Pentecost VII - Proper 11 B - July 23, 2006

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

H o m i l y    G r i t s
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Year B Proper 11 - July 23, 2006
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                                               Almighty God, the fountain 
of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in 
asking:  Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those 
things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we 
cannot ask; through the worthiness of your son Jesus Christ our Lord, who 
lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  
Amen.

¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Isaiah 57: 14b-21 I have seen their ways but I will heal them

Psalm 22: 22-30 Deus, Deus meus - My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?

Ephesians 2: 11-22 That he might create in himself one new humanity, 
Mark 6: 30-44 Twelve baskets full of broken pieces



The world seems to clamor briefly and insistently at the Church's doors in 
these exciting days, with cascading floods of electronic mail, especially 
as the General Convention descended like a Mother Ship for its triennial 
visitation amongst us, this year again not only called upon to invite or 
disinvite gentle Gene Robinson to bring along his joyous gay sexuality 
into episcopacy. And the truly world shaking event of our free and fair 
election of Katherine Jefferts Schori of Nevada to be the Presiding Bishop 
of the Episcopal Church, in succession to my hero Frank Tracy Griswold.  
Katherine has her Ph.D. in oceanography, and a knowledge of the rough seas 
ahead of her in our own Galilee of the Gentiles will serve us all well.  
It is always a wonderfully varied circus and a distracting carnival, with 
its specialty banquets,  jamborees, sentimental reunions, parliamentary 
procedures, cloakroom intrigues, love affairs, hissy fits,  and committee 
boredom.  We are grateful that somehow it seems always to bubble and 
squeak in the Church's guts rather than catch fire and explode or tear 
apart the Body limb from limb.  This year we are especially threatened 
that half the primates of the Communion may  jump ship and founder and 
drown as they swim for a distant homophobic shore, or bail out of our gay 
friendly Church by whatever vines they can hang onto for canonical swings 
to Afric's sunny strand.  In spite of threats to leave, every sideshow 
freak always shows up at Convention, and in a Church such as ours, rather 
than a Sect, such as theirs, we have learned to be roomy, to accomodate, 
to show hospitality, to live in uneasy peace, to make Eucharist together. 
Some will always walk, or more likely slither away. Adios, y que te vaya 
bien. Goodbye, and go well! 

In 1988, just before I went to the General Convention in Detroit, I got a 
letter from a layman in a Chicago church who identified himself as a 
member of a group called Jews For Jesus.  It's a group of fundamentalist 
Christian proselytes from Judaism, who keep their Jewish identity and 
believe they are called to evangelize Jews to become Christians so that 
they can be "saved". They think all Jews must accept Jesus as their 
personal Savior or they will "go to hell."  My correspondent pointed out 
that there would be some legislation at General Convention concerning 
Jewish-Christian relations, and that he hoped I would be in favor of a 
strong program of evangelizing the Jews. His name was Mendelsohn, the 
great name in music that one is predisposed to honor, but I never met him 
or heard him play the piano. The Convention did in fact adopt some 
sensible rules for our Church's relationship with the Jewish community, 
but did just the opposite of what the correspondent wanted, for it called 
for mutual respect, and for the church to learn from its Jewish roots and 
to respect our sisters and brothers of the Mother Faith, who share with us 
the Biblical covenants and the promise and hope for the Reign of God in 
history and who like us and the Muslims as well  wait for the Messianic 
age, the Day of Resurrection,  and the Light of Dawn.  Not a word about 
converting the Jews to Jesus.

The New Testament doesn't tell us to convert Jews to creedal faith in 
Christ Jesus.   In fact it says the opposite: it says that it is we who 
have already been changed, who have been brought into the messianic 
covenants, and that our separation has been ended:  "Remember that at one 
time you Gentiles were separated from Christ, alienated from the 
commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no 
hope and without God in the world.  But now in Christ Jesus you who once 
were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ.  For he is our 
eirene, our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the 
dividing wall of hostility." To claim that Jews now need to be "converted" 
is to build a new wall of hostility, like the one the Zionist state has 
itself put up around the trespass of their settlements in the West 
Bank.    .    Jesus, our Jewish Friend, our Jewish brother, our Jewish 
Lord, our Jewish Liberator, has opened up the way for all of us 
"peoples"-- Africans and African Americans, Englishmen, Germans, Swedes, 
Poles, Irish, Lithuanians, Italians, to  become fellow citizens with the 
saints, and members of the household of God. But our liberating myths must 
revise themselves to share a vision of Promised Land for all, and not 
merely an artificial Eretz Israel for a Diaspora gone two thousand years 
ago.  .      The Church early on made some  treacherous deals with the 
Roman Empire, to the shame of its teachers and at the expense of our 
Jewish sisters and brothers in the Covenants and the Promises.  As early 
as its "New Testament" writings it began to blame Jews for the death of 
the Jewish Jesus,  to ingratiate itself with the Roman government, which 
in fact had executed his capital punishment "under Pontius Pilate."  The 
imperial authorities preferred to hear the anti-Jewish version rather than 
to hear the earliest testimony of Mark's gospel, that Jesus had been 
crucified by the Empire as a revolutionary.  The Church was henceforth 
privileged, the Jews henceforth demonized:  historically, this is in broad 
strokes what happened, and it led to the establishment of the Church by 
the Emperor Constantine, who took its cross and made it a sign of imperial 
conquest. In Hoc Signo Vinces.  For the Jews the Way of this Cross led by 
swastika-crooked paths to Auschwitz. Treblinka, Buchenwald, and the 
Holocaust of six million in Europe sixty years ago.

It is especially important for Christians to learn the truth of our 
Church's complicity in the destruction of European Jewry, which ought to 
be for us as horrible a realization as our imperial Gentile murder of 
Jesus,  the Messiah of us all.  With the rise of the militarist mentality 
of the Zionist State of the Israelis , and the phenomenon of these 
formerly oppressed peoples of the Diaspora gathered into a vengeful and 
land-grabbing political system to oust the people of Palestine, the world 
is aghast at the horrible irony of these things.  The oppressed have 
become oppressors, and so the world is in convulsions that threaten now 
the survival of civilizations who cite Scripture as we slay our spiritual 
siblings.   As we have learned to distinguish between the Nazis and the 
German people We read history wrongly if we do not see imperialism at work 
now in the eagerness of the U.S. to have multi-national troops come to 
occupy Iraq in the name of unwanted Yankee hegemony there.   If our myths 
are to continue to be salvific for us, if they are to have power to shape 
and give a healthy and wholesome and holy direction to our common life, 
they must first of all be read honestly.   The New Testament teaching 
about the Church's relationship with the Jewish covenant is quite simply 
that we are, because of Jesus our Jew, allowed into that mythic structure, 
which the writer to the Ephesians calls a "holy temple"-- we are joined 
together and grow together into a Holy Temple in the common Lord.  
"Temple" was a Jewish place of worship, and in Jesus the Jew we are 
mystically grafted into it, pasted into it, to be a real dwelling place of 
God.  Paul elsewhere uses the metaphor of grafts into a tree, to describe 
Church and Covenant.

Peace, "Shalom" is the gift that Isaiah speaks of when he speaks of 
building up the community, and the promise of God's spirit is to all who 
are contrite and humble, says Isaiah.  "Peace to the far off and the near" 
and "the far off" means us Gentiles, and the :"near" means the Jews.  We 
are all covenanted with God in spite of our faithlessness.  So there are 
two feedings of the multitudes in Mark's gospel:  the one we have today, 
for our gospel reading, in which just after the execution of the Baptist, 
the apostles rejoin Jesus and meet with thousands from Jewish villages, 
and their five loaves and two fishes are enough for all, with twelve 
baskets full left, one for each of all the tribes of Israel, and five 
thousand are fed.  Two chapters later Jesus is in Gentile territory, the 
Decapolis--the Ten Gentile Towns--and there's another setting of the 
table.  Here Jesus does not say "they are like sheep without a shepherd" 
for that was a Jewish metaphor, for a Jewish king, a Jewish messiah needed 
there.  Here, with Gentiles he says, "I feel sorry. .. they are hungry and 
will collapse on their way."  A different message for a different 
context.  And Jesus now is asked "how is anybody going to eat in such a 
deserted place?" That deserted place is of course the Gentile world, our 
own world, which Jesus comes to visit from Judaism, and says, "How many 
loaves have you?"  Seven, we say.  Seven is the number of the Gentiles, as 
Twelve is the number of the Jews.  Seven they say and Jesus takes the 
seven loaves and thanks God for them and when it's over there are seven 
baskets full.    Just as at the first feeding there were twelve, enough 
for all the tribes, so now in this second sitting at the banquet, we 
Gentiles are fed after the people of the covenants and promises.   And we 
too get to eat as much as we want and still there are seven baskets full 
of broken pieces left over for us to feed all the Gentiles that shall ever 
be.   And it is four thousand who are fed.  So while there are successive 
feedings, there is the same Lord, the same food, the same abundance, and 
the numerology is a  way of telling us what the context also tells us.

Now and again Public Television presents "Shoah",  the long movie of 
interviews with Holocaust survivors and with German and Polish people who 
were still alive and wanted to talk about their part in the death camps in 
the 1940's.   These almost weekly TV reminders of the Holocaust and of the 
crimes against Judaism and Jews must keep us vigilant as well to see how 
wrong Israel is now in its politics in Palestine, as we watched its 
subservient counterinsurgency role in the U.S.sponsored mischief in 
Central America in earlier decades.

The journalist Anthony Loewenstein*  writes that "Both Israelis and 
Palestinians have been guilty of unpardonable crimes against one another, 
but for the US, Palestinian acts are always 'terrorism', while Israelis 
are 'conducting incursions' or 'rooting out militants'. This hypocrisy 
must end. A full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza should, 
hopefully, see the establishment of a vibrant, independent Palestinian 
state living in peace alongside a secure Israel."  Vibrancy, independence, 
security, and peace, an increasing number of us believe, will not come to 
the Holy Land until the various dreamed-of projects for theocratic states 
and racist boundaries for Arab bantustans,  gigantic U.S. budgets for 
ruling the world, are abandoned and swept into the dust-bin of history.  
One democratic state in Palestine, with citizenship, liberty, and justice 
for all, more closely approaches the commonwealth of God than two puppet 
national security states battling it out until the edge of doom.       

The Word of God invites us into the Jewish faith and the Jewish hope, but 
it is not a 19th century Zionist fantasy or a fundamentalist nightmare 
that will fulfill the hopes of Jews or the hopes of Gentiles.  We need to 
be converted to the covenants and promises of God,  and it is not our 
Jewish sisters and brothers who need to be converted to our short-sighted 
"Christian" plans to rule a new Christendom from Washington DC, with a 
Zionist entity as our Middle East manager.  All of us--Jewish, Christian, 
Muslim, need to hear the gospel of peace, preached by Jewish prophets, 
Christian apostles, and the Muslim Prophet of Mecca:  that God's project 
is new human being, a new humanity, so making peace and bringing hostility 
to an end.    

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

* Antony Loewenstein is a journalist with Fairfax Internet  This
was
posted to the Internet on Friday, July 4, 2003.