[Date Prev][Date Next][Date Index]
Christmas 2nd Sunday B: January 5, 2003
H O M I
L Y G R I T S
Second Sunday
After Christmas - Year B
January 5, 2003
Copyright 2003 by Grant Gallup
(Permission given for free distribution in fair use
or quotation )
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary -
Jeremiah 31: 7-14 - Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance
Psalm 84 or 84:1-8 Quam dilecta! How dear to me is your dwelling.
Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a With the eyes of your heart enlightened
Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23 He made his home in a town called Nazareth
or Luke 2:41-52, The boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem
or Matthew 2:1-12 They saw the child with Mary his mother
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
Jeremiah 31:7-14 Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance
or Sirach 24:1-12 Wisdom tells of her glory in the midst of the people
Psalm 147:12-20 The Lord has pleasure in those who fear him
Wisdom of Solomon 10:15-21 Wisdom opened the mouths of those that were
mute
Ephesians 1:3-14 as above
John 1:(1-9), 10-18 He came to what was his own
Most of us "edit reality" in order to live with the past. We like to
remember the sweet and forget the bitter. In this way we manage to
survive with our sanity in a world full of sharp corners, ugly scenes,
horrid smells, repulsive tastes, cacophonus sounds, frightful feelings.
So we celebrate Christmas and the New Year with tinsel and ribbon,
feasting and champagne, ornaments and fireworks and chimes.
If we go to church only on Christmas Eve, we see only the front page of
the first edition of the Gospel Gazette. Joy and gladness with a mother
and child, sleepy cows and asses, sweet hay and angels, shepherds and
stars. Peace on earth to all people of good will. And if we are high
church, a champagne brunch after the Eleven O'Clock.
Today we turn to the obituary page, hear of the shadow side of Christmas,
direct from the West Bank : pesadillas: bad dreams with warnings of
murder, helicopters in search and destroy missions, raids of the IDF,
secret and hurried trips into exile, the massacre of innocents, women
weeping inconsolably for their slaughtered children. And this is still
Christmastide: the twelfth day of Christmas! This is the side of
Christmas that will never be shown in Marshall Field's windows, that
never got a Norman Rockwell cover for the Saturday Evening Post. Few
carols mention it, no one wants to sing of it. The gospel today starts
with a nightmare, or a night stallion if you prefer. A pesadilla, we say
in Nicaragua. "Get up and get out of this country--the Security State is
about to destroy the lives of your children in a preemptive strike." Not
long ago Matthew had crowds thronging about the Babe, rich and important
visitors coming from foreign lands to bring gifts. The stars of heaven
had taken notice of his birth and put on a Light Show . Now Joseph and
Mary may have to use some of their bounty from the Persian wizards to
make good their escape--to pay a coyote at the frontier, to bribe the
(always easily bribed) Immigration and Naturalization officials to look
the other way at the border, to pay for hospedaje on the way, to find
sanctuary in a friendly church of the resistance movement. All the
elements of this story are daily in the back pages of the newspapers even
now, in our own time. Not much news of the Resistance Movement gets into
the front page or the mainstream press. The flight into Egypt is the
story of refugees now, undocumented aliens, and those who run for their
lives. History books are full of the stories of exiles: God's people are
slaves in Egypt, exiles in Babylon, are shut up in ghettos. Black
people for four hundred years in exile, fleeing the slave trader, the
cotton plantation, rural poverty, the urban police state. In our own
time, surviving Jews fled from Europe and now Palestinians are turned
into exiles by the proverbial people of exile themselves, the hated of
old Israel have become Israelis who hate, the despised have become
despisers. . Thus we too often become like that which we most despise,
and the Zionist State of Israel has become Hitlerian in its oppression of
the people of the Land, its exploitation of non-Jews, whom they treat the
way the Third Reicht reated as untermenschen their ancestors. . Latin
Americans walk and run and swim northward to escape economic slavery
(you thought they came for the privilege of freely reading the free
press, like Newsweek, the Economist, the New York Times?).The Mother of
Exiles no longer wants your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free. Nicaraguan young people who thought they
would find Paradise in the U.S., phone me after their long wetback
journeys to Gringolandia to tell of their disappointment and dismay with
the reality there, the racism and the culture of crime, which they should
have known about from television. But they were looking at the
commercials.
Banishment may be from homeland, for doing justice, as Athanasius was
banished for telling the Nicene truth against Imperial religion. Or
banishment may be condign punishment,as Archelaus was sent off to Gaul
(Pilate, too, was removed for cruelty) by an empire anxious about
tranquil control of the provinces. So the U.S. protected the Shah in
exile, the Somozas in Miami, Contras in Honduras, and funds the
Venezuelan ruling class in their continuing efforts to topple the poor
people's champion, Hugo Chavez. . An Exile is different from an Emigré or
an Expatriate. There are many of us who choose to live outside the
imperial homeland, but we are not ëxiles. We choose a new country, a new
punto de vista, a new way of seeing the world, and of being in the World,
without boundaries, where we can read more than right-wing newspapers and
talk to people who know what we mean when we talk of the class system and
who do not think Socialist is a curse word, or liberation theology a
joke, that being gay is a crime against nature. Hugo of St. Victor
wrote: "The person who finds the homeland sweet is still a tender
beginner; the one to whom every soil is as a native soil is already
strong, but the one is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign
land." St. Augustine said "God alone is the country of the soul." As we
grow older or move nearer to danger, we think more frequently of our
readiness for the journey home.
"Vendepatrias" -- "nation-sellers" was the name given those who fled
the Sandinista revolution here in 1979, for the privileges of Miami, for
almost automatic citizenship in the U. S., for counter-revolution. The
Saninista Revolution will live in history as perhaps the only one ever
guided by Jesus' gospel of liberation. John Brentlinger wrote of the
Revolution a book called "The Best of What We Are" (1) and it is the best
book about the Nicaraguan Revolution. But those who fled and those who
betrayed the Revolution were the worst of what we are, who live only in
the past. The empire rewarded them with its support of the Contra army,
and continues its support of any group subversive of the Great Motherland
of Latin America, subversive of the poor and their hope. These are also
emigrés, but they are not refugees: a refugee is fleeing oppression, not
justice and equality. Moses and Jesus and Mohammad were all exiles in
their own lands, exiles from ignorance and oppression. Jesus did not
hide in Egypt to avoid confronting tyranny. Neither did the Prophet
stay away from jihad. Those of us who are mere "ex-pats"--ex-patriates--
do not qualify as gospel exiles. Though we can learn along with exiles
that, as Edward Said wrote, "in a secular and contingent world, homes are
always provisional." (2) Dr. Ernesto ("Che") Guevara is a model for us of
the international revolutionary, the one at home with the struggle
wherever it finds him, ready to meet death on its behalf, wherever he may
be, always living, and ready to die, for the future of Humanity.
There are other kinds of exile: exile from family (many Gay and Lesbian
people, disowned for who they are), exiles from health (people living
with untreated or incurable disease), exiles from dreams and hopes
unfulfilled, exiles from the blessed enchantment of childhood who live in
tormented adolesence, exiles from lost marriages, from "the blight of
love's decay". Old people, exiled into Alzheimer's or Terminal Towers
warehousing. One way or another, many of us are in exile. Some in
self-imposed exile from intimcy and community into privilege and
smugness, exiles from our own mortality. On a busy street in London,
William Butler Yeats knew his own exile from the magic island of
Innisfree, where peace came dropping slow. He heard it in the "deep
heart's core" and wrote "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
and I shall have some peace there, where peace comes dropping slow"
When I visited there, and rowed out to the Isle, I slapped my way
through a cloud of insects. The Isle looked better from the boat. But
everyone has a dream of home that leaves out the sand fleas.
God promises that no one will be left behind--that all shall be carried
back from exile. Even the forgotten sparrow and the lost swallow shall
find their homes near the altar. At Casa Ave Maria, we are now beset with
palomas de castilla. Pigeons nesting in the eaves. We take it as a Sign,
and pretend they are the swallows and sparrows of Temple Mount. We
rejoice in our
virtual Jerusalem.
Today we come to a story of the national Security State and its terrorism
in the life of the infant Church. The Church remembers the heathen
Pontius Pilate in her creed, but she can never forget the imperial
puppet, the Idumean-Jewish traitor, Herod the King. The Emperor Augustus
said of Herod, "I would rather be his pig than his son". Herod the
Great , rich and famous throughout the known world--he was president of
the Olympic Games--had slaughtered three of his own children, in his
constant suspicion of plotting against his throne. He changed his will
seven times. The birth of Jesus may have been in 7 BCE, a couple of
years before Herod's own death in Jericho, of a long and painful illness
in March of 4 BCE. Rumors of legitimate Jewish heirs to leadership may
indeed have provoked Herodian mayhem. So the Christian tradition that
claimed a massacre in Bethlehem (a small town--could not have had more
than a couple dozen babies under two years of age) was easily believed.
Matthew says Jesus' family fled to Egypt to escape the terror. (Matthew
needs Jesus in Egypt, so as to call him out again, to fulfill
prophecy.) After Herod's death, one of his heirs, Archelaus,
slaughtered pilgrims at a Passover and in 6 CE he himself was an
exile--Rome banished him to Gaul.
Joseph and Mary too fled political oppression, and in their escape was
the promise of the future: "Out of Egypt have I called my Child." Now
Herod is dead, and few remember his 37 year reign, his wonderful building
program, the taxes he collected, his fortresses and military industrial
complex, his fame and fortune, his ten glamorous wives and ill-fated
family, his presidency of the Olympic games. He was a kind of proleptic
neo-liberal, like Clinton or Bush, putting his country's people and
resources at the disposal of the empire he faithfully served. He kept the
trade routes open for the free market system. He turned the land into a
national securi state, and he is, like the Imperial presidency, condemned
by history to be associated with oppression. There is no good news, no
gospel of Herod, just as there will never be a gospel of Bush, either One
or Two. Joseph's gospel is the one we hear today: the immortal promise
that God's purposes will not be for ever thwarted, but that God will
send to us dreams and visions, and plans of escape, God will send angel
coyotes to lead the poor to safety, and to a better life. And that the
poor will have a better Christmas than the ones they have spent in exile.
Another dream is given, too, with rubric for the coming Revolution::
"Arise, and return. Make a home in Nazareth." Even in occupied
territory. The exiled are never to be abandoned, for our God calls us
home to be God's own family, the family that began at the safe-house in
Nazareth, where the Revolution will be born again. .
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 2nd series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
(1) Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press. (Said was raised as an Anglican in Egypt. Look
him up on your internet search engine.) Note, also, the following
paragraph from "Punishment By Detail ", by Edward Said, in the Al-Ahram
Weekly for August 13,2002.
"In the West. . . there's been such repetitious and unedifying attention
paid to Palestinian suicide bombing that a gross
distortion in reality has completely obscured what is much worse: the
official Israeli, and perhaps the uniquely Sharonian evil that has been
visited so deliberately and so methodically on the Palestinian people.
Suicide bombing is reprehensible but it is a direct and, in my opinion, a
consciously programmed result of years of abuse, powerlessness and
despair. It has as little to do with the Arab or Muslim supposed
propensity for violence as the man in the moon. Sharon wants terrorism,
not peace, and he does everything in his power to create the conditions
for it. But for all its horror, Palestinian violence, the response of a
desperate and horribly oppressed people, has been stripped of its context
and the terrible suffering from which it arises: a failure to see that is
a failure in humanity, which doesn't make it any less terrible but at
least situates it in a real history and real geography.
Yet the location of Palestinian terror -- of course it is terror -- is
never allowed a moment's chance to appear, so remorseless has
been the focus on it as a phenomenon apart, a pure, gratuitous evil which
Israel, supposedly acting on behalf of pure good, has been
virtuously battling in its variously appalling acts of disproportionate
violence against a population of three million Palestinian civilians. I
am not speaking only about Israel's manipulation of opinion, but its
exploitation of the American equivalent of the campaign against
terrorism without which Israel could not have done what it has done. (In
fact, I cannot think of any other country on earth that, in
full view of nightly TV audiences, has performed such miracles of
detailed sadism against an entire society and gotten away with it.)
That this evil has been made consciously part of George W Bush's campaign
against terrorism, irrationally magnifying American
fantasies and fixations with extraordinary ease, is no small part of its
blind destructiveness."