Rogation Sunday Easter VI-B

[Grant M Gallup <grant73@turbonett.com.ni>]

 H o m i l y    G r i t s
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Monday,Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week are the traditional Rogation
Days.
                                                                     
Year B - May 21, 2006
                                                 
O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as 
surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you,
that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your
promises, which exceed all that we can desire;  through Jesus Christ
our
Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for
ever and ever.  Amen.

¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Acts 11:19-30 It was in Antioch that the disciples were first called
"Christians".
 or Isaiah 45: 11-13, 18-19 Will you question ME, about MY
children?
Psalm 33 Exultate, justi, or 33:1-8, 18-22
1 John 4: 7-21 Love is perfected among us in this: that we may be bold in
the day of crisis
or Acts 11:19-30 as above
John 15:9-17 I have called you Friends.

____________________________________________________________________________





 There are several dishes on the buffet today, multiple choices on the 
menu.  It's the Sunday before the Ascension Day, which itself seems will 
now be served up as a leftover on the Sunday after, without ever having 
been the main course on Thursday.  The liturgical engineers have rightly 
seen that Ascension is not a separate "occasion" from Easter, but part and 
parcel of the One vindication of Jesus as the Holy One of God.  Our 
sisters and brothers in Islam do this vindication by rescuing Jesus from 
the crucifixion entirely; we do it by rescuing Him after a real time 
murder.

   A rubric now remembers that "Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this 
week are the Traditional Rogation Days,."  but not a peep is uttered about 
today being Rogation Sunday, and nowhere are the old English traditions of 
Rogationtide told, its customs rumored . Already no one remembers them as 
"Gang Days,"  from the custom of "ganging" around the parish to Beat the 
Bounds or Bless the Hounds.  The Litany is not much sung in Procession 
around the parish boundaries, nor are boys whipped  with willow wands and 
splashed with water all the way that they might vividly remember the 
route.  These former customs have already mercifully been forgotten.      
For Anglicans Rogationtide used to be as famous as Pentecost, even.   It 
was the time when we got all our requests to God together and sent them 
off with Jesus on his trip home on Ascension Day. Rogation means "asking" 
and so Asking Sunday was the idea.   Easter is coming to an end, and 
Pentecost is two weeks from catching fire. 

It is hard for us to hear the word "Christian" these days without 
wincing,  what with its abuse by U.S. fundamentalists and their Born-Again 
self-appointed Texas dictator. When a radio or TV station or a publication 
is called "Christian" I avoid it like a pot hole in the street, a nasty 
obstacle to progress, for I know at once that bumpy bigotry is nigh.   
"Born-again" is another word made vile by its perverted use by these 
mindless jerks.  Thank God that so far the Lutherans have saved 
"Evangelical" from being slopped into the pig pen of garbage words.  In 
Nicaragua it is a good word, used instead of "Protestant" to signify 
anyone who isn't a Roman Catholic.  (Anglicanos and Luteranos are the 
exception here.)  But fundamentalists are to the Jesus community what 
self-immolaters are to the Ummah of Islam. And now today it is our 
celebration of this great Easter Season that has given us the definitive 
name of "Christian",  which our reading from Acts today tells us got its 
start as an epithet in Antakya,  now in Muslim Turkey. A cave I visited 
there in 1969, called St. Peter's church, is still there, and is sacred to 
Muslims as well as Christians,  and a spring of holy water from which 
everyone drinks and carries away its blessings. Once a year, there is a 
mass celebrated to remind us all of its antiquity as the first "Christian" 
church.   Up till Antioch, there was only one "church", and that was in 
Jerusalem, and nobody there was called "Christian".   The faithful there 
called themselves "The Way" or "the Disciples",  and they were all 
Judeans, and didn't think of themselves as different from the other 
believers in God, who were all Jews. 

Almost by accident, there were some Jews from North Africa and Cyprus who 
had become followers of "the Way" --what a mix they were already! -- 
Hellenistic Jewish Jesus People, and they went up to Antioch and for the 
first time spoke to non-Jews about Jesus.  Up till then, the only 
"converts" to the Way had been Jews, from as far away as Phoenicia, Cyprus 
and Antioch, to be sure, for the church members had fled Jerusalem after 
the murder of Stephen, the first martyr, and so the little church in 
Jerusalem was dispersed, sent running for cover.  And one of the towns 
they fled to was Antioch.   Luke says they preached "the Lord Jesus" to 
Greeks.  Not "the Christ Jesus", but "the Lord Jesus."  Preaching Jesus as 
Christ, as Messiah, would have made little sense to non-Jews, who "didn't 
care nothin' about no 'messiah'."  What's a "messiah?" they might have 
said, as in What's a gefilte fish?  What's a matzo ball?  What's lox and 
bagels?  "Messiah" was on the kosher menu, but it meant nothing to Greeks. 
Such talk was "to the Greeks foolishness."  Instead, the church preached 
to the Greeks in another idiom.

It preached to them Jesus as kyrios,  LORD, World Ruler.  They understood 
this as a contradiction and confrontation of the universal political 
conviction that Caesar was World Ruler.  It was revolutionary to say 
"Jesus is Lord."  It was good news to the conquered and oppressed peoples 
of the Empire that a man named Jesus from the outback had proclaimed a new 
world order, that a victim of the Emperor had come back from his grave and 
was claiming Caesar's place.  It is as if believers were now to claim that 
Jesus, and not George W. Bush, was "World Ruler, President of the Planet,  
and Commander-in-Chief", and to act on that belief.   It was for this 
reason that the disciples got into trouble with the Empire,  and not 
because they were peddling just one more variant religious idea around 
their weekend lodge meetings.   Now Barnabas was sent down to Antioch from 
the Mother Church in Jerusalem to do some mothering in Antioch.  He liked 
what he saw there, and went to find Saul (Paul, as we know him now) and 
brought him back to Antioch with him and the two of them spent a year 
there, and taught the church, so that by the time they finished the locals 
could be called "Christians", by this time they knew that Jesus was not 
only World Ruler and Kyrios, but was also the "Anointed One," the "Sent 
One", the "Christos,"  the Messiah waited for by the Jewish people like 
Paul and Barnabas.  And so his name became the name of his disciples as 
well, and his vocation in history   to preach peace to those afar off and 
those who are nigh.

 The story goes on to tell that the first thing they did together as 
Church was to listen to the prophet Agabus, who foresaw a world wide Great 
Depression coming--one of many that would afflict mercantile societies 
throughout history--as one menaces the markets today-- and they took up a 
collection and sent it back to Mother Church in Judea, and sent the cash 
by the hand of Barnabas and Saul.  So the first reading illustrates and 
illuminates mothering as an act directed towards Mother Church.  How the 
church is re-produced, how it is given new birth and new life in new 
cultures and new places with new people and how it faces new challenges is 
by mothering.  It is the newcomers themselves who are the givers of new 
life out of Antioch. We don't know their names, but we know they were 
mixed-bag newcomers themselves, from north Africa and Cyprus!  Not from 
Capernaum or Nazareth, or those Jewish places the apostles were from.  
They were outsiders themselves.  It wasn't any big thing for them to go 
and preach to Greeks at Antioch, for they themselves spoke Greek. They 
were bicultural people already, and they used the language of the people 
they were talking to,  not just speaking in Greek, but using the metaphors 
of Greek culture in the pagan world.  Jesus is KYRIOS, they said.  A new 
metaphor in which they en-culturated the gospel, and so enabled new life, 
new birth in that place.  A Mother does not clone herself in the child, 
but contributes her gifts, along with the Father's gifts, so that a wholly 
new thing will happen, and a wholly new life will come about.  Something 
new and wonderful happens in parenting.   And mothering isn't just 
birthing.  The apostles Barnabas and Saul go on to spend a whole year 
there in Antioch after the conversions,  teaching the neonates.  Mothering 
is nurture, not just birthing.  So every church and every church member 
needs more than the birth of water Baptism, but also the care and feeding, 
the attention and teaching, of flesh and blood church life.  The 
internalizing of the gospel, the contextualizing into life, the 
conscientization, which is a way of transplanting the antennae of gospel 
consciousness into the personality, and into the community--this is what 
makes growth possible for the Body of Christ.  What does it mean that 
Jesus is Kyrios?   What will it mean when you act politically as a 
believer?

Max Lerner said once long ago that our value systems come and go, somewhat 
in the cycles of the decades.  So that we remember  the sixties as a 
revolutionary, altruistic age, when people were concerned about the rights 
of others:  civil rights, women's rights, Gay and Lesbian rights. And in 
the seventies we had Nixon and treachery and a decade of turning inward 
and away from the world into self.  The eighties then gave us yuppies and 
buppies and guppies and  an "I'll get mine" philosophy for the upwardly 
mobile and the greedy.  The decades of greed and lying have stayed with us 
through the end of one century and the start of another. They have invaded 
and captured the "old republic" that Gore Vidal remembers,  and it is no 
more.  We have been made objects of refuse in a decaying Empire, and lost 
our citizenship in a democratic republic. Evil spirits of self indulgence, 
sexual rapine, financial conquest, have  invaded and occupied the 
political life, and even churches, so that some of us who are ordained 
feel it more comfortable to go without a clerical collar in public.  Now 
we have a world of world leaders calling for the impeachment of the war 
criminal who sits in the White House today.

 "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.
 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity." (1)

For believers who dare to accept the name of Christ as their own in the 
apithet "Christian",  greed should have had its hash settled once and for 
all back there in Antioch, when we were first foretold by the Spirit of 
the needs of the world, of the great famine over all the world, and Luke 
tells us it first happened in the days of Claudius, the world emperor and 
commander-in-chief at the time.  But it also happens now, in the days of 
the world emperor and commander-in-chief George W. Bush. There are great 
famines in the whole world,  because of the maldistribution of the world's 
resources, deliberately so engineered by the "free market system", 
designed to make the few rich and the masses poor.   There's famine in the 
world for generosity, sharing, hospitality, because of the failure of 
compassion.  The commandment, "Thou shalt not steal" has been diminished 
to prohibit hungry people from taking food for their babies. Martin Luther 
had another take on the commandment:

"If all who are thieves, though they are unwilling to admit it, were 
hanged on the gallows, the world would soon be empty, and there would be a 
shortage of both hangmen and gallows. . . A person steals not only when he 
robs a man's strongbox or his pocket, but also when he takes advantage of 
his neighbor at the market, in a grocery shop, butcher stall, wine and 
beer cellar, work shop, and in short, wherever business is transacted and 
money is exchanged for goods or labor.  . . . These men are called 
gentlemen swindlers or big operators.  Far from being pickpockets and 
sneak-thieves who loot a cash box, they sit in office chairs and are 
called great lords and honorable, good citizens, and yet with great show 
of legality they rob and steal. . . . . . . Those who can steal and rob 
openly are safe and free, unmolested by anyone, even claiming honor from 
men.  Meanwhile the little sneak-thieves who have committed one offense 
must bear disgrace and punishment so as to make others look respectable 
and honorable." (2)

Eric Gill, in his Autobiography, tells a wonderful story about theft, 
Easter, and forgiveness, told to him by a priest friend, Abbot Ford.  "I 
think I had made some tentative remark about medieval ecclesiastical 
corruption and he said: 'The Church is as full of corruption now as then.  
Last year when I was in Rome I employed a small boy to do a small job for 
me and I gave him some money out of which he should have brought me some 
change.  But he didn't reappear.  A few days later, in Easter week, I ran 
across him again and I said,"Hallo, you're the young rascal who did me out 
of threepence last week." And he replied, "Oh, but Father, that was before 
Easter."   Abbot Ford told me the story, I now realize, as showing that 
superstition was still common and that the poor people still regarded 
religion as a kind of magic. . . But at the time, I took it to show that 
even rascally urchins went to confession and expected bygones to be 
bygones after Easter.  Easter!  The Rising of the Lord. How could you have 
the heart to recall small things that happened before that!  And isn't it 
possible that the thief who, in spite of everything, loves God is better 
than the honest man who doesn't?" (3)

And so it was in Antioch that the disciples determined, every one 
according to his or her ability, to send relief to the sisters and 
brothers in need, and now they are back in the Gaza strip, back there on 
the West Bank,  back there in Palestine,  back there in Iraq, lying 
battered in the Palestinian or Iraqi  highway, looking for relief.   So 
the cycle of selfishness  can end, self-interest can give way to motherly 
concern for others. In the gospel reading, Jesus says, "I have not called 
you servants, but I have called you friends."  

Has the church's life changed so much from the days in the upper room when 
Jesus made friendship the style of governing his church?  Bishops,  
priests, deacons, archdeacons, subdeacons, archpriests, archbishops, 
mother superiors, prebendaries, canons, apostolic delegates, deputies and 
alternates, delegates and deans--but Jesus had only one name for us all: 
"friends", the name that peace-loving Quakers use for themselves,  and it 
was not he who first called us "christians," back there in the Springtime 
of the gospel.  We were called followers of the Way before that.  In Iraq, 
the Mennonite-Brethren-Quaker peacemaker teams I ran around with styled 
themselves as "Getting in the Way",  with the double entendre  of 
nonviolently obstructing the warmaking and warmongering of the U.S. and 
Britain, Empire Builders.   There, they gave to heaven new martyrs -- new 
Witnesses, to Love.   If we are the friends of Jesus, we will once again 
"get in the Way" and find all of Jesus' friends there too, and all of the 
Prophet's true friends.   And we will forgive the petty sins of all when 
we are reminded, "But Father, that was before Easter! "

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) From "the Second Coming", by William Butler Yeats. 
Written in
1921.copyright renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. The Norton
Anthology
of Poetry, Revised.  New York: W W Norton & Co., 1975.
(2) Martin Luther, the Large Catechism, 395-396, quoted in the preface
of
"You Shall Not Steal": Community and Property in the Biblical
Tradition,
by Robert Gnuse.   Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, Inc., 1985.
(3) Autobiography, by Eric Gill. p.184. London: Jonathan Cape, 1940.