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Pentecost 2-B - Proper 7
H o
m i l y G r i t s
The Second
Sunday after Pentecost
Year B Proper 7
- June 22, 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup
- permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
O Lord, make us have perpetual love and reverence for your holy Name, for
you never fail to help and govern those whom you have set upon the sure
foundation of your loving-kindness; 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:
Job 38: 1-11, 16-18 Where were you when I laid the foundations of the
earth?
Psalm 107:1-32 or 107: 1-3, 23-32 Confitemini Domino
2 Corinthians 5: 14-21 From now on we regard no one from a human point of
view
Mark 4: 35-41 (5:1-20) "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
1 Samuel 17:(1a, 4-11, 19-23), 32-49 There came out of the camp of the
Philistines a champion named Goliath of Gath.
and Psalm 9:9-20 The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed
or 1 Samuel 17:57-18:5, 10-16,
Psalm 133 A Song of Ascents
or Job 38:1-11 The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind
and Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32 O give thanks to the Lord for he is good
2 Corinthians 6:1-13 We urge you also not to accept the grace of God in
vain
Mark 4:35-41 as above
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
O God of all nations, you have revealed your will to your people and
promised your help to us all. Help us to hear and to do what you
command, that the darkness may be overcome by the power of your light;
through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Psalm 81:1-10 Raise a loud shout to the God of Jacob.
Deuteronomy 5:12-15 Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy
2 Corinthians 4: 5-12 We proclaim ourselves as your slaves for Jesus'
sake
Mark 2:23-28 The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the
Sabbath.
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary
(Corpus Christi)
Exodus 24:3-8 See the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with
you
Psalm 115 Non nobis, Domine
Acts 9:11-15 The Lord said to him, "Get up and go to the street called
Straight"
Mark 14: 12-16, 22-26 Go into the city and a man carrying a jar of water
will meet you: follow him.
"God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform," so sings our hymn
by the prolific poet William Cowper, "He plants his footsteps in the sea,
and rides upon the storm." He titled the hymn "Light shining out of
darkness," and Canon Douglas notes in The Hymnal 1940 Companion that it
may have referred to Cowper's mental affliction, for he suffered from
melancholia all his life; and eventually died of it. The hymn was
published just a few months after Cowper's attempted suicide.
Old Joe McCain, my Black neighbor, parishioner, and good friend in
Chicago for nearly 30 years, had his own version of this hymn, which
brings a new insight. Joe used to say, "God moves in a mischiev-ious way
his wonders to perform." Old Job, with whom Joe had a lot in common,
couldn't have put it better himself. And God's answer to Job, the one we
heard for our first reading, speaks grandly and beautifully about the
mystery and power of God's ways. It seems also to be the answer of a
bully. We are all on Job's side here, in spite of God's marvelous
rhetoric. It sounds like Yahweh is tooting his own horn and even a bit
sarcastically, overweeningly, to Job, sitting in sickness and poverty:
God seems to side with Job's advisers, who had assured him that he must
have done something terribly wrong to suffer so much. They knew the
Bible verses that promised prosperity to the faithful, and punishment to
the sinner--the seminal texts for the Prosperity Theology of the "Bobble
Belt" in the U.S. today. Job, who seemed to be upright and just, must
nevertheless have some secret flaw that provoked God's wrath. Poverty
and illness are God's punishment for sin. I remember the shock this
doctrine dealt me when as a child of ten years in 1942 my dear mother
suffered from clinical depression after her three grown sons, my
brothers, were all drafted into military service and she was so
distraught she attempted suicide. And how morbid I felt a few years later
when in puberty I found I liked Jimmy more than I did Lucy. God had made
me queer, and predestined in Presbyterianism to everlasting death The
Deuteronomic doctrine is often invoked now by the Baalists whom the
prophets denounced., but who nevertheless find fertile fields in
fundamentalism.
We ought to prefer the words that Robert Frost gives to God in his
"Masque of Reason" (2) , a long poem in which Job and Mrs. Job and God
get together a thousand years later, and with Satan they all have their
picture taken. "There is nothing you are not behind," Job says to God:
"I did not ask then, but it seems as if now after all these years You
might indulge me. Why did you hurt be so? I am reduced to asking flatly
for the reason--outright!" God at first answers, "Oh I was just showing
off to the devil, Job. As is set forth in chapters one and two. Do you
mind?" Job says, "No. No. I mustn't. It was human of you. I expected
more than I could understand and what I get is almost less than I can
understand." God then gives the answer which is the real point of the
book Job. He says to the suffering one: "Job, you must understand my
provocation. The tempter comes to me and I am tempted. . . He thinks
he's smart. He thinks he can convince me it is no different with my
followers from what it is with his. Both serve for pay.
Disinterestedness never did exist, and if it did, it wouldn't be a
virtue. Neither would fairness. You have heard the doctrine. It's on
the increase. He could count on no one. That was his look out. I could
count on you. . . and before you died I trust I made it clear I took your
side against your comforters in their contention you must be wicked to
deserve such pain."
Job says, "God please. Enough for now. I'm in no mood for more
excuses." And God replies: "I saw you had no fondness for committees.
Next time you find yourself pressed on to one for the revision of the
Book of Common Prayer put that in if it isn't in already: 'Deliver us
from committees.' It will remind me. I would do anything for you in
reason. . . I had you on my mind a thousand years to thank you some day
for the way you helped me establish once for all the principle there's no
connection man can reason out between his just desserts and what he
gets. Virtue may fail and wickedness succeed. I have no doubt you
realize by now the part you played to stultify the Deuteronomist and
change the tenor of religious thought. My thanks are to you for
releasing me from moral bondage to the human race. . . unless I liked to
suffer loss of worship. I had to prosper and punish evil. You changed
all that. You set me free to reign. You are the emancipator of your
God. And as such I promote you to a saint."
So there it is. Job sets our religion free from a disastrous formula of
quid pro quo, with wealth and health interpreted as God's approval and
poverty and illness seen as condign punishment for sin. It is a powerful
religion, especially in a culture based on power and success, and it is
the religion of the healthy, wealthy, and the wise in the ways of the
world.. Paulus tells us it was his religion before his conversion, when
he was still Saulus. Jesus, who was poor, uneducated, of no
importance--of the working class, a convicted criminal, when regarded
from a human point of view, as Paul puts it, was one to be dismissed, and
his followers hounded down like Ba'athists in Iraq, (1) or Arab
revolutionaries in a Guantanamo cage: captured, chained, tortured. From
the world's point of view, praise and blessing belong to the rich, the
beautiful, the healthy, brilliant, admired, successful, dominant. This
is the faith of capitalism rampant in the denominational religion of game
shows, talk shows, and preaching shows. .
Paul found in the whirlwind of the gospel in the Roman Empire that the
world is neither round nor flat, but cruciform. He finds a new creation,
a new structure for judgment: the Cross, and knows that in the crucified
and vindicated Christ God acts to reconcile the captured world to
Godself. This reconciliation is not the treacherous term of the theology
which betrays the poor by insisting that they reconcile themselves to the
way the rich have stolen and polluted the creation. That they accommodate
themselves to Imperial hegemony over their lives, their religion, their
governments. "Reconciliation" to capitalists means "get used to it. We
own it." God is not a bookkeeper for the transnational corporations,
counting out merits and market losses, rewarding the cheat and slapping
the wrists of the fumblers. Instead, God acts to bring justice to us as
God's friends, to give us The Justice and The Just Society. God is
closest to us in our struggles and as we storm the citadels of
capitalism, and give back the world to all its inhabitants, its wealth
to all its people, and God's hand in history will redirect the traffic.
.
God talks to Job in the dry and devastating sandstorm of the desert and
to the disciples in the great wind storm on the Galilean lake. Believers
at Rome in the first century surely had a special love for this story of
their little church, once tossed about in the midst of a gale on their
own lake Gennesaret at the edge of Empire, now sinking in the floods
of the Great Sea in the middle of all known lands--the Mediterranean.
The bark of he Big Fisherman seems overwhelmed by the pagan Sea, its
power to persecute and jail and execute the believers, to drown them in
calamity. "Teacher, do you not care if we perish?" was that young
Church's prayer, and has surely been the prayer of every persecuted and
frightened cell of Christians, Muslims, or Jews, at some time in these
our own decades of human self-destruction. Now all modern nations, and
some War Churches, have abandoned conscience and embraced offering the
blood of their youth to the god Molech. (3)
Siegfried Sassoon at first served bravely in World War I's early years,
and then repented. He declared he had believed the war was one of
"defense and liberation" but had become a war of "aggression and
conquest" and he could "no longer be a party to prolong the sufferings
for ends which I believe evil and unjust." Robert Graves used his
influence to keep Sassoon from being court-martialed, and helped him get
tried by a medical board that judged him shell-shocked. Sassoon's poems
ought to be recited by U.S. and British chaplains to their young troopers
each time they pray to the gods of war.
He wrote:
"They"
The Bishop tells us, 'When the boys come back
They will not be the same, for they'll have fought
In a just cause: they lead the last attack
On Anti-Christ; their comrade's blood has bought
New right to breed an honorable race.
They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.'
'We're none of us the same!' the boys reply.
'For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;
Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;
And Bert's gone syphilitic; you'll not find
A chap who's served that hasn't found some change.'
And the bishop said, 'The ways of God are strange.' (4)
The gospel says Jesus wakes, 'though he seemed a moment ago to be asleep
in the midst of the storm. I've noticed that, too. He's asleep in the
stern, where the rudder is--where the ship is given its direction. It's
where the cathedra is, the seat where the Bishop sits now (and some
Rectors). Paul says, the love of Christ constrains us, and the Greek
word is also capable of meaning "directs us"or "urges us" Even when it
seems that the Lord is asleep, or far away tending to other business,
Jesus is here in the same boat, the same church, with us. And at the
rudder. "Have you no faith, don't you know I'm the One who spoke to Job
and said, 'Tell me if you can, where were you when I shut the sea with
doors, when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its
garment, and said to it, ' Thus far you shall come and no farther' and
here your proud waves be stayed. Have you entered into the springs of
the sea, and walked in the recesses of its deeps?' And to the sea he
says, 'Be still!'
Jesus speaks the Word and the Wisdom of God in his life and death with
us, in the boat with us, in the Church with us. . He sails our little
boat to God, and reconciles us to God, not to the injustice of our
plight, or the horror of our fears and anxiety. He doesn't come to tell
us we deserve the storm and he doesn't come to tell us with Job's
advisers that we deserve illness, poverty, and loss. Or that we must be
reconciled to being evicted, expelled, ethnic cleansed, so that better
folk and whiter ones can move in to the next block or the West Bank.
Jesus says, "Peace, be still"
Jesus speaks to the swine in the graveyard, "Get out of here. Don't
occupy this territory. Go jump in the lake." From stilling the storm
that besets the Church, Jesus moves to the unconverted world of the
Gerasenes, a world whose ideology is that of death, lurking about in the
cemetery of an imperial culture which sees human beings as things to be
possessed, as commodities to be owned by Empire, by what is inferior to
human life. In mid eastern desert culture, swine were ages ago deemed
unacceptable, even for the Sunday barbecue, not because pigs are dirty
(they aren't--they are one of the cleanest animals, left to themselves)
or because the people knew about trichinosis (they didn't) but because
pigs are animals that compete with humankind for food in a desert
economy; sheep, goats, and cattle can feed themselves on grass--pastoral
life can accommodate them; it cannot herd pigs. Swinehood thus became
to desert people a metaphor for the forbidden ways;, the selfishness, and
tastes of the Gentile world. When Jesus asks the demon's name, it
replies with its military title, proud of its size and power, status and
distinction: "My name is Legion." The name of a Roman imperial military
unit. "My power is the power of General Tommy Franks and airborne
liberator George Bush, the first U.S. president to don a military uniform
while in office." "My name is now Legion in the Empire: I am the
Department of Defense, I am Homeland Security, Gestapo--Geheime Staats
Polizei (Secret State Police), I am C.I.A., F.B.I., Secret Service,
N.A.T.O., and I am W.T.O.-- I am the Pentagon of Power over human life on
this planet." Intercontinental ballistic missiles, Depleted Uranium nose
cones, Nuclear submarines." The money spent on such obscenities could
heal the world and feed it, could fund our voyages to other galaxies
where we might learn of Dante's "Love that moves the sun, and the other
Stars." Jesus learns the names of all those now hell-bent on the
domination and exploitation of all life on the planet. Their name is
Legion. No one can bind this filthy power any more in our world; it has
run rampant, and no one has the strength to subdue the injustice and
nastiness of the military industrial spirits, who are night and day
slaying our society, forcing us all to live in tombs, in ghettoes, in
chains, in the country of the Gerasenes.
Jesus comes to us, too, and asks, "What is your name? What are the names
of those among you who diminish and bind and hurt human life? Name the
powers, Name the demons! --and Jesus binds us to confrontation as well
as reconciliation. For there can be no reconciliation with God or with
the Human Future until we have confronted our demons and evicted them.
There is no cheap grace, no inexpensive redemption, no bargain basement
salvation at religion shops, and no discount deliverance. The whole
herd of demonic pork barrel religion must be named-- It is Military
might, it is Legion, it is Superpower, it is the Occupying Force, it is
The Coalition Authority. This is the One World of U.S.A. dominance.
True believers in the True Jesus of Galilee, our Jewish-Palestinian
Liberator, will act now to restrain the U.S., the man with an unclean
spirit who is now on a rampage, howling and bruising himself and the
world. He can only see Jesus now from a distance. But Jesus shouts now
to our demoniac nation, "Come out of him." May we be exorcised of our
Legions and come out of the tombs, abandon our death dealing and come to
sit among civilized humanity, fully clothed in the gospel of God and in
our right mind.
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) Ba'ath Party. Arab.nationalist party, founded by Michel Aflaq, a
Syrian Christian. Different (and mutually hostile) forms of the Ba'ath
Party exist in both Syria and Iraq. The Ba'athists' socialism has made
them the target of the U.S. invaders, who have taken the oil which the
Ba'athists had nationalized long ago at the time of their revolution. The
Oil is now a commodity wholly owned by the U.S.A., Britain, and their
multinational corporations. When I was in Iraq before the invasion,
gasoline was less than two cents a gallon. I wonder what the U.S. and
Britain are charging for it now. . .
(2) Robert Frost, "A Masque of Reason," from The Poetry of Robert Frost,
Ed. Edward Connery Lathem, for the Franklin Library edition, 1981.
(3) Molech, or Moloch. (from Hebrew Melekh, "king"). A Semitic deity
worshipped by parents compelling their children to pass through a furnace
of fire. A sanctuary of Molech may have been set in very early times in
the Hinnom Valey at Jerusalem. He has been worshipped by patriots
since.
(4) Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) in World War One British Poets, Ed.
CandaceWard. Dover Publications. 1997. Ward notes that Rupert Brooke's
patriotism and enthusiasm for the Great War, and Sassoon's later angry
rejection of it were reflected in a saying among British troops: "Went to
war with Rupert Brooke, came home with Siegfried Sassoon."