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Epiphany III-C Jan 25 2004
H o m i l y G r i t s
The
Third Sunday after the Epiphany
Year C - January 25, 2004
The
Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle
One or more of the
Lessons appointed for the Feast may be substituted for those of the
Sunday.
(© Copyright 2004 Grant
Gallup - permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation
)
Fasts and Feasts: 25, Week of Prayer for Christian Unity ends; 26, SS
Timothy, Titus & Silas; 27th, St John Chrysostom, 407; also, SS Lydia,
Dorcas & Phoebe 28th, St Thomas Aquinas, 1274. Birth of José Marti in
Havana 1853. 30th, Murder of Mahatma Gandhi 1948: Day of Nonviolence &
Peace.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Nehemiah 8: 2-10 The priest Ezra brought the law before the assembly,
both men and women
Psalm 113 Laudate, Pueri - Give praise, you servants of the Lord
I Corinthians 12: 12-27 Our less respectable members are treated with
greater respect
Luke 4: 14-21 Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to
Galilee
Conversion of St. Paul:
Acts 26: 9-21 "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting."
Psalm 67 Deus misereatur - God be merciful
Galatians 1: 11-24 I went away at once into Arabia
Matthew 10: 16-22 You will be dragged before governors and kings
¶ Revised Common Lectioanry
Nehemiah 8: 1-3, 5-6, 8-10 as above BCP
Psalm 19 Coeli enarrant
I Corinthians 12: 12-31a as above BCP
Luke 4: 14-21 as above BCP
Lutheran Lectionary: current/proposed
Is 61:1-6 Neh 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Ps 146 Ps 19
1 Cor 12:12-21, 26-27 1 Cor 12:12-31a
Lk 4:14-21 Lk 4:16-30
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary: 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Nehemiah 8:2-4, 5-6, 8-10 as above BCP
Psalm 19 as above RCL (Vulgate, Ps 18)
1 Corinthians 12:12-30 as above BCP
Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21 as above BCP
The key word in the gospel reading today is the word "today". Luke tells
us that after his Baptism, and after his testing in the remote hermitage
in solitude, Jesus returned with power into his own village of Nazareth
and went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day to read the lesson from the
Prophets. The lectionary guided him to the Prophet Isaiah that Saturday
morning.
Now some scholars think that Jesus might have been inalfabeto, unable to
read and write, as Muslims are proud of Muhammad's illiteracy, which
seems to endorse the literacy instead of the Angel Gabriel, who taught
the Prophet to "Recite!", and over a period of years whispered to him all
of the dictation, which he repeated to literate scribes and kinfolk, so
that the word Qur'an means "Recitation." A poor artisan's son need not
necessarily have had his schooling neglected, and the Synagogue in
Nazareth may have indeed by rote taught its "sons of the covenant" to
memorize large tracts of Torah and the Prophets in childhood and youth.
Many Muslim children around the world still memorize all of Qur'an, and
when I was a youngster, I memorized the Shorter Catechism of the
Westminster Assembly as well as some of Dr. Martin Luther's Kleiner
Katechismus,and lots of Psalms and Bible verses. (When I got to
seminary I was the only entering Junior who didn't have to take an
Introductory course in English Bible.) And much of what I knew was of
course learned by rote, which is a method I still use in teaching
English to Nicaraguan youth, and I am currently teaching one of my
advanced students by having him read the Gospels aloud to me in
English. So what do they mean when they say Jesus was illiterate-- that
he wasn't ready for Paradise Lost or Shakespeare's plays? or that he was
functionally illiterate? or that he had only a good short-term memory
for texts? I knew an illiterate Black Baptist preacher in Chicago years
ago, when I was Dean of the Chicago West Deanry, whom I met while we
both paid for tickets in traffic court, who asked if he could "borrow my
church" for services; since I was dean of the deanery, I invited him to
use St Timothy's, a great barn of a parish church in the deanery that
was sparsely attended, and the Reverend "Z" Brooks (he had no first
name, just the initial "Z") filled old St. Timothy's on Sundays, and
even invited Bishop James Montgomery to come and make a visitation. The
Reverend Mr. Brooks' method was to have his wife read the Bible aloud to
him, and he would memorize a long text, and then go to the pulpit and
preach at great length from that reading, unfolding, and enfolding, and
refolding, and wrinkling and unwrinkling the text with great ingenuity
and insight. The Spirit of the Mighty One descended when he took up the
microphone, which he hardly needed for amplification. So I have in a
way been to that Nazareth synagogue when the carpenter's son stood to
recite. "The Spirit of the Mighty one is upon me because Spirit has
anointed me to preach good new to poor people, and has sent me to
announce parole and amnesty to prisoners, and to give sight and insight
to the blinded and the ignorant, and has sent me to liberate oppressed
people. I'm here to announce the year of Jubilee, the year acceptable to
God for radical change. The year when the enslaved must be set free."
And then Jesus finished the Recital and sat down and added a brief
postscript: "TODAY!"
This is not a story about somewhere else, or a Bible story for
yesterday's children. Jesus says to us as well, "Today this Scripture
is to be acted out in your presence, to be completed in your own hearing
of it." It is today that God acts in us. I once heard a young rabbi say
at an interfaith meeting, "Well, in Biblical times God spoke to the
prophets." An older rabbi who was present at the meeting gently
corrected him, saying, "My son, it is these times -- my time and your
time, that is Biblical time. If it is true in Bible time, it is true in
this time, for we are Bible people living in Bible time." Neither
Isaiah nor the people of Nazareth would have been honored if Jesus had
recited the Scripture and then sat down and said, "Well, that was then,
this is now," as one teenage cliché thinks it is clever to "diss" the
whole of the past with which it is unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and to
make it irrelevant to our present life.
The Past is Prologue. And Isaiah wrote Jesus' script that morning, just
as Martin Luther King updated it and passed it on, to Archbishop Tutu,
and he has passed it on to us, in prophetic and apostolic succession.
You can't go with Jesus to the synagogue in Nazareth now--it's not there
any more. You can't go hike from Selma to Montgomery with Dr Martin
Luther King Jr., anymore--his precious Lord has taken him by the hand and
led him home. You can't go to South Africa to face down the Devil
Apartheid with Desmond Tutu anymore. It's been done, and Africans have
taken their future into their own hands. . But the agenda of the
liberating God is written new every morning, and you will surely get your
chance. Dr. King was fond of quoting from James Russell Lowell's
powerful hymn, fatuously charged with heresy and dropped from the Hymnal
1972, because it boldly claimed "Once to every man and nation Comes the
moment to decide, in the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or
evil side." In the midst of the beatings and jailings, the gassings and
lynchings of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr King brought life to the words
"Though the cause of evil prosper, Yet 'tis truth alone is strong; though
her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong, yet that
scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown, Standeth God
within the shadow Keeping watch above his own." All of us who marched
and sat-in and prayed and registered voters in the Deep South in the
sixties, knew then that it was our moment to decide. And those of us
who have stood up and spoken up for Gay and Lesbian people since the
Stonewall rebellion in 1969, and the birth of the Lesbian and Gay
Liberation Movement, knew it was our moment to decide. Now, with the
consecration of the heroic Gene Robinson, who has stood up for the nation
of Gay and Lesbian people throughout the world, people of justice in the
General Convention of the Church have also stood up to be counted, and
indeed have been counted. These acts of the Holy Spirit in the People of
God have wrought a sea-change in our history: Let justice roll down like
waters, like a mighty flood, to engulf all the churches, all the
synagogues and mosques, all the people of the earth in a Baptism of joy
and justice.
And those of us who have gone to the Holy Land to stand with the people
of the land against the oppression of the Israeli police and military,
know that now is the moment to decide. Israeli Zionists have taken the
name of God's people captive and claim to have superceded the God of
Israel in power over the world. Those of us who stand now against the new
tyranny of U.S.A. militarism and imperialism, its undoubted drive now for
domination and exploitation of the world, for we see that this is, as a
Nicaraguan said to me this morning, "Hitler regresado" -- Hitler come
back, and we all are now in a moment to decide in the strife of truth
with falsehood, for the good or evil side. This is a crisis, a moment
of judgment.. .
Four hundred years before Jesus, the people of God were returned to their
homeland, and straggled back to freedom from their long exile, when Ezra
the Priest found them ignorant of their history, ignorant of their
Scripture and its meaning for their lives, ignorant of their cult, their
prayers, their traditions. They couldn't even be mindless
fundamentalists, for they had no texts to turn into totems and taboos.
So they set up an outdoor pulpit and Ezra and the elders began to recite
the old Scriptures they had found, and with their hermeneutic of
restoration, to explain them. And everyone stood to listen, as we stand
to hear the gospel, as Muslims stand to hear the Call to Prayer, hands
behind their ears to hearken. Jesus stood up to recite and sat down to
comment, as if at a Quaker meeting. The liturgical context of this
teaching is evident: God intends us to use our liturgy as a preparation
for changing more than our postures. Jesus went straight from the
synagogue that day to confrontation after confrontation. First with the
folks of his home town, who scorned his insistence that the prophet's
word must be contextualized in the present. Then, on and on, to the
ultimate confrontation at court, and at Calvary. Ezra called the
people to "stand under" the reading, so that they might "under stand" the
prophet. This is not an ancient text for ancient people, nor an exercise
in nostalgia, guaranteed antiquity by its quaint old-fashioned language
in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. Always what God has to say to us and
what we need to do about it, must be referenced to the hot-button issues
left off the news by CNN and all the other news editors, corrupters, and
managers. Increasingly, in the US of A, your Sunday liturgy may be the
only venue where you can hear any news, not just the Good News. .People
are likely to begin to weep and mourn when your preacher, your liturgist,
your person in charge of contextualizing the Scripture, stands up to
recite or sits down to comment. Today, if you will hear the Voice,
harden not your hearts, as your forebears did in the wilderness.
Sojourning in Nicaragua with us now are Baptist friends Sandy and John,
who have been hard at work in the Peace and Justice movement in the
States, and are now tired and depressed from the struggle, and need to
respond to Jesus' invitation to "come apart and rest awhile." . They
assured me last night under the tropical moon hanging above the mango
tree, as we sat in the patio, that they are pessimistic, but not
hopeless, for they rightly see that pessimism we have a right to, when we
know the truth about our species, but hope is a Christian duty, for we
know Jesus is Lord, and that faith, hope, and charity, are not optional
for us.
Today is the day of liberation: every Lord's day is a day for us to
celebrate the Victory of our God, and for us victory cannot be a matter
of sitting about admiring our trophies, kissing the relics of the saints
of ancient days and reading with joy of their
triumphs. Every generation is in some sense a new nation, and every
confirmation class a new Church, committed to
nonviolence and the justice struggle. This was Thomas Jefferson's view
of politics--that every new generation of citizens constituted a brand
new republic, and must make its own revolutionary war of independence.
We don't have George III to kick around anymore, but we have George the
Second. We have tyrants a plenty to raise our fists against, to hound
into exile, to bring to trial in the Hague, to organize militant prayer
bands that our God shall, with our proactive help, put down the mighty
> from their seats, that God may exalt the humble and the meek, as our
Mother Mary prays daily in Magnificat.
It is by hearing and doing the word of God as if it were a new Book, that
God makes a new people out of an ancient people in every generation.
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 3rd series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
Continuing appeal for financial support in solidarity with the
ministry of Casa Ave Maria. Budget cuts amongst donors who have long
generously paid the small salaries of the teachers in our Escuelita, our
"little school" next door to the guest house, have now compelled me to
ask for the financial help of those who receive Homily Grits or benefit
> from someone else having read, marked, learned, or inwardly digested
them. Many of you know the work of the Casa in this poor barrio, and
the classes we offer free to neighborhood youth, in English, computers,
piano, guitar, recorder, singing, dancing, and now, Tae Kwon Do, the
peaceful martial arts--our teacher is Dr. Leonardo, a young physician!
And the ministry of healing we offer in helping people with the costs of
medicine and dentistry. And the hospitality we offer to pilgrims and
solidarity workers, along with the opportunity to enter into the life of
the plain people of Nicaragua, our solidarity with Nicaraguan artists,
artisans, poets, musicians. I want to begin a school for young artists,
to teach painting and drawing. Some of you know also of my own devotion
to the struggles of the Palestinian and Arab peoples, and of my
pilgrimage with Christian Peacemaker Teams to Hebron, and to the
ancient holy land of Abraham and Sarah, in Iraq, a year ago. Our friend
Gene Stoltzfus, the Chicago Mennonite, was on BBC television last night
telling of that continuing work of CPT in Baghdad. I would like very
much to continue these various ministries, and as I enter my 72nd year on
the 28th January I want to go back to Cuba with the usual suspects, who
are old friends. So this foot note is a blatant appeal for dollar
charity in solidarity with these requests. I put all of my begs in this
one askit. Checks by way of your parish priest or bishop, or pastor, or
to me directly: Casa Ave Maria, Box # (Apartado) RP-10, Managua,
Nicaragua, C.A. Hasta la victoria siempre. GRANT IN MANAGUA. (Many
thanks to those of you who have already sent your gifts. )