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Pentecost 21 - Proper 27-B, Nov 9, 2003
H
o m i l y G r i t s
The Twenty
First Sunday after Pentecost
Year B
Proper 27- November 9, 2003
November 8 - 1983 Augusto Ramírez,
priest martyr in the defense of the poor in Guatemala.
November 10 -
1483 - Martin Luther born in Germany
November 11
- Martin of Tours, Soren Kierkegaard.
(© 2003 by Grant
Gallup - permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation
)
O God, whose blessed Son came into the world that he might destroy the
works of the devil and make us children of God and heirs of eternal life:
Grant that, having this hope, we may purify ourselves as he is pure;
that, when he comes again with power and great glory, we may be made like
him in his eternal and glorious kingdom; where he lives and reigns with
you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
1 Kings 17:8-16 The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of
oil fail
Psalm 146 or 146:4-9 Conserva me, Domine - Protect me, O God
Hebrews 9:24-28 He has appeared once for all, at the end of the age
Mark 12: 38-44 This poor widow has put in more than all who have
contributed to the treasury.
¶ Revised Common Lectionary -
Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17 "My daughter, I need to seek some security for you."
and Psalm 127 Nisi Dominus - Unless the Lord builds the house
or 1 Kings 17:8-16 as above, BCP as above, BCP
and Psalm 146 as above, BCP
Hebrews 9:24-28 as above, BCP
Mark 12:38-44 as above, BCP
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
Proper 27-B
1 Kings 17:8-16 as above, BCP & RCL
Psalm 146 The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down. As above, BCP & RCL
Hebrews 9:24-28 as above, BCP & RCL
Mark 12:38-44 as above, BCP & RCL
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary - (32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)
1 Kgs 17:10-16 as above, BCP, RCL, LBW
Ps 146:7, 8-9a, 9b-10 as above BCP, RCL, LBW
Heb 9:24-28 as above as above, BCP, RCL, LBW
Mark 12:38-44 or 12:41-44 as above, BCP, RCL, LBW
¶ Poor Widow:--Points for Shared Reflection - By Miriam Therese Winter
(1)
+ This story is paradigmatic of several contemporary justice issues,
notably, the inequity between haves and have-nots, and the feminization
of poverty. What does this Gospel story say to realities such as these?
+ Consider the irony of a poor woman giving her all to the wealthy,
male-dominated religious institution, with inadequate recompense. What
parallels come to mind between her experience and your own?
A Psalm on Behalf of the Poor.
Choir 1 Helpless are the poor, Shaddai, for the poor do not have access
to the bounty of the earth.
Choir 2 Homeless are the poor, Shaddai; they lack he opportunity for
shelter and security in the time of dire need.
Choir 1 Hungry are the poor, Shaddai; they dream at night of lavish
feasts, at dawn, of daily brad.
Choir 2 Without hope are the poor, Shaddai, when promises all trickle
down to nothing but despair.
Choir 1 How long must the poor cry out to You and wait to receive an
answer?
Choir 2 How long can we keep faith in You, so silent to our need?
Choir 1 Forgive us our doubts and addictions, our escape from
desperation.
Choir 2 Give us the strength and fortitude to wait upon Your word.
Choir 1 May the morning star bring hope to all in the midst of
destitution.
Choir 2 May evening find the poor at rest in Your everlasting arms.
Choir 1 On That Day the poor will dance through all the streets of
heaven.
Choir 2 On That Day there will be no trace of inequality.
Choir 1 Blessed are You, God of the Poor, Mother of all Your children.
Choir 2 We cling to the breasts of Your abundance, and gratefully drink
our fill.
¶ Mother Teresa of Calcutta
Make us worthy, Lord, to serve our fellow human beings throughout the
world who live and die in poverty and hunger. Give them through our
hands this day their daily bread, and by our understanding love, give
peace and joy. Amen. (2)
¶ Voices of the First World:
The Universal Mother: Kagaba Myth (3)
The mother of our songs, the mother of all our seed, bore us in the
beginning of things, and so she is the mother of all types of men, the
mother of all nations. She is the mother of the thunder, the mother of
the streams, the mother of the trees and all things. She is the mother
of the world and of the older brothers, the stonepeople. She is the
mother of the fruits of the earth and of all things. She is the mother
of our youngest brothers, and the strangers. She is the mother of our
dance paraphernalia, of all our temples and she is the only mother we
possess. She alone is the mother of the fire and the Sun and the Milky
Way. . . . She is the mother of the rain and the only mother we possess.
And she has left us a token in all temples. . . a token in the form of
songs and dances. She has no cult, and no prayers are really directed to
her, but when the fields are sown and the priests chant their
incantations the Kagaba says, 'And then we think of the one and only
mother of all growing things, of the mother of all things.' One prayer
was recorded, 'Our mother of the growing fields, our mother of the
streams, will [you] have pity upon us? For [to] whom do we belong?
Whose seeds are we? To our mother alone do we belong.'
¶ The Aphrodite of the Flowers, at Knossos - SAPPHO (4)
Leave Crete and come to this holy temple
where the pleasant grove of apple trees
circles an altar smoking with frankincense.
Here roses leave shadow on the ground
And cold springs babble through apple branches
where shuddering leaves pour down profound sleep.
In our meadow where horses graze
and wild flowers of spring blossom,
anise shoots fill the air with aroma.
And here, Queen Aphrodite, pour
heavenly nectar into gold cups
and fill them gracefully with sudden joy.
(translated by Willis Barnstone)
Lots of things have been learned to me and to my former professors in
seminary, those who are still alive, since we parted company in 1959, and
one of them is that archaeologists in the city of Rome have learned us
all about the Christian community centers that existed in the first two
centuries of the Church's life there. Before the imperial Church moved
into the handsome basilicas, we had thought she had lurked in underground
catacombs, but have now learned that this was largely Romantic fiction.
Christians began to meet and for a couple of hundred years continued to
do so, in the homes of wealthy widows, made so by the widow-making
Empire, for they were widows of the martyrs, or of those who had fallen
out of favor with the tyranny called Empire. As missionaries like
Peter, or even Paul, arrived in Rome on their visits, they would stay in
the homes of these widows. Eventually they were the centers for
Christian worship, and were expanded to become grand places, though from
outside the house no one would know that they were illegal "safe houses",
for the revolutionary movement that was called the Way. Father Kevin
Pearson, then a seminarian, went with me to Guatemala City in 1988 and we
studied Spanish in one such contemporary Safe House there, which was
actually the home of the first Anglican woman priest of Guatemala, then
in New York City teaching liberation theology at the General Seminary.
Her house was used as the Oscar Romero Institute, an underground
language school, and "consciousness-raising" center, where we encountered
and learned from those who were in the Resistance. We stayed with Don
Herlindo Hicho and his family, whose daughter Irma Ramos had been
"disappeared" a few years before in the Guatemalan government's attack on
university student leadership. Kevin and I actually slept in the bunk
beds in her little bedroom, still furnished with her childhood dolls,
pictures, and mementos. Secondary relics of a modern martyr and saint.
Her spirit moved amidst us as we listened and learned.
In the first century, these houses were called "tituli", and were usually
named for women saints: Mary and Cecilia and the others named in the
sanctorales. Women actually owned them and women named them.
Eventually, however, they became the "cardinal" (that is the "hinge")
churches of the city of Rome, and the deacons appointed to service in
them were called the Cardinal Deacons. (There's a lot more to this story
that ends up with all-male Cardinals flitting in red feathers about the
city of Rome. and living in palaces where women appear only as servants
or secret concubines. Save that for the novelists.)
But here I want to remind us of how important widows were in the early
Church. The Acts of the Apostles tells us they were the reason that the
order of deacons was invented in the first place: someone was needed to
look after the poor widows, for they weren't all rich, with big houses in
Rome. Every revolutionary movement has widows. One of the striking
things about Central America in my experience here since 1989 is the
number of widows: the widows of the disappeared, with whom we met in San
Salvador and in Guatemala, where there are thousands of women whose
husbands, daughters and sons were kidnapped by the dictatorships
installed and maintained by U.S. tax dollars . And the widows in
Nicaragua, whose husbands were murdered by the Contra, also supported by
U.S. tax dollars (they are even now boldly asking the U.S. to pay
military retirement benefits to them, as Veterans of the U.S.
counter-revolutionary army.) Widows are one of the classes of oppressed
created by the counter-revolutions funded so generously, if sometimes
secretly, by American tax payers. The slaughter of their husbands,
their daughters, and their sons has always politicized women to the point
that they are willing, if they had not been before that, to commit
themselves and their goods to the Revolution, to the cause of the Kingdom
of God. Nowadays their gifts are often diverted to serve the
counter-revolution in the Church.
Back in the time of Elijah there were widows in the land. Jesus chose
also to preach about one such widow in his very first sermon at Nazareth,
when he offended his neighbors by reminding them, "There were many widows
in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years
and six months, and there came a great famine over all the land and
Elijah was sent to none of them, but only out of the country to
Zarephath, in the enemy territory of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow."
Elijah is suffering himself, not only from the famine in the land, but
because the government of Ahab was looking to kill him for his political
opposition. He goes off to hide in Lebanon. For a Jew to hide there was
as bad as it might be now, or worse. The Bible says God had told him to
go hide there.
Now when Jesus says the only one to help Elijah was a Palestinian woman,
we see that it would be as if a rabbi in Ariel Sharon's hearing would
stand up in the Knesset and say that God had visited a widow of a
Palestinian guerilla in Lebanon, rather than visit any of the needy
widows made so by Hammas. You were not surprised then that the synagogue
tried to throw Jesus off a cliff after that homily.
The first reading was the text that Jesus referred to, and it was in the
context of that struggle, a religious war, that the visit was made to
Zarephath. It's a town on the coast of Palestine--the Philistine coast.
The people there worshipped the prosperity God called Baal, and they also
worshipped fertility gods, who promised them riches and children if only
they would offer worship to the gods of wealth, prosperity, possessions,
sexuality. Rain would fall, sun would shine, whenever they pushed their
gods' buttons. Elijah says, "Oh No they won't!" And he asked the true
Godof heaven to show that he could not be manipulated by the worshippers
of Good Luck. God heard Elijah, and turned off the nozzle for three and
a half years, when there was no rain, no crops, no prosperity, no food.
And when Elijah himself got hungry God said go over to the PLO side, over
there on the West Bank, and the Arab widow will feed you. He goes at
once, not to rip her off of her last meal, as it seems to her at first,
but to help her survive by helping him to survive. The Revolution has to
be built by the solidarity of peasants, workers, unemployed, outcast (she
not a 'believer') whose gifts are all to be used by God to guard the
prophetic voices amongst God's people. So the widow's last little
skillet corn bread is shared, her last fist full of masa for tortillas,
her last little jar of oil never runs out, and there's food enough, and
"she and he, and her household ate for many days." "The gospel is always
one hungry person telling another hungry person where to find bread."
In my experience in Managua, the beggar women and men who come to the
gate are always courteous and generous themselves--sometimes when I hear
them call at the gate, I bid them wait while I get dressed, or finish my
prayer, and they wait patiently until I or someone else can come to
serve them. God's table is always furnished with guests, for they
obviously tell others where to find coffee and tortilla, as sharing good
news with a compańero.
God uses such outsiders as the Widow of Sidon to preserve the Word of God
when it is lost or hidden in the midst of God's own Church. So God used
the widows of Cenral America to preserve in the Western hemisphere the
dedication to the people that has been lost in the North, which
hypocritically vaunts itself as "democratic." There are hungry widows
in Nicaragua, in Bolivia, in the Congo, in Ethiopia, in all of Azania
too (it won't be called "South Africa" much longer) and there will
doubtless be more widows in all the world before the great Widow-Making
Empire is folded up and put away.
Jesus looked at the widow in the Temple one day, and pointed her out to
the disciples. They sat in that part of the Temple called the Court of
the Women, probably because Jesus had women disciples as well as men, and
their presence with the male disciples meant they would not go into the
Court of Israel, where men only could go. So they sat where they could
see the thirteen trumpet-shaped boxes that received the gifts of the
people. They were prominently placed, so that all could see the sums
that the wealthy (who gave generously) cast clinking into the basons.
Jesus doesn't denounce their gifts, but notices as they all do that "many
rich people put in large sums." There's a natural tendency to want to
see how much the rich put into the offering plate or how they patronize
the parish budget or the building fund. Nowadays they usually use
envelopes, or wire transfers, so we can't see how little they actually
put in compared to their assets. It can't always be modesty they
motivates them. It is sometimes shame.
Along comes a poor woman with two copper coins, which Mark explains are
the lepton, which was about a quarter inch in diameter, and were in
circulation in Palestine, but not in Rome. In Nicaragua we have such
insignificant coins--"chump shange" we called it in Chicago-- I have one
in my pocket just now, familiarly known as a "chelín" --it takes four of
them to make one cordoba, and it takes fifteen cordobas to make a dollar.
Even some beggars here look disdainfully on the gift of a chelin, worth
25 Nicaraguan centavos. The centavo here is of such little value that
there is no coin for it any more, but only little paper scrips like
Monopoly money, that I like to use for bookmarks. Mark tells his readers
that the two leptons were worth a quadran, so they'd understand. Two
little coins, worth even less than a chelin. Mark tells us she had two
of them, and that she gave both of them. She could have kept one, and
fulfilled more than her obligation: fifty per cent, which was the
standard of Luke's gospel. Our cheap grace idea of tithing is not in
the New Testament at all--where the standard is that which Luke tells in
his presentation of Zacchaeus "reparations to the poor" of fifty per cent
of our possessions. But in Mark, time and again, it is one hundred per
cent that is expected. Remember the rich young man who wanted to be
Jesus'disciples? So the poor widow, unlike him, has heard the gospel
and preaches it in her life. Jesus puts her gift in perspective: in
comparing it deliberately to the tithing of the rich: "I say to you the
poor widow has put in more than all those who contribute to the temple,
for they all give out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has
put in everything she had, her whole living." The value of any gift
cannot be set by its cash value, but by what it represents for the giver,
what it has cost the giver in terms of the giver's situation. It is a
small percentage of abundance which the rich give, but one hundred per
cent out of her impoverishment which is the acceptable gift of the widow,
and is the Sacrament to Shame the Rich. And so the Palestinian widow
gave to Elijah, when her death and her son's death from starvation were
immanent. For her Last Supper she chose to invite the Messenger of God,
and so she too was giving her life in the measure of meal and the cruet
of oil, just as Jesus did with bread and wine, and as the widow in the
Temple cast in all that she had. Jesus commended her, just as Elijah
had asked a share of the poor, who are the real experts and all our
teachers at sharing and solidarity. No one is allowed to get off the
hook by claiming "There are others who have more than I do who could be
carrying the load." Neither the widow in the Temple nor the widow of
Sidon made such a claim, for they know that those who are better off than
they will rarely offer to carry the load. Some do, of course: that's
where the tituli churches of early Rome came from, and those widows had
been motivated by the murder of their families; their husbands had not
died of old age and left them riches.
And that's how the Church got on the move in the Empire. There are even
now wealthy patrons of the Kingdom movement, of the revolutionary reign
of God, within the imperial world owned by the Rulers of darkness,
'though most are content to maintain the institutional Church which takes
few risks. But God sends prophets always to get the help of the poor,
of women, of outlaw minorities. Gays and Lesbians, long hidden in
closets and confined to cellars, are even now more at risk, having heard
God the Mother call them to come into the Light and out of closets and
dungeons of self-oppression. They have moved closer into the telescopic
sites of the murderers who pretend only to be protecting heterosexual
monogamy, defenders of the patriarchal family, whose real targets are
nearby dissidents and escapees from their Control.
It is interesting that Jesus does not praise the widow for helping
Elijah: in fact, he says that it was she who was blessed by his visit.
She got to make an investment in the future, she got to share in the
meals of many days, she got to pour from the cruse of oil till the famine
ceased. She was privileged to have been called upon to see the future
and help to birth it. She is one of the myriad unnamed heroines of
Biblical faith, the ones who midwived the Reign of God.
The epistle lesson talks of sacrifice, and how Christ has become not the
kind of priest who has to take repeated sacrifices to God on our behalf,
but that he himself, our priest, has become our own sacrifice, and that
the next time Messiah comes it will not be to deal with our sins and
failings, but to bring us our final liberation and deliverance, to
complete the revolution for us who breathlessly await its fulfillment.
Our own total commitment is what he calls for now, not our dribbles and
drabbles, no tithes and bribes and tips, mordidas and propinas, but
commitment. Always do the generous thing, one of the saints told me
once: you will never regret it. Love is always in the Red, financially
and politically. When he lay in his last illness in a cheap Paris hotel
room, the prophet and gay saint Oscar Wilde said, "I am dying as I have
lived, beyond my means." We are all called upon to do that. Jesus said,
"Little children, it is your father's good pleasure to give you a
Kingdom."
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) Woman Word: A Feminist Lectionary and Psalter: Women of the New
Testament.
by Miriam Therese Winter. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co. 2001
Copyright 1990 by Medical Mission Sisters.-
(2) Mother Teresa of Calcutta
from Lord Hear Our Prayer, ed. by Thomas McNally and William G. Storey.
Copyright 1978 by Ave Paria Press, Notre Dame, Indiana.
(3) Universal Mother: Kagaba myth. From The Essential Mystics, Selections
from the World's Great Wisdom Traditions. Edited and with an
Introdeuction by Andrew Harvey, HarperSanFrancisco copyright 1996.
(4) Aphrodite of the Flowers, by Sappho. Translated by William
Barnstone, from The Soul is Here For Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many
Cultures. Edited by Robert Bly, Hopewell NJ: The Ecco Press. Copyright
1995.