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EASTER VI-B May 25, 2003
H o m i l y G r i t s
The
Sixth Sunday of Easter
(Monday,
Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week are the traditional Rogation Days.)
Year B - May 25, 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup
- permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as
surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you,
that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your
promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our
Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for
ever and ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Acts 11:19-30 It was in Antioch that the disciples were first called
"Christians".
or Isaiah 45: 11-13, 18-19 Will you question ME, about MY children?
Psalm 33 Exultate, justi, or 33:1-8, 18-22
1 John 4: 7-21 Love is perfected among us in this: that we may have
boldness in the day of crisis
or Acts 11:19-30 as above
John 15:9-17 I have called you Friends.
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
Acts 10:44-48 Then Peter said, "Can anyone withhold the water for
baptizing these people? "
Psalm 98 Cantate Domino
1 John 5:1-6 Whatsoever is born of God conquers the world
John 15:9-17 As above
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary
Acts 10: 25-26, 34-35, 44-48 And Peter made him get up, saying "Stand up,
I'm only a mortal."
Psalm 97 Dominus regnavit
1 John 4:7-10 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from
God.
John 15: 9-17 As above
There are several dishes on the buffet today, multiple choices on the
menu. It's the Sunday before the Ascension Day, which itself seems will
now be served up as a leftover on the Sunday after, without ever having
been the main course on Thursday. The liturgical engineers have rightly
seen that Ascension is not a separate "occasion" from Easter, but part
and parcel of the One vindication of Jesus as the Holy One of God. A
rubric now remembers that "Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week
are the Traditional Rogation Days,." but not a peep is uttered about
today being Rogation Sunday, and nowhere are the old English traditions
of Rogationtide told, its customs rumored . Already no one remembers them
as "Gang Days," from the custom of "ganging" around the parish to Beat
the Bounds or Bless the Hounds. The Litany is not much sung in
Procession around the parish boundaries, nor are boys whipped with
willow wands and splashed with water all the way that they might vividly
remember the route. These former customs have already mercifully been
forgotten. For Anglicans Rogationtide used to be as famous as
Pentecost, even. It was the time when we got all our requests to God
together and sent them off with Jesus on his trip home on Ascension Day.
Rogation means "asking" and so Asking Sunday was the idea. Easter is
coming to an end, and Pentecost is two weeks from catching fire.
It is hard for us to hear the word "Christian" these days without
wincing, what with its abuse by U.S. fundamentalists and their
Born-Again self-appointed Texas dictator. When a radio or TV station or a
publication is called "Christian" I avoid it like a pot hole in the
street, a nasty obstacle to progress, for I know at once that bumpy
bigotry is nigh. "Born-again" is another word made vile by its
perverted use by these mindless jerks. Thank God that so far the
Lutherans have saved "Evangelical" from being slopped into the pig pen of
garbage words. In Nicaragua it is a good word, used instead of
"Protestant" to signify anyone who isn't a Roman Catholic. (Anglicanos
and Luteranos are the exception here.) But fundamentalists are to the
Jesus community what self-immolaters are to the Ummah of Islam. And now
today it is our celebration of this great Easter Season that has given us
the definitive name of "Christian", which our reading from Acts today
tells us got its start as an epithet in Antakya, now in Muslim Turkey.
A cave I visited there in 1969, called St. Peter's church, is still
there, and is sacred to Muslims as well as Christians, and a spring of
holy water from which everyone drinks and carries away its blessings.
Once a year, there is a mass celebrated to remind us all of its antiquity
as the first "Christian" church. Up till Antioch, there was only one
"church", and that was in Jerusalem, and nobody there was called
"Christian". The faithful there called themselves "The Way" or "the
Disciples", and they were all Judeans, and didn't think of themselves as
different from the other believers in God, who were all Jews.
Almost by accident, there were some Jews from North Africa and Cyprus who
had become followers of "the Way" --what a mix they were already! --
Hellenistic Jewish Jesus People, and they went up to Antioch and for the
first time spoke to non-Jews about Jesus. Up till then, the only
"converts" to the Way had been Jews, from as far away as Phoenicia,
Cyprus and Antioch, to be sure, for the church members had fled Jerusalem
after the murder of Stephen, the first martyr, and so the little church
in Jerusalem was dispersed, sent running for cover. And one of the towns
they fled to was Antioch. Luke says they preached "the Lord Jesus" to
Greeks. Not "the Christ Jesus", but "the Lord Jesus." Preaching Jesus
as Christ, as Messiah, would have made little sense to non-Jews, who
"didn't care nothin' about no 'messiah'." What's a "messiah?" they might
have said, as in What's a gefilte fish? What's a matzo ball? What's lox
and bagels? "Messiah" was on the kosher menu, but it meant nothing to
Greeks. Such talk was "to the Greeks foolishness." Instead, the church
preached to the Greeks in another idiom.
It preached to them Jesus as kyrios, LORD, World Ruler. They understood
this as a contradiction and confrontation of the universal political
conviction that Caesar was World Ruler. It was revolutionary to say
"Jesus is Lord." It was good news to the conquered and oppressed peoples
of the Empire that a man named Jesus from the outback had proclaimed a
new world order, that a victim of the Emperor had come back from his
grave and was claiming Caesar's place. It is as if believers were now to
claim that Jesus, and not George W. Bush, was "World Ruler, President of
the Planet, and Commander-in-Chief", and to act on that belief. It was
for this reason that the disciples got into trouble with the Empire, and
not because they were peddling just one more variant religious idea
around their weekend lodge meetings. Now Barnabas was sent down to
Antioch from the Mother Church in Jerusalem to do some mothering in
Antioch. He liked what he saw there, and went to find Saul (Paul, as we
know him now) and brought him back to Antioch with him and the two of
them spent a year there, and taught the church, so that by the time they
finished the locals could be called "Christians", by this time they knew
that Jesus was not only World Ruler and Kyrios, but was also the
"Anointed One," the "Sent One", the "Christos," the Messiah waited for
by the Jewish people like Paul and Barnabas. And so his name became the
name of his disciples as well, and his vocation in history
to preach peace to those afar off and those who are nigh.
The story goes on to tell that the first thing they did together as
Church was to listen to the prophet Agabus, who foresaw a world wide
Great Depression coming--one of many that would afflict mercantile
societies throughout history--as one menaces the markets today-- and they
took up a collection and sent it back to Mother Church in Judea, and sent
the cash by the hand of Barnabas and Saul. So the first reading
illustrates and illuminates mothering as an act directed towards Mother
Church. How the church is re-produced, how it is given new birth and new
life in new cultures and new places with new people and how it faces new
challenges is by mothering. It is the newcomers themselves who are the
givers of new life out of Antioch. We don't know their names, but we know
they were mixed-bag newcomers themselves, from north Africa and Cyprus!
Not from Capernaum or Nazareth, or those Jewish places the apostles were
from. They were outsiders themselves. It wasn't any big thing for them
to go and preach to Greeks at Antioch, for they themselves spoke Greek.
They were bicultural people already, and they used the language of the
people they were talking to, not just speaking in Greek, but using the
metaphors of Greek culture in the pagan world. Jesus is KYRIOS, they
said. A new metaphor in which they en-culturated the gospel, and so
enabled new life, new birth in that place. A Mother does not clone
herself in the child, but contributes her gifts, along with the Father's
gifts, so that a wholly new thing will happen, and a wholly new life will
come about. Something new and wonderful happens in parenting. And
mothering isn't just birthing. The apostles Barnabas and Saul go on to
spend a whole year there in Antioch after the conversions, teaching the
neonates. Mothering is nurture, not just birthing. So every church and
every church member needs more than the birth of water Baptism, but also
the care and feeding, the attention and teaching, of flesh and blood
church life. The internalizing of the gospel, the contextualizing into
life, the conscientization, which is a way of transplanting the antennae
of gospel consciousness into the personality, and into the
community--this is what makes growth possible for the Body of Christ.
What does it mean that Jesus is Kyrios? What will it mean when you act
politically as a believer?
Max Lerner said once long ago that our value systems come and go,
somewhat in the cycles of the decades. So that we remember the sixties
as a revolutionary, altruistic age, when people were concerned about the
rights of others: civil rights, women's rights, Gay and Lesbian rights.
And in the seventies we had Nixon and treachery and a decade of turning
inward and away from the world into self. The eighties then gave us
yuppies and buppies and guppies and an "I'll get mine" philosophy for
the upwardly mobile and the greedy. The decades of greed and lying have
stayed with us through the end of one century and the start of another.
They have invaded and captured the "old republic" that Gore Vidal
remembers, and it is no more. We have been made subjects in a decaying
Empire, and lost our citizenship in a democratic republic. Evil spirits
of self indulgence, sexual rapine, financial conquest, have invaded and
occupied the political life, and even churches, so that some of us who
are ordained feel it more comfortable to go without a clerical collar in
public. Now we have Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general of the
United States, calling for the impeachment of the unelected and very
popular war criminal who sits in the White House today.
"Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity." (1)
For believers who dare to accept the name of Christ as their own in the
apithet "Christian", greed should have had its hash settled once and for
all back there in Antioch, when we were first foretold by the Spirit of
the needs of the world, of the great famine over all the world, and Luke
tells us it first happened in the days of Claudius, the world emperor and
commander-in-chief at the time. But it also happens now, in the days of
the world emperor and commander-in-chief George W. Bush.
There are great famines in the whole world, because of the
maldistribution of the world's resources, deliberately so engineered by
the "free market system", designed to make the few rich and the masses
poor. There's famine in the world for generosity, sharing, hospitality,
because of the failure of compassion. The commandment, "Thou shalt not
steal" has been diminished to
the prohibition of hungry people taking food to feed their babies.
Martin Luther had another take on the commandment:
"If all who are thieves, though they are unwilling to admit it, were
hanged on the gallows, the world would soon be empty, and there would be
a shortage of both hangmen and gallows. . . A person steals not only when
he robs a man's strongbox or his pocket, but also when he takes advantage
of his neighbor at the market, in a grocery shop, butcher stall, wine and
beer cellar, work shop, and in short, wherever business is transacted and
money is exchanged for goods or labor. . . . These men are called
gentlemen swindlers or big operators. Far from being pickpockets and
sneak-thieves who loot a cash box, they sit in office chairs and are
called great lords and honorable, good citizens, and yet with great show
of legality they rob and steal. . . .
. . . Those who can steal and rob openly are safe and free, unmolested by
anyone, even claiming honor from men. Meanwhile the little sneak-thieves
who have committed one offense must bear disgrace and punishment so as to
make others look respectable and honorable." (2)
Eric Gill, in his Autobiography, tells a wonderful story about theft,
Easter, and forgiveness, told to him by a priest friend, Abbot Ford. "I
think I had made some tentative remark about medieval ecclesiastical
corruption and he said: 'The Church is as full of corruption now as
then. Last year when I was in Rome I employed a small boy to do a small
job for me and I gave him some money out of which he should have brought
me some change. But he didn't reappear. A few days later, in Easter
week, I ran across him again and I said,"Hallo, you're the young rascal
who did me out of threepence last week." And he replied, "Oh, but Father,
that was before Easter." Abbot Ford told me the story, I now realize,
as showing that superstition was still common and that the poor people
still regarded religion as a kind of magic. . . But at the time, I took
it to show that even rascally urchins went to confession and expected
bygones to be bygones after Easter. Easter! The Rising of the Lord.
How could you have the heart to recall small things that happened before
that! And isn't it possible that the thief who, in spite of everything,
loves God is better than the honest man who doesn't?" (3)
And so it was in Antioch that the disciples determined, every one
according to his or her ability, to send relief to the sisters and
brothers in need, and now they are back in the Gaza strip, back there on
the West Bank, back there in Palestine, back there in Iraq, looking for
relief. So the cycle of selfishness can end, self-interest can give way
to motherly concern for others. In the gospel reading, Jesus says, "I
have not called you servants, but I have called you friends." Has the
church's life changed so much from the days in the upper room when Jesus
made friendship the style of governing his church? Bishops, priests,
deacons, archdeacons, subdeacons, archpriests, archbishops, mother
superiors, prebendaries, canons, apostolic delegates, deputies and
alternates, delegates and deans--but Jesus had only one name for us all:
"friends", and it was not he who first called us "christians," back there
in the Springtime of the gospel. We were called followers of the Way
before that. In Iraq, the Mennonite-Brethren-Quaker peacemaker teams I
ran around with styled themselves as "Getting in the Way", with the
double entendre of nonviolently obstructing the warmaking and
warmongering of the U.S. and Britain and Spain. If we are the friends of
Jesus, we will once again "get in the Way" and find all of Jesus' friends
there too. And we will forgive the petty sins of all when we are
reminded, "But Father, that was before Easter! "
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) From "the Second Coming", by William Butler Yeats. Written in
1921.copyright renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. The Norton Anthology
of Poetry, Revised. New York: W W Norton & Co., 1975.
(2) Martin Luther, the Large Catechism, 395-396, quoted in the preface of
"You Shall Not Steal": Community and Property in the Biblical Tradition,
by Robert Gnuse. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, Inc., 1985.
(3) Autobiography, by Eric Gill. p.184. London: Jonathan Cape, 1940.