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Proper 18-A - Pentecost XVI 4 Sept 2005
H O M I L Y G R I T S
Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Proper 18 Year A
September 4, 2005
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary -
Ezekiel 33:(1-6) 7-11 Turn back, turn back from your evil ways, O
house of Israel
Psalm 119:33-48, or 119:33-40 Legem pone - Teach me O Lord the way of
your statutes
Romans 12:9-21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with
good.
Matthew 18:15-20 Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am
there among them.
____________________________________________________________________________
A woman in her thirties, Mayra Climaco was a member of the Monimbo
Indian nation from the west of Nicaragua. She was our group leader
for the two weeks of our pilgrimage in August of 1987, while the U.S.
sponsored counter-revolutionary mercenaries still waged a war of
terrorism on revolutionary Nicaragua. She shepherded us about from
one town to the next, visiting day care centers, schools, a
university, a children's burn-and-trauma hospital, a minimum security
prison farm, a women's brick-making co-operative where twenty of us
pitched in and bought five older women a cow, so they could have
cheese and sour cream and sell a little butter and milk. We visited
churches and the headquarters of various political parties, and we
stood at the edge of Santiago, a terrifying active volcano, and heard
the story of how the ancients had
human sacrifices there. We went to the grave of Ben Linder, the
young hydroelectrical engineer who had come to Nicaragua from
Portland to provide electricity to the rural community of El Cua, and
was slain there by Contra bandits, their guns and bullets paid for by
my income taxes and yours as a human sacrifice to the Baals of the
capitalist system. He had been working to harness the waters of a
stream in the service of the poor. His grave stone was engraved with
a unicycle, a dove of peace, and dancing stars. Ben had been a
juggler, a clown, and a unicyclist who often, like the Pied Piper,
led children to the health center for their vaccinations. The North
American Church workers of Nicaragua named our community center in
Managua for Ben Linder, and it still functions as our meeting house.
(Five years later I met Ben's parents there,) Comandante Daniel
Ortega-Saavedra, then President of Nicaragua, came to Matagalpa and
served as pall-bearer for Ben's funeral.
On the way back from Matagalpa we stopped in the tiny village of
Ciudad Darío, named for Rubén Darío, Nicaragua's greatest poet.
* Our bus chugged its way up an unpaved road to the cemetery
entrance, and there we all got off and waited while Mayra Climaco
went up the hill alone with a large bouquet of fresh flowers to take
to the grave of her compañero, her young lover, a soldier murdered
months before by the same Contra bandits, the mercenary army of
traitors, halfwits, and degenerates created in Miami by the C.I.A.
Mayra's face was wet with tears as she went up the hill with her
flowers, but was dry and serene when she came down. She looks years
older than she is, and her cinnamon skin, her flashing bright eyes,
her straight black hair braided once down her back, assert her
indigenous parentage, and her face has all the ancestors of the
hemisphere in it. Why does her face look so ancient, and she only
in her thirties? She told us that her mother and father were both
murdered by the Somocistas, named for the dynasty of Anastasio
Somoza, the dictators installed by the U.S. to run Nicaragua as its
own finca. It was overthrown by the Nicaraguan people in the Triumph
of July 19, 1979, after a long guerrilla struggle. Back on the bus,
Mayra said she does not forgive, that if she came face to face with
her parents' killers, she would kill them herself. She said if she
met with the ones who murdered her compañero -- her eyes flash, and
she speaks in halting English, so we all would understand-- "But . .
. it would be by . . . a slow way."
Matthew reports that Jesus said, "If your brother or sister sins
against you, go and tell them the fault, between you and them alone.
If they listen, you have gained your sister or brother. If they do
not listen, take two or three others along, for witnesses. Whatever
you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven." While Mayra stood
firmly on the dusty hill with her flowers and her pain, with her
lover buried there beneath our feet and her ancient people's sorrow,
we took photos of beautiful children in the street. Then a campesina
woman came to the door of her nearby shack with her hands extended,
and she lifted them up as a priest's hands, offering us a large
tortilla, and on it a square of cuajada--fresh cheese curds she had
made. Her smile was her invitation as she proudly offered us this
holy campesina communion--the tortilla still warm from the comal on
the hot coals. A dozen of us shared the gifts-- handed them around
as forgiveness was handed round that day. "Whatesoever you loose on
earth shall be loosed in heaven. Where two or three are gathered in
my name, there am I in the midst of them."
In 1985, on my first pilgrimage to the holy land of Nicaragua, our
Witness for Peace delegation had a meeting with Comandante Tomas
Borge, then Minister of the Interior, at his home. He is now the
only surviving member of the original founders of the Frente
Sandinista de Liberacíon Nacional. (I saw him gloomily hovering about
the other day in a sporting goods store in Managua.) During the
time of "the Monster", as the last Somoza of the dynasty was called,
Borge was tortured in prison, while his wife was
tortured, raped and murdered. In June of 1976, while Borge was in
prison, Carlos Fonseca--the founder of the FSLN--was ambushed and
shot in the mountains. The jubilant commander of the Tipitapa prison
came to his cell to gloat that Fonseca was dead. "You are wrong,
Colonel," Borge replied, in words that have entered into legend and
song, "Carlos Fonseca is one of the dead who never die." "You guys
are something else," muttered the commander. 1
Borge later wrote in Christianity and Revolution that the philosophy
of the Sandinista revolution, once it was victorious, was to treat
the defeated oppressors with compassion:
"What are we doing in the prisons? I once said, ' We are not
interested in destroying sinners, but in eliminating sin, and what
are we doing with these murderers? We are trying to convert them
into what they have never been: true human
beings. That's what we're attempting to do, and I believe it is our
moral obligation to raise them from their condition as beasts to the
condition of human beings. That is the philosophy of our
revolution. And clearly, they don't understand. When I was a
prisoner I would speak with them of these things, and would tell them
that someday we would help them, and yet they wouldn't believe it,
and they still doubt it. I remember it had
been a few days since they'd captured my wife's murderer. When that
man saw me (they had savagely tortured her, had raped her, had ripped
out her fingernails), he thought--who knows what?--that he was going
to be killed, or that he was going to be beaten at the least. He was
absolutely astonished when I arrived before him and treated him like
a
human being. He couldn't understand it, nor can he understand it
even now, and perhaps he will never understand. As we've said from
time to time: ' Our revenge toward our enemies will be to pardon
them; it's the best of revenges.'"2
"Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God;
for it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.
No, if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him
drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head. Do
not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."
One evening after supper Mayra told us that she had herself once
confronted Tomás Borge about his attitude. She smiled as she told
how she contradicted this most revered of all men in Nicaragua--this
giant of the people who was not very tall--and how she told him that
she would have to be convinced, that she was not ready to forgive her
parents' killers, her lover's murderers. I do not want to take from
Mayra the anger that is hers, nor the wrath stored up forever in her
experience, but I believe she has now forgiven us of the Witness for
Peace team for our own share in the crimes of our nation in
Nicaragua. She gained a brother in me. When I left Managua that
September day in 1987, she shepherded the last of us through the
formalities of leaving the country: at the airport, she saw us
through all the little bureaucracies that haunt even a revolutionary
society. And then, after we had entered the departure area,
separated from her by a sheet of plate glass, we all pressed our
lips to it from our separate sides, and exchanged our kisses, and
then she smiled and waved goodbye.
While I was at Maryknoll Seminary for the Liberation Theology summer
session of 1987, I found their book, "Revolutionary Forgiveness:
Feminist Reflections on Nicaragua." 3 Thirteen American women visited
there a few years before that, and two acquaintances of mine--Carter
Heyward and Anne Gilson--both priests--edited the book for the
Amanecida Collective. One of them, Laura Phyllis Biddle, writes in
that book:
" I learned in Nicaragua that forgiveness is a revolutionary virtue.
It is revolutionary not because everyone is forgiven, or because
forgiveness is all in God's hands. God is part of the revolution.
Forgivenss is revolutionary because the former victims of an unjust
system--such as that of Somoza--are able to see the systemic
character of victimization and recognize thereby their former
oppressors also as victims. Those who forgive are prepared to blame
the way society was structured rather than simply the individuals who
participated in it. The individuals are held responsible primarily
for the future, not the past. They are given a chance to change,
rather than being cast away." 3
There is in the world a failure of civility, where all disagreement
is reduced to creeching and "sharply worded notes", as they say in
diplomatic terms. Capitalist punishment devises new ways of
exterminating the enemy, the transgressor. There is a love of mob
rule, and incitement to it by the robot mass media. It is codified
and carried out in secret or in public, as it may serve national
purposes. I remember how shocked I was years ago when I joined
Iranian students in Chicago demonstrating for the overthrow of the
Shah and saw and heard young people, masked and hooded, shouting
"Death to the Shah! "
Later I sat in closed-door session with them and saw their faces and
heard their stories, until I myself could almost shout "Down with
Reza Pahlevi!" But the U.S. government in those days would not have
jailed me, as it might have jailed the Iranian students. That now has
begun to change radiclly in the U.S., and demonstrators are likely to
be caged. The sentinels' task, when they yell that danger and
disaster are coming is not to call down wrath upon the heads of the
people they are called to save, but to warn, to "premonish", as the
old Prayer Book ordination service says--to warn beforehand, before
it's too late. The purpose of confrontation is healing and
restoration. The message must fit the occasion. Nowadays, the
Matthean stages of confrontation and attempts at reconciliation
before resort to excommunication, are pretty much ignored. For
outside of Roman Catholics and Mormons, excommunication means little;
you simply go down the street to another denomination. It is perhaps
futile to flail people from churches with vengeance-directed
discipline. Discipline comes from the same word as "disciple" and
means "learning." It doesn't mean the Ban. The binding and
loosing of Jesus is a time for learning and a time for recess. The
young Church is reported to have insisted that the excommunicate were
to be treated "like Gentiles and tax brokers." But to Jesus no one
was ever outside the pale of God's love. Jesus accepted the
invitation of an excommunicate tax broker, Zacchaeus. And a
Syro-Phoenician woman's plea for a sick child. The discipline of
the Church is to make response possible, to be response-abling. It
is sometimes flippantly said, "I don't get angry, I get even." But
the one is worse than the other. Anger need not always be wrong, but
vengeance is always and in all circumstances forbidden to believers.
Those who practice it betray the God who created them. Take a look
at the way vengeance has consumed the United States and its leaders,
since September 11, our date with destiny. Instead of vengeance,
the Apostle says, there is to be confrontation with love, not
violence; with friendship, not hostility.
This must be as true in our personal relationships and in our
community and national behavior, our religion and our politics.
With our buddies and our bureaucrats and our bishops. With pals and
politicians. We must walk the way of inclusion, not isolation and
annihilation. So the prophet Ezekiel calls the Church to be the
early warning system, to "premonish", and the Apostle calls us to be
militant in our loving, glowing hot with spirituality, to laugh with
the laughter, to cry with the tears, to find ways to feed even hungry
enemies, and not to stoop to the methods of those we are trying to
win from wickedness to liberation.
And finally Jesus gives us a message of civility, charity, and
solidarity for church life, and his promise that it doesn't take a
Moralizing Majority or a Fundamentalist Phalanx to bully our way to
the Kingdom, but that in fact the presence of Jesus will be there
when there are only two or three of us together working in love to
overcome all evil with all good.
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
____________________________________________________________________________
*Rubén Dario wrote: To Roosevelt.
Roosevelt. . .
primitive and modern, simple and complex,
one part Washington, four parts Nimrod.
You are the United States,
future invader
of our native America. . .
1 Sandinistas: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution, by
Matilde
Zimmermann.
Durham and London; Duke University Press. 2000. {page 203}
2 Christianity and Revolution: Tomás Borge's Theology of Life, edited
and
translated by Andrew Reding.
Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. 1987. {page 46}
3 Revolutionary Forgiveness, The Amanecida Collective, ed. Carter
Heyward
& Anne Gilson. Maryknoll. Orbis Press. June 1987.
Within the coming month, we shall change our Internet Server for
Homily Grits from Telematix to Turbonet, and hope that all
subscribers will receive our postings regularly. Louie Crew's
website at Rutgers University will continue to post them as well.
--Grant Gallup