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Nov 13 2005
H O M I L
Y G R I T S
Twenty Sixth Sunday After Pentecost
Proper 28- November 13,
2005
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary -
Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18 Their wealth shall be plundered, their houses laid
waste
Psalm 90 Domine, refugium or 90:1-8, 12 Lord, you have been our
refuge
1 Thessalonians 5:1-10 When they say "Here is peace and
security",
destruction will come upon them.
Matthew 25: 14-15. 19-29 "I reap where I sowed not, and gather where
I
have not strawed."
____________________________________________________________________________
The first reading is enough to scare you into joining the Quakers,
signing onto a Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron, or at least asking
your rector about joining the Episcopal Peace Fellowship.
Zephaniah, at least in this reading, is a Prophet of Doomsday. His God
launches a search and destroy mission on Judah (exposition can extrapolate to a
contemporary nation state) and YHWH promises ruin, wrath, and
devastation, complete with darkness, gloom, battle cries and the sudden
end of all the inhabitants of the planet Earth. At the close of the
year, with the drawing of the natural cycle of the seasons towards the
apparent death of warmth, beauty, and sunlight in the North, and the
coming of the harsh judgment of winter, the Church accompanies the
apparent natural disaster with an increasing emphasis on the last
judgment, the end of all things, and the Day of the Lord.
Here in the South, instead, nature does not give us a metaphor for the
Eschaton, for it is at work drawing us into a gaudy if meretricious summer, and
instead it is political corruption, economic hopelessness, and the oppression
of Gringo hegemony that have done their best to bring a long winter of
discontent and disaster to God's poor people. Today the Prophet Zephaniah
(blessed be he!) tells the oppressive nation that its money won't buy its
way out of the coming disaster, no matter how much it spends on its
Homeland Security Police. (in German, Geheime Stats Polizei (1) )
This shift in USA's legal system has been noted by the alternative press but
not much reported in the self-controlled mass media. "This is
the most profound shift in our legal institutions in my lifetime and - most
remarkable of all - it has taken place without engaging any broad public
interest whatsoever." So spoke William G. Young, the U.S. federal judge
presiding over the criminal case against Richard Reid, British citizen
and alleged "shoe bomber," discussing the Bush administration's shift to
secretive military tribunals for alleged terrorists. (Ironically, this
judge was appointed by President Ronald Reagan!)
Meanwhile, the USA is an increasingly hyper-religious people:
Recently, a young man named Darrell Lambert was ousted from the Eagle
Scouts, who had bestowed numerous medals upon him, because the Boy Scouts of
America require belief in "a supreme being" to qualify for membership
and Darrell says he is an atheist. (Everyone ought to know by now that the
Supreme Being and the Supreme Court are the same thing in the USA.)
The Scouts also require heterosexuality, and won't accept gay members.
Many of us find ourselves atheists to the same false gods of patriotism and
militarism and heterosexism that guide the sect appropriately called
BSA. Thus the response of the North to terrorism is to excite
itself with more patriotic, homophobic religion, accompanied by a terroristic
counter-terrorism.
What is to be our response as believers to the warning that the sins of
idolatry, injustice, presumptuous self-confidence have brought divine
judgment upon the empire and the Earth? Is it to be that of the
babbling cabal of Bible banging Christian fundamentalists who run the nation
now, or their counterparts in a corrupt fundamentalist form of Islam?
I remember once finding in a church basement a World War II German
political insignia--a little brass button--from the Plebiscite
that confirmed Hitler in power. It had only one word "Ja!"
with an exclamation point. The YES of the U.S in the mid-term plebiscite
has now given dictatorial power to Unser Führer, an unelected
caudillo. "God won't do anything" is the attitude
of most people. "God won't do us any good, and he won't do us any harm"
is a cynical rationale for jump-starting a war of terror on terrorism.
"We'll do it ourselves. We'll make the world safe for the American Way."
The people whom the Prophet Zephaniah talks about here are not what we
commonly call atheists; for these folks believe mightily in God, or say
they do, and insist that God has given them the right to run the world.
And then they go on to act as if God did not exist, and had no part in
their plans. This is the praxis of atheism. This is a people that lives
without vision or vigilance, which Bill Stringfellow the Prophet
(blessed be he!) identified as the work of Prayer. I heard him preach
once years ago--1981, in East Lansing, Michigan--at the ordination of my
friend the 71 year old Anne Garrison and he told us that we were not
ordaining her for being a religious person, as if she had achieved
perfect attendance at Sunday School for all those years. Instead, she
was being ordained (as all Christians are) to a life of vigilance, a
life of prayer. Her ordination was an opening to future vigilance, not
a reward for a virtuous past. Our name for prayer is therefore
vigilance, and it is our DEW line, our early warning system, our watchtower,
our way of seeing in the dark. The armies now have a kind of binocular
which enable troops to see in the dark. So Paul spoke of that when he
says in today's epistle: "But you are not in darkness." And the
day of the Lord won't surprise you when it comes, because you are awake,
and can see, even in the dark. Since we belong to the Day, we won't be
surprised by Day Light. The Spirit of God praying in us and
through us provides an inner vigilance of Spirit--the Spirit of watchfulness
and discernment.
Graham Ward (2), writes in Theology Today on the coming of cyberspace
and
the difference posed by its technology between virtue and virtuality,
between tradition and nostalgia, and the consequences for our
understanding of Space, Time, Light. "The establishment and
maintenance of various cybernet forms are costly, and the majority of
forms are there for one reason--to make money. The infinite,
frictionless surfing through light is manufactured--one travels in
preorganized ways, along preorchestrated routes--by free-market
capitalism. It is, to quote Yeats, 'an artifice of eternity.' . . Yet, it
fosters forms of virtual living that are now detached from the Good, and
> from its codependents: the True, the Beautiful, and the Just. . . . .
Christian theology must contest this detachment. . . Christian theology
must criticize this virtuality without virtue." This virtuality is the
Black Hole of communication, the observation of our world without vigilance.
This manipulation of electronic cyber "light" is used by the Domination
System for the purpose of keeping most of the world in darkness.
Television and the Internet have become the toys of the rich nations, the
tools of propaganda for capitalism, the weapons of Empire. Those who
live without the light of the gospel, without the spirit of vigilance,
deny that such an alternative "light" exists or that it has any power or
ability to change the world for good. We see its opposite--the darkness
and menace of the military establishment today--squandering the wealth of
the planet on preparation for cataclysmic war that will leave us all in
darkness.
When I was a young man at my first job as an office boy in a Chicago
printing plant, several co-workers were Baptists who published a
fundamentalist newspaper in Swedish, and would not watch television at
all or go to the movies, for they feared contamination by the mass
media. I thought them mad, but humored them, in our common discussions
of religion. Now, fifty years later, I can see what they meant. The
mass media are voluntarily and in their own interest in the service of
the Domination System. So the question of Revolutionaries must always
be, "What is to be done?" To begin with, what kinds of contamination
should believers try to avoid in our imperialist and militarist
culture? Is opting out of consumerism and consumption the only way?
When I first came to live in Nicaragua in 1989, I met Dorothy Granada and
her compañero, Charles Gray, at one of the weekly demonstration of U.S.
citizens in front of the U.S. embassy here, protesting the Empire's war
on Nicaragua. They had renounced wealth and privilege to
move here--Charles had been a millionaire who gave away his fortune to work
with Dorothy in the peace and justice movement. He designed the
"world equity budget", calling the world's people to try to live on $128
a month, which he had calculated as each human being's fair share of
the planet's wealth, as he and Dorothy had vowed to do. (3) Dorothy
later participated with Father MIguel D'Escoto in the long fast which was
part of the Evangelical Insurrection against the U.S war on Nicaragua, and
later, in 2001, she had fame thrust upon her when Arnoldo Aleman, the
Somoza-like caudillo of Nicaragua expelled her from the country, for
having ministered as a nurse in the war zones to the revolutionary
Sandinistas as well as the counter-revolutionary Contras, the darlings
of the U.S. government. When Aleman left office in disgrace for
massive thefts, Dorothy was invited by his successor to return.
Dorothy and Charles are for many of us examples and icons now, of non-violent
resistance to war making and war mongering. Children of Light.
Franz Jägerstätter, Austrian peasant and conscientious objector, was
beheaded by the National Security State known as the 3rd Reich on
August 9, 1943, for refusing induction into the German army. While in
prison, his chaplains, military officers and attorneys tried to persuade him
against his conscience to accept induction. He could not be swayed, and
"described a dream he had had in 1938 in which crowds of people were
struggling to board a shiny new train. At some point he heard a voice
announce, ' This train is bound for hell.' It occurred to him afterward
that this train was a symbol of the Nazi movement. Surely, he
concluded, one should not board such a train; surely, having discovered its
destination, one ought to jump off such a train before it reach its goal,
even though it might cost one's life." (4) His dream speaks to
us now:
Jump Off This Train. He too is one of the children of light, the
children of the new Day that is dawning, and a patron saint of
conscientious objectors to the neo-fascism of Gringolandia's 4th Reich.
"You are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the
night or of darkness. . . for those who sleep sleep at night, and those
who are drunk get drunk at night." The nation is drunk in its dark
night, beset by the night stallions of war and military mayhem. So Paul
uses the metaphor of inebriation, of night time addictive behavior and
somnolence. The gospel's prescription is that of an "Intervention" by
believers, who are the Friends of the Planet. The Church is called to be
an Intervention Team to put a final NO to the world's drunken binge
of self-destruction, and a joyous YES to embracing the sobriety of
solidarity with the poor, who are the future of humankind, in a
non-violent, nonconsumptive world.
Just as no believer should take up arms, or pay for them, to enforce the
empire's ambitions, now that a "just war" is an oxymoron, indeed an
oxy-idiotic term, a damnable lie--so no believer should have a job in the
military establishment, the armed enforcers, or the armaments industry.
Fellow believers ought to join together to do an AA-type "intervention"
with our neighbors who have signed or resigned themselves into
war.
Summing up his commitment to the "world equity budget", Charles Gray
wrote "I can see the formation of High Consumers Anonymous, with folks
getting together and testifying as to our past high consumption life and
how long we had been off the ' bottle'of wasteful and unjust living, and
how when we backslide or are tempted to do so, we call on our High
Consumers Anonymous support groups to help us back onto the proper path.
If it worked as well for [us] as it has for AA, we'd soon have millions
of members and the revolution would be underway. . . The world equity
budget has put us in a special kind of dialog with our still rich
friends. We ask them to personally reckon with the institutionalied
violence of the worldwide maldistribution of wealth, to consider living
on their equal share as a step toward a nonviolent economics and a more
peaceful world."
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 2nd series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
1 Gestapo: Geheime Staats Politzei, literally, Secret
State Police, a secret police organization operating especially against persons
suspected of treason or sedition and employing methods held to be
underhanded and terrorist. --Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary.
2 Graham Ward, "Between Virtue and Virtuality" in Theology
Today, April 2002, pp 55-70. Ward is professor of contextual
theology and ethics at the University of Massachusetts.
3 "The World Equity Budget, or Living on About $128 a
Month" by Charles Gray, in "Reaching New Heights Through Downward
Mobility", ed. Dorothy Norvell Andersen, 1991, Tucson, Arizona.
4 "Franz Jägerstätter, Conscientious Objector, Martyr
(1907-1943", in All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and
Witnesses for Our Time. Robert Ellsberg. New York: Crossroad Publishing
Co.1997.