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Pentecost XIII - Proper 18-B, Sept 7, 2003
H
o m i l y G r i t s
The
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Year B
Proper 18 - September 7, 2003
+4 September
+Albert Schweitzer, Missionary to Africa, 1965+
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always
resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake
those who make their boast of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and he Holy Spirit, one God, now and for
ever. Amen.
Isaiah 35:4-7a Say to those who are of a fearful heart, 'Be strong, do
not fear!"
Psalm 146 or 146:4-9 Lauda, anima mea - Praise the Lord, O my soul!
James 1:17-27 Pure and spotless religion in the eyes of God is to go to
the help of orphans and widows
Mark 7:31-37 People were absolutely amazed and kept saying: Everything
he does is wonderful!
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity
and Psalm 125 Qui confidunt - Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount
Zion.
or Isaiah 35:4-7a as above, BCP
and Psalm 146 as above, BCP
James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17 Has not God taken an option for the poor in
the world?
Mark 7:24-37 As above, BCP
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
Almighty and ever-living God, you have given great and precious promises
to those who believe. Grant us the perfect faith which overcomes all
doubts, through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Isaiah 35:4-7a,as above, BCP
Psalm 146 I will praise the Lord as long as I live. (Ps. 146:1)
James 2:1-10 [11-13] 14-17 Is it not the rich who oppress you, is it not
they who drag you into court?
Mark 7:24-37 as above, BCP
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary - 23rd Sunday/Ordinary Time
Isaiah 35:4-7 as above, BCP
Psalm 145 (Vulgate 144) - I will extol thee, my God and King
James 2:1-5 Do not try to combine faith in Jesus Christ with the making
of distinctions between classes of people.
Mark 7:31-37 As above, BCP
from "The Koran Interpreted" - A translation by A.J. Arberry
"It is not piety, that you turn your faces to the East and to the West.
True piety is this: to believe in God, and the Last Day, the angels, the
Book, and the Prophets, to give of one's substance, however cherished, to
kinsmen, and orphans, the needy, the traveller, beggars, and to ransom
the slave, to perform the prayer, to pay the alms. And they who fulfill
their covenant when they have engaged in a covenant, and endure with
fortitude, hardship, and peril, these are they who are true in their
faith, these are the truly godfearing." ["The Cow" 178ff.]
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports each year that
there are growing millions in exile from their homes, all around the
world, some of them, "the internally displaced persons", exiled within
their own homelands, may be as many as 20 to 25 million. (1) War,
political and economic oppression, segregation, racism, exile, famine,
disaster, have made their lives a holocaust of unrelieved suffering.
They are among the one-and-a-quarter billion human beings counted as
"homeless" on this planet earth which we claim in our prayers to be "our
island home." The planet itself under the exploitation of capitalism is
rapidly becoming a galactic slum, the escombros of our solar system.
Millions of its people scrabble, even in rubbish piles, for food for
their children, and some end up in the scavenger villages built on the
mountains of rubbish outside Two Thirds World cities, like the one at
Acahualinca in Managua. To visit it is to glimpse the nightmares and
stallions that ride in the dark of the moon, and the sickness that lays
waste at mid day. In Latin America governments are toppled on a
regular basis in the economic struggle, which merely changes the owners
and the management of the capitalists in charge, while the single
communist country, Cuba, is a pariah for having fed its people and given
them the best of the world's health care without the thieving
multinationals and the pharmaceutical companies who are amongst the
greediest drug runners of our time. While most of the people of
Nicaragua live on less than a dollar a day, the Pax Americana insists
that as quid pro quo for its stingy loans, the impoverished republic
send its young people to join the Empire's occupying army in Iraq-- fresh
meat for feeding the Monster war machine owned by Baboso Bush's friends.
. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has recently made
pastoral visits throughout Africa and visited a refugee center in The
Gambia, where a youth from Sierra Leone begged him to use his high
office to plead the cause of displaced persons. Archbishop Williams
gently told the refugees "May your experiences as refugees be a thing of
the past." And he promised that these concerns will not be forgotten.
When an eight year old girl named Judah told how her fellow Liberians had
been raped, tortured, and murdered, women carrying infants began crying
and sobbing. In an old slave-trading center, Freetown in Sierra Leone,
His grace spoke of contemporary forms of slavery: "Even today we are not
free from the slavery of destructive patterns of human behavior, he
said. There is the slavery of poverty, the slavery of injustice, the
slavery of greed - both sexual and financial, the slavery caused by the
HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the slavery of violence in which bitterness and
revenge can be guaranteed to keep people captive forever, unless
delivered by truth and reconciliation. We must go on identifying and
overcoming every kind of slavery we encounter in our society. In
overcoming slaveries we learn to recognize one another as human and, in
this way, we learn to see in each other the face of Christ." Dr Williams
linked his remarks to the Church's commemoration on July 30 of the
anti-slavery hero, William Wilberforce. He said, "I was asked some years
ago who I thought had been the greatest Briton of the last 1000 years.
With all due respect to Winston Churchill and William Shakespeare, my
answer was that William Wilberforce did more to change the course of
human history in his work to abolish slavery than can easily be told."
(2)
What the Archbishop did not say was that the sale of human bodies as
commodities has been followed in modern life by the continued traffic in
human beings as commodities by the wage slavery that is consumer
capitalism, and which many churches still bless as "democratic." The call
to "reconciliation" flies in the face of the denunciation of that term as
unacceptable to the poor of the earth who do not accept that they must be
"reconciled" to being poor, and be "reconciled" to their slavery to the
Me First World's economic system which keeps them poor. In this
preaching, alas, there is little to identify the slavery that is beyond
the personal or the destructive pattern of individual misbehavior.
"Greed" is not ever spoken in the same breath as "government" or
"industry", nor is the "slavery of poverty" linked to the
multi-national corporations and their "slave-owning slavery of riches".
The "slavery of injustice" is not linked to the enslavement of the
judicial system, and the "for sale" sign on the courts. The "slavery of
the HIV/AIDS pandemic" is not seen as connected with slavery to the
stock market and the money-making schemes of the pharmaceutical industry,
which make impossible the dream of health and well being for most of
world's people. Thirteen million Africans are dying from AIDS, and most
have no access to the medicines they need, whose manufacture and
distribution are controlled by the Me First World. William
Wilberforce, it is true, helped deliver England from chattel slavery,
just as William Shakespeare helped deliver the English language to the
modern world, much of which has suffered from the commercial abuse of
those who speak English very well in banks, and can afford to be
entertained by his plays in pricey theatres. Winston Churchill
delivered England's empire into the hands of its Nuclear Warhead heirs in
the New England--and in Texas--and did so in the best language
Shakespeare had delivered to us and which the Airhead Emperor cannot
speak.
At the Episcopal General Convention in Minneapolis on 31 July,
Njongonkulu Ndungane, Archbishop of Cape Town, said that the people of
South Africa know about reconciliation between black and white people but
now "must also deal with the wider issue between the poor and the rich."
The Archbishop can speak the word "reconciliation" without gagging.
Liberation theologians know better than to try. The Archbishop went on
to note that this rift is continuing to widen: "There are [in South
Africa] 4.5 million people who are unemployed, and sixty per cent live a
life of poverty. People lose the sense of value and community. If
children are not lovingly cared for, and men and women are deprived of
opportunity to work, they will fall prey to drugs, to crime and other
means to ease the pain. They lose the vision that God has set before us.
Nothing is more important than human life, and the poor have the same
dignity as the rich and the same means for survival." One observer,
Berend Schuitema, commented to the Listserve "Anglican Left" that he
found Archbishop Ndungane's comments reflect a "soft theology", which he
defined as "easy reference to following Jesus and all that. What is
severely lacking is a more comprehensive liberation theology that should
become pronounced [in] amplifying the ethics of Jubilee economics." (3)
According to the South African Medical Research Councils Burden of
Disease Report, released in May 2003, AIDS is the single biggest cause of
adult mortality in the country, accounting for 39 percent of all deaths,
at least five times more than the next largest single cause,
homicide/violence. Estimates of the number of HIV-infected individuals in
the country vary from 5 million (Medical Research Council) to 6.5
million Meanwhile, the South African government stalls on its program
for the development of antiretroviral drug treatment.
Illness is a form of exile. The Prophet uses the images of illness and
disability, blindness, deafness, voicelessness, as places of exile. Many
of us know what the exile of illness is like: the isolation from family,
from friends, from a hopeful vision of the future. We are unable to hear
the voices of our beloved ones, and we have little or no voice in what is
done to us and with us, as our bodies are carried about, poked, cut,
sewn, and bandaged. There aren't many decisions we can make. There
isn't much we can sing about, there aren't many places we can go, when we
are exiled in illness, shut away in quarantine. The Prophet speaks of
nature itself as having been in exile: this certainly speaks to our time
when the great money-makers have made a wilderness where nothing can grow
without the chemicals they sell and no bird will sing in the denuded
land. The Prophet speaks of these exiles, too, and declares that the
exile of the earth itself from God's purpose is about to end.
"You will have vision again, you will hear good news with your own ears,
your tongues will find songs once more, you will have a voice in things
again", so the prophet assures all exiles. The oppressors do not want
the exiled, the refugee, the poor, to have vision, nor to hear buenas
noticias, nor to have a voice in anything. So the media everywhere in
the world are being Murdoched and muted, maimed and murdered, and school
children are dumbed down and cannot find their way around a map of the
world they live in. .
Jesus was on his way from Tyre on the coast of Lebanon, where he and his
friends had been voluntary exiles --they had come for re-creation and
relaxation, had come apart to rest a while . The best "vacations" are
like that. (The word "holiday" reflects the holy time the retreat is
meant to be, more than a mere vacating of the premises.) They are little
voluntary exiles, which take us away to encounter the alien, the
different ones, so that we can learn from the Other and come home more
fully
to ourselves. Jesus was always a pilgrim and never a tourist. A pilgrim
is on the way to somewhere, to learn, to pray, .to have eyes opened, ears
unstopped, to find healing for crippled lives lived narrowly in one
culture. A tourist is always a bystander, an observer, a consumer looking
for a bargain, a sybarite looking for a new and different thrill. The
pilgrim Jesus goes to alien territory, the Gentile Ten Towns, and there
one who cannot hear or speak is crowded close to him for his attention.
The crowd wants a miracle, for magic and marvels are often substitutes
for dignity and freedom, and celebrity is a bogus bait-and-switch for
celebration. Helpers of the poor sometimes seem to feed on publicity and
praise for their deeds more than they enlist the poor to pull up the
roots of poverty. But Jesus takes the needy one aside for the intimacy
and grace that cannot be found in hype or headlines, and Jesus speaks
privately to his new friend, with openness. Mark saved the Aramaic word
for us, the actual word that Jesus used, with the signs of spitting and
poking, and his cry to heaven in the groan "Eph pha tha!" The Church for
a long time used it at Baptism, to pray that neophytes would be "opened
up" to hear, opened up to speak without being tongue-tied, opened up to
listen for and to speak God's love. Even the novelty-loving crowd is
surprised by what happens--the Opening has come! Ears can hear! A
voice can speak! Look how this Jesus does everything so beautifully!
The voiceless strangers of the world today go to God in their need.
Martin Luther, Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us in "The Cost of
Discipleship", reckoned Suffering among the marks of the True
Church--along with its being One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.
Discipleship means today what it meant to all the prophets. And
Bonhoeffer believed that God comes to share the prophetic witness of the
people of God.
We all go to God when we are sore bestead
Pray to God for succour, for God's peace, for bread.
For mercy for ourselves, our sick, our sinners, our dead.
All of us do so: Christians and unbelieving.
We go to God when God is sore bestead,
Find God poor and scorned, without shelter or bread
'Whelmed under weight of the sick, the weak, the dead.
Christians stand by God in God's hour of grieving.
God goes to everyone when they are sore bestead,
feeding body and spirit with God's bread.
For Christians, pagans alike, God hangs there dead.
and both alike, forgiving, forgiving. (4)
Zambia's then-president Kenneth Kuanda welcomed 140,000 refugees to his
country in 1988 with these words: " To be a refugee is terrifying.
Nothing makes a human being more helpless than that. . . when I speak of
them as brothers and sisters, I mean that. They do not come from some
unknown kingdom in the stars. They belong here. They are part and parcel
of the human race, and we must allow them to maintain their dignity."
The letter of James, the Lord's caliph and brother, calls us to be
doers of the Word of God, and not only auditors. What good is it to have
ears if we do not truly obey, a word which means to "hear". We were once
the Church of the poor, and are called by Allah God to listen to the cry
from minarets and the bells from steeples to "Hear O Israel" and "Come to
God!" We are called thereby always to "take an option for the poor, as
God herself has done." To say "I heard that" without responding with
action is, Brother James says, to be one who takes a look in the
looking-glass and sees the truth of one's face and then a second later
forgets what it looks like. "Let everyone be quick to hear but slow to
speak." Quickness is an odd word to use about hearing, isn't it. We
don't think of listening as capable of velocity: slow, medium, or top
speed. We know that people talk at different rates and rhythms:
slurred, stammering, slow, or moderate and modulated, as in BBC Special
English broadcasts, or fast as a motor-mouth in a twenty second
advertising lie. James suggests there are speeds to the ways we listen,
and that we are often running our mouths on fast and our ears on slow.
James says religion is more about DOING than it is about listening to the
Allah u Akbar! five times a day, reading the Daily Office at the seven
appointed slots for the Liturgy of the Hours, or even listening to
marathon Moody sermons, for that matter, for those who listen and don't
care about the weakest and most exiled are fooling themselves, lying to
their own hearts. As in all religions, Brother James names orphans and
widows as especially in need of help. In Two Third World societies, that
is to name the weakest and poorest. Now we have other categories of the
helpless--there are discarded and forgotten street people, the addicted,
the mentally ill, boat people and raft people flailing desperately to
reach the forbidden shores of bare survival. God has chosen them all
and taken an option for these outcasts of our history and demands his
Church to do likewise. We are called upon, as Jesus was--on our way
home from holiday--to be with the poor, who are called to be the
liberators and saviours of the world. There is no voice of the poor
on Sundays in the Sunday newspapers, or the fake religion of the Boob
Tube. The voice of the poor rises from the Church of the poor, the
"Allah u Akbar!" from the minarets of the world's mosques.
Ephphatha! A word from Jesus to the Church, to our society. Be opened!
Be open to the poor, the homeless, the exile, the refugee, to those who
look to share your loaf, your holy place, and invite Jesus in! Take an
option for the poor. Jesus' brother James says we will find them rich in
faith and hope. You don't need much faith and hope when you've got
privilege, power, respect, and the satisfaction of every possible human
need. Faith and hope are God's gift to the poor, and God has made them
rich in these assets, rich enough and eager to share these gifts with us
all.
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) Immigration Information Source, http:www.migrationinformation.org
This source shows there are now 700,000 Iraqis homeless in their own
land, and we may thank our tax dollars for this war crime. (Many more
have fled, like Saddam Hussein's daughters, Raghdad and Rana, to Jordan,
Syria, and other lands, where they live in permanent exile, somewhat
better off than most refugees, and better off than their brothers Uday
and Qusay, and their 14 year old nephew betrayed and murdered in their
homes. The whole episode reminds one of the extirpation of the family of
Tsar Nicholas II at Ekaterinburg.
(2) Anglican Communion News Service. Thanks to James Rosenthal.
(3)Reported by Matthew Davies. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal
Church USA (ECUSA) held a forum on Global Reconciliation on Thursday 31
July at St Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis. Berend Schuitema's
comment is from the Anglican Left listserve. Quoted with his
permission.
(4) Translation paraphrased G.M.G.