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SS Simon & Jude, Oct 28
H o m
i l y G r i t s
Saint Simon
and Saint Jude, Apostles
October 28, 2003
Copyright
Grant Gallup - permission given for free distribution in fair use or
quotation )
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
O God, we thank you for the glorious company of the apostles, and
especially on this day for Simon and Jude; and we pray that, as they were
faithful and zealous in their mission, so we may with ardent devotion
make known the love and mercy of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; who
lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and
ever. Amen.
Deuteronomy 32:1-4 A faithful God, without deceit
Psalm 119:89-96 In aeternum, Domine - O Lord, your word is everlasting
Ephesians 2:13-22 You who once were far off have been brought near
John 15: 17-27 Servants are not greater than their master
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
Jeremiah 26:[1-6] 7-16 Thus says the Lord: . . . It may be that I may
change my mind
Psalm 11 In Domino confido - In the Lord have I taken refuge.
1 John 4:1-6 Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in
the flesh is from God
John 14:21-27 Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and
not to the world?
Preface: Apostles
Color: Red
In the diocese of Chicago, we had a number of parishes with double
names: St Joseph and St. Aidan, who lived and died centuries and
continents away from each other; St George and St Mathias, one of whom
probably never existed except in myth, and the other was the understudy
who stepped in for Judas Iscariot. There's St Paul and the Redeemer,
but they met only once, on the highway to Damascus, in a vision And
there's the Messiah and St Bartholomew: we know quite a lot about the
former, but almost nothing about the latter, who is said to have written
a gospel that got lost, and have gone to India and got himself skinned
alive in Armenia, probably by a rug merchant in a bazaar. (I bought a
carpet from him once, I think, in Beirut.) The double names of these
saints don't signify much except the mergers of parishes and missions
that over the years couldn't support themselves or their parsons, and so
the bishop forced them into shotgun weddings. In some diocese now,
parishes marry each other, and in others, rectors marry each other. (I
once saw two cardinal rectors eating popcorn out of the same box in a
middle row at the Music Box, a gay movie house in Chicago, and they are
still an item, twenty years later, 'though one of them has decamped to
the Orthodox Church in America.)
But we digress. Saints Simon and Jude went to apostle school together,
and tradition has it that they ran away to Persia together and tried to
convert the Zoroastrian Magi. It's the way of militants to try to export
their religion far and wide. Simon is called "Zealot" by St.
Luke--nowadays we would say "fundamentalist" or "super-patriot" or even
"terrorist". Patriotism, after all, can be that of a scoundrel, like
Ronald Reagan, comparing the vicious low-life Contra to "the founding
fathers", or like the terrorist George W. Bush, who thinks it patriotic
to launch pre-emptive strikes on weakling Muslim nations, or pay the
client state, Israel, to do it for him. Or, nationalism could be
compared to that of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, or Lucky Brazil's "Lula",
:who like the idea of returning the land and the riches of the Americas
to their rightful owners, the people who live on the land. Another
Simon, named Bolivar, has been called upon by the valiant Hugo Chavez to
name the Bolivarian Revolution in Latin America, and to raise up Zealots
to struggle with the Yankee imperialist. Simon Zelotes was one of those
nationalists who thought the occupying army of the Romans ought to get
out of Palestine. He thought Palestine ought to belong to those who have
lived there for two thousand years, and not surrendered to those
settlers who came to rob the riches of the land. If Simon were alive
today, he'd be called Simon Arafat, or Simon bin Laden. Apparently he
joined up with Jesus because the Jesus Movement looked like a sure
thing--Jesus is the one who had been overhead saying, "I have come to set
the world on fire and how impatient I am until it be done!"
And then there's Jude. We know him as Jude Thaddeus. In Chicago
newspapers, there are frequent little adverts thanking him for special
favors, because there's a major shrine to him at Ashland and 21st Street,
and his novenas never end. . The Roman Catholics have got a franchise on
some outlets named for Jude, as he is called upon as the patron of
hopeless cases. In John's gospel he speaks up only once, to ask Jesus
"how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the whole
world?" An especially disturbing question if it is true that the
purpose of the Church is to be the vanguard of a universal new humanity.
How can our gospel ever unite the world if it is only to be shared
amongst ourselves? Will Simon & Jude's mission to Iran in olden days to
plant the seed of gospel now at last come to nothing but the
fundamentalist brother of Billy Graham dithering and meddling there?
How is it, Jesus, that you have let this happen? And you, Jude, if you
are the patron of Hopeless Cases, give us a hand with these Graham
crackers. Jesus' answer comes in that great farewell discourse of
chapters 14 through 17 in John's gospel. Today's gospel is only the
verses from the 15th chapter, but they give us some of Jesus'reply. "If
the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you." Jesus
assumes the opposition of the world to the gospel vision; he assumes
persecution, he assumes the hatred of the world for the coming of
Liberaiton, for the coming of a new vision of humankind, unknown to the
fundamentalism of any faithlessness. Along with this realistic
prognosis, however, comes also a command: "This I command you, that you
love one another." And this is where we have work to do, and where I have
a lot of work to do: to love one's enemies is easy, but to tolerate
one's fundamentalist friends is the hard part. Solidarity with Quakers
and Unitarians, with Buddhists and Hindus, even with atheists and
agnostics, is easy. But try to love a fundamentalist and you've got a
day's work ahead of you. But it is the challenge of the Church's
children in this crazy century to love the unlovable. It is in our
solidarity with all god-fearing folk, even at some broad level with
fundamentalists, that in the face of unloving opposition, from the
worldly "Christianity" which hangs onto the old order of things, that we
must fully live and work in obedience to and in faithfulness to Jesus,
who promises us the "Paraclete"-- the "Walker-Alongside", the
revolutionary Compañero, the "running buddy" who will be the Hurricane of
Truth sweeping the way ahead of us. The Strong and Healing wind of the
Spirit.
Luke says Jude was the nephew of Jesus. Nephews in my experience like to
follow their uncles around, for they meet interesting friends that way
The Reverend Grant Ford of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan
Community Churches founded in the U.S. an order of Gay monks named for
Jude, . the one referred to in the New Testament as "Judas Not
Iscariot." The tradition says that Simon and Jude were martyred
together in what is modern Iran on the same day. Another tradition says
they died peacefully together. John Boswell found a liturgy in an old
euchlogion which invoked these two saints for the blessing of a same-sex
marriage.
In any case, it is remarkable and instructive that they are remembered
together in the Church's Kalendar. The Eastern Orthodox Church shyly
observes their remembrance on separate days. The gospel for their feast
day is appropriate for them, as a gay apostolic couple. "I command you
to love one another, even if the world hates you. If you were like the
world, the world would love you, because the world loves its own; but
because you are not of the world, I chose you-- therefore the world hates
you. You should remember that you my servants are no greater than your
master. They persecuted me, they'll persecute you, too. They hated me
without any reason."
Jesus' message to all Gay and Lesbian people is to identify himself with
them, in the oppression that the world gives to them, the scorn and
opprobrium that the world has for them in this evil and unloving age,
gone mad with bloodshed, where you are rewarded and praised, decorated
and celebrated for taking up arms to slaughter your fellow human beings
in warfare, but where you will be at least laughed to scorn and at worst
beaten and battered and hung on barbed wire with Mathew Shepherd, and
left to die, for being a lover and not a fighter. "You are my witnesses,
you are my martyrs"-- that's the Greek word there-- because you have been
with me from the git." So the Jesus who chose them to be his disciples
and his apostles, very well indeed may have introduced them to each
other. "Nephew Jude, I'd like you to meet my passionate friend Simon."
So it is like Jesus to choose us for friends and choose friendships for
us, and given half a chance Jesus will fix us up with someone to love.
At least we'll get (as he promised) brothers and sisters and mothers and
children and all sorts of wondrous relationships in this world and in the
world to come. He said so, one afternoon when they sent relatives to
fetch him home from his collection of oddballs and freaks, "Dorothy's
friends," like she found on the way to Oz, the same kind that Jesus
liked. Those of you seek to do God's will are my kith and my kin;
Jesus said that. And Paul wrote to the Ephesians and to us, that
distance and difference can no longer divide us. Jesus has abolished the
laws of racism and class and heterosexism, and has given us one new
humanity in place of the old destructive divisiveness and estrangement.
Even our militancy and our true patriotism ought not to divide us
anymore. Simon didn't stop being a militant Palestinian nationalist when
he learned from Jesus that the world was full of his siblings. My own
true patriotism as a U.S. citizen and a Chicagoan, and at the same time
a legally resident alien in Nicaragua, and at the same time a lover of
every land I have sojourned in, including Cuba, Lebanon, Turkey, and
Iraq, among others, doesn't mean I have to have the kind of insane
jingoism of the C.I.A. flunkie who betrays the human race in the pay of
the war criminals running the U.S. at the present moment. It's good
that the Sandinistas of Nicaragua should love their country and that the
Baathists of Syria should love theirs, and it's good that I, the Gay
Socialist Chicagoan should love "Michigan, my Michigan", at the end of
the country road in the land where I was born. Our differences should
not make us hostile to each other, for we are in Christ no longer mere
"strangers and sojourners, but fellow and sister citizens with the
saints--a new construction, with Jesus as its cornerstone."
The writer to the Ephesians tells us that those of us who are in Christ
have come from distant places to be together in Christ---and this means
more than geographically distant places. We have come also from the
nearby lands of benighted homophobia and the outrageously distanced and
alienated land of sexual oppression and rejection, from secret upstairs
closets and unknown lockers in the cellar, for Jesus is our peace, who
has made us both one people, one human race.
The Song of Moses begins our readings today with a proclamation of
Yahweh's greatness:
"God is the Rock, whose work is perfect,
for all his ways are Equity,
A God faithful, without unfairness,
Uprightness itself, and Justice."
So don't tell me that Simon and Jude don't belong together. That's a
merger Jesus himself arranged, and it's a marriage made by the God who is
the God of Justice itself. So Simon and Jude's day is a holiday of Gay
saints, a holiday of Gay Zealots, of queers who will Act Up! Of Dykes on
Bikes! And of international solidarity of a galaxy of gay and joyous
militancy. And Strait and Plain ones, too, for those who see that Jesus
has broken down the dividing walls of hostility and abolished in his
flesh all oppressive laws and commandments and ordinances, and created in
himself One New Humanity--one complete androgynous femininity and
masculinity, a Womb-Man, in place of the Two, thus making Peace. And
he has reconciled us all to God in one body on the Cross. And that
through us, through Saint Simon Sandinista and Jude of Hopeless Cases,
Jesus still preaches peace to the neighbor and the ones afar off..
The gay saint Wystan Hugh Auden wrote it out for us in what has become
Hymn #463 in the Hymanl 1982, with the lovely
tunes by David Hurd and Richard Wetzel. It 's from Auden's Christmas
Oratorio, "For the Timne Being":
He is the Way.
Follow him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures.
He is the Truth.
Seek him in the Kingdom of Anxiety:
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
He is the Life.
Love him in the World of the Flesh:
and at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
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