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Lent II-C Feb 20 2005
H O M I L Y G R I
T S
Second Sunday in
Lent -- Year C
February 20, 2005
Book of Common Prayer
Lectionary:
Genesis 15: 1-12, 17-18 A promise to childless Abram
Psalm 27 Dominus, illuminatio
Philippians 3:17:4-1 Our commonwealth is in heaven
Luke 13:(22-30) 31-35 Herod the Fox, Jesus the Hen
The readings today tell us of destinations, travel plans, and
pilgrimages. The people of God are always on the move, for it's a
Rolling Stone upon which Jesus builds his Church--this faith
commitment of apostolic origin, and it had better be, or it gathers
moss. We are called always to be out the door and into the wind.
> From the time of Abram/Abraham, whom God called to move on out of Ur
of the Old Iraq, in the Chaldees, and the first part of that trip,
like all trips, was out of doors; indeed, A Star Trek future is
proclaimed: "God brought him outside his tent and said, 'Look toward
heaven and count the stars, if you can.'"
But he didn't spend all the time contemplating, or we would still be
waiting for his move. Looking towards the heavens puts the future in
perspective--sub specie aeternitatis. God promises to form the
future, to form a People. Abram, old and childless, is in a bad way
for future prospects, in a culture built squarely on progeny as the
only future. So he had, according to common legal practice in the
ancient middle east, adopted a servant, who would take care of him in
his old age and benefit as his heir. Somebody remembered here as
Eliezer of Damascus. But YHWH intervened and said to Abram, "Get up,
we're on the move." And YHWH makes a Pacto with Abram, the foundation
covenant of all our faith. And not only our faith as "Jesus
Christians," for Abram is the father founder (and Sarah the mother
founder) of all our hopes, Jews and Muslims too, all of whom look
here for the fountains of our faith. We all of us pray to the God of
our father Abraham and our mother Sarah, and indeed we pray through
them to the One they taught us to trust.
Here in this ancient tale we hear today how this happened. For both
YHWH and Abram, this had to have been a pilgrimage of trust--for
Abram is himself an Ancient of Days, and so the geezer God and the
geezer believer commit themselves to each other in old age, and hope
for progeny. The sacrifice, a very primitive one to us who are
accustomed to symbolic, bloodless and sacramental or hygenic
financial sacrifice, meant chunks of flesh laid out as prima facie
evidence of life and death commitment. The visiting YHWH walks
amidst the sacrifice, like a Jewish momma in a kosher butcher shop,
sniffing the roasts and ribs and cutlets, in a ritual whereby the
violators of a contract are promised that they will be likewise
spatch-cocked, skewered and laid out for the beasts and birds of
prey, if they should ever violate the terms of the deal that they
"cut," the pact they bound themselves to.
So YHWH binds godself to accept such slaughter, bound now to Abram by
the promise of YHWH's own life pledged here in sacrifice. It's a
frightful risk that Abram takes, because he puts himself in the hands
of God. But God is taking the same risk, for progeny. And puts
godself in the hands of Abram.
"It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,"
says the letter to the Hebrews, and D. H. Lawrence responded: "but it
is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them. . . Save me, O God,
> from falling into the ungodly knowledge of myself as I am without
God. Let me never know, O God, let me never know what I am or should
be when I have fallen out of your hands, the hands of the living God.
. . Let me never know myself apart from the living God." Our Pacto
with the living God puts us forever in those hands.
"To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the
great river, from the Nile (or the wadis of Egypt) to the river of
the Euphrates. . . the Lord promises to be Abram's backup, his
deliverer. And all the middle east and its oil deposits are promised
to the spiritual descendants of Abraham--the whole human race--and
not only to the Texas friends of the capitalist cabal in Crawford.
"Your reward shall be very great, your descendants, old man, shall be
numberless!" George Bush on the other hand, is running out of
troops in Iraq. He will soon be able to number his descendants on his
fingers and toes. YHWH will see to that.
Longing for a better land is there in Psalm 27 as well, for "What if
I had not believed that I should see the goodness of the Lord in the
land of the living.?" Fundamentalists of all the religions have
always thought it obligatory to draw up real estate contracts
and forge God's signature on their political solutions, and to make
bloody war and to draft their tenuous peace/piece treaties and Camp
David agreements over the land of the dead, always appealing to these
texts as to quit-claim deeds from the county surveyor's office.
Indeed, the current usurping landlords in Palestine, the Zionist U.S.
satrapy of Israel, invented by the British foreign office on its own
maps, founds its 20th century military imperium in Palestine firmly
on such Bible stories, and supported by ancient traditions of
land-grabbing, honored also in our hemisphere by Manifest Destiny and
Westward the Course of Empire takes its sway. The U. S. considers
Israel the newest virtual star in its bomb-spangled flag. But Paul
in the epistle speaks of another land: "Our commonwealth is in
heaven," he writes, "and from it we await a liberator." "God alone,"
says St. Augustine, "is the country of the soul." That ultimately
must be our pilgrimage's goal. The eretz Israel of the soul is YHWH,
who walks through the shambles (a word that means a slaughter-house)
and binds himself to a people of faith, and not to the boundaries of
a client state of the U.S. empire, invented to control the supply of
oil in the middle East and to feed a mythology of world dominion.
Paul writes to his first European church, the little one in Philippi,
and he writes because he's worried about some of the Jesus Christians
there. When he speaks of the "enemies of the cross of Christ," in
contrast to the friends of the cross, he does not speak of pagans, of
the country peoples, those outside the citified covenant religion.
He couldn't care less about their praxis. They aren't bound to
covenants they didn't sign onto. He's upset because these "enemies
of the cross of Christ" (in contrast the friends of the Cross) are
also his fellow church members. He warns them about those who live
in an earthly-minded way instead of a heavenly-minded way. He warns
about those whose "god is their belly." And we may think that this
means those who have fallen off their Lenten diets and gone back to
martinis, sirloins, and hot fudge sundaes. Well, the commentaries
don't give us such an easy out. . . for those "whose God is their
belly" is symbolic language for all those who live life solely on the
level of the senses, as if they were all that mattered: satisfying
all the appetites, as we are urged to in TV advertisements. "The
belly" also stands for the part of the anatomy that's slightly below
it, the pudenda, but modestly out of sight until late night TV, or
the Playboy channel. "The belly" stands for the canasta basica of
consumerist capitalist culture, which commoditizes all of life.
Paul reminds folks again that the earth with all its beauty and
wonder, its capacity to please and inspire and delight, is not the
ultimate goal of human destiny, nor is it all intended for the
supermarket shelf. The Lord is going to change our present "vile
bodies" into a body of glory. The biological equipment we presently
have is limited (as you get older, you will learn more about its
limits) and as we get older, the equipment breaks down, needs repair,
and eventually quits. Our bodies die. To live as if the flesh--the
sarx--were all there is forgets our heavenly commonwealth, forgets
the commitment we made with YHWH when together we laid out the
sarx--the meat--on the grill: our own and God's Our commitment to
Another Country--the one we already have passports for--"our
citizenship is in heaven," one translation puts it. We're on the way
to eretz Israel, our real home, but that's not the same as Tel Aviv
or our Florida retirement. Paul calls us not to forget the passports
we have in our pockets. Jesus, too, calls us to the pilgrimage:
"Will those who are saved be few?" he is asked. Always, when
confronted with folks who dropped theological enquiries into his
Question Box, Jesus adroitly sidesteps, and responds to this query,
"Will the saved be a small number?" by saying, "Well, they'll be
skinny, because the gate is narrow." Those who are burdened with too
much of this world, too much baggage, won't get through the strait
gate, the narrow way, that leads to life. (I see northamerican guests
here at the Casa in Managua who pack as if they were on safari, and
need luggage to carry home emus and elephants, and arrive with enough
snacks for a month's meals, as if we had no rice and beans in
Managua. Others come here with a toothbrush and a backpack, and move
easily as breeze.)
What will you do when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Sarah
and Rachel and Rebekah come to sit down in the commonwealth of God,
with folks from all over the world (not just from within the
boundaries of the nation state of Israel, or the Bible Belt, or the
Kingdom of Judah, or the Third Reich, or the Fourth Republic, or the
United States of America) coming to sit down in the Commonwealth of
God, with folks from all over the world, not just Jesus Christians,
not just Jews and Muslims, but folks from Shinto temples and
Zoroastrian funeral pyres, and Communist Great Halls of the
People--all kinds of folk who respond in faith, coming to sit down in
the Commonwealth of God, and you exclusivists cast out?
Jesus weeps over this--and note the wondrous feminine image here)
"How often would I have gathered you together as a hen gathers her
brood, but you would not." You would not come and get under my loving
wings of protection. So Jesus reminds us that he is the Hen of God,
and Herod is the Fox whose days are numbered--the political solutions
which always work mayhem in the hen yard. So Jesus beckons us to join
him in pilgrimage. Joanna, wife of Herod Antipas' butler, was one of
the team of women that supported Jesus' ministry and accompanied him,
and through her spying on her husband Jesus doubtless got word of the
Fox's plans, for it was when Antipas heard Jesus was in Galilee that
he concluded the man was dangerous, and put out word that he wanted
"to meet him." (Like Nicaragua's corrupt criminal President Aleman a
few years ago wanted to "meet" Dorothy Granada.) But Dorothy and
Jesus stayed on the move. Now Dorothy's back ministering to the sick
and Aleman is under house arrest in his mountain retreat. The wheels
of God grind slowly.
The unrelenting grace of God bids us to join Jesus in pilgrimage:
"Behold, we go up to Jerusalem." To the city of Salem, the land of
Peace. Lent is the season of pilgrimage, not of settling down into
an eretz Israel of our own political arrangement with the gods of the
age. We are going somewhere, we are moving. Supposing Abram had
settled down in Ur? And Paul got tenure at the University of Tarsus
as chair of the philosophy department? And Jesus opted for cabinet
making in Capernaum, learned to read and write and wrote a book with
"Soul" in the title, which almost made the best seller list.
God is on the move and comes to every one, in the words of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor hanged in a Nazi concentration camp a
few days before the end of World War II. They are about God's own
pilgrimage, as well as ours: Bonhoeffer's hymn:
All go to God when they are sore bestead,
Pray to God for succour, for God's peace, for bread,
For mercy for them, the sick, the sinning, the dead.
All of us do so, Christian and unbelieving.
All go to God when God is sore bestead,
Find God poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
Whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead.
Believers stand by God in God's hour of grieving.
God goes to everyone when sore bestead,
Feedeth body and the spirit with God's bread,
For Christians, pagans, alike God hangs there, dead.
And both alike forgiving, forgiving.
So it is not only God's people who are always going somewhere, always
on the move. It is also God who is always going somewhere, always on
the move. The Liturgical expression of this is always the
Processional. Anglicans are so fond of it-- (and the Puritans hated
Processionals, and forbade them) -- We never take the short way into
church, nor the quick way to heaven, but a splendid and self-assured
stroll with a place for everyone on the path, and detours with the
incense, sending relish down the sanctuary side. The longest way
round is the shortest way home. "Like a mighty army moves the Church
of God." But also, like a pilgrim people. For "here we have no
continuing city, but seek one to come," says St. Paul. And this same
God comes to us each morning, passing in the midst of our sacrifice,
binding Godself to our commitment, with God's own life. To bind us
close to God, to promise us God's unrelenting presence, and promise
us God's very life to back up the commitment. God walks in the
midst of the "shambles" -- the way we have laid out our lives, in
pieces and pledges-- and God promises always to accept what we
offer. And with it to change the direction of history, and be with
us all the way to the Omega point.
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
© Copyright 2001 by Grant M. Gallup, translation of Bohoeffer hymn by
GMG.