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Pentecost 22 Proper 28-B Nov 16 2003
H
o m i l y G r i t s
The Twenty
Second Sunday after Pentecost
Year B
Proper 28- November 16, 2003
Ignacio Ellacuria, Compañeros
Jesuitas, & their two housekeepers, Martyrs in El Salvador, 1982.
(© 2003 by Grant
Gallup - permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation
)
Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scripures to be written for our
learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly
digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of
everlasting life, which you have given in our Savior Jesus Christ; who
lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and
ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Daniel 12:1-4a (5-13) Those who lead many to justice shall shine like the
stars for ever and ever.
Psalm 16 or 16: 5-11 Conserva me, Domine - Protect me, O God, for I take
refuge in you.
Hebrews 10: 31-39 Do not abandon that confidence of yours; it brings a
great reward.
Mark 13: 14-23 When you see the desolating sacrilege [spoken of by Daniel
the prophet] set up where it ought not to be
¶ Revised Common Lectionary -
1 Samuel 1:4-20 She named him Samuel, for she said, 'I have asked him of
the Lord.'
and 1 Samuel 2:1-10 My heart exults in the Lord
or Daniel 12:1-3 as above, BCP
and Psalm 16 Conserva me, Domine
Hebrews 10:11-14, (15-18), 19-25 By a single offering he has perfected
for all time those who are sanctified.
Mark 13:1-8 "Look teacher, what huge blocks of stones! What marvelous
buildings!"
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
Proper 28-B
Daniel 12:1-3 as above, BCP & RCL
Psalm 16 My heart is glad and my spirit rejoices; my body shall rest in
hope. (Ps. 16:9)
Hebrews 10:11-14 [15-18] 19-25 as above RCL
Mark 13:1-8 As above, RCL
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary - (33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Dan 12:1-3 as above, BCP, RCL, LBW
Ps 16:5+8, 9-10, 11 as above
Heb 10:11-14, 18 as above
Mark 13:24-32 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass
away.
¶ Popol Vuh - The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (1)
And the third to magnify himself is the Second Son of Seven Macaw, named
Earthquake. "I am the breaker of mountains," he said. But even so,
Hunahpu and Xbalanque* defeated the Earthquake. Then Hurricane spoke,
Newborn Thunderbolt, Raw Thunderbolt; he spoke to Hunahpu and Xbalanque:
"The second son of Seven Macaw is another one, another who should be
defeated. This is my word, because what they do on the face of the earth
is no good. They are surpassing the sun in size, in weight, and it
should not be that way. Lure this Earthquake into settling down over
there in the east,"Hurricane told the two boys. "Very well, your
lordship. There is more to be done. What we see is no good. Isn't it a
question of your position and your eminence, sir, Heart of Sky?" the two
boys said when they responded to the word of Hurricane. Meanwhile he
presses on, this Earthquake, breaker of mountains. Just by lightly
tapping his foot on the ground he instantly demolishes the mountains,
great and small. When he met up with the two boys: "Where are you going,
boy?" they asked
Earthquake.
[*twins, sons of One Hunahpu and Blood Woman who control the morning-star
aspect of Venus]
¶ Broken Spears : the Spanish Conquest. (2)
[True elegies composed by postconquest Aztec poets, who contemplated the
destruction of their own metropolis and the ruin of their culture. (With
them) we find this statement written in Nahuatl: 'And all these
misfortunes befell us. We saw them and wondered at them; we suffered
this unhappy fate.' ]
Broken spears lie in the roads:
We have torn our hair in our grief.
The houses are roofless now, and their walls
are red with blood.
Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas,
and the walls are splattered with gore
The water has turned red, as if it were dyed,
and when we drink it,
it has the taste of brine.
We have pounded our hands in despair
against the adobe walls,
for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead.
The shields of our warriors were its defense,
but they could not save it.
We have chewed dry twigs and salt grasses;
we have filled our mouths with dust and bits of adobe;
we have eaten lizards, rats and worms. . . .
¶ The Virgin Martyrs - Sigebert of Gembloux (3)
Hinc virginalis sancta frequentia
Therefore come they the crowding maidens,
Gertrude, Agnes, Prisca, Cecily,
Lucy, Thecla, Juliana,
Barbara, Agatha, Petronel.
And other maids whose names I have read not,
Names I have read and now record not,,
But their soul and their faith were maimed not,
Worthy now of God's company.
Wandering through the fresh fields go they,
Gatherinhg flowers to make them a nosegay,
Gathering roses red for he Passion,
Lilies and violets for love.
(translated by Helen Waddell)
¶ from The Supreme Identity, by Alan Watts (4)
"The psychology of 'bigger and better', of the record smasher, the money
maker, the imperialist, the speed maniac, the time saver, and the
religious fanatic is the psychology of the drug addict. He has not the
faintest idea of when or where to stop. He knows only that he wants more
and more and more of the same--more speed, more cash, more power, more
territory, more converts, more thrills. He wants to possess infinity,
whereas the man of sensibility asks only to be possessed by infinity.
Thus in the certainty of his given and eternal identity with the ultimate
Reality, man is at last free to love things and people for themselves
rather than for what he can get out of them. Free from anxiety and
impatience he can concentrate on the creation of quality rather than
quantity. Free from the compulsion to deserve eternal life by piling up
merits, he can love people with their benefit in mind rather than his own
salvation. Free from the craving to possess spirit and life, he can
devote himself to the perfection of form and matter.
Order, beauty and discipline, harmony and co-operation, exist already
in nature below the human level. But the infinite Reality expresses
itself as man to introduce a yet more complex and exquisite order. When
man considers himself separate from the infinite, he manifests a chaos
parallel to the necessary element of chaos in nature. Yearning for the
infinite, he wrecks the finite limitations that seem to bar its
attainment, first spiritually and then physically. But when he realizes
that he is after all one with the infinite from the beginning, he is in a
position to be a creative instrument and to fulfill the positive aspect
of his destiny. "
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Apocalyptic literature is the stuff that provides some fringe groups of
the Church with their élan vital, gives distraught mental patients the
theo-logic of insanity, gives moonstruck inmates of loony bins topics
for their table talk. It was not for these reasons that the Russian
Church excluded the Apocalypse from its liturgical readings, and that
mainline churches tend to use only selections appropriate at
funerals. "Apocalypse" means "Uncovering" or "Discovery" as
"Revelation" means "opening the veil." It is not for their obscurity
that such writings are mistrusted and neglected, but because they were
written under oppressive governments in language coded to deliberately
keep them secretive and opaque to the casual and uninitiated reader. They
tell of imminent cosmic cataclysm to destroy the ruling powers of the
earth, and so frightened the establishment. They were written for the
direction and delight of insiders who were outside the system. People
on the margins still today develop argot and street languages, like
ghetto "Rap", to enable their daring denunciation and their delight in
dissent, in the very presence of the Man. "Rap" can thus trace its
ancestry to the so called Negro Spiritual, which was also a hidden
language of Apocalypse in the night time of chattel slavery for the
African American nation. "Swing low, Sweet Chariot, Coming for to carry
me home" originally carried the secret stubs of tickets on the
Underground Railroad, heading North to escape, and was not a death wish
for a ride to honky heaven. Grade school kids devise highly elaborate
forms of what we called "Pig Latin" to talk secrets, not behind the
teacher's back, but out front of the teacher's face. "Playing crazy" is
an ancient way of subversity, isn't it? Apocalyptic Literature also is
not so crazy as it sounds. And it does sound crazy. Turn on your TV or
radio some Sunday morning and listen to the chialists and
pre-millenarians blow forth, for their exposition of Bible texts will
astonish, frighten, and entertain you as richly as the Rocky Horror
Picture Show.
Interpreting apocalyptic writing is not so simple as casting an I Ching
forecast, nor is it so double-minded and patient of so many
interpretations as is the weather forecast in the Old Farmers Almanac.
Daniel was written by an anonymous author about 165 BCE, and given the
name of a mythical figure. Mythical doesn't mean he never existed; it
means that he has been added to. As Tennyson's Ulysses says of himself
after a lifetime of adventure, "I am become a Name." Yet there will be
more: for life is "a bringer of new things." Now he mythos of Ulysses
has been added to by James Joyce. And so Daniel became the John Wayne of
his time. One day I saw students in Texas protesting the taking of
hostages somewhere and they carried a placard saying "Duke! Where Are You
Now That We Need You." and "Send the Duke." The history is slim: he
was John Wayne, born Marion Michael Morrison in Winterset, Iowa. He
never fired a real shot in real anger in the pursuit of real justice
anywhere, but made dozens of B pictures and ate a lot of true grits
before he got an Oscar for "True Grit" in the sunset boulevard of his
Hollywood career. But no one would have been inspired by a placard
that called upon us to "Send Marion Michael Morrison" to end a hostage
crisis anywhere.
A true heroic figure of my own time, who has yet to become a Name, was
the Black Panther martyr, Fred Hampton, of Chicago's west side who
started a daily program that fed neighborhood kids breakfast and
revolutionary catechesis at Saint Andrew's Church, where I was Vicar for
thirty years. (One morning after mass, I came down to the church
basement still in cassock, during breakfast, and Fred teased me in
front of the Panther's class, "Hey, Father, what you got up in under that
dress?" and I riposted: "You'll have to get in line, Fred--there are
others ahead of you." He joined in the roar of laughter that followed.
He was a courageous man, street-smart and fiercely loyal to family and
friends, hard as adamant in his resistance to tyranny. He was
machine-gunned while asleep in his bed in a night time assassination by
the State's Attorney's police, under the direction of Ed Hanrahan, whose
name (like Pilate's) lives on only because of the ones he murdered.
(Before I left St Andrew's in 1989, I took the Panthers' handmade sign
advertising the Breakfast Program, to the DuSable African American
history museum in Chicago, where it will have a long life recalling the
witness of the martyred Panthers. Fred Hampton's name will live on in
the hearts of West Siders for centuries to come. And our Biblical
Daniel's name lives on because he is a symbol of resistance to oppression
throughout late Jewish history, in the Maccabean period, and in every age
still calls for resistance to tyranny.
Michael, the "Prince" to whom the Book of Daniel refers was not a human
hero at all, but the Guadian Angel of the Jewish nation, and we still
consider the Archangel Michael as special guardian of the Church, as
Muslims know him as the Angel Guardian of the Ummah, the nation of all
believers. "The Wise who lead many to justice" in the reading today are
the heroes of all nations in the Resistance to tyranny. The book
Daniel (not "of Daniel" for he did not write it) was written in the
second century BCE, in the time of Syrian and Greek oppressors.
Antiochus IV had interrupted the Temple sacrifices at Jerusalem, hanged
Jews for keeping Sabbath, forced others to eat pork, killed others at
their prayers. As U.S. occupation troops behave now in Iraq.* So this
book was written practically in a secret code, to give hope and courage
to the oppressed. It speaks of perseverance in hardship, of courage and
faith in the face of tyranny. Mark's "Little Apocalypse" in his
thirteenth chapter, was written under another tyranny--the Roman Empire,
as was the last book in our present canon, the Revelation to John.
Mark was written probably in the eighties, about events that happened in
the thirties and forties, within living memory of the events. Around 40
CE the Emperor Caligula, whose real name was Gaius, set up his own statue
for worship in the Temple in Jerusalem. His nickname was "Little Boots",
and he was a depraved and decadent crazy. So the redactor's comment, "Let
the reader understand." (Remember Caligula from the film "I
Claudius"?) The Jews were as appalled as if someone had entered our
church on Saint Francis' Day with a live goat on a leash, and proceed to
cut its throat at the altar and splash its blood on the congregation.
Simply Not Done. This is not a minor infraction, like a wino sitting on
the church steps with his Kool-Aid and White Port, which we got used
to.
Mark writes of the "awful horror" of it all. "Desolating sacrilege" and
"Disastrous abomination" read other translations. "Abomination of
desolation", the older versions read. "Let the reader understand" he
footnotes. What reader? His own expected readers, in around 80
C.E.--they would have remembered this, and nodded in recognition. "You
know what I'm talking about" is the thrust of his footnote. "Not
mentioning any names, of course" because the Roman Empire was still
around, after all. They knew he was talking about the Emperor
Caligula's statue. WE didn't know that from the Bible alone. We had to
read commentaries to find that out--from Bible scholars like Reginald
Fuller and Gerard Sloyan. So when Jesus' preaching on the Last Things is
interrupted by the evangelist Mark to say "Let the reader take note!" we
are being told that we need to educate ourselves about the context in
which the gospels were written, where they were first passed on in oral
tradition, and what stance we must ourselves take towards oppressive
government. And what action we must opt for to preserve human life and
the future of God's people. We are being told in that little footnote
to read the Bible with the newspaper in the other hand.
The Church today does not live in a vacuum, and the people of God have
never lived in one. We live out our own hope for humankind and the
coming of justice and peace in the context of the things Jesus talked
about and lived amidst. Look at the "wonderful stones and the wonderful
buildings" of Twenty First Century America, and hear the words of Jesus
about the constructions his disciples gaped at in wonder. The
resistance to imperial oppression, like careful Kofi Annan, cannot
always point directly at the Shrub, squatting where it ought not. You
don't invite the Abomination to exterminate you, to arrange an airplane
crash on your way to a peace conference. (Let the reader understand.)
Mark places this preaching of Jesus about the Supreme Tribulation as the
last of Jesus' preaching, just before his arrest and judicial murder.
The terror that Daniel and Mark 13 and Apocalypse all deal with is
religious fanaticism, always the tool of Empire. Why don't more U.S.
citizens stand up to Bush now? We live in an unelected monarchy, but why
don't Brits with their more viable crowned republic get rid of Blair?
Why don't Iraqis now dump the chump Chalabi? Why do Pakistanis still
support their dictatorship? When will Israelis expel Ariel to Miami
where the Central American dictators also retire?
The world's populations are on the move, and the polls are beginning to
gallup down the track to finish them off. There'll be some messages
along the way if we listen for them. But the message of Apocalyptic
literature also is that if we are so oppressed that we have to talk a
secret language, we must also ourselves avoid acting like the crazies,
and in the war on fanaticism not ourselves turn to violence. For there's
always in this literature another Act to come: an enormous post script,
an addendum to the last chapter: if measurable history in the calendar
is too short a time for God's people to work out Liberation in our own
days, if for us there is not "world enough and time", then there will be
another world and another time. There will be a "new heaven and a new
earth." So to the question, "Do you think we are in the last days?"
--the question churchfolk ask in these evil days-- the answer is
twofold: HELL NO, there's too much evil left to defeat, there's too
much good for the Church to do for this to be the END time. And the other
answer is HEAVENS YES, for we've had enough of this, and there's always
room for the New Heaven and the New Earth, for our work to be finished,
our inauguration banquet to begin at the start of New Time. Some
Christians are comforted by the idea that "THE END IS NEAR" but the real
Gospel is always that it is God who is always near, and that's the point
of all Apocalypse, that it is the Revelation that tears all the curtains
down to show us the Way, and rolls up history to pack it all Away.
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
* See Christian Peacemaker Teams website: : cpt_iraq@yahoogroups.com
Testimony of an Iraqi man detained and tortured by US Forces
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by ns.tmx.com.ni id
hA4AbWZB018625
(1) Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of
Life, and the Stories of Gods and Kings. [mid 16th century]
Translated by Dennis Tedlock. New York, Simon and Schuster. Copyright
1985 by Dennis Tedlock.
(2) "Broken Spears" from Native Mesoamerican Spirituality: edited by
Miguel Leon-Portilla et.al., New York: Paulist Press. 1980, copyright the
Missionary society of St Paul the Apostle in the State of New York. A
volume in the Classics of Western Spirituality.
(3) from The Mentor Book of Religious Verse, ed. & copyright 1956 by
Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska. New York: Mentor Books, the New
American Library of World Literature, Inc. January 1957.
(4) The Supreme Identity: An Essay on Oriental Metaphysic and the
Christian Religion, by Alan Watts. New York: Random House: Pantheon
Books. copyright 1972 by Alan Watts.