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Advent IV-B
H O M I L Y G R I T S
Fourth Sunday of Advent: Year
B
December 18,
2005
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary -
2 Samuel 7:4,8-16 I will spank him with a switch such as mortals use
Psalm 132 Memento, Domine or 132:8-15 Surge, Domine
Romans 16:25-27 According to my good news and the preaching of Jesus
Christ
Luke 1:26-38 Fear not, Mary, for God loves you dearly.
"O come, O come, thou living word,
and pierce our hearts with healing sword,
> from God's own mouth proceeding far
to lance the fest'ring wounds of war.
Rejoice, Rejoice! To mend our strife
shall come in flesh the God of life."
This is a new "O antiphon" for the first day of December, by
Jim Cotter,
who has written one for each of the 24 days of the Greater Advent that
is
our last month of the secular year and our first month of each year of
grace. December used to be our tenth month (thus its name) when
New
Year's Day came in March. But our times, and our calendars, are out
of
joint. Jim's antiphon for the 2d day of December is another O
Sapientia
: "O come, O come, thou wisdom strange from deep
within God's womb to
range the earth at midnight's hours of fears to make us wise beyond our
years. Rejoice! Rejoice! Our God shall leap with light
that rouses us
> from sleep." (1 )
Today we celebrate the favorite Anglican feast of our Lady--the only
one,
for 400 years, except in vanguard Anglo-Catholicism. It is the
feast of
the Annunciation, which we also keep on March 25, old new year's day, a
pregnancy of
nine months before Christmas, but which the liturgy reminds us of now
in
late Advent, just a few days before the Nativity, while it has our
attention. The readings indeed indicate that it took a lot
longer than
nine months to make this Baby. We have in the reading from 2 Samuel
a
longer flashback than in the gospel reading. For we are taken back
to
the time of King David, the storied ancestor of Mary and of Joseph.
We
hear the tale of YHWH's promise to David, "I took you from
following
sheep, to make you not the follower of sheep, but the leader of my
flock." David had said to YHWH, "I will build you a
house" and even
Nathan the prophet had thought it a good idea, till he thought
again. A
word came back from YHWH, "Well, I have never had a house.
I've always
lived in a tent. I like tents. I can move quickly that way,
it's like
having a gypsy caravan. That way I can go where the action
is. But if
you want a house, I'll tell you what I'll do--I'll build YOU a house--a
royal house. I will give you a dynasty, with descendants forever,
and a
place, and a planting, and a Sabbath."
In Studs Terkel's "American Dreams Lost and Found" there is the
recurring
wish, in the testimony of so many of the people interviewed, for "a
house
of their own." The American dream was that every American
should have a
home of their own--and every poor kid from Joe Louis to Muhammad Ali,
> from Horatio Alger to Richard Nixon, wanted to have a house, or three,
or
four. Billie Holliday sang the dream for us as "God bless the
chile
that's got her own." I proudly remember with what pride Ali
showed me
around his newly restored Tudor mansion in Hyde Park, in Chicago, and
in
its library still with empty shelves, he pointed with pride to the one
Book on a shelf above our heads, the Holy Quran, which Muslims thus
reverently enthrone above their daily lives at home. But
Allah (simply
the Arabic word for God, and not a proper name) promised
David, and
Ali, and all of us, something better than a Tudor house in Hyde Park.
Ali
is an example to all of us in his resistance to military tyranny, and
we
should be prouder of him than of our military conquerors. A brave Black
Muslim had to remind us of the peaceable Kingdom of God that we had
abandoned on our way to Manifest Destiny. Allah has promised us all a
Home, where the revelation of justice and compassion is enthroned just
above our heads. "An everlasting place in my Love, for all
your
descendants."
David's reply: "How about a nice sweet smelling termite-proof
cedar
house?" (Cedar was for him a big deal--like an antiqued
brick
condominium in the suburbs might be for a Cardinal Rector. Cedars had
to
be brought all the way from the mountainside in Lebanon, where they
still
grow in a tiny forest owned by the Maronite Church, which has exclusive
right to peddle its twigs, cones, and branches, as sacred objects from
the holy mount.) YHWH responded to David's offer
with, "I'll just
move around, if it's okay with you." It's always been a desire
of
rulers, from David on down, to build their god or goddess a big house,
and
keep him or her confined to premises, and to speak only when spoken
to. But YHWH always wanted to be a nomad,
because of his
desert ancestry, and is apparently On The Move once more in our own
Dispensation. God seems to be saddling up his camels in the middle
East
and accepting prayers made in response not only to the sounding of
the
Shofar by the Baal Tokea, but God also hears the bells of Angelus from
churches and the muezzin's calls from minarets. The God of the
whole
earth is building this house with the living stones that will be found
fit for the wholeness of the human future with Godself.
Today is Mary's day--the only saint honored so resolutely by Christians
and Muslims alike, although she herself was always, and remains among
us
still, as a Jewish maid and mother of us all. Christmas
isn't just the
theological feast that John writes about in the first chapter of his
gospel. It is also the picture book that Luke so beautifully paints
for
us in his nativity stories. He is credited in legend with having been
commissioned by our Lady
herself to do her portrait at Czestochowa, in Poland, and Giovanni
Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino, painted St. Luke and an angel
sitting barefoot before his canvas still on its easel. But Luke's
own
brushes and paints show up in his gospel--in the second chapter, where
he
takes Joseph to the city of David in Judea, because he was descended
> from
the house and family of David. With Mary, to whom Joseph was
engaged.
The first to hear the angels' message that the Liberator has been born
there were the working class shepherds, who lived on the hills of
Judea
with their livestock. And so the world's artists have
followed Luke
and his shepherds to Bethlehem--the House of Bread--and found the
Burning Babe there, in Luke's manger, a link in the food chain.
Luke's
visitation of God is always on a human scale, even a proletarian scale:
the lowest social and economic class thereabouts, and the humblest
animals, even the poorest sacrificial animal, the dove of peace. Luke,
like the God of his Mary's Magnificat, looks with favor on the
lowliness
of shepherds and servants. Around Luke's imagined Annunciation,
Visitation, and Nativity, other artists have also placed their stage
props: Doves and lilies, cherubim and stars, spinning wheels and
rabbits, flowers, trees and birds, bridges and towers. And
candles,
lamps, baskets of lowers and fruit. The other day Silvia, our
housekeeper, went out to buy a square yard of
musgo--live moss--from the mercado, to serve as the grass to be placed
in
the Nacimiento, the Christmas crèche, under the manger of the Ninõ
Dios,
on Christmas Eve. And she brought from home her tiny statue of
Guadaloupe
to adorn the scene. All of these are stage-props, too, as is Luke's
Bethlehem. Lucas Cranach the Elder, who painted Luther and
Melanchthon,
appropriately well fed and dignified, with strength and confidence in
their faces, also did Madonna and child under the Apple Tree, in which
Baby Jesus is having a nice little Lutheran lunch of a chunk of bread
and
a bright apple, while our Madonna with gorgeous long brown tresses
seems
to grow from the Apple Tree, which an old English folk song gives
as a
Nick Name to Jesus Christ. Gilbert Keith Chesterton wrote in
"The
Everlasting Man": (2)
"No pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event
does in
fact affect any of us with that peculiar
and even poignant impression produced on us by
the word B E T H L E H E M."
This is true even though scholarship has told us that Jesus was
probably
born in Nazareth, and that Luke was presenting here the portrait which
the ancients believed he had painted on canvas. But how appropriate his
story is as a vulgate translation of John the Evangelist's "The Word
was
made flesh and dwelt among us", and how different his infancy
narrative
is from Buddha's story, how upside down! Gautama is the peace loving
prince born in a palace who became a beggar, whereas Jesus is the
beggar
born in a barn, who became the prince of peace. Magical
stories that
mix history with myth. But they are all gospels that preach
the good
news of liberation from patriarchy, feudalism, and
capitalism. And they
are all stories that liberate us from the consumerist society that uses
them all as its tools.
Tony Clavier, a North American pastor, has written, "We have
made the
enemies we have by our lack of self-criticism and our own conversion to
the worst forms of Capitalism and consumerism. . . I feel very
strongly
that the USA has brought a great deal of this upon our own head. To us,
the terrorists are Medieval thugs-- damn it they don't treat their
women
well --but to them we are cultural imperialists who would invade their
space in much the same way as Israel seems to invade their space."
(3)
Our failure to live out our own high resolves has brought us to
our
feckless pursuit of privilege, wealth and power over all the earth.
We
once shared the founding principle of submission to God with Islam,
and
we shared the founding principle of renunciation of worldly riches with
Buddhism. His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote in "The Good
Heart" that "
The purpose of all the major religious traditions is not to construct
big
temples on the outside, but to create temples of goodness and
compassion
inside, in our hearts." (4)
In an ecumenical gesture, Anglican Bishop George Browning of
Canberra,
Australia, announced in an ordination sermon one day before Advent
that
he would graft into the Ramadan witness of Islam in keeping Advent
by
fasting from sunrise till sunset every day until Christmas., in
solidarity with those who suffer unjustly, and invited others--Muslims,
Christians, and Jews, to join him. (5)
Catholics--whether Eastern Orthodox, Roman, Lutheran, or Anglican--have
celebrated Mary as living with us, as one of us, and not remote. as
if she had no
body, parts, or passions. .Nevertheless, at an ecumenical
liturgical
conference at Valparaiso, Indiana, in 1981, an Anglican
priest spoke
about the difficulty that the RC doctrines of the Virgin Mary posed for
the rest of us. The speaker, a Roman whom I remember only as
Father
Empereru , responded that the RCs don't really have any feasts to its
Doctrines about the Blessed Mother that have been very popular.
The
widely popular festivals of Mary are geographical, not theological.
Czestochowa, Lourdes, Guadaloupe, Montserrat, Fatima, Copacabana
in
Bolivia, Luján in Argentina, Mariazell in Austria, and even the
English
feast of Our Lady of Walsingham, where our Lady's house was brought
over
> from the Holy Land by angels, before the advent of FedEx. Feasts
thought
up by the clergy--like Immaculate Heart of Mary, or the Queenship of
Mary, the Solemnity of Mary, have a hard time capturing those
thoroughly
human constructs of dates and places. The more the
clergy pushed for
theological holidays, the more likely Mary was to show up in some
backwater country town to chat with a peasant, or smile at some
potato-hungry Irish child at Knock, during the famine (where she was
seen
celebrating mass, assisted by St. John the Beloved Disciple in deacon's
vestments.) Advent means God and Theotokos (his Mother) will
show up
where they are most likely to be given hospitality at our tables and in
our calendars.
In our celebration of the Advent of the God of justice, we also now
celebrate the life of the prophet Ivan Illich, 76, who died on December 2
afew years ago at his home in Bremen. He gave welcome to our Jewish
Lord and his
Mother; and he had railed against modern technology, education as
a
commodity, and canned health care. He preached that automobiles
enslaved
society and bicycles were faster. Born in
Vienna, he had been forced in 1941 to flee by the Nazi race laws
because
of his mother's Jewish ancestry. He studied in Italy, entered
the Roman
Catholic priesthood, and served in New York and Puerto Rico.
In 1961 he
founded the Intercultural Center of Documentation in Cuernavaca, one of
the great centers of liberation theology. Called by the Roman
bureaucracy to answer to an inquisition, he refused to subject
himself,
and lost the Church's funding. So he severed his ties with PaPa
and
preached that schooling made people dumb, and the legal system,
rather
than providing people with solutions, heightened their frustration. He
might have added that religion should start pointing the earth's people
towards a communitarian earth and heaven, and stop urging them into a
capitalist hell. (6)
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
grant73@turbonett.com.ni
GRITS 4th series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
(1) Jim Cotter, "Exoectant Advent", from which his O
Antiphons are
quoted. Copies of the beautifully printed and bound little book can
be
ordered by post from Jim, at Cairns Publications, Dwylan, Strud Fawr,
Harlech, Gwynedd, LL46 2YA. $10 USD. ISBN is 1 870652 38
X. Checks to
Jim Cotter. Website is
www.cottercarins.co.uk
and e-mail to
jim@cottercarins.co.uk.
(2) G.K. Chesterton "The Everlasting Man", (Part II, chapter 1, the God
in the Cave).
(3) The Rev. Anthony Clavier, Diocese of South Dakota Trinity Episcopal Church, Watertown, SD www.tecwatertown.org
(4) His Holiness, The Dalai Lama, "The Good Heart,"copyright Wisdom Publications. 2001.
(5) Anglican Communion News Service:
(6) Ivan Illich. His radical anarchist views were made known through
four famous books published in the 70's. Deschooling Society (1971),
Tools for Conviviality (1973), Energy and Equity (1974) , and Medical
Nemesis (1976). He writes about "radical monopolies" and "counter
productivity" in the technologies of education, energy consumption, and
medical treatment, in both "developed" and "developing"countries, but in
different ways to each. Other books: Toward a History of Needs (1978) and
Shadow Work (1981) Gender (1982), H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness
(1985) ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988) In the
Vineyard of the Text (1993). In the Mirror of the Past (1992), Illich
was a polymath who spoke at least six languages fluently and wrote in
three (English, Spanish, and German). His work has been translated into
more than twenty-five other languages.