When Jesus bid his disciples, "Follow me", it was also an invitation to
the dance. In waltz, tango, or discipleship, Jesus bids, "Walk this
way. Dance this way. Take my hand, I'm the Stranger in your
Paradise."
We all know the erotic tongue flicking of Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter,
have read of the dinner party Donner Party, or have seen the Stephen
Sondheim horror musical, "Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet
Street", with Angela Lansbury playing the historical Margery Lovett, who
baked cannibal pies for the Barber and Chef Sweeney Todd, who was hanged
in London in1802. Margery suicided in her cell. Stories of cannibalism
in modern times are not infrequent, but they are committed either by
groups out of extreme necessity, at remote sites of airplane crashes on
mountaintops, or by psychopathic lovers linked up through chat-rooms,
who take literally their partner's invitation, "Eat me!" or the offer,
"I could eat you up." Crazy people sometimes stash their victim lovers'
parts in the freezer for roasts and cutlets, as Jeffrey Dahmer did in the
Dairy State, and this is always, oddly, more repulsive to us all than
the devastation of an Arab nation by our uniformed soldiers carrying our
SPQR--Senatus Populesque Rumsfeld. And our cannibalizing of Iraq's
lifeblood, petroleum, the splaying of her women and children on the tops
of our tanks and Humvees.
Tobias Scheebaum, a nice Jewish gay boy from Manhattan, wrote lyrically
of his adventures among primitive peoples who still lived on the edges of
the modern world. In one of his books, he tells of a year with a head
hunting cannibal tribe in a Peruvian jungle, during which year he says,
at a feast he was offered and tasted human flesh. (3) When I was in
seminary, I tried hard to be sophisticated, but winced, gulped and
swallowed hard when a returning missionary told me he had tasted human
flesh in his foreign travels. Somewhere I never went. But no cannibal
ever ate these (to us) ghoulish meals for their caloric value, but to
ingest the power and virtue of the victim. It disgusts us, but there's
no accounting for taste, and not much accounting for religious practice.
Here in Managua, a Hindu dinner guest very nearly came to reverse
peristalsis when I told him that the Nicaraguan specialty mondongo was
made from boiling up calves' feet with tripe, the lining of a cow's
stomach. Reincarnation meant mondongo was off the menu for him.
Vegetarians and vegans, if they are fundamentalists at it, surely have
problems with all of our Christian talk of lambs and holocausts, blood
and sacrifice. But the Eucharistic Sacrifice is in fact an unbloody
sacrifice which defuses itself not only of cannibalism, but of
meat-eating, not by discarding the metaphors of centuries of human life
and culture, but by setting our common table with bread and wine, the
commonest and finest gifts of Mother Earth and Father Sun. We do not
offer wheat and grapes, but our own life's work--our blood and sweat and
tears--that have been added to them to make them an acceptable and
reasonable service. We invoke Jesus to add the meaning of his own brains
and brawn, body and blood, to the mix. We elevate them at the Eucharist,
along with the Gospel book, and these elevations bid us bend the knee to
the scriptural "Wisdom" and sacramental "Supper" that are the basis of
our share in human civilization. Slaughter house fundamentalism talks of
Christ's blood being spilled, a metaphor in the systems that think of
blood as "satisfaction for sins", but we might better think of Christ as
sharing his blood with us by spiritual transfusion. It won't make
Jehovah's Witnesses happy, for they think blood transfusions are "eating
blood" and as fundamentalists, they forbid it. Jesus' humanity, in his
flesh transplanted, his blood transfused sacramentally, are shared with
us. I've spent lots of time in hospitals in my seventy-one years, and
received at least half a dozen times the blood of strangers transfused.
These days, folks walk around with the hearts and kidneys of donors,
and so one way or another more and more of us share each other's bodies,
organs, life blood, and as science leads on to a brave new world of
cloning, we may find that we humans are thereby not only members of one
family, but of each other in ways not exclusively spiritual.
Jane Harrison in her book Themis, (4) reminds us, as did Sir James
Frazier in The Golden Bough that sacraments of cannibalism are
prehistoric, probably universal to humankind, and hardly originated with
Jesus or the Apostles. Humankind has always symbolically eaten the
flesh of the gods, and usually in some connection with Springtime and
fertility rites. The Abraham and Isaac story in our own Bible is a way
we have mythologically of signing off on human sacrifice and declaring an
end to it. We have given up eating the meat, but not slaughtering our
youth in warfare. And those of us in the War Churches still think that
our God accepts their mangled bodies and their splattered blood. Moloch
is a patriot.
Jesus Christ, whose true disciples do not kill, speaks of his body as
flesh for the table, calls it Bread in all these "Bread Sundays", and
says "The one who eats this bread will live for ever."
Eric Milner-White wrote this prayer. I wonder if someone has (or will)
set it to a tune for Jesus.
Lord, this is thy feast,
prepared by thy longing,
spread at thy command,
attended by thine invitation,
blessed by thine own Word,
distributed by thine own hand,
the undying memorial of thy sacrifice upon the Cross, .
the full gift of thine everlasting love,
and its perpetuation till time shall end.
Lord, this is Bread of heaven, Bread of life,
that, whoso eateth, never shall hunger more.
And this the Cup of pardon, healing, gladness, strength,
that, whoso drinketh, thirsteth not again.
So may we come, Lord, to thy Table;
Lord Jesus, come to us. (5)
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
* The Enlightened Mind, An Anthology of Sacred Prose, edited by Stephen
Mitchell. Harper Collins, 1991.
(1) "Three things are alleged against us; atheism, Thyestean feasts,
Oedipodean intercourse"--Athenagoras, Legatio pro Christanis, iii.
Thyestes in ignorance ate the flesh of his two sons; Oedipus in ignorance
married his own mother. - Tacitus, Annales, xv.44. - from Documents of
the Christian Church, selected and edited by Henry Bettenson, Oxford
University Press, 1963.
(2) Elizabth I (1533- 1603) From S. Clarke, Marrow of Ecclesiastical
History, ed. 1675, Pt II, Life of Queen Elizabeth. Bartlett's Familiar
Quotations. 14th edition. by John Bartlett. Little, Brown & Co. 1968.
(3) Keep the River on Your Right, by Tobias Schneebaum, Grove Press,
1968. Forty five years later Schneebaum went back to the Amazon to see
if any of the tribesmen survived. Film makers went with him to make
this DVD documentary with the same title. Other books by Schneebaum
include "Secret Places: My Life in New York and New Guinea" (University
of Wisconsin Press, 2000) and "Where the Spirits Dwell: On Odyssey in
the Jungle of New Guinea", Grove Press 1988,
(4) Themis, South End Press, 1963.
(5) "The Lord's Supper", from A Procession of Passion Prayers,
"marshalled by Eric Milner-White, Dean of York,
printed privately at York by H.Morley & Sons Ltd., published for the
author by S.P.C.K.1950.