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Christmas Day
H O M I L Y G R I T S
Christmas Day 2004
Principal Service
Isaiah 52:7-10 - Beautiful feet
Psalm 98 - Cantate Domino
Hebrews 1:1-12 - Long ago God spoke to our ancestors
John 1:1-14 - The Word becomes flesh and lives among us
I went out to the west side of Chicago as a mission priest nearly
fifty years ago to St. Andrew's church, which was listed in the
diocesan directory with the letter "(c)" in parentheses, to indicate
it was a colored congregation. Not "B" for Black, or "AA" for
"African American," but a little "c" for "colored." There was no "g"
for Gringo or "w"for white or "LW" for lily white, in the directory,
for parishes that deserved the name. People of all colors came to
St. Andrew's -- from the freckled light skinned old Southern ladies
to the dark black priest from South Africa, Wandile Kuse, who was
getting his Ph.D. in the United States. "White" folks, too, who
lived in Chicago's suburbs and drove into the city on Sundays for
worship in our ghetto, an Italian word imported and translated from
its original, which defined a Jewish ward, to USA language for an
African enclave. Color requires the spectrum of all shades of light
for its definitions. (Thus my old friend Paul Goldman, a Jewish
gentleman married to a Roman Catholic Irish lady, always referred to
"people of color" and to a "man of color" or a "colored woman."
But we are all people of color, of some tint or hue from the palette
of amplitude.
Then came the Sixties and the civil rights revolution and Black
became the right word to use. My eighty year old dentist, aptly
named Dr. Brown, objected; he declared that he had been born a Negro
and a Negro he would remain. There was an incident one summer, when
the teenage son of a Hinsdale family, whose father was a
vice-president of Armour & Co., came to work as a volunteer
supervising our church playground. Some of our kids took offense
when the suburban lad (he thought politely) referred to them as
"Black youth", for they had not yet been notified of the change in
our parlance, which change took place in upscale white suburbia
before it took place in our own down scale slum, that our word
"Negro" was out of fashion. It was a while before "Black" took hold
in common speech. In 1988, at a conference in Chicago, the Reverend
Jesse Jackson (whom I had met when he was a
necktie-and-seersucker-suit seminarian working with Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. in the long hot summers) said that it was time again
for a change in our terms. The word Black had not worked very well,
and the preferable term now was to be "African American." Not
"Afro-American," as it had been for a very brief time--because
"Afro" was already the name of a popular hair arrangement, and people
have, within reason, a right to be called what they want to be
called, so the old term "African American" should be quite acceptable
now in our culture and in our country. But the NAACP didn't ever
drop "colored" from its name. And my old friend Dr. Brown died a
Negro, buried from a Negro church.
Our culture, indeed most cultures, have associated the color Black in
so many ways with evil, misfortune, death, disaster, that the
experiment of applying it to an ethnic group was a risky business.
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable has dozens of entries for
pejorative uses of Black. The church used Black for funerals, and
along with the color of the unbleached candles used at All Souls
masses, we got the Hallowe'en colors of orange and black. In recent
times we switched to white as more appropriate to life and
resurrection. The use of Black at funerals, however, had not been a
Christian invention--the church borrowed the idea from ancient Roman
custom, and the Romans had taken it from the Egyptians. The
pejorative uses of Black included Black Ball, Black Mail, Black
Death, the pirate's Black Flag, a sad day as Black Monday or Black
Friday, criminal societies as the Black Hand, a family's shame as the
Black Sheep, a withering glance as Black looks, and so on. Black got
associated with Dark, as well--deprivation of light: thus, "black as
the inside of a cow, tail down and mouth closed." Even the Muslims
claim that the great stone at Mecca, called the Kaaba, which every
Muslim hopes once in a lifetime to kiss, was white when it fell from
the heavens, but turned Black because of the sins of humankind. So
the word Black for all the many colored and various-hued peoples of
African descent was a word already in trouble. In the Scriptures,
the word "Black" is not associated with sin, but the color "red" is
indeed so. "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as wool,"
God promises by the mouth of Isaiah. We will all do ourselves a
favor if we disassociate Black as color from darkness, as absence of
Light or Enlightenment.
And now I come to the one point of this homily for Christmas day.
"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the
Word
was God. . . in him was life and the life was the Light of
humankind. The
light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it."
LIGHT is the major symbol of Christmas time, not White. "I'm
dreaming of
a Light Christmas," is the song I sing today. Light is the presence
of all colors, and brings all together. It's the chief metaphor for
this cosmic event wherein truth, the meaning of existence, the
purpose of life, is made clear, visible, palpable among us, and we
need to have everyone participate in the metaphor that fully embraces
it. In the Spanish language, the very word for giving birth is "dar
la luz" to give light to. The Quakers speak of divine guidance as
the Inner Light. The Buddha is referred to as the Light of Asia,
Jesus is called the Light of the world, and so on. Light is not the
opposite of Black or of Negro or Colored, but it is the opposite of
Night, and Obscurity and darkness and confusion. At Christmas the
metaphor of light surrounds us, sparkling on our Christmas trees and
wreaths, shining on
candles amidst the poinsettias, glowing in the sparkling eyes of
children. John's gospel begins with this Light. The metaphor is
sustained throughout his evangel: "The Light shines in darkness and
the darkness has not overcome it." The shadows have not engulfed,
surrounded or extinguished the Light that comes into the world with
Jesus Christ. Light is beckoned out of the noonday sun onto the
toreador's costume--the "trajes de luz" -- and sequins glow on the
Christmas gown of 80 year old Sister Maggie, in Managua: "Sister
Sparkle Plenty" we call her in that habit. Light is the chief
ornament of humankind.
The Light of Christ is not delimited by the edges of European
Christian culture, by the borderlands of Caucasian dominance, and
cannot be. St. John says that "the true light which enlightens every
person was coming into the world" in Jesus Christ at Christmastime.
This remarkable statement means that Jesus was not born here as a
"fenómeno" or a freak, a
space cadet or stranger to our species, but came to be at home in
every human venue, in every culture, and wears the skin and bone, the
brains and beauty, of every ethnicity, every people. The light of
Christ, the light of Christmas is the light that enlightens every
person, and there is recognition here that all humanity has the gift
of light, and all in their own ways radiate the truth that is from
God. In spite of the way it looks to some, Jesus was not born in
order to become the emblem of cultural imperialism for the Western
world, the first "Roman" catholic or the first European anything.
John tells us that he has come to all, and to all that receive him,
this Word gives the strength to become children of God. (Muslims
would say People of God, the name Vatican II adopted for the
Church.)
The Word becomes flesh, not the other way around. The flesh does not
transform itself into Logos, into Ideas, into Tenets, into creedal
statements. We do not need to take our life, incarnated as White,
Black, Yellow or Red people, and make it our identity. The Words we
use to describe ourselves will not outlive our Flesh. They are
inappropriate to become the Truth about us. So Christmas comes to
celebrate the Light that is in each one of us, and all of us, by
becoming Flesh. It's already there, given by God with every human
being. God does not enter the human family in Nazareth as a stranger
to us, but as one of us: our brother, sister, sibling--who empowers
us to become one Ummah, the Muslim name for the People of God, one
community of believers in One God, to come home to that house at
Christmas.
That family is larger than the North American alliance of Jewish,
Catholic and Protestant leaders that have forged U.S. policy for a
century. Some of our leadership is beginning to recognize that.
Indeed, the hardest thing for us all to learn is that Jesus did not
come into the world to fulfill the expectations of late 19th century
Zionists, hoping to occupy Palestine. How can anybody read his or
her daily office without stumbling now on the cursing of Israel's
enemies, for we find ourselves reminding God that we are not
praying for death and destruction to Palestinians. The modern
Israeli nation state has kicked Biblical myth in the belly with its
neo nazism. It is said that we become like that which we most
despise, and now the State of Israel looks more and more like a
ghastly caricature of the German Reich which hatched their egg in the
Holocaust. Every one of us should begin the process of protest
against this use of "anti-Semitic" to mean "anti-Zionist." Anybody
who can learn from history must see that Ariel Sharon and George Bush
were not sent by the Lord of history. Now, let us get this clear:
al Arabs are Semites, along with our Jewish sisters and brothers.
You could look it up.
God does not enter the human race to be incarnate only in Jews or
Christians or North Americans. Nor are our books of prayer and
scripture let down from heaven in a net. Christian language about
God as "Father" is abhorrent to Muslims, as it logically implies God
has a wife, which apparently does not matter in Western religion,
and they further do not admit it as a metaphor of God's relationship
to humans as "his children." Jesus is the Messiah for them, the
Christ, sent to be an apostle of God. Mary is ever Virgin to the
Muslim, and Jesus is Son of Mary indeed, and Second Adam as well,
created by the immediate action of God and not by human generation.
God saved him from crucifixion (Christians believe that too, but
think it was by a miracle of resurrection, which is after all a
miracle of escape), and Muslims know that he ascended into heaven.
Both theirs and ours are mythic language--metaphors for the escape of
the Just from those who kill and maim. The Holy Spirit is the breath
or wind of the One God. All of this means that Christmas can be a
time for us all--believers of the Book-- to celebrate the common
humanity of Jesus and Mary with ourselves. The Qur'an has more about
Mary than the New Testament does. Islam speaks of the Ummah, the
congregation of all faithful people everywhere, and popular Islamic
schools celebrate saints and the tombs of holy heroes. The faithful
believe in forgiveness of sins and in heaven and hell and the
Resurrection of the Body and the Life everlasting. There may be room
even for dialogue on the doctrine of God which is shared by the
religions of the Bible. For the Ash'arites taught that God's
attributes are additional to God's essence and subsist eternally in
God, and thus recognize distinctions within the Oneness of God.
Alfred Guillaume closed his book, "Islam" with this paragraph:
"All people of goodwill may take comfort from the words of
Abdul-Raham Azzam Pasha, who in a Christmas message a year or two
ago, prayed that Christians would remind the peoples of the world of
the principles of peace and mercy that Christ taught. The Arabs, he
said, would especially remember their Christian Arab brethren who
stood shoulder to shoulder with them in the struggle in which they
were engaged." * At Christmas 2004 we are called all of us to be
street Arabs, on the road to Bethlehem.
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 4th series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
*Alfred Guillaume, "Islam", Penguin Books, 1954. p.199.
(An earlier version of his homily was posted at Christmas 2000.)
©Copyright 2001 and 2004 Grant M. Gallup
Dear preachers and prophets, bold & wise women and brave & clever
men: Thank you if you have already sent a contribution for our
little school in Managua, as an Advent offering for our Jesse Tree or
a Christmas gift for our Christmas cactus (we have no balsam here) in
solidarity with our service of gospel grits each week. We don't get
enough income from our guest house to cover expenses of the
ministries here, and we invite your partnership. Come as Magi,
visit and stay with us, and make us even happier. After the New
Year, when I return from Gringolandia, I shall begin a "Blog" with
the help of Dr. Louie Crew, who has so graciously posted these
homilies and encouraged them for so many years. Managua Blogua is
on the way.