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Christmas Day Dec 25
Christmas Mid-Day
December 25, 2005
____________________________________________________________________________
H M I L Y G R I T S
Christmas Day
grant Gallup)
This homily is based
on one first presented at Christmas 2000}
Psalm 98 - Cantate Domino
Hebrews 1:1-12 - Long ago God spoke to our ancestors
John 1:1-14 - The Word becomes flesh and lives among us
I went out to the west side of Chicago as a mission priest in 1961, to
St. Andrew's church, which was listed in the diocesan directory with
the
letter "(c)" in parentheses, to indicate it was a colored
congregation.
Not "B" for Black, or "AA" for "African
American," but a little "c" for
"colored." People of all colors came to St. Andrew's --
> from the light
skinned old Southern ladies to Wandile Kuse, the dark black priest from
South Africa who was getting his Ph.D. in the United States.
"White"
folks, too, who lived in Chicago's suburbs and drove into the City on
Sundays for worship in our ghetto, an Italian word imported and
translated from its original, which defined a Jewish ward, to USA
language for an African enclave. Color requires the spectrum of all
shades of light for its definitions. (Thus my old friend Paul Goldman,
a
Jew married to a Roman Catholic Irish woman, always referred to
"people
of color" and to "a man of color" or a "colored
woman."
But we are all people of color, of some tint or hue from the palette of
amplitude.
Then came the sixties and the civil rights revolution and Black became
the right word to use. My eighty year old dentist, Dr. Brown,
objected;
he declared that he had been born a Negro and a Negro he would remain.
There was an incident one summer, when Chris Church, the teenage son of
a
Hinsdale family came to work as a volunteer supervising our church
playground. Some of our kids took umbrage when the suburban lad
referred
to them as "Black youth", for they had not yet been notified of
the
change in our parlance, that "Negro" now was out. It was a
while before
"Black" took Roots. In 1988, at a conference in Chicago, the
Reverend
Jesse Jackson (whom I had met when he was a seminary drop-out working
with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the long hot summers) said that it
was
time again for a change in our terms. The word Black had not worked
very
well, and the preferable term now was to be "African
American." Not
"Afro-American," as it had been for a very brief time--because
"Afro" was
already the name of a popular hair arrangement. People have, within
reason, a right to be called what they want to be called, so the old
term
"African American" should be quite acceptable now in our
culture and in
our country. But the NAACP didn't ever drop "colored"
> from its name. And
Dr. Brown died a Negro. Our culture, indeed most cultures, have
associated the color Black in so many ways with evil, misfortune,
death,
disaster, that the experiment of applying it to an ethnic group was a
risky business.
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable has dozens of entries for
pejorative uses of Black. The church used Black for funerals,
and along
with the color of the unbleached candles used at All Souls masses, we
got
the matching Hallowe'en colors of orange and black. In recent times
we
switched to white as more appropriate of life and resurrection. The
use
of Black at funerals, however, had not been a Christian invention--the
church borrowed the idea from ancient Roman custom, and the Romans had
taken it from the Egyptians. The pejorative uses of Black
included
Black Ball, Black Mail, Black Death, the pirate's Black Flag, a sad day
as Black Monday or Black Friday, criminal societies as the Black Hand,
a
family's shame as the Black Sheep, a withering glance as Black looks,
and
so on. Black got associated with Dark, as well--deprivation of
light:
thus, "black as the inside of a cow, tail down and mouth
closed." Even
the Muslims claim that the great stone at Mecca, called the Kaaba,
which
every Muslim hopes once in a lifetime to kiss, was white when it fell
> from the heavens, but turned Black because of the sins of humankind.
So the word Black for all the many colored and various-hued peoples of
African descent was a word alreay in trouble. In the Scriptures,
the
word "Black" is not associated with sin, but the color
"red" is indeed
so. "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as wool,"
God promises
by the mouth of Isaiah. We will all do ourselves a favor if we
disassociate Black as color from darkness as absence of Light or
Enlightenment. And now I come to the one point of this homily for
Christmas day.
"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and
the Word
was God. . . in him was life and the life was the Light of humankind.
The
light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome
it."
LIGHT is the major symbol of Christmas time, not White.
"I'm dreaming
of a Light Christmas," is the song I sing today. Light is the
presence of
all colors, and brings all together. It's the chief metaphor for this
cosmic event wherein truth, the meaning of
existence, the purpose of life, is made clear, visible, palpable among
us, and we need to have everyone participate in the metaphor that fully
embraces it. In the Spanish language, the very word for giving
birth is
"dar la luz" to give light to. The Quakers speak of
divine guidance as
the Inner Light. The Buddha is referred to as the Light of Asia,
Jesus
is
called the Light of the world, and so on. Light is not the opposite
of
Black or of Negro or Colored, but it is the opposite of Night,
and
Obscurity and darkness and confusion. At Christmas the metaphor of
light
surrounds us, sparkling on our Christmas trees and wreaths, shining on
candles amidst the poinsettias, glowing in the sparkling eyes of
childen.
John's gospel begins with this Light. The metaphor is sustained
throughout his evangel: "The Light shines in
darkness and the darkness has not overcome it." The shadows have
not
engulfed, surrounded or extinguished the Light that comes into the
world
with Jesus Christ. Light is beckoned out of the noonday sun onto
the
toreador's costume--the "trajes de luz" -- and sequins glow on
the old
nun's Christmas gown in Managua: "Sister Sparkle Plenty"
we call
her.Light is the chief ornament of
humankind.
The Light of Christ is not delimited by the edges of European Christian
culture, by the borderlands of Caucasian dominance, and cannot be.
St.
John says that "the true light which enlightens every person was
coming
into the world" in Jesus Christ at Christmastime. This
remarkable
statement means that Jesus was not born here as a "fenómeno" or
a freak,
a space cadet or stranger to our species, but came to be at home in
every
human venue, in every culture, and wears the skin and bone, the brains
and beauty, of every ethnicity, every people. The light of Christ,
the
light of Christmas is the light that enlightens every person, and there
is recognition here that all humanity has the gift of light, and all in
their own ways radiate the truth that is from God. Jesus was not
born in
order to become the emblem of cultural imperialism for the Western
world,
the
first "Roman" catholic or the first European anything.
John tells us
that he has come to all, and to all that receive him, this Word still
gives the
strength to become children of God. Forsake your sins and opt for
John's project is a sure way into the Kingdom of God which come as the
violent bear it awayl
Th Word becomes flesh, not the other way around. The flesh does
not
transform itself into Logos, into Ideas, into Tenets, into
creedal statements. We do not need to take our life, incarnated
as
White, Black, Yellow or Red people, and make it our identity. The Words
we use to describe ourselves will not outlive our Flesh. They are
inappropriate to become the Truth about us. So Christmas comes to
celebrate the Light that is in each one of us, and all of us, by
becoming
Flesh. It's already there, given by God with every human
being. God
does not enter the human family in Nazareth as a stranger to us, but as
one of us: our brother, sister, sibling--who empowers us to
become
children together of One God, to come home to that family at
Christmas.
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
grant73@aturbonett.com.ni
Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
GRITS4thseries now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits