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Easter IV-B May 11, 2003
Hom i l y G r i t s
The Fourth Sunday of Easter
Good Shepherd Sunday
Year B - May 11, 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of your people: Grant that
when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and
follow where he leads; who, with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and
reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Acts 4: (23-31) 32-37 No one claimed private ownership of any possessions
and everything they owned was held in common.
or Ezekiel 34:1-10 Prophesy against the shepherds
Psalm 23 Dominus regit me or 100 Jubilate Deo
1 John 3:1-8 We will be like him, for we will see him as he is
or Acts 4:(23-31) 32-37 as above
John 10:11-16 The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
Acts 4:5-12 They made the prisoners stand in their midst
Psalm 23 Dominus regit me
1 John 3:16-24 How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's
goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?
John 10:11-16 as above
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary
Acts 4:8--12 This man is standing before you in good health by the name
of Jesus Christ of Nazareth
Psalm 117 Laudate Dominum
1 John 3:1-2 The reason that the world does not know us is that it did
not know him.
John 10:11-18 The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep
There was a time, not long ago, when the Bible was interpreted to justify
slavery, and dubious texts are still picked out and amplified to serve
as subtexts for subtler discrimination now. There was a time, not long
ago, when Holy Writ was perverted to justify the bloody wars against
Islam we call the Crusades, and it still serves as subtext for the
fundamentalist alliance with Zionists to "liberate" Arab nations, as for
the imperial U.S.A.-British-Spanish assault on Iraq . There was a time,
not long ago when the Bible was freely twisted to justify the subjugation
of females, and it is still so twisted by organizations that jocularly
call themselves churches. It was only a few decades ago that our
brothers and sisters of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa decided
they could no longer use our Bible to bless their dotty doctrine of
apartheid. (pronounced "apart-hate"), and it was only a few years ago
that Dr. King went to the mountaintop in Tennessee where he looked over
into the Promised Land to see who was running for President there, and
it still wasn't Jesse Jackson. Colin Powell, an old fashioned
Episcopalian Negro, has now served as a faithful functionary of the
White Man's Burden in the Neocolonial world. And it has been only a few
years, actually since my own ordination in 1959, that most of the
Episcopal Church has decided women are sufficiently human to ordain as
well. The Church is still fussing about whether or not it can ordain Gay
people, 'though it has been doing so in closets for centuries, and
canonizing them as well. What kind of Banquet could deserve the name
Celestial if there were no Lesbian or Gay caterers? Ann Sathers, the
Chicago gay restaurant ikon, is surely there at the End-Time now,
arranging the menu for us late-comers.
The older the Church gets, the more we are forced to remember, and the
more we forget. The Church forgets about its own past, so it fails
sometimes to be ready for the present, and shies away from the future.
The Church forgot the Exodus when it allowed anyone to live in slavery,
and itself bought and sold in the markets of human flesh. The Church
forgot the story of Mary of Nazareth and all the Bible's women when it
subjected any woman to any man, and it abandoned the life and teaching of
Jesus when it took up the sword of Caesar to kill in the name of the
Prince of Peace. We have now slaughtered Iraqis in the name of our
powerful and patriotic God, and have forgotten that there was a time
when we at least crossed ourselves first, and fasted afterwards. The
Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas remembered that "In the past when
Christians killed in a just war, it was understood they should be in
mourning. They had sacrificed their unwillingness to kill. Black, not
yellow was the appropriate color. Indeed, in the past when Christian
soldiers returned from a just war, they were expected to do penance for
three years before being restored to the Eucharist. (1) The Methodist
Caesar George Bush goes instead to the National Cathedral, loosely
affiliated with the Episcopal Church, to declare his wars from the
pulpit. Now we ought to tie black bands of mourning about our old oak
trees, and save the yellow ribbons for Easter baskets.
Today we have a Scripture that the Church has wanted to forget for two
thousand years. It is a central part of the Jesus gospel, and it is
urging its way back into our attention. Some churches use Acts 4: 32-27
in their lectionaries but many have dropped those verses, and most
Christians won't get to hear the cited contraband. The verses were
written by Luke, the author of the gospel named for him, in which Luke
quotes Jesus at 14:33 as saying, "None of you can become my disciple if
you do not give up all your possessions." What a terrible thing to
say! And Luke tells us that the first Christians believed that and
acted on it. They didn't know, as we think we know, that Jesus was only
"shuckin' and jivin'" -- he couldn't possibly have meant it. That's
crazy! All our possessions? The "wealth of nations"? He must have
meant "sit loosely to your cash," rather like J. P. Morgan, and be
generous to bishops. He must have meant a tithe. We can go for
that--that's what the "Old Testament" had called for. Ten per cent for
the clergy, or was it ten per cent for the Temple? A kind of graduated
income tax. You say All Our Possessions?
Now here comes the way the Church worked this out, not long after
Pentecost: The whole group of believers was united, one heart and
soul. No one claimed for their own use anything that they had, as
everything they owned was held in common. The apostles continued to
testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus with great power, and they
were all given great respect. None of their members was ever in want, as
all those who owned land or houses would sell them, and bring the money
from them to present it to the apostles; it was then distributed to any
members who might be in need. Now in English, at least, there's an
unkind, even slanderous word, for such an arrangement of the economy.
Look at it again: No one claimed anything as private property. The
Church early on abolished private property for its members, under the
guidance of the Holy Spirit, and then (as a result) "continued to testify
to the resurrection with power." Resurrection means revolutionary
arrangements with property. Easter and Economics are linked. And the
result of such Easter Economics is that none of the members was ever in
want. The abolition of privatization meant the redistribution of
wealth, the end of poverty. Luke gives then a couple of examples of what
happened next. One of them, a person for whom we have remembered his
name, out of respect, was Joseph, a Cypriot whose last name was Barnabas
("Son of Encouragement"), encouraged us all by selling his land and
bringing the money to the apostles. Luke tells us also the story of
Ananias and Sapphira, as well, as a footnote to his Communist Manifesto
in Chapter Four. He tells us of these two who drop down dead when they
welch on their commitment to the Lord. Now it is argued that this was
all optional, and that Christians have the option of being communists by
joining a monastery or a convent or a voluntary common-property
community. But if you look at the story again, you can see that the
option was whether or not you wanted to be a Christian, and if you
decided yes, you were then committed to the common life, you were
committed to being united heart and soul and claiming nothing for your
own. You are then committed to selling what you own and giving over the
funds to the community for redistribution to the needy. It's like being
a Baptist--you're nor required, but if you decide for immersion, it's
bottoms up into the tub. The argument of "optional" won't hold the bath
water. Common Property in the Church was no more optional than the
Common Bath, or the Common Prayer, or the Common Heart and Soul. It is
sometimes argued hat this was "an experiment" of one isolated gospel
community that failed, so we are permitted to forget it. The same may be
said of the decalogue, or the Sermon on the Mount, or of monogamy.
Since the human race has failed to keep any of those, as well as the
Athanasian Creed, "without doubt it shall perish everlastingly." The
day is coming when believers will again take seriously the consistent
teaching of Scripture and tradition about communism, just as the Church
had to take seriously what the revelation is about the One-ness of the
human race, in the story of Eva and Adam. It was only in 1959, after
all, that the discoveries in the Olduvai Gorge in
Tanzania demonstrated to the scientific world that humankind has one
ancestry, that the Bible story is corroborated, that all human beings are
Africans under the skin. That we are all descendants of the first
humanoids who got out of their trees and slowly stood up to become homo
erectus and then homo sapiens. Eva was the first homo sapiens, the first
"wise human" for she communicated with the wise serpent, not a sign of
evil in ancient stories but a sign of sagacity. The Bible says that the
serpent was "the most subtle" -- the wisest -- of beasts. Doesn't say
the most wicked. Nobody in the U.S. took Exodus seriously until Black
folks began to sing, "Go down, Moses. . . Tell old Pharoah 'Let my people
go!'." The day is coming when believers on the planet will take Acts
4:32-37 seriously again. The class system has injected the church with
distinctions between peoples on the basis of ownership. Our separations
in the world are based on money and property. The fullness of preaching
the gospel will one day require us to listen again: "None of you can be
my disciple unless you give up all claim to private property." Peter and
John were released from jail and went back to the Christian community
described by Luke, and the first thing they do is pray.
"Sovereign Lord" they say as they begin their prayer. Now these words
have come into question in our own day in talking about God. Some
people think that words like "Lord" about God are ways of reinforcing
male domination, and give the wrong message in patriarchal images,
titles that belongs to monarchies or feudal societies, like king, queen,
baron and baroness, duke and duchess. But we need to look at how the
early Church used it. When Peter calls God "Sovereign Lord," he is
deliberately using this language to say it doesn't belong to the Emperor,
that neither Caesar nor Herod has any right to it, that Pilate has no
right to it, and that God alone is Sovereign. Thus Peter, like a
Jehovah's Witness, would have refused to salute the flag, or pledge
allegiance to it, or to call George W. Bush his "commander-in-chief".
Peter would have said these titles are God's alone. The Black
community, it has been pointed out, has always used "Lord" of Jesus in
the same way that it has always refused the title to the White Man.
"Massah" was the name that slave owners demanded they be called, but
Blacks gave that name to God alone as Master and Sovereign Lord. God is
not made in the image of Mister Caesar or Mister Charlie or Mister
Bush. Only Jesus has the right to the name which is above every name.
Jesus is Kyrios, Jesus is Lord.
Peter quotes the psalm, "The kings of the earth set themselves in array
against the Lord and against his anointed." And it is the experience of
the Church when it is truest to itself that it will be opposed by the
rulers of the earth, because then it is threat to atheistic capitalism.
Communism comes in both its atheistic and Christian varieties, but
capitalism comes only in the atheistic mode. It isn't atheistic
communism that the U.S. opposed in Central America, it was the other
kind, which had its articulation in the gospel. It's the kind that the
Miskito Indians of Nicaragua's east coast practiced for centuries before
Carlos Fonseca was born. The kind the First Nations of north America
practiced before Karl Marx scribbled out his theories in his London
attic.
The kind Luke and the First Churches practiced. And they didn't think it
up either. It goes back to the Garden of Eden, back to when God gave the
human community, not the multinational corporations, the stewardship of
all the earth.
The desert fathers and mothers revived it in Egypt, Benedict revived it
at Nursia, and Francis and Clare at Assisi. Gamaliel Bradford, in his
essay "Gods Vagabond: St. Francis of Assisi", quotes Ernest Renan "Note
well that Francis forbids us to possess, he does not forbid us to enjoy"
and " the experience of humanity even without Francis has long ago taught
us that possssion and enjoyment are by no means identical." (2) Shakers,
religious fellowships, communes, institutes, there must always be in the
faithful community some expression of voluntary (not "optional")
communism. In Judaism, we all learned of the Essenes, and every great
faith has had its communitarian lifestyles--Sunnis and Shiites and the
tiny Zorastrian community we met in Iraq praying and laughing and dancing
in the desert. . The war the U.S. fought against the people of Viet
Nam taught us all for the first time about the faithfulness of Buddhist
monks and nuns, laying down their lives for their own people.
Commonists, communists, all--and because of their common life, all of
them more fully human, trying to reflect the divine society of the
Quicunque Vult, in which "none is afore, or after other; none is greater,
or less than another". The main point of Good Shepherd Sunday is to
lift up the intimacy and caring, feeding and healing, that are possible
in the common life which is common future of humankind: one flock, one
fold, one Shepherd.
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) Thanks to Robert Cromey, Rector Emeritus of Trinity, San Francisco,
for this quotation from Stanley Hauerwas, the United Methodist theologian
now at Duke University, cited from the July 21, 2001 issue of the
National Catholic Reporter. Fr. Cromey comments: "That we now find that
to be unimaginable is but an indication (of) how hard it is for us to
imagine what it might mean to be a Christian."
(2) In "The Story of Jesus in the World's Literature," ed. Edward
Wagenknecht, New York, Creative Age Press, Indc. 1946.