[Date Prev][Date Next][Date Index]
Pentecost 16 - Proper 22B - Oct 5, 2003
H o
m i l y G r i t s
The Sixteenth
Sunday after Pentecost
Year B
Proper 22 - October 5, 2003
2 October
1869 - Birthday of Mahatma Gandhi
9 October 1967 Ernesto
Che Guevara, murdered by CIA in Bolivia
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we
to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve: Pour upon us
the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our
conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are
not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus
Christ our Savior; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one
God. for ever and ever. Amen.
Genesis 2:18-24 This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh
Psalm 8 Domine, Dominus Noster or 128 Beati omnes
Hebrews 2: (1-8)9-18 Jesus is not ashamed to call them his brothers and
sisters
Mark 10: 2-9 From the beginning, God made them male and female.
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
Job 1:1; 2:1-10 and One day the sons of God came to present themselves,
and Ha Satan also came among them.
Psalm 26 Judica me, Domine Give judgment for me, O Lord
or Genesis 2:18-24 And the Lord God planted a garden, eastward in Eden
and Psalm 8 Domine, Dominus noster - O Lord our Governor, how excellent
is your Name in all he world
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12 Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and
various ways by the prophets
Mark 10:2-16 In the house his disciples asked him again about this
matter.
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
Genesis 2:18-24 This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh
Psalm 8 Domine, Dominus noster - O Lord our Governor, how excellent is
your Name in all he world
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12 as above, RCL
Mark 10:2-16 as above, RCL
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary - (27th Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Genesis 2:18-24 as above, RCL & LBW
Psalm 127 Canticum graduum beatus (Vulgate)
Hebrews 2:9-11 We see Jesus, who for a little while was made a little
lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor
Mark 10:2-6 Because of your hardness of heart Moses wrote this
commandment for you
¶ Teresa of Avila: Mary and Martha must combine. (1)
Do you suppose St. Paul hid himself in order to enjoy in peace these
spiritual consolations, and did nothing else? You know that on the
contrary he never took a day's rest so far as we can learn and worked at
night in order to earn his bread. . . . Oh my sisters! how forgetful of
her own ease, how careless of honor, should she be whose soul God thus
chooses for His special dwelling place! For if her mind is fixed on HIm,
as it ought to be, how she must needs forget herself; all her thoughts
are bent on how to please Him better, and when and how she may show Him
her love. This is the end and aim of prayer, my daughters, this is the
object of that spiritual marriage whose children are always good works.
Works are the best proof that the favors which we receive have come from
God. To give our Lord a perfect hospitality. Mary and Martha must
combine.
¶The King James Version (2)
(A letter from King James I to the Duke of Buckingham, December 1623)
My only sweet and dear child, Notwithsanding of your desiring me not to
write yesterday, yet had I written in the evening if, at my coming out of
the park, such drowsiness had not come upon me as I was forced to sit and
sleep in my chair half an hour. And yet I cannot content myself without
sending you this present, praying God that I may have a joyful and
comfortable meeting with you and that we may make at this Christmas a new
marriage ever to be kept hereafter; for, God so love me, as I desire only
to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished
in any part of the earth with you than I live a sorrowful widow's life
without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant
that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband, James R[ex].
.
¶ The Living Talmud: (3) Joshua Ben Perahyah says: Provide thyself with
a Teaher, get thee a Comrade, and Judge Everyone with the Scale Weighted
in His Favor. . . GET THEE A COMRADE. This teaches that a man should
get a comrade for himself, to eat with him, drink with him, study
Scripture with him, study Mishna with him sleep with him, and reveal to
him all his secrets, the secrets of the Torah and the secrets of worldly
things.
When two sit studying Torah and one of them makes a mistake in a matter
of halakah or of a chapter heading---or says of the unclean tha it is
clean, or of the clean it is unclean; or of the forbidden that it is
permitted, or of the permitted that it is forbidden--his comrade will
correct him (ARN). . . . If necessary, a man should buy a devoted friend
for himself. As the Sages mused to say : Give me friendship or give me
death And if a person cannot easily find a friend, he must strive all
his heart to do so, even if he has to go so far as compel the person to
love him, even if he has to buy his love and friendship (Maimonides).
¶ Sonnet CXVI - William Shakespeare (4)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
¶ The New York Times by way of Rex Wockner
MARRIED CANADIAN COUPLE DENIED ENTRANCE TO U.S.
A Canadian gay couple married in the province of Ontario, where full
same-sex marriage was legalized by court order this summer, was refused
entrance into the United States Sept. 18 when they insisted on using a
"family" form to clear customs and immigration.
US. officials said that Kevin Bourassa and Joe Varnell were legally
single and needed to fill out separate forms. The incident occurred at
the Toronto airport, where the Department of Homeland Security clears
U.S.-bound passengers in order to avoid operating customs and immigration
facilities in smaller U.S. cities where the only international flights
arrive from Canada. "We were not going to divorce ourselves in order to
enter a country," Bourassa told The New York Times. The couple was
headed to speak at a human-rights conference in Georgia. They may sue
over the matter if heir lawyer can figure out who and how to sue.
Bishop James Pike, who himself had committed matrimony several times,
used to say that the reason Islam had an edge on Christianity in Africa
(and is now the fastest growing religion on the planet) was that the
Christians were said to preach three gods and one wife whereas the
Muslims were heard to preach one god and three wives. Right wing groups
in the Churches are very ardent to defend lifetime heterosexual monogamy
seem to have forgotten that for most of the history of the peoples whose
lives are recorded in the Bible, polygamy--not monogamy--was "Biblical
sexuality" and that without it indeed, their own flourishing family trees
might be rather more like way side shrubbery or tumbleweed. In 1988 at
the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, under the watchful eye of
Anglican Communications officer Jim Rosenthal (also known as Compass
Rose), the African bishops asked for and got permission to baptize
polygamous families and thereby bring a husband and all his wives to
church membership without demanding that the husband forsake all but one
of the wives and thus abandon the multiple families structure inherited
from of old. Polygamy is and has been a feature of the extended family
ideal, giving status and wealth to the husband and father, assuring
security for the related wives and mothers, along with their children.
The families were thus enabled to provide hospitality with the many extra
hands available for work and service. My grandparents had a dozen
children, my own parents had eight, my heterosexual siblings had families
of two, three or four kids, anecdotal evidence that the extended family
is giving way to the independent elementary family in these latter days
(except amongst Latter Day Saints, whose ideal Mormon sized family was
cut off at the knees when Utah joined the Union, but they still have
schisms that want to go back to Olden Days.) Polygamy is still for
many a fact of abundant life, and to force all the extra wives to leave
would be to consign them to poverty and disgrace. And would consign the
men to social shame and obloquy, where manhood is defined not by the
condoms and condos and Cadillacs owned but by the wives and kids in
tow. So the bishops said that in Africa, the Church would allow such
extended families to be baptized, provided hat after Baptism, no new
Wives be added to the collection, and that ultimately in this way
polygamy would be phased out and monogamy phased in.
We should remember the whole context of polygamy in the Middle East, its
sacred place in Hebrew Scripture and in the Qur'an. when we overhear the
discussion of Jesus with the scholarly Pharisees. "Is it lawful for a
man to divorce his wife? " And our myth of the origin of human
sexuality--the deep sleep and the rib-ectomy, the creation of the "Eva"
from the costilla of the sleeping Adam, and the pronouncement of marriage
as union into One Flesh. Our story of the Rib is from the second chapter
of Genesis, and is the older version of the two mythic accounts of human
genesis. In the first version, God makes the human all at once, in two
models: in the translation by Oria and Lenowitz, it goes like this:
"The gods said 'let's make some red dirt that'll look like us, just like
us. It'll boss: the fish in the sea, the bird in the sky and cattle and
all the earth and all the crawlers crawling the earth. So the gods
godmade man as he looks looking like the gods they godmade them prick and
hole they godmade them and the gods blessed them and the gods said to
them BREED a lot and fill the earth and take it over."
Now the version we hear today is from the second chapter, and God
has made only an undifferentiated generic human being, the Adam, and is
in the process of looking for good company for the Adam. God has
noticed that the Adam was alone in Eden, and brought all the wild things
for the Adam to have a look at, and all the birds, from leathery to
feathery, and "none proved to be the suitable partner for the Adam."
Only after all these failures in love-partner possibilities, does God
decide on a general anaesthesia and a rib-ectomy. The story does not
claim to be science, and it does not try to say everything there is to
say about human origins or human sexuality. But it does say that the
sexes have one origin--that gender specificity was not there at the
beginning, that male-ness and femaleness are not eternal, that across the
gender gap we are "bone of each other's bone, flesh of each other's
flesh."
The Upanishads, eighth century BC, from India, tell us of the
universe before time, being itself the SELF, which shouts, "It is I!" and
in doing so finds itself alone, and "lacked delight and wishes there were
another." Resonances of Genesis Two, aren't there? In the Sanksrit myth
the Self swells up and splits to become male and female; like the Adam,
it was both before that. And now the sexes embrace, and become men and
women, bull and cow, mare and stallion, and know that they are One with
creation, from Godself to anthill. Here too is the unity of creation,
and the origin of sexuality as the fulfillment of the needs for
companionship, for suitable companionship.
In the Greek version of the Creation story which appears in Plato's
Symosium there are also similarities, but here there are three original
creatures, or races of creatures. There's a race of males who live in
the sun, a race of females who live in the earth, and a race in which the
sexes are joined, which lives in the moon. The gods are afraid of these
creatures--they are huge, for each is a double creature, back to back,
each with four hands, four feet, two faces, and so on. The male race is
two males, back to back, and the female is two females, back to back, and
the both-sex race is a male and female joined, back to back. The gods
decide to cut them down, and to filet them down the middle, like red
snappers, and so keep them from becoming two powerful. In this myth,
when the halves are divided, they hanker for reunion with their other
halves, and so continue to this day to do so. This myth explained for
the Greek the phenomenon not only of male and female heterosexuality, but
of sexual attraction in all its form as the search for the lost unity.
That if we are friends of God we shall find our own true loves and our
own true selves and be reunited with the one who is indeed our "other
half" -- whether in a hetero-sexual, homo-sexual, or ambi-sexual
relationship. This myth, like the one we have in the Bible, does not
divide God into male and female, as does the Eastern myth. It does not
assign primary sexual gender to our God but it does explain for people
what sexuality seems to be doing in the human race.
None of these stories is primarily about pro-creation, but about
relationship. Sexuality is in all these myths a provision for and an
explanation of the need and the drive for union with the Other. This is
Biblical sexuality, this is mythic sexuality in all the great creation
myths.
Now let us look at the exchange of Jesus with the Pharisees, in the light
of these traditions. The Pharisees come to him not really to learn about
human relationships or the wonder of sexuality or the great enabling
grace of the old stories. They come with their yellow legal pads and
pencils and they come to argue Canon Law and Church Tradition. "Isn't
it legal to get a divorce? Can a man divorce his wife?" Well, Jesus knew
the law books, perhaps not quite so well as they, but he had seen the
havoc they wreaked in people's lives. Someone has said that the purpose
of canon law is to provide for failures. Jesus knew about those, and
said so: "What do the books of Moses say? That is, the law books?" He
might have said, "What do you find about divorce in the Song of Songs
which is Dolomon's?" That's about rapture, but they wanted to talk about
rupture. "What about David and Jonathan?" he might have parried. But he
didn't digress, and advised they go to the law library, and not to
poetry. The interlocuters say, "Moses says it's legal, right here at
chapter and verse." And Jesus says, "but that's a provision made because
of your failures, because you ruptured instead of raptured. Because of
your hardness of heart. But it was not so from the git. God made you
for love and you want to talk law. God made you for union and you want
to talk schism. God wanted One mind, One heart, One flesh, and you want
to talk about how to divide up the bank account, the condominium, the
water-bed, and visiting rights."
Of course Moses allows for failure, but you're planning on it. It wasn't
so from the beginning. Of course the Church sees that relationships can
come apart, and that hard feelings take the place of honeymoons. But to
demand divorce, even to countenance that a woman be sent away from her
husband, was to consign her to death and destruction. The relationship
didn't just end, and the partners return to square one. The extra wives
of the polygamist in Africa, to whom will they go? The divorced wife of
whom the Pharisee spoke, what was to become of her? In India today,
brides whose dowries are spent or incomplete, are disposed of with a
deadly divorce: a quart of lamp oil and an accident near the fire, and
it is done. It is this graver "hardness of heart" that Jesus is
addressing when he denies divorce to the powerful males of the first
century. He was not a fundamentalist, for notice there is no
discussion here of a woman divorcing her husband, a situation that was
unheard of. Jesus is coming to the defense of defenseless women. The
question was not addressed to him from the Twentieth century but from the
First. To try to contextualize it to present day Texas or to lay the
prohibition down for all times and places is to fumble and flop. Jesus
points here to eternal principles that cannot be vitiated by the
emergency arrangements we have made to parachute out of our crash
landings, to climb into life-jackets when we jump overboard.
You insist on talking about rights and privileges and permissions and you
miss the point. Human relationships are about opportunity and rapture
and new life, new hope, and an end to "control" and the beginning of
autonomous relationships. Aloneness is to come to an end, and there
will no longer be the division that law talks about, but the union that
human sexuality and gender make possible. When God brings human beings
together, therefore, in this venture of rapture and union, let no human
institutions, however legally sanctioned, be used to create division and
despair and isolation. Let no man or man-made institution tear
asunder.
And no human law or failure of human law can destroy the intent of God
that our sexuality, as all the myths have told us, is for rapture and our
reunion with our true selves and each other and our God. The Pharisees
might have come to Jesus to ask "Is it lawful to stone to death these two
men taken in an act of sex?" Maybe they did, and maybe Jesus answered
them: "What do the books of Moses say? What does Leviticus say? And
they'd say, "Well, here's chapter and verse." And Jesus, as always,
would say, "Look beyond your petty nasty human laws which are about
failure and exclusion and not about joy and gladness for all. Look into
our Original Blessing, before our failtures, to the way God intended
human beings to relate to each other, to seek their true selves and to
find their true joys, and what God has so put together, what God has
joined, let no one put asunder."
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
[Based on and amplified from a homily preached at Integrity/Chicago on
October 4, 1988]
(1) The Essential Mystics: Selections from the World's Great Wisdom
Traditions. Edited and with an introduction by Andrew Harvey.
HarperSanFrancisco .©copyright 1996 by Andrew Harvey.
(2) "Hopelessly devoted to You", a letter from King James I to the Duke
of Buckingham, December 1623, from A Queer Reader,
edited and © by Parick Higgins. New York: The New Age Press. 1993
(3) "Get thee a comrade", from The Living Talmud: The Wisdom of the
Fathers" selected and translated by Judah Goldin. New American Library,
Mentor Religious Clasic.First printing 1957. ©Judah Goldin.
(4) The Sonnets of William Shakespeare, New York, the Heritage Press.
Special contents copyright 1941 for George Macy Companies, Inc.