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Lent II B: March 16, 2003
H O M I L
Y G R I T S
The
Second Sunday in Lent
Year B - March 16, 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who
have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent
hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable
truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son, who with you and the Holy
Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Genesis 22:1-14 God tested Abraham, the khalil Allah ("The friend of
God")
Psalm 16 or 16:5-13 Conserva me, Domine
Romans 8:31-39 If God is for us, who is against us?
Mark 8:31-38 He began to teach them that the Human Being must undergo
great suffering
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord
appeared to Abram.
Psalm 22:23-31 He does not despise nor abhor the poor in their poverty
Romans 4:13-25 Abraham is the father of all of us
Mark 8:31-38 as above
or Mark 9:2-9 And he was transfigured before them.
I am always reminded, when hearing the story of Abraham's Sacrifice, that
the motto of the diocese of Chicago, where I priested for thirty years,
is Jehovah Jireh, which is the faith of the Church, and the faith of
Abraham, that "The Lord will provide." I preached on that text on
Second Lent in 1985, when my then new friend the Presiding Bishop had
the day before been consecrated the Bishop of Chicago, and I noted that
we ought not to take the text too literally on this occasion, considering
it referred to the Lamb that God provided to Abraham for slaughter and
holocaust. Those who come to ordination in our epoch may indeed be
sacrificial lambs as St Paul reminds us in the epistle today, "for thy
sake we are being killed all the day long, we are regarded as sheep to be
slaughtered." Human sacrifice wherein human flesh is eaten still goes on
in the world, perhaps literally only in a recalcitrant mountain people
living at the back of beyond, as Tobias Schneebaum has told us of his
friends and dinner partners in New Guinea. But in the "civilized world"
of modern governments and old religions, there is a massive military
devotion to human sacrifice. Young people are offered for holocaust in
warfare by their doting elders, who have most of them avoided service in
either war making or peacemaking--like the members of the U.S.
President'sWar Cabinet, where only the churchman Colin Powell as a
general has let loose the dogs of war, as he was called upon to do again,
only after he had disguised himself as a dove. Recently on an Internet
discussion group, it was noted that the Episcopal Church still offers
military personnel a medallion to wear which embodies a representation of
"the Crusader's Cross." A kinder description of this cross is "The
Jerusalem Cross", which is also the emblem of the seminary I was
graduated from, Seabury-Western in Evanston, Illinois. The commentator
who described the Cross as that of the military onslaught on Islamic
countries is technically correct, but ecumenically inept. The offering
to God of the blood of the Empire's enemies mingled with our own in a
Children's Crusade needs to be seen for what it is--human sacrifice to
Moloch, loved and worshipped by all the world's uniformed slaughterers in
the name of the blind drunk god of patriotism. As those who come to the
eucharistic bread have renounced the cannibalism our earliest defamers
accused us of, so we at Baptism renounced the bloodbaths the prophets of
our time now rightly identify us as blessing.
Another mode of human sacrifice amongst us is the way we waste the
resources of the lives and gifts of all the Church's ministers, whether
lay or ordained. We fail to raise these many personal gifts God has
scattered amongst us, though they are close at hand. The Anglican
Communion has prophetically shown the Pope and the Oecumenical Patriarch
the way to ordain baptized women to ordained ministry, but hesitates now
to see the great gifts that God gives in the Gay community.
Morever, the martyrs of our time have often been murdered by those who
said they were doing God's work. The story of Abraham and Isaac was
first told, perhaps, to explain the end of human sacrifice amongst the
People of Abraham's covenant.
The sacrifice of the best children and young people to a bloodthirsty
deity was common practice amongst old men of old religions, and went on
even amongst our spiritual ancestors, who practiced it perhaps with
Canaanite neighbors. James Frazier's "The Golden Bough" tells of these
murders, especially that of the King's Son, almost universal in
antiquity. The story came to be used by our forebears, and by the Spirit
of God found its way into our common Bible, to tell us that human
sacrifice has no sanction and no place in our Abrahamic religions. The
Abrahamic covenant we committed ourselves to at Baptism is a Pledge to
nonviolence. It is our faith as well as Abraham's that is tested in this
Pledge. The dedication that God wants from us is unto Life, not unto
military murder, and as for the gift of life for Sacrifice, Jehovah
Jireh. God will provide, the God who is Merciful and Compassionate.
Dylan Thomas's "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in
London" may have to be re-titled "A Child of Baghdad," if Unser Führer
and his bloodthirsty cabinet have the way of their warheads:
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other. (1)
Two million Londoners have refused the mourning of the death of English
and Iraqi children which Tony Blair called them to; they are tired of
elegies of innocence and youth, which have filled Westminster Abbey for
generations of Empire. Enough!
Jews look to Abraham as the founder of their identity as a people, and
Muslims call him "Al Khalil", God's friend, and their holy place, the
Dome of the Rock in Jeruslaem, is the place, they say, where he offered
Isaac, and where our One God stayed his hand and ours. This story surely
means that the holy places, too, belong to all of us, and we cannot
accept the arrogant claim of Zionist Israelis that it is exclusively
their national capital. Zealots among them plot to blow up the Dome of
the Rock to make way for a restored Temple, and the annexation of
Palestinian territory for lebensraum, which they translate from the Nazi
for
eretz Israel. To honor Abraham at Temple Mount is the privilege of all
believers, and to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem is the birthright of all
the spiritual descendants of Mother Sarah and Father Abraham.
What about this Sarah? Let's ask some other questions of these tales.
How about Sarah's feelings that day? Was not this her son, too? The son
of her old age, the child whom Yahweh promised her, which made her laugh
so loud that God heard it and then she was embarrassed at her own
guffaw? The Bible unfortunately was mostly written by males, and
unreconstructed patriarchal males at that, so we don't know what Sarah
thought. But we can imagine, for imagination is the chief gift of the
Spirit to religious people, and required of creative theologians. This
story is a story of blessing to Sarah that she would be the Mother of
Nations, and that the leaders of the world's peoples would come from
her. There aren't many Sunday School stories that are so gender
inclusive as this one, and so our attention is specially drawn to its
telling. A long time ago, I saw a play in Chicago called "Levitation,"
in which a young man visits a shrine--the home of his childhood and
youth, in the Midwest, and there he encounters the ghosts of his parents
and family, some of them still alive, and the shades too of his father's
grade school teacher, and one of the Wright Brothers, and of his own
lover, who is still alive but thousands of miles away. The old school
teacher sums up the play in one line, when she says that "the dead have
no more lessons to teach, only stories to tell."
When we visit each week the shrines of our deceased forebears, our places
of worship, which serve as old homesteads, (they are what we have left,
now that the homes of our childhood are mostly locked up and abandoned in
our disposable culture), or we sit upon the virtual front porches of our
ancestors in the pews at the parish church, we can look around us and
see the spirits of Grandfather Abraham and Grandmother Sarah, and Uncle
Paul, and Brother Jesus, and Mother Mary, and Joseph our Foster Father.
They've come to tell us their stories, out of the Scriptures, stories
which enable and guide our own stories in the making, and to bring them
back from our wasting of them, from neglecting them, from emptying them
and leaving us to ignorance and extinction. The stories give us common
ancestors, a common nation, a common family. Last week we heard the
tales of the human family's covenant with Noah and his offspring, for all
of us come from the eight souls in the
Ark. It was a covenant with the earth, which we must ratify and
fulfill in our time, or perish in the debris of wars or the waste of our
own toxic landfill. The way the stories in the Bible were written, you
know, is not the way they appear. Moses's story was told first, about law
and commandment and Exodus. Then Abraham's was later remembered, about
identity and promise and hope, and then someone heard the tale of Noah,
and the family of humankind grew once more, and finally came the story
of the Adam and the Eve, wherein we learn that our common ancestor is not
someone who looks Jewish, or Arab, or African, or Irish or Japanese at
all: our common ancestor is the One who made us from God's own
imagination, in God's own image, female and male. (And some of us were
made both male and female, as Quintin Crisp observed. ) God makes us for
each other, and to keep companionship with us in the garden in the cool
of the day.
When we know that, then we can see as the Greek slave Epictetus saw at
Rome, "If these statements. . . are true that God and humans are akin,
there is but one course open to us, to do as Socrates did: never to
reply to one who asks his country, 'I am an Athenian' or 'I am a
Corinthian', but 'I am a citizen of the universe'. When a person has
learnt to understand the government of the universe. . . why should he or
she not say, 'I am a citizen of the universe, and a child of God.'" And
not 'I am an American' or 'I am an Iraqi', but 'I am a citizen of the
universe, and a child of God." We might also learn not to say "I am a
Christian" or "I am a Jew" or "I am a Muslim", but I am a Believer, I
trust the God of Abraham and Sarah.
We learn in the gospel today that to identify oneself with such a
universal kinship is to offer oneself for suffering. Jesus saw himself
not only as a Semite, but as the Human Being, the "Child of Humanity", as
one translation puts it. What is meant is that Jesus is not only an
ancient Middle Eastern prophet, not only the finest flower of the Jewish
people, not only the Messiah and the "Great Prophet" the Muslims revere,
and not only the Christ of Christian faith and Lord of the Church who
Liberates the world, but that this One is the Child of all our Kind and
Kindred, the Truly Human One. And he tells us that such an identity,
to be on the side of God and not of men, is to be rejected by those
nationalistic elders, jingoistic priests, yahoo patriots, and to be their
targets "And he said this plainly," Mark tells us: "If anyone wants to
come this Way with me, they must be aware that they are taking up a
stauron, a cross". This is the the risk of jail or prison, of
capitalist punishment, the hangman's noose, the lethal injection, the
firing squad. It is not only Jesus who has taught us these things: it
is taught in all places of the world, in all nations. We hear this from
the Buddha: "Self, that which seems to those who love self as their
being, is not the Eternal, the Everlasting, the Imperishalbe. Seek not
self, but seek the truth. . . Self is the Cause of Selfishness and the
source of evil. Self begets selfishness. There is no evil but what
flows from self. There is no wrong but what is done by assertion of
self."
" Hard it is to understand,"the Buddha taught in his sermon on charity,
"By giving away our food, we get more strength, By bestowing clothing on
others, we gain more beauty; by giving abodes of purity and truth, we
acquire great treasures." And then, "The cleaving to self is a perpetual
dying." "The one who would save ones own life shall lose life," Jesus
taught, "And whoever would give life away for the gospel's sake, shall
find it."
Gandhiji wrote, "The true child of God has the strength to use the sword,
but will not use it, knowing every human is the Image of God." I
remember when Jerry Falwell debated at Oxford University in 1985 with the
Prime Minister of New Zealand, on the proposition that it is moral to
threaten the use of nuclear warfare against an enemy. He was booed for
his
affirmation of the ancient law of tooth and claw. Now we hear the world
booing the unelected President George W. Bush, one of Falwell's
disciples, and his drumming up disaster for the world. "Under the rule
of nonviolence,' wrote Gandhi, 'There is no room for violence for the
sake of your country. . . this doctrine tells us that we may guard the
honor of those under our charge by delivering our own lives to the hands
of those who would commit the sacrilege. And that requires far greater
courage than delivering blows."
Paul asked, 'Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or
nakedness or peril or sword" separate us from the love of God? South
Africa's Michael Scott wrote several generations ago "How, some are
asking, can truth and nonviolence prevail against all the power of a
modern state? Perhaps the question would be better put the other way
around. How can force, even if wielded by a powerful organization like
the state, prevail against the truth?" The lies of the U.S. government,
even the lies of Cordial Colin the churchmammal, nor those of Dick
Chney's wooden brained puppet Rumsfeld, did not prevail in the world's
hearing, despite the massive attempt of the bought-and-paid-for media to
tell the establishment's lies for it.
Yet Gandhi consistently taught that there is no value in suffering as
such, but that it is rather readiness to suffer, to sacrifice the self
rather than the principles, which are of common concern, which is the
value we cherish. Abraham did not wish to slay his Child, and Isaac was
certainly an unwilling victim, for he had to be tied like a hog. Jesus,
too, went to his death tied up and afraid and despairing, crushed (not
like Socrates, the old one, who cheerfully quaffed the hemlock) but the
truth which Paul expresses was their truth and it is ours, too, and
belongs to all who look to the God of Life and Love, and not the God of
Revenge and Death. "I am sure," wrote Paul, that "neither death nor
life, no angel, no government official, nothing that exists, nothing
still to come, not any power or created thing, can ever come between us
and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus.
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) Dylan Thomas, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in
London", 1946, from "Chief Modern Poets of Britain and America, Vol 1.
Fifth Edition. from Dylan Thomas, Selected Poems, 1939, 1943, 1946, by
New Directions Publishing Corporation, copyright 1952 by Dylan Thomas.
This homily is dated for the 16th of March, by which time I shall have
returned to Managua from Baghdad, where I go on
February 24 with Christian Peacemaker Teams. I expect to be much enriched
by this solidarity with believers there, including the members of the
Chaldean Church, the oldest in the world. Pray for us. .