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St Martin Nov 11
Martin of Tours
H O M I L Y G R I T S
November 11, 2005
¶ Lesser Feasts and Fasts lectionary
Isaiah 58:6-12 Is not this the fast that I choose?--to let the oppressed
go free!.
Psalm 15 Verba mea auribus - Hear my words O Lord
or 34:15-22 The eyes of the Lord are upon the justice doers.
Matthew 25: 34-40 He will separate people as a shepherd separates
sheep from goats
This used to be called Armistice Day as well, when at the eleventh hour
on the eleventh day of the eleventh month the Allied Powers kept a moment
of silence to honor the laying down of armaments in 1918, which brought
an end to what
was innocently called The Great War, which was to end all wars. It
was a serendipity unknown to Woodrow Wilson that it was also the feast of
a soldier saint who had foresworn the use of violence.
Martin was born around 330 C.E. in Sabaria, in what is now Hungary.
He grew up in Pavia, in Italy. His father was in the Roman imperial
army, and Martin himself entered the officer corps and was assigned to
Amiens in France. As a young officer, he one day met a beggar, who
asked for help in the name of Christ. Martin used his military
sword to redistribute his own property to the poor man--for he cut his
military great cloak in two, and gave half to the beggar. (He learned
that figure perhaps from Zebedee, in Luke's gospel, who gave half his
goods to feed the poor.) Legend has it that the next night
Jesus Christ appeared to Martin clothed in the half-cloak and said to
him, "Martin the Catechumen covered me with this clothing."
Martin saw that the cloakless poor man was Jesus with whom he had
shared. He soon asked to be baptized and then his baptism
"took", for he had a positive reaction and was in time
"conscientizado"--his conscience was elevated, or as Buddha
would say, he was awakened. About the year 339 he asked to be
discharged from the Military, for he saw that it was inconsistent with
his Baptism to serve Caesar in that way. "I am Christ's
soldier," he declared, "and I am not allowed to
fight." He was charged with cowardice, but offered to be
a fourth century Witness for Peace, to prove that untrue. He
offered to stand between opposing lines of soldiers, unarmed, as the
members of Witness for Peace did in our generation in Nicaragua, and do
so still in Iraq and other countries of the Holy Land with Christian
Peacemaker Teams. He was "discharged for the good of the
service" and went to live as a recluse for a while before
joining Hilary at Poitiers, the great theologian bishop (yes, that is
possible!) who had himself been converted from a great pagan
family. Martin was ordained and eventually, and reluctantly, became
Bishop of Tours in 370 C.E. Martin's "creative
violence" towards his own property and his refusal to show
destructive violence towards other of God's children who called
themselves soldiers, seemed to become the principle by which he also
dealt with controversy. He permitted violence in the forcible
destruction of the shrines of heathen religion but stood against the
Emperor who condemned to death the practitioners of magic and
superstition. Martin was not excessively popular
with other bishops, because he lived simply and was ardently opposed to
any violence in the repression of unbelief and heresy. He called for
bloodless jihad, not bloody crusade. He was a missionary to
the simple country people (that it what "pagan" meant) who
lived round about his hermitage, and always defended the poor in whom he
had first met Christ.
He died on November 11, 397. Martin Luther was doubtless named for
him, and by derivation in an apostolic succession of nomenclature, so was
Martin Luther King Jr., for them both. A name resplendent with
honor. Martin's memory is much misused by those who want to
use him as a symbol of the pious soldier in service of state
violence. Such a twisted reading does violence to his memory.
The real truth about Martin is that he renounced violence against
persons--if the sword was to be used, it was to be used on behalf of the
poor in the forcible (if necessary) redistribution of property.
"To break unjust fetters", as Isaiah declared, is to be
the proper observance of fast days. "Breaking the yoke"
refers not to making
an omelet of hen's eggs but to doing violence to the way in which humans
are forced to labor as beasts of burden, as oxen and other animals
without recompense. Isaiah demands that the hungry be fed,
that the homeless be sheltered, that the naked be clothed, that we do not
turn away from "our own kin"--that is, our sisters and brothers
in all the human family, who
live in economic slavery and who subsist there hungry, homeless,
naked. Take a look at the violence which northAmericans and Brits
have authorized their leaders to inflict upon their poor sisters and
brothers in Afghanistan, and submit that to St. Martin's mind
today. Papa Bush remember promised us a "gentler kinder
America" and now his clone has given us a vengeful, murdering one
instead, with Papa's mentoring. But Isaiah promises that if we will
like Martin give up military violence, used
by the Christian Church and the Anglo American media to exact revenge and
to enforce injustice against the Ummah (the whole world of
believers) if we will give that all up and give up the clenched
fist and the wicked lying word (read, Television), and turn to
justice, Isaiah says we will get Light and Guidance and Relief and
Strength and Refreshment and the opportunity to Rebuild. But
what you see is what you get. "You yourselves give them
something to eat" Jesus still says to us, his
disciples, when the multitudes are hungry. "You yourselves
share your clothes" Jesus tells us as he told Martin on a November
day. Jesus approved of the use of Martin's sword to
redistribute property (remember he told his disciples to sell their
coats and buy swords--but forbade Peter's personal violence to the high
priest's servant). In the Temple, when he had no sword in his own
hand, Jesus (according to John 2:15) "made a scourge out of cords
and drove them out of the Temple." Where property is misused or not
shared, Jesus used the scourge of creative violence to end that misuse,
but when Peter used his
sword against a flunky soldier, Jesus stopped him and healed the flunky,
as he healed Martin the flunky by a proper use of his own sword to
divide his property with a poor man.
The real call of the gospel is not to quietism and retreat from the
world, or a vocation to exhort the warring powers to "be nice and
obey the Marquess of Queensbury rules." There is no
permissible theology of Just War which is anything but just plain
war. War is hell, and hell is off limits to believers, who
have been saved from it. The sword of the Spirit is given to us, to
cut through the cloak of lies, the mantle of privilege,
the shields of comfort and consumerism, and to freeze the assets off
the
rich, to assure that the poor are clothed and housed and fed.
When we with Martin see each poor Afghani girl as Mary our own sister,
and each Iraqi boy as Jesus who gave her to us as our Mother. Jesus
came to us stripped of his clothes, a bleeding Savior without a
weapon then we will lay down our cluster bombs and share the enormous
wealth of the richest land in the world to heal the poorest lands on the
planet. Our WMD's -- and we have more than all the world combined
-- will save no life, and the money we spend on them could save the
planet from its self-destruction. Imagine what would happen if in
all the churches we were to make the poor our priority, instead of
parking lots, perquisites, and pensions. If we were to make
their hunger the military objective of our endless struggle, and put our
armies to cooking Afghan children's meals, our Eucharistic
feast to share. "When did we see you hungry?" we, now in
our redoubts with Bush and Blair will ask at the soon coming Crisis and
Judgment, when we are all together in the Dock. Jesus will reply,
"You saw it on CNN in
November." "You saw it on Saint Martin's Day."
Rings I have, watches, tokens, a dog tag
To take back to the land of the living,
From the dead to deliver to fathers or sisters,
Cherished possessions of my luckless companions
Lost in four years of rooted abuse.
O to forget, forget the fever and famine,
The fierndess of visions, the faith beyond reason,
To forget man's lot in the folly of man,
And swear never to kill a living being,
To live for love, the lost country of man's longing.
(from Brotherhood of Man, by Richard Eberhart)*
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
grant73@turbonett.com.ni
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