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H o m i l y G r i t s The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (July 24, 1783, Simon Bolivar born in Caracas) Year B Proper 12 ^S3o July 2006 (© 2003 by Grant Gallup - O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that,with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, hat we finally lose not the things eternal; 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: 2 Kings 2:1-15 The Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind Psalm 114 In exitu Israel Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling. Mark 6: 45-52 He came to them early in the morning, walking on the Sea. > From the Qurán, Surah "The Repast"- 5: 69: Truly, those who have attained to faith in this Word, as well as those who follow the Jewish faith, and the Sabians--the followers of John the Baptist-- and the Christians--all who have faith in God and the final Day and do righteous deeds--no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve. At the end of the movie, "Being There", the amiable dingbat, Mr.Gardener, who knows nothing but what he has seen on television--surely an anticipation of Junior Bush--and on the strength of that has become President of the United States, finds himself alone in a park at the side of a lagoon. He wants to get to the other side and so, to the surprise and delight of all who see the film, he simply gets up his courage and walks across the water. The air-head does have special powers, after all. Clergy often joke that in seminary they slept through the course called Walking on Water 101. Few laity expect tricks of that kind from us, but we fantasize the effect it might have to make up for our failings. Walking on Water and Flying Through the Air--Jesus did the one, Muhammad in his NightJourney the other--are two of the commonest wish fulfiments we have. As we get older, we grow less adventuresome, even in our dreams, and I no longer like to dream of flying or aquatic ambulation, and when I fly I take the on the aisle in a wide bodied jet, where I don't have to look out the port hole at the sky or the sea. For I have a long history of walking on water in my dreams, and of featherless flight above the`upturned faces of friends and family. Mark tells a story today that sounds like he's recounting to us his own sleepwalking on the sea.zzzzzzzz To take this story literally (instead of seriously) becomes a problem for us. In fact, most lectionaries for today snipped out this pericope and gave us stories of Jesus feeding the crowds or of his conflict with neighbors. Even when miracles happen, we can now explain them. Few of us are impressed by the story in this morning's news that a preacher in the town of Forest, Ohio, in the course of the pastoral prayer, appealed for heaven to endorse his call that the congregation repent. Suddenly lightning struck the church steeple, travelled down the electrical wiring through the pulpit microphone and obligingly hit the preacher himself. The service went on, but it was found that the church caught fire, and damage was estimated at twenty thousand dollars..Dreams, Joseph Campbell says, are our private myths, just as myths are our public dreams. A dream is laden with symbolic language about our waking lives, messages to us about our experience, fears, hopes, themeaning of the day-time lives we lead. They are even the ways we theologize, that is, put into the most profound language we know, the praxis, the acting out of our beliefs. Dreams are not messages from meaninglessness--that is madness--but from God, that is from the ground of our being and meaning. And some dreams are so common, so usual, their symbols so frequent in the recollections of all of us, that they are our public dreams, our myths. They become the content of our religious language, our public worship, the rituals of our lives that dignify us and affirm our humanity. They draw us closer to each other in a common quest for spiritual and mental health in our life together, as one human race, working on one human project. Mark says he remembers this happened between three o'clock and six o'clock in the morning. This is the fourth watch of the night, for he is using the Roman method of dividing the night into four watches of three hours each, starting at 6 p.m. when the day ended. The fourth watch of the night was when Jesus came to the young Church, tossed about in its little boat, as it made its way slowly, for the wind was against them. It's the time of nightmares and night stallions, of restless riding, rapid eye movements, when they are in the heaving seascape of the dream. The writer to the church at Ephesus not many years later writes about his church, too, as "tossed to and fro, carried about with every wind of teaching"--the latest fad of philosophy, the newest New Age charm or fundamentalist certainty, "by cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles." This is the symbolic language of a tiny faithful folk in the midst of an ocean of opposition. But the writer to the church at Ephesus doesn't blame the ocean so much as the frailty of the passengers. "Children" he says are tossed about in this way. "We are to grow up in every way into him who is the head" says the writer, so that we won't be tossed about in our boat, no matter how little it is. Mark says that Jesus was on the mountain praying, high above the sea, high above the storm, high above the wind that was against them, when he saw them making headway painfully on the dreamscape, and that he came to them walking on the sea. And they thought it was a ghost, and were terrified. Most of us, unless we especially like to amuse ourselves with English ghost stories, would find more terror in the sea's storms than in its midnight spectres. The challenges that come to us in our dreams or in our daytimes frighten us, and Jesus sometimes walks to us directly across the night terrors, through the plague that stalks in the darkness, and the sickness that lays waste at mid-day. Then here comes the Word to strengthen us: "Jesus got into the boat with them and the wind ceased." That's the gospel today and tonight. Jesus gets into the boat with us and all our winds cease. In Mark's dream of the Risen Christ, of Jesus the Ghost Captain, he is in the same boat with us, in solidarity with his friends, and goes with us at once to familiar Gennesaret where we moor our boat. We recognize him, and once again he begins to heal the sick and from everywhere we come again to touch the fringe of his cloak and be healed. I sometimes wake in the madrugada--the spooky and magical Spanish word for the darkest part of the night--and a hell-full of foolish fears and trivial terrors slips into bed with me. St John's Wort, paroxetine, melatonin, chamomile tea, don't always forestall their coming. Little frets and big frights gang up and rage about the tiny boat of my life, and I call upon Jesus my Captain to get into the barco with me and throw them overboard. A Jesusprayer saves me and my boat till the Light of Dawn: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner." Allah Akbar! God is greater! So the wind ceases in the fourth watch of the night. * Mark says they were astounded when the wind ceased, with Jesus in the boat, "for they did not understand about the loaves." Say what? What's that got to do with it? Is that a non sequitur, or what? A frequent answer is that this is a nature miracle, the stilling of the sea, just as the fabulous increase in the loaves of bread was a "nature miracle." What they didn't understand, we are told, is that Jesus, like Mr.Gardener in "Being There," was after all "quite a guy, that he had special powers, and could do it all for us, as with a magic wand. Remember that in every instance when Jesus was called upon to help, he riposted, "What resources do you yourselves have?" "How many loaves do you have tucked away?" The disciples always came to him, of course,saying "We can't do anything, we have nothing, so send them away." Or,"our resources are too little, we don't have enough to go around. All we have is a piece of this and a short-end of that, and the wind is blowing the wrong way. It's too late in the day or too early in the morning. It's a long way to shore. We're in a helpless and hopeless place, and we're in a sea of troubles. We are in a slough of despond." No doubt that's true. The neo-liberal theft of the earth's resources and the Bush-whacking of the world have done a number on us all. Yet Jesus says to us at our stumbling into the Twenty-first century, "Take heart." And always asks, "How many loaves do YOU have?" What are you able to come up with? I'm here for you, and I'm in the boat with you, and on all the hillsides with you. Grow up and don't be frightened, you're not niños, you're not kids anymore. There are enough gifts to go around here; some I've sent as apostles, some prophets, some evangelists (that doesn't mean hucksters) all so that you can grow to maturity in personhood, so that the thing to understand about the loaves is that it is your own resources that must be called upon if there is to be a Feast of Life. It is your own resources of courage that must be called upon if there is to be a stilling of the storms, and a safe harbor for our little barco at journey's end. Jesus says he's in the boat with us always, and we've got the mantle of the prophets to enable us, so we can part the waters of the Red Sea or of the rolling Jordan, for Moses and Elijah and Elisha are all with us in the boat as well-- this is the Old Ship of the Old Zion. Paul is in the boat with us, calling out that we remember our own Baptism in waters that need not frighten us, for they have given us life, and now we are to grow up and take over the navigation, to chart our courses and find our way home. Joseph Campbell writes that neurosis might be defined as the failure to come across the critical threshold of our adult "second birth"-- that stimuli which should evoke in us thoughts and acts of responsibility evoke instead fear, flight to protection, dependence on adult authority figures, the blaming of others for failures--whereas the first requirement of adulthood is to take responsibility. This is what Jesus asks his disciples to do. Fantasies that we need to walk on water or fly through the air, are just that: dreams and fantasies. Did Jesus walk on the water? That's the childish part. We must not believe that Jesus walked on the water. We need to believe that Jesus is in the boat with us, that this, the most wonderful, sweetest, strongest of human beings, is in the boat with us. That Jesus is in solidarity with us and with our project for a better life for all humankind and all animal kind and all plant kind. That Jesus wants our boat to get to shore, and that he wants us to understand about the loaves. Jesus is speaking when I say to you today: "Take heart. It is I. have no fear." Because that's the gospel in nine words. GRANT GALLUP Apartado RP-10 CASA AVE MARIA Managua, Nicaragua C.A. Tel. 011-505-2662165 grant73@turbonett.com.ni GRITS 3rd series now on-line: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits * Easily memorized "Jesus prayers" are found throughout the hymnody of the Church. For example, in Advent: "Come thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free; from our fears and sins release us, let us find our rest in thee." (Hymnal 1982 66) Christmas: "O Jesus, very Light of Light, our constant star in sin's deep night: now hear the prayers your people pray throughout the world this holy day." (Hymn 85) In Epiphany: "O Jesus, while the star of grace impels us on to seek thy face, let not our slothful hearts refuse the guidance of thy light to use." (Hymn 124). Lent: "Lord Jesus, Sun of Righteousness, shine in our hearts we pray, dispel the gloom that shades our minds and be to us as day." (Hymn144).Holy Week: "Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended, that man to judge thee hath in hate pretended? By foes derided, by thine own rejected, O most afflicted." (Hymn 158). Alleluia, alleluia! Give thanks to the risen Lord. Alleluia, alleluia, Give praise to his Name. Jesus is Lord of all the earth, He is the king of creation. Alleluia! "(Hymn 178). And so forth.
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