Homily Grits Advent Sunday 06

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

H O M I L Y       G R I T S

Year C

6  December 2006 First Sunday of Advent

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of
darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this
mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great
humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his
glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise
to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and
the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.   Amen.


Jeremiah 33:14-16 the days are surely coming
Psalm 25: 1-10 To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
I Thessalonians 3:9-13 Timothy brings news of faith and love
Luke 21:25-36, cites Mark  -- "If winter comes, can Spring be far
behind? "

The Bible promises here that this generation will not pass away till
all be fulfilled, till all has taken place. And gives us some signs
of the end times. One day a generation ago a "chittlin"  first
arrived on my breakfast plate one Thanksgiving morning on Chicago's
west side at the home of an African-American parishioner. They told
me it was soul food. Up till then, I thought grits was soul food. But
chitterling it's spelled; chittlin' it's pronounced. The lining of a
hog's guts, cleaned for ever and boiled for hours, filling the
apartment  with slaughterhouse smells. After them, I knew that the
Bible was right: my generation had not passed away, and all had been
fulfilled. Not much more could happen to me now!

Every generation passes away, while we aren't looking. Every
generation since the time of Jesus has been tempted to believe that
the generation referred to in apocalyptic literature is its own, that
now indeed we are living in the "last times." It will now only be a
few days, or weeks, or months; and in every century since, groups and
sects have gathered around their visionary leders and gone to
mountain tops to wait for the Coming. And in each as well "some foul
beast, his day come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be
born," to parody, blaspheme, and betray the promise. Today,
Palestinian children are the holy innocents slaughtered for Zionist
lebensraum in the West Bank.

A few years ago, it was a group that called itself "Heaven's Gate,"
but they turned it into Hell's Gate for those who abandoned hope and
entered there. Today, one of the saner groups--the Seventh Day
Adventists--are among the fastest growing religious groups in the
U.S., and I think they're right about Saturday as the Sabbath, but
wrong to abandon chittlin's and Sunday as the First Day of Forever.
Each year on the Sunday nearest St. Andrew's day, all of us turn into
Adventists for a season--First Day Adventists, indeed, celebrating
the day beyond days, a day of continuous day, and "light at evening
time." Which is why we are here on the First day of each week--to
hold each other up, to see each other face to face so that each may
supply what is lacking in the other. The Puritans liked to name their
children out of the Bible, and our epistle lesson from Thessalonians
supplies one such name: May the Lord make you "Increase" and abound
in love. Thus a Mather was Increased. In Advent, we look back to
Jesus' first coming, and forward to his birth in each other's lives.
Paul prays that we may increase and abound in love so that our hearts
may be "established", with no need of alibis, and unblameable in
holiness before God, Jesus, and the saints. We shall all be involved
with each other's version of the facts, face to face. "Cara a
Cara"--Face To Face-- the revolutionaries here in Nicaragua used to
call their chats with their political leaders. No holds barred, all
faces unveiled. In these meetings, obreros and campesinos addressed
the president of the Republic as "Compaņero." I remember the last
meeting we all had with Daniel Ortega, who was our president then, in
1989,  just before the U.S. poured millions into defeating him.  Now
the Nicaraguan people have risen up and elected him their president
in spite of the U.S.A.   

The gospel tells us that merely historical phenomena will not presage
the end, that the end times will be signified (and dignified?) also
by cosmic collapse and chaos: signs in the sun and the moon, serious
disorders in nature. But with all of this, it encourages us: SURSUM
CAPITA -- "Lift up your heads" (not lift up your
capitalism!)--instead, lift up the part you think with. Because your
liberation is near, Look Up. Sister Penelope of the Community of St.
Mary the Virgin wrote in her little book "The Coming", that "human
beings are rational animals, built [physically] to look forth beyond
themselves in soul and body." We are called "homo sapiens"-- upright
higher mammals. We tand up on our legs and look Face to Face at each
other, "till we have faces" wrote C. S. Lewis, to look God in the
eye. Jesus tells us to look up and raise our heads, not to cower or
look away shifty-eyed and ashamed. As a child, I never thought much
of slouching in a pew, bowing the head and pinching the bridge of the
nose as the calisthenics of prayer. But thus I was trained in what
was called Sabbath School on Sundays. It was years later that I
learned at mass instead: Stand up and Sursum Capita, and Sursum
Corda. The day of the Lord is to be searched out, looked into, sought
after, watched for, with lifted hands and hearts.

"Still shine the stars." The sun and the moon and the stars will be
missed by many who never take time to Sursum Capita. We still live in
a world of nature and of grace, and Life is a Miracle. Don't get
drunk with occupations, don't let money-grubbing and even earning a
living and "killing" your time weigh you down. Jesus' coming will
then be a snare instead of a liberation. Jesus says, Look at the fig
tree, for example. You can tell when it's coming into blossom that
summer is near (or whatever tree you have, Luke adds for those far
> from figs). Look at the Evergreen of the North, the mango tree of
Managua: --in Chicago, when you see truckloads of balsams, you know
Christmas is near, and the return of old Sol. In Managua, when you
see carts full of mangos, you know that Semana Santa is not far off,
and the Risen Lord. Jesus says there are also vital signs that Jesus'
Second Time is about to burst upon us. Some years ago in Chicago,
just after Thanksgiving, two little boys, eight or ten years old,
nearly knocked me down as they flailed their way out of a revolving
door in a downtown department store. They and the security guard who
pursued them knocked over the fat red kettle of the Salvation Army
Santa Claus out front. His bell, and the kettle's crash, got
everyone's attention as the urchins vaulted like tiny reindeer--"On
Comet! On Cupid! On Donder and Blitzen!" I was secretly glad they got
away. The Holiday season had arrived.

Shoplifting is merely an alternative form of shopping--a variant form
of consumerism. Shopping is the chief sacrament of consumerist
culture. Stealing is attendant to it, as Lying is attendant upon
political campaigns.One Sunday a few years ago one the first of the
Christmas shoppers cat burglared their way over the roof into Casa
Ave Maria, my home in Managua, and tiptoed away from the sala with
the VCR, a BB gun I once used to silence a noisy pigeon nesting in a
rain gutter (and never used it again I was so sorry) and a dear old
camera that I could never get to focus. The cat burglars of Cristo
Rey Sunday, with their miserable loot and the urchins of the
revolving door were actually not much different from ruling class
Episcopalians doing their shopping on the Internet. All are pushed by
the compulsion, the fantasy that to own is to BE, that to get is to
GROW, that we are what we OWN. "The one who dies with the most toys
wins."

John Paul II wrote years ago (in 1988) in his encyclical Sollicutudo
Rei Socialis"(4:28): "All of us experience firsthand the sad effects
of this blind submission to pure consumerism. In the first place a
crass materialism, and at the same time a radical dissatisfaction
because one quickly learns, unless one is shielded from the flood of
publicity and ceaseless, tempting offers of products, that the more
one possesses the more one wants, while deeper aspirations remain
unsatisfied and perhaps even stifled."

Paul wants us to have an INCREASE this Advent time, and prays that
the increase will come in the love we have towards each other and
towards all human beings, not an increase in material goods (not for
ourselves at least, who have so much) but an increase in, an
abounding abundance of love.

And Paul wants us to have unblameable hearts. I now have had a total
of seven coronary bypasses, so the analogy of hearts has made more
and more sense to me each year. The ancient world believed that the
heart was the center of emotions--its relationship to the circulatory
system is not set forth in the Scriptures. But they do set forth that
it had something to do with the center of life and feeling. They knew
it could be choked with the cares of the world and the fat of the
land, though they didn't know about cholesterol. The prayer of the
apostle is that our lives may be capable of taking on an increase in
love, that we have our hearts established, that is, strengthened, and
blameless; that our stress tests will show that it is functioning
just fine. The surfeit of consumer goods in our lives, blind us to
the scarcity and hunger all around us, usually out of sight. "One of
the greatest injustices in the contemporary world," John Paul
continues in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, "consists precisely in this,
that the ones who possess much are relatively few and those who
possess almost nothing are many. It is the injustice of the poor
distribution of the goods and services originally intended for all."
The vast expenditures of the Me First World on armaments and weapons
systems, symbolized by the security guard outside the Christmas
windows at Marshall Fields, becomes a part of the consumerist system.
As Paul talks of our hearts, Jesus talks about our heads: "Sursum
Capita" --and we sing our response: "We lift them to the Lord." Lift
like bread and wine our brains and thoughts. Our human-ness, our
reason, our critical faculties, our analysis of history and current
events. John Paul calls us to be in solidarity with our neighbors
everywhere in the world with a solidarity that is "not a feeling of
vague compasion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many
people both far and near" but is instead, "a firm and persevering
determination to commit oneself to the common good."

To lift up our heads enables us to see beyond our own plates, which
already have too much upon them. "Heads up!" to look out how we may
do justice, look out actively for ways to DO the gospel, and look for
the Second Advent.

The events which Jesus describes as being a sign of the coming of the
Child of Humankind are really things that happen in every age of our
history. Eclipses, solar and lunar, comets, meteors, occur in every
age. There is political dislocation in every century, nations in
perplexity, elections in peril. Hurricanes and typhoons and
terremotos and volcanoes in them all. There is the phenomenon of
human failure and despair and the "very powers of heaven" are shaken,
and the faiths and religions of earth. Empires perish, philosphies
that shaped the centuries are toppled, and certainties that comforted
the masses are snatched away.

But Jesus says that is in these events and through them that we may
always discern a human future-- "the Son of Man" means that at
least--that we may discern a new humanity on the way, 'though in a
cloud, and with strength and authority from beyond.

The winter solstice, on December 21st, when the day is shortest and
the night longest, is when the turn-around happens, and it is
Christmas time, when the old world draws on through the first of
shortening nights towards the Dayspring from on High. The prophet
Zechariah spoke of the day of the Lord as one in which the cold and
frost will be gone--that there will be Day, and "light at evening
time". We accomplish that easily enough by falling our clocks back in
the Fall, and springing them forward in the Spring. These too are
symbols for the coming of the Lord, and his return with all he saints
to take part with us in a new way of relating to each other in the
human commuity, a new way of being which does not have to do with
getting and spending, but with loving and being. When you see these
things happen, lift up your hearts, and hands, and voices, for "Lo,
he comes, with clouds descending." 

GRANT M. GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
APARTADO RP-10
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup73@turbonett.com.ni
Tel. 011 404 2662165