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Pentecost 23 Proper 29-B Nov 23 2003
H
o m i l y G r i t s
The Twenty
Third Sunday after Pentecost
Year B
Proper 29- November 23, 2003
Nov 28 - 1976 Lilliana Esthere
Aimetta, Methodist, Martyr in the cause of the poor, Buenos Aires
Nov 29 International
Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People
(© 2003 by Grant
Gallup - permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation
)
Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in
your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of Lords: Mercifully
grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be
freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who lives and
reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Daniel 7:9-14 As I looked, the beast was slain
Psalm 93 Dominus regnavit - The Lord is King and has put on splendid
apparel
Revelation 1:1-8 Behold he is coming with the clouds and every eye will
see him
John 18:33-37 Pilate called Jesus and said to him 'Are you the King of
the Jews?"
or Mark 11:1-11 "What are you doing, untying the colt?"
¶ Revised Common Lectionary -
2 Samuel 23:1-7 When one rules justly, it dawns on them like the morning
light
and Psalm 132:1-12, (13-18) Remember O Lord in David's favor, all the
hardships he endured
or
Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 as above BCP
and Psalm 93 as above BCP
Revelation 1:4b-8 as above BCP
John 18:33-37 as above BCP
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship Christ the King - Last Sunday after Pentecost
Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 as above
Psalm 93 Ever since the world began, your throne has been established.
Revelation 1:4b-8 as above BCP, RCL
John 18:33-37 as above BCP, RCL
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary - The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ the
King
Last Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Dan 7:13-14 as above, BCP, RCL, LBW
Ps 93:1a, 1b-2, 5 as above BCP, RCL, LBW
Rev 1:5-8 as above, BCP, RCL, LBW
John 18:33b-37 as above, BCP, RCL, LBW
¶ Conrad Noel: Jesus the Heretic (1)
And so we have come full circle back to the things which are not shaken
and are eternal. We began with the Blessed Trinity as the basis of a New
World Order. We dismissed pietism as an unworthy parody of piety We
discovered that there were in all ages almost unseen minorities which
kept alive the flame of true piety; they were not ashamed to be called
rebels and heretics and without them, true orthodoxy would have sunk into
dull conventionality and death. They were the salt of the earth; and
from such a group had sprung the Son of Man, representative of all that
was alive in humankind and representative of God, indeed God Himself
clothed in human flesh.
Here was Joy for every age, every generation;
Prince and peasant, chief and sage, Ev'ry tongue and nation.
Denounced as a heretic and a pretender, He had lived and died that He
might bear witness to the Truth, for He Himself was the Truth of God
Incarnate. God the Father had vindicated His Son by raising Him from the
dead and had exalted Him in triumph to His own right hand, that from the
very Heart and Energy of God He might pour His Spirit upon all mankind
that they with Him might establish God's kingdom of equity here upon
earth.
¶ Jon Sobrino: Christ the Liberator (2)
So the presence of Christ in history depends, in a way, on what his
church is. In affirming the lordship of Christ, the church is stating
two things. One, directly, is the transcendent possibility of Christ, as
Lord, influencing history. The second is that, in believing that Christ
himself accepts, so to speak, being mediated by the church, it confesses
its responsibility for making him present in history. The Lord is
still--partly--at the mercy of the church. . . This, I believe, is
what is at stake when in ecclesiology it is said that the church is the
sacrament, the body of Christ. In one of his brilliant phrases in the
letter to the Colossians, Paul states that he rejoices in the sufferings
he is undergoing for their sake and then adds, without any apparent
logical or necessary connection, ' In my flesh I am completing what is
lacking in Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, that is, the
church. (1:24)' The now exalted Christ, the Lord, needs to go on
suffering throughout history for the sake of his church. . . Christ,
then, has decided to make himself present in history, but in order to do
so he needs the church to reproduce the work of Jesus in history. He
'needs' us in order to be Lord. . . .
The New Testament nowhere spells out precisely what this cosmic
lordship of Christ is. It states that the powers of this world are
subject to it, but that they are not yet annihilated, which will happen
in due course, ' after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority
and power (1 Cor 15:24) so that only at the end, once death has been
overcome, will Christ hand over the Kingdom to the Father and God be all
in all. According to this, between resurrection and parousia it falls to
the church, as body of Chrsit, to make him present in a history in which
powers contrary to the Lord exist. In working terms, the 'state', the
'emperor' and 'wealth' are not the final powers in history, since they
are subject to Christ, which generates the hope of being able to triumph
over them. But, on the other hand, without being naive, as these powers
are not yet destroyed, to put it mildly, this will happen only at the
end.
¶ How Many Heavens : Dame Edith Sitwell. (3)
The emeralds are singing on the grasses
And in the trees the bells of the long cold are ringing,--
My blood seems changed to emeralds like the spears
Of grass beneath the earth piercing and singing.
The flame of the first blade
Is an angel piercing through the earth to sing
"God is everything!"
The grass within the grass, the angel in the angel, flame
Within the flame, and He is the green shade that came
To be the heart of shade."
The grey-beard angel of the stone,
Who has grown wise with age, cried, "Not alone
Am I within my silence, -- God is the stone in the still stone, the
silence laid
In the heart of silence" . . . then, above the glade
The yellow straw of slight
Whereof the sun has built his nest, cry "Bright
Is the world, the yellow straw
My brother,--God is the straw within the straw: -- All things are
Light."
He is the sea of ripeness and the sweet apple's emerald lore.
So you, my flame of grass, my root of all the world from which all Spring
shall grow,
O you, my hawthorn bough of the stars, now leaning low
Through the day, for your flowers to kiss my lips, shall know
He is the core of the heart of love, and He, beyond labouring seas, our
ultimate shore.
¶ The Unknown Christ of Hindusim: Raimundo Panikkar (4)
God is at work in all religions: the Christian kerygma does not proclaim
a new God, but the mirabilia of God, of which the Mystery of Christ
hidden in God is the alpha and omega. The very expression in fact is
declaring that Christ is not yet 'finished', not 'discovered', until the
' last moment' or the 'end' has come. The process itself is still open
ended.
In the wake of St Paul we believe we may speak not only of the unknown
God of the Greeks, but also of the hidden Christ of Hinduism--hidden and
unknown and yet present and at work because he is not far from anyone of
us. St Paul had to fight on two different fronts in order to defend the
Christian position. On the one hand the Jews, even when converted,
tended to make Christianity into a reformed sect of Judaism (Romans and
Galatians are the main epistles in this struggle.) The Greeks, on the
other hand, were inclined to absorb Christianity into a kind of gnosis or
a variety of Greek wisdom. In both cases the struggle was the
same--against the attempt to minimize the figure of Christ and interpret
it apart from the central mystery of the Trinity. Paul's reaction was to
show how in Christ the mystery of God has been revealed, and how he--the
Pantocrator, the cosmic redeemer, the beginning and end of all things,
the only-begotten, the Logos, is at the same time Jesus, son of Mary,
crucified by Men and risen from the dead so that he may sum up the whole
act of creation in himself and lead it back to God the Father, gathering
together all the scattered pieces of wandering humanity, of a Mankind
which remains full of expectancy, because the children of God are still
to be made known. Finally, I shall formulate a theological conclusion
which is directly consequent upon this christological approach: the
unity of Christ. Whatever God does ad extra happens through Christ.
Thus, recognizing the presence of God in other religions is equivalent to
proclaiming the presence of Christ in them, ' for in him all things
subsist.' (Col.1:17).
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My friend Norman Pittenger, who was born in the USA, and for many years
was the closeted gay Professor of Theology at the General Seminary,
eventually came out and become an expatriate to England and a fellow at
King's College, Cambridge. He used to say that whereas England was a
crowned republic, the United States was an elected monarchy. That was
when we still had elections by the people, instead of selections by the
oligarchy. I have, off and on in my life, attended various political
parties, especially cocktail parties, and worn various hats and bumper
stickers, from the membership in the Republican Party held by my father
in gratitude for its giving him a job in County Welfare, in Depression
days, when I was born, to the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace when I
was in high school, to the romantic monarchism of my Tolkein period,
(He once described himself as a philosophical anarchist, but believed
that true anarchy would ultimately result in a natural monarchy). So
there is something in me even now that is in tune with the Rojinegro of
the Sandinista flag--the Black of Anarchism, the Red of Socialism. So
still throbs in my heart the anarcho-syndicalism there since bypass
surgery, the communism of the Church in the Acts of the Apostles and the
Catholic socialism of my unsettling and unsettled years. Along with
becoming an Anglo-Catholic in my college years, I tried to fit English
history, including its monarchy, into my head. My forebear, John Gallop
was a Puritan, and the first captain of Boston's Harbor, whose
grandfather had come over on the Mary and John in 1630. I loved it when
I heard of Garrison Keillor's testimony before a Senate subcommittee
regarding the National Emdowment for the Arts in the early nineties, when
he said of his forbears: "My ancestors were Puritans from England. They
arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than
were permissible under English law at that time." For lack of a
Lutheran church in the hamlet where I was born, I was raised a
Presbyterian, but my Lutheran mother kept me from ever becoming a
Puritan, taught me how to play cards and mix lager with ice cream,
pronouncing that "everything goes good with beer," all the while singing
"Ach, Du Lieber Augustin". But somewhere along the way, in spite of the
burps, I came to agree with E. M. Forster: "I believe in aristocracy. .
. not an aristocracy of power, based on rank and influence, but an
aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. Its
members are found in all nations and classes, and through all the ages,
and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They
represent the true human tradition, the one queer victory over cruelty
and chaos." I suppose it is something like what Lezgay people call
"gaydar," the gay radar that twitches our antennae. There is also
our instinctive love of monarchy--and of parodies of it--and of
celebrations of it. It will offend no one of us now to find that the
current Charles, Apparent lady-in-waiting to the English throne is
rumored to be bisexual as well as a royalist. Since GRITS isn't
published in England, the news is not under the ban. God save the
Queens!
Attempts are made from time to time in the US Episcopal Church to get
into its calendar the January 30th martyrdom of Charles Stuart, King of
England, beheaded on that date in 1649 by the Roundheads and Puritans who
also colonized New England. He was beheaded for crimes against the
people, but it was the upwardly mobile land-grabbing bourgeoisie who did
it, not the poor street people who groaned aloud in horror at his
beheading and the destruction of the English Church. "They were like men
coming up with axes to a grove of trees * they broke down all your carved
work with hatchets and hammers. They set fire to your holy place * they
defiled the dwelling place of your Name and razed it to the ground." So
until the Restoration must Anglicans have whispered from their forbidden
Prayer Book the prophetic Psalm 74, Ut quid, Deus? "O God, why have you
utterly cast us off?" I came to believe that Charles had died as much in
defense of the Catholic religion as in defense of the "divine right of
Kings", and 'though the latter died with him, the former lives on
vibrantly in the Church of England and all its Anglican subsidiaries,
including even the Methodism which now makes itself available to Ecclesia
Anglicana for remarriage after its divorce, or was it only separate
maintenance.
The theory of the divine right of Kings goes back to Constantine the
Emperor, who on 28 October in the year 312 CE
raised the cross as an emblem of warfare and began the western tradition
of Christ as Despot King, with the Roman Emperor as his Vicar. The
Roman Pope, by means of a forged document called the Donation of
Constantine, inherited the false claim to rule the world in the name of
Jesus Christ, and technically still holds the claim, although Vatican II
has hid away the triple crown which symbolized that claim. Now it is
more blatantly the claim of the US Methodist president as the only
Super President of the only Super Power on the Planet, the one who rules
in the name of Jesus Christ of Sunday School fame. Ronald Reagan, who
never went to church, spoke of the struggle between the Western nations
and the Soviet Unon as a struggle with "an evil empire" as opposed to the
blessed one of which he was the Head, and George Bush has inherited the
tiara of Jesus the Empire's Capitalist Christ who is also the Messiah of
the Israeli puppet satrapy and the Halliburton Hegemon.
But on the last Sunday of the Church's year we find ourselves observing
the "Feast of Christ the King" although it is not so named in the Prayer
Book, nor in the Revised Common Lectionary. The Lutherans include it, by
title, having found it in the Roman calendar, where it was put at the
time the popes lost their papal states, in hopes of recalling the glory
that was the Vatican in its days of yore. It is coincidental and
ironical that this year we observe it in the same week as the harvest
festival which the Puritans bequeathed to us, and called Thanksgiving
Day. No King or Queen would have been welcome to share the venison and
Indian pudding at their first thank full harvest home which was in a way
for them a Feast of Passover. It was a feast of liberation in the
promised land to which they had escaped from the tyranny of royalty and
rubrics, from Parliament and Prayer Book. They thought they had gone in
Exodus from Egypt. England and its church were tied to an oppressive
monarchy, a dissolute nobility, an exploitative economy. They came to
the colony to escape all that. Others would come later to transplant the
English system, with its class and caste and royal governors, and
eventually
"protestant episcopalians" in Connecticut would woo Scots bishops to lay
hands on Samuel Seabury who sailed to their shores for consecration. At
first bishops were as suspect here as dukes and princes, barons and
marquises and there was as much opposition to sending Seabury abroad to
be made a Bishop as there would have been had a Congressman been sent to
be made a Knight of the Garter.
It's interesting that when the monarchy and episcopacy were restored in
England after the death of Cromwell, one of the important arguments for
bringing back Charles II was that monarchy was better for commerce and
trade than the Puritan republic had been. Nowadays, about all that the
British monarchy does is to hype trade in the Commonwealth and get in
drag for parades. There's a side of us that hankers after the class
distinctions, the caste system, the hierarchy of unearned honor, and we
bestow "celebrity status" instead of noble titles in the US, and big
money can buy the admiration of the masses, for almost anybody, and
instant fame on television. Theatre figures, sports people, either the
owners or the owned, are our Princesses and Serene Highnesses. In our
time, it is more important that the Pope be a Celebrity than that he be a
triple-crowned Patriarch of the West. Jesus Christ is sung about on
Broadway as a Superstar.
Jesus entered Jerusalem in today's gospel on a borrowed vehicle. He did
not arrive, like Bush or Putin to their colonies, in a luxurious state
limousine, flags aflutter, motorcycles all about and helicopters
overhead. Jesus' jurisdiction, if we will learn from him and from the
sacred writings, is a jurisdiction unlike the Empires of the fallen
world. Its value system is totally opposed to the system which exalts
titles, patriarchal power, inherited money, stolen territory, subject
peoples, conquered and kicked, tortured and tormented colonies. Jesus'
Way is an underground revolutionary movement, where people recognize each
other's commitment to Jesus Christ as what they have in common, by a
kind of "gaydar" of gnosis,
a wink and a nod, a handshake, an abrazo, a Pax Christi, the tracing of
an IXTHUS in the dust of the road. Though they do not even know each
other, or come from the same place. The country folks who came with
Jesus were told to go into the suburban village and borrow the ride-- a
humble animal, not the proud steed of the military or the nobility, the
horse--which was the SUV of its time--but the colt, and to do so on the
basis of its owner's allegiance to the same Master as themselves. "What
are you doing, untying the colt?" they were asked. And they answered in
code: "The answer Jesus had told them" which was "Say: 'the Master
needs it and will send it back here directly.'" They would know Who the
Master was. And that the claims of the Kingdom are not property rights
but the right to common Use for common Need.
Their own socialist commitment to Jesus' enablement, to Jesus' entry
into their urban life, to Jesus' welcome to their city and to its temple,
was to give their own clothing; Änd they brought the colt to Jesus, and
threw their garments on it. And he sat upon it. And many spread their
garments on the road." Each of us brings what we have to the Coming,
this Coming of our royal One, and we are all of us in the human
community, redeemed to be royal persons, a holy priesthood, called to
serve the Queen and King we meet in each other, and appointed to offer
prayers for one another as Priests to our God, on each other's behalf.
For no one can be her own priest, his own intercessor. No one is greater
nor lesser in our Trinitarian society of the catholic commonwealth. If
there is to be competition amongst us, it is to excel in service and not
for titles.
When Jesus enters the Holy City, he goes first to the Temple. Let
judgment always begin with the House of God. We must clean up the
Church's act before we can clean up the world's misbehavior. Mark
tells us that Jesus went into the Temple and "looked around at
everything, as it was already late." What did he see there, since his
first visit when he was twelve years old and his parents had left him
there to talk with the teachers? Had he been thinking all those years
about the tables of the money changers? Did he remember the class and
caste system which excluded women and foreigners and eunuchs? Did he
hear talk of "gentry" and "best family" and "Upper crust" and "our kind
of people" there? Did he see reserved seating, and thrones for the
clergy? Did the smell of animal sacrifice offend him? Did he detect the
abuse of animals underneath the odor of incense rising to the nostrils of
Yahweh? Did he foresee the Zionism that would make his Kingdom of Israel
a rocket-launching terrorist state in the twentieth century of his Reign
of Peace?
Or did he think of his Kingship, which had just been declared by the
people in the streets? Was he now reassured that in this his royal
palace, "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all people"? Were
his thoughts racing ahead to later in the week, later in the century,
later in the epoch, later in he planet's trajectory, or was he now more
urgently rehearsing his answer for the Praetorium, where he would be
asked by Procurator Pilate."So you are a King then? What do you mean by
King?"
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) from THE MAGIC OF THE MASS, the last chapter of Jesus the Heretic, by
Conrad Noel, London, the Religious Book Club. 1939.
(2) from Christ the Liberator: A View from the Victims, by Jon Sobrino,
translated from the Spanish by Paul Burns. Markyknoll NY Orbis Books,
copyright 2001. (Chapter 11, "Lord", pp.165ff.)
(3) "How Many Heavens. . ." by Dame Edith Sitwell, from the Collected
Poems of Edith Sitwell, copyright by Edith Sitwell, from
The Mentor Book of Religious Verse. Edited by Horace Gregory and Marya
Zaturenska, New York: The New American Library 1957.
(4) Raimundo Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism: Towards an
Ecumenical Christophany, Epilogue, pp. 168-169, Maryknoll: Orbis Books.
Copyright R. Panikkar, 1964. .
Appeal for Your charity in solidarity with the ministry of Casa Ave
Maria.
Budget cuts amongst donors who have long generously paid the small
salaries of the teachers in our Escuelita, our "little school" next door
to the guest house, have now compelled me to ask for the financial help
of those who receive Homily Grits or benefit from someone else having
read, marked, learned, or inwardly digested them. Many of you know the
work of the Casa in this poor barrio, and the classes we offer free to
neighborhood youth, in English, computers, piano, guitar, singing, and
dancing. And the ministry of healing we offer in helping people with the
costs of medicine and dentistry. And the hospitality we offer to
pilgrims and solidarity workers, along with the opportunity to enter into
the life of the plain people of Nicaragua, our solidarity with
Nicaraguan artists, artisans, poets, musicians.
Some of you know also of my own devotion to the struggles of the
Palestinian and Arab peoples, and of my pilgrimage with Chritian
Peacemaker Teams to Hebron, and to the ancient holy land of Abraham and
Sarah, in Iraq, a year ago. I would like very much to continue these
various ministries, and as I enter my 72nd year in January I want to go
back to Cuba with the usual suspects, who are old friends. So this foot
note is a blatant appeal for dollar charity in solidarity with these
requests. I put all of my begs in this one askit. Checks by the usual
routes, or to me directly: Casa Ave Maria, Box # (Apartado) RP-10,
Managua, Nicaragua, C.A. Hasta la victoria siempre. GRANT IN MANAGUA