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Pentecost IV, Proper 6-A June 12, 2005
H O M I L Y G R I T S
Fourth Sunday After Pentecost
June 12, 2005
Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and
love, that through your grace we may proclaim your truth with
boldness, and minister your justice with compassion; for the sake of
our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy
Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary Proper 6-A
Exodus 19:2-8a You have seen what I did to the Egyptians
Psalm 100 Jubilate Deo Be joyful in the Lord, all you lands
Romans 7:6-11 The very commandment that promised life proved to be
death to me.
Matthew 9: 35-10:8 (9-15) When he saw the crowds, he had compassion
for them.
Charles Wesley's hymn, "Love Divine, All Love Excelling" is one of
many
that could appropriately accompany the gospel reading today, for this
wonderful Jesus Prayer in two lines:
Jesus, thou art all compassion,
Pure, unbounded love thou art. 1
The Matthean Church eloquently remembers how it was founded on the
compassion of Jesus, how he had instituted the ministry of
discipleship and apostleship as a result of his own experiment as
pastor. The story is briefly told, and its lessons laid down as in a
Magna Carta for a community devoted to the Liberation of all
humankind. (But only
humankind?) Jesus had gone about "all the cities and villages",
ignoring diocesan and parish boundaries, and teaching in synagogues
as well as to ekklesias, and outside them as well, like John Wesley,
in every farmer's field and on every city street corner. He did not,
so far as we know, anticipate St. Francis and preach to birds or
beasts. He enlisted them to help him with his teaching: "Behold the
birds of the air." But it was from the beginning a threefold
ministry--not of Contantinian offices: bishops, priests, and
deacons, but ministries of teaching, preaching, and healing in a
style of generosity and openness. The three ministries were united
and exercised in Jesus himself, and subsequently then shared out
amongst his followers, for not all were so learnéd or wise as their
autodidact rabbi, not all so charismatic, and not all such gifted
therapists. Yet the ekklesia (those "called out") was together
capable of this threefold ministry when it acted in concert, as a
team, we would say today. He sends them to "the lost sheep of the
house of Israel" which does not mean a group of dissenters or
outcasts within the house of Israel, but it means the whole
country, the entire nation, all the People, whom the gospels see as
lost. And Jesus has a chance to see "the crowds"--the
multitudes--who look to him for the truth, to be healed, for a new
way to be God's people.
Out of this threefold ministry Jesus had an experience that the
gospel writer calls splagxnisthon, and which we without embarrassment
translate compassion, cited in our collect for today. But the root
word is splagxna, which (if you try to pronounce it) is almost
onomatopoetic for its meaning, which is the stirring of the bowels!
Or, the heart, or the affections. Jesus was moved in his guts, his
depths, his "gizzards and lights", his womb, by the experience of
ministry and the result of that was his prescription for the
apostolic ministry of his Church, for before he sent, he went. His
own experience preceded his institution of apostleship for others.
And his was always a "hands on" ministry. Perhaps we ought to ordain
now by laying hands on the guts and gizzards, and not just the bald
spots and wigs, of the ordinands. We ought to pray for a stirring in
their splagxna. For bellies full of compassion.
We at once recognize the familiar ministries of teaching and
preaching as appropriate to the ordained ministry, whether that of
bishops and priests of the apostolic succession or ruling and
teaching elders of the denominations. But apart from our dutiful
performance of sacramental rites in sick rooms, and Mother Eddy's
somber reading rooms and
churches, or Jimmy Swaggart's swooning or slain-in-the-spirit sisters
and brothers, healing is not always essential to ministry amongst
us. We did without it for centuries, or relegated it to miraculous
performances of the saints at shrines and sanctuaries. There was a
time when the building of hospitals accompanied our evangelism, but
now we have in many places massive medical centers that have largely
abandoned their founding charters, which committed them to serve
the sick poor. My Church medical insurance paid fifty thousand
dollars to the church-related hospital for my cardiac bypass surgery
a few years ago--and for that I am grateful with my life. But what
system will serve the prospective cardiac candidate in a poor Managua
barrio? No open-heart surgery can be done in our poor little
hospitals here. The rich fly out, for here there is no surgeon, no
surgery, equipped for the task. My neighbors with clogged arteries
face a 19th century prognosis. No Church has heard Jesus say here
"heal these sick." No Albert Schweitzer has yet come to our
Lambarene. Yet idealistic people do come--from "Doctors for Global
Health ", and other such compassionate and adventuresome groups, who
have a different model of health care in their hearts and minds.
Dr Lanny Smith writes that "Liberation medicine is 'the conscious,
conscientious use of health to promote human dignity and social
justice.' Are North American churches or governments committed to
'liberation medicine'? Dr Jennifer Kasper, President of DGH, writes,
"Where our US government preaches and practices pre-emptive strikes,
we take an anti-militaristic, peaceful orientation of engagement.
Rather than destruction, we are about construction, of clinics and
schools and minds. Eschewing hate, we draw on art and music in our
healing. In this age of globalization of economies and corporations,
we see a need for globalization of human rights and
responsibilities." She cites the preamble to the constitution of the
World Health Organization: "Enjoyment of the highest obtainable
standard of health us one of the fundamental rights of every human
being without distinction of race, religion, political belief,
economic or social condition" (2)
For healing in the gospels signifies not an effort to build good
public relations for the Empire, but the triumph of God's empire,
God's commonwealth or reign, in a New Order of Life and Health for
all. Systems of health care then as now often blame the poor for
their illnesses, especially where sin is regarded as a cause for
disease. As a child of twelve, imbibing rural Calvinism and
farm-style classical Lutheranism with our own cow's unpasteurized
milk, I learned these things at Sunday school and I came to fear that
my own uncle's suicide and my mother's severe clinical depression and
attempted suicide were thus caused by their sins. Confused and
dismayed by my own fundamentalism, I asked my mother about this, and
she was surprised at my question and so asked me another, "What sin
did I commit?" This was the beginning of the revision of my
theological method, now to be based on experience and acquaintance
with suffering, and not on a heartless precept. But first I had to
have, like Jesus, a movement of gutsy passion to rouse me. Here in
poor Nicaragua, there is no community of cardiac surgeons, but there
is an ancient community of healers known as curanderas, and they
are regarded as almost magicians for the healings they effect. They
use plants and chants, herbs and hymns, roots and rhymes, leaves for
teas and tisanes, balms and blessings. Tacitus called Christianity
a disease that the reasonable Romans would cure by good sense, and
now too frequently modern medical "science", too expensive for the
poor to know about, dismisses their own venerable curanderas as
witches, frauds, or swindlers. But in our time, it is the poor,
organized as they are in Cuba, for example, who are doing the truth
of the gospel of health and fulfilling the call of Jesus to heal the
nations, cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers and cast
out demons. And Dr. Jesus prescribed that all this be done without
profit. "You received without payment, give without payment" is his
prescription for all humanity, not just to Fidel and the Cubans.
The present world, which was to be 'healed' by Rome according to
Josephus and Aristides, and by market capitalism according to our
present world rulers, is alas still very sick, and often with what
are called iatrogenic disease--disease induced by the treatment.
Medicine as big business is an iatrogenic disease. The apostolic
church's lifestyle provided healing and looked to God's future action
to establish Pax Christi in place of Pax Romana in all the world.
Now it is Pax Americana that claims to do so, but the gospels see
that the causes of disease are found in political oppression and
unjust economic practices and social structures. The gospel calls
the demons of mental illness after the name of military occupation,
legions. The gospel says that Jesus had compassion because he saw
that the people were like sheep without a shepherd. The abandoned
sheep were for him a symbol of the abandoned people of God, and he
called upon a little marginal community to shepherd them. He saw the
people as well in the symbol of a harvest awaiting the reapers.
Jesus' response to the opportunity of an immense harvest is not
despair but Prayer. Prayer
for the sending of a ministry.
It is time we noticed that his compassion is expressed for the
animals as well as the humans in the gospel reading. Compassion -
for animals? Where in our society do we see compassion for
animals? Do we recognize that Jesus' metaphor for compassion for us
human beings was provoked by his compassion for sheep? And "Which
one of you, seeing his ox or his ass fallen into a pit, will not pull
it out on the Sabbath day?" Animals and plants are in solidarity
with us and with each other! Dr Lanny Smith writes: "Know anything
about global ecology and the concept of mutualism? . . . Like the
hummingbird that pollinates flowers while drinking their nectar. Or
the mycorrhizae, a fungi that lives off a flower's roots while
helping the plant get more nutrients and water. Then there is he
interaction between the badger and the honeyguide bird, that leads
the badger to beehives so it can share in the sweet spoils." Our
teachers, alas, have not been the hummingbird or the honey badger,
but money-makers and exploiters of the environment. Dr Smith
reminds us that the interchanges can be fatal or life-giving.
"Echoes haunt us: the poetry of napalm and depleted uranium; the
logic of Agent Orange in Vietnam repeated now with Plan Colombia, as
vast tracts of rain forest are cleared of people to make way for
Monsanto monoculture (only their genetically modified seeds withstand
their manufactured defoliant) and petroleum exploitation."
Peter Singer, the Australian bioethicist, in his Writings on the
Ethical Life, turns to Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) to find this
prophecy: "The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may
acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them
but by the hand of tyranny. . . the question is not, Can they reason?
nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" 3 For Bentham it was a
valid question, but for us science
has long ago shown that animals feel, even if they do not
philosophize, as acutely as we do: Thus: "It can easily be shown that
many of their senses are far more acute than ours--visual acuity in
certain birds, hearing in most wild animals, and touch in
others--these animals depend more than we do today on the sharpest
possible awareness of a hostile
environment. Apart from the complexity of the cerebral cortex
(which does not directly perceive pain) their nervous systems are
almost identical to ours and their reactions to pain remarkably
similar, though lacking (so far as we know) the philosophic and moral
overtones. The emotional element is all too evident, mainly in the
form of fear and
anger."4
Can we in the human community come to have the kind of compassion for
our fellow animal passengers and plant species on spaceship Earth
that we claim our God has for us and all our kind? Some folks have
no more compassion for redwoods than they have for robin redbreast.
Yet Jesus and St. Francis, and many other prophets, seers, and saints
have seen that day nearer now than ever before when we will
understand our solidarity with all life over death. Fyodor
Dostoevsky was another of the prophets: Father Zossima speaks of
compassionate love out of the pages of Dostoevsky's great novel,
The Brothers Karamazov:
". . . Love will teach us all things: but we must learn how to win
love;
it is got with difficulty: it is a possession dearly bought with
much
labour and in long time; for one must love not sometimes only, for a
passing moment, but always. There is no man who doth not sometimes
love: even the wicked can do that. And let not men's sin dishearten
thee: love a man even in his sin for that love is a likeness of the
divine love, and it is the summit of love on earth. Love all God's
creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf,
every
ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate
thing. If you love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God
in
all; and when thou perceive this, thou wilt henceforward grow every
day
to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the
whole world with a love that wilt then be all-embracing and
universal."5
And another prophet, the poet Robert Bridges, offers this in The
Testament of Beauty:
"So it was when Jesus came in his gentleness
with his divine compassion and great Gospel of Peace,
men hail'd him WORD OF GOD, and in the title of Christ
crown'd him with love beyond all earth-names of renown.
For He, wandering unarm'd save by the Spirit's flame
in few years with few friends founded a world-empire
wider than Alexander's and more enduring;
since from his death it took its everlasting life,
HIS kingdom is God's kingdom, and his holy temple
not in Athens or Rome, but in the heart of man.6
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
1 The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse. Oxford University Press.
reprinted 1983.
2 Doctors for Global Health Reporter, Spring/Summer 1005, Vol.
9,.Issue 1.
3 Quoted in Singer, p. 33, from Bentham's "Introduction to the
Principles of Morals and Legislation," ch.17.
4 Quoted in Singer, p. 38, from Richard Serjeant, "The Spectrum of
Pain", p.72.
Peter Singer, Writings on the Ethical Life, HarperCollins (Ecco
Press) 2000.
5 "Universal Love", Father Zossima, in Dostoevsky's The Brothers
Karamazof, Robert Bridges' version in The Spirit of Man. Excerpted in
A Treasury of the Kingdom. Oxford, 1954.
6 From The Testament of Beauty. The Mentor Book of Religious Verse,
January 1957.
©Copyright 2002, 2005 by Grant Gallup