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H o m i l y G r i t s The Second Sunday of Advent Year C - December 10, 2006 Padre Gaspar García Laviana, Martyr in Nicaragua, 1978 Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. ¶ Revised Common Lectionary - Baruch 5:1-9 as above, or Malachi 3:1-4 I am sending my messenger Luke 1:68-79 The canticle of Zechariah* Philippians 1:3-11 as above (*or Luke 3:1-6) ¶ St Gregory the Great - Sermon to the people in the Basilica of SS Marcellinus and Peter: (1) Our Saviour continues to praise John's austerity: But what went you out to see? A man clothed in soft garments? Behold they that are clothed in soft garments, are in the houses of kings. John is described as being clothed in a garment of camel hair. And what means, behold they that are clothed in soft garments are in the houses of kings, unless that he openly makes it plain that they fight not for a heavenly but for an earthly kingdom, who in God's service ever shun what is painful, give themselves over solely to outward things, and seek the soft things and the delights of this life. Let no one believe that sin can ever be present from soft living, and from the love of precious clothing. Because if there were no fault in it, Our Lord would scarcely have praised John for the austerity of his clothing. If there were no fault, neither would the Apostle Peter have reproved women in his Epistle for this very desire for precious garments, saying, not in costly attire (I Peter iii.2; I Tim. ii.9). Consider then, what fault there may be should men also seek for the things from which the Pastor of the church has said that even women should abstain. ¶ Cries of Advent - Jim Cotter (2) (For each day of December until Christmas Eve) EACH DAY - Amen! Alleluia! Come, Jesus, Messiah! You are the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. Come! say the Spirit and the Bride. Come! let each hearer reply. Come forward, all who are thirsty! Accept the water of life, a free gift to all who desire it. You are the descendant of David, the fulfillment of human hope, the end of the darkest night, the bright star of dawn. The giver of this testimony speaks: Yes, I am coming soon. Amen! Alleluia! Come, Jesus, Messiah! 7th O Lion, Regal in Courage, crushing our blighted bones and hardened hearts, come with one pound and roar, awaken us, your stillborn whelps, to new and vigorous life. 8th O Swallow, capering and darting through the heavens, ending our winter when you build beneath our eaves come, bird from paradise, small and powerless, invincible as the phoenix. 9th O Cornerstone, O Keystone of the Arch, holding in your being the opposites of your creation, come and give us courage in our bearing and our striving. 10th O Sovereign Stag, of Hind Embracing, fresh and whole and eager, carrying love's immortal wound, come to us who are banished, barren, snared; climb down to free us; lead us home to headwaters, crags, and columbines. 11th O Salmon, leaping like lightning from the womb, bursting above cascades of chaos, climbing love's deadly ladder, come and sow your blood and burning water at the ancient source of all our sorrow: drowning, you destroy our death; leaping, you lead us to life: O Icthus, come in glory. 12th O Sovereign of all the Peoples, uniting Jew and Gentile, white and black, come and reconcile us whom you are shaping out of common clay. 13th O Divine Eagle, soaring in the skies, shadow gliding across the valley floor, come and hover over us, your brood, who pierced the only pinions that can bear us up from death and sin to sun and moon and eternal life. 14th O Voice of the Voiceless, enabling to find words those whom others have made speechless, come and lift the outcast from the dungeons of their silence. EACH DAY Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus, come soon! Christ has come! Christ comes now! Christ will come! Alleluia! [ to be continued in each Homily Grits of the Advent season] ¶ Second Sunday in Advent: "Mary." by Chris Glaser. (3) "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you: therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Child of God."Luke 1:35 Mary was the first charismatic 'Christian.' She was filled with the Holy Spirit. She did not speak in tongues, she did not preach the gospel, she did not dance in the Spirit. Instead, according to Luke, she paraphrased a prayer that her predecessor Hannah had offered to God when she learned she would give birth to Samuel. And she gave birth to One whose movement would transform the world and, specifically, us. Last evening, a friend and I rented and watched a video, The Apostle, Robert Duvall's homage to 'low' Southern evangelical Christianity. Though the protagonist is--to say the least--tarnished, my friend admired the character's absolute faith. The apostle argues with God, sins mightily, and yet boldly proclaims the truth of salvation in a way that common folk can understand. After committing a terrible sin, he baptizes himself in a river and discerns--perhaps egotistically--his calling as an apostle. (As I think of it now, this is not unlike Paul's late-acquired apostleship.) I recalled how, when I first came to an awareness of my terrible sin' as a child--that of being homosexual--I fervently attempted an about-face, consciously washing away my sinful identity while taking my daily shower. I prayed for the infusion of the Holy Spirit that would make me like everyone else. Trouble is, the infusion of the Holy Spirit does just the opposite. Like the charismatic Christians who 'annoyingly' raise their hands in praise, or speak a cathartic 'gibberish,' the Spirit led Mary away from the normal--to conception first and marriage second. The Spirit has led us too along a path most of us would rather not have taken: being queer in Christ. As with Mary, the Spirit has midwifed in us a movement to recover the innate relationship of sexuality and spirituality, the integral nature of body and spirit, as well as the inclusive nature of the Body of Christ, the church. Just as Mary's conception warranted stoning by the religion of her day, so our conception prompts attacks from the religion of our time. Maybe his mother's vulnerability promoted Jesus to defend the woman from the men accusing her of adultery. May the Body of Christ follow Jesus' lead, defending the vulnerable so violently judged. Mary, may we, like you, open our wombs to the Holy Spirit, so that the movement that is born of us is vouchsafed sacred. ¶ The Nearness of God: Kenneth Escott Kirk (4) I have been thinking a good deal lately about the nearness of God. I fancy we don't quite realize how differently people speak about it, all meaning the same thing--"I've found a friend in Jesus", "The heavenly Father leadeth me", "I am filled with the Spirit"-- all these mean the same thing, that we know God is as near as anyone can be. It's mainly a matter of upbringing, aesthetic preference in use of language, temperamental difference (emotionalism versus intellectualism) & so on--as in musical or artistic matters of choice. In every case, the ultimate vindication of the nearness of God is in Revelation & the Gospel; & this would be said even by those who speak in terms of immediate experience if they were challenged to exonerate themselves from the charge of self-hypnotism or hallucination. The essential fact is that God is near, and whether we think of this as a matter of experience or of faith makes little difference--it is in fact based upon both. But as long as one teaches oneself to remember it constantly, & not simply strain after it in time of need, all will be well. (a letter written Aug 6 1952 from Tissington to John Henry and his wife Dorothy ) Take home from the Eucharist today three words from the Word of God. Swallow them and digest them as you swallow and digest the Bread of Tomorrow and he Wine of Liberation. Just as you take into your hands and into your mouths the Crumb from the King's table and to your lips the Cup of the Covenant in his blood, take also these three words into your minds and hearts today: Prepare, Discern, Change. John the Immerer is the one who speaks to us in the word of preparation. John comes onto the stage in the musical play Godspell, remember, with a bucket of water and a sponge, as he splashes water over the other members of the cast, singing Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord, Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord. So John came preaching justice, for he was the first liberation theologian of our Epoch. He was, according to Jesus, the greatest of the prophets, and we tend to forget that Jesus himself said so, and we tend to forget that because John was so very great that the Church, very early on, began to be afraid that he might outshine Jesus, as centuries later on it feared the Prophet Muhammad might also shine too bright, and so when the gospels were written down, they went out of their ay to make people understand that John was after all only an usher, a fore-runner, a curtain-raiser or an emcee, but not the Main Act of a three-ring circus. But Jesus never spoke of John as an "only" or as a "merely". Jesus said he was the Greatest, just as Muslims speak of God, and like them that John was Greatest ever born of a woman. John came preaching preparation, and still does so, and today John is back again amongst us with his gospel of Get Ready, take your places, start your engines. Luke sets John's word in history, and tells us the news came when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Tiberius Caesar had been Emperor fifteen years , Herod was tetrarch (that is, ruler of a fourth) of Galilee, and Caiaphas was high priest (his father-in-law Annas still had a lot of influence, though retired, like Papa Bush) . Pretty precise in his dating, Luke was. About 27 or 28 C.E., perhaps in the month of August or September. Preparation had to take place specifically, some time, not any old time, but THIS TIME. Luke gives us the date, almost the hour and the minute, when GET READY must begin. He doesn't tell us this, but at about that time the Han dynasty was beginning in China, Cymbelline was recognized as King of the Britons, London was being settled, Italians were first using soap which they had got of course from the French, the Pantheon was being built to house all the gods of Rome, and the oboe had just been invented at Rome, the "ill wind that nobody blows good,." as some wag would put it one day. The Japanese had recently started their style of wrestling, and gaining weight by eating lard, and Pontius Pilate had replaced Archelaus as Tetrarch. Jesus still lived at home with his mother and his brothers and sisters. In Preparation. Incubating. In the womb of history. When we use the word Prepare, we forget that it is made up of two words, PRE, meaning beforehand, and PARE, meaning to trim, to cut, as in preparing vegetables or trimming the fat off a cutlet before cooking. To pre-pare is to take some action beforehand in planning the future. Look at the things I have mentioned that were being PREPPED at the time: Changres in government in China and Britain, Changes in hygiene and health in Italy, changes in music and sports, in Rome and Japan. Everything we're living with now in terms of what all these have come to be in our own experience, all had a beginning in their preparation back in 27 A.D., in the time of our Lord, or C.E., of the common era. What we do today in our own land, in our own cities, in our own churches and at our own holy tables, is inevitably a preparation for what is to come after. We need consciously to look at what we might in fact be introducing to the stage of history, what we might indeed be ushering into the future. What it is we have set "slouching to Bethlehem to be born." The unelected leaders of the Western World say we need to prepare for Starwars and nuclear Wars, that we must prepare for an endless war on terrorism and on terrorists. And so we have done so, and are prepared indeed to destroy all life on the planet if necessary, to save it for the market, for capitalism, and to keep it from choosing socialism or home-rule or independence or the Religion of the Prophet, or any way but our own way. The surface-to-air missiles we sold to half the world half a century ago to save it from communist Russia are now turned on us from the hills of Afghanistan and the deserts of Iraq. President Reagan said in 1985 that he told the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that he was confident there would be an alliance between the two superpowers against "an alien race" if there was ever "a threat to the world from some other species from another planet." But the threat against which the US and Russia had finally to make common cause was not from another planet, but from the Two Thirds world of our own planet---the rising victim nations, the barking underdogs, the oppressed peoples of the global hegemony the Me First world has made. It is not so far after all > from Chechneya to Central America, from Pakistan to Peru. You get what you prepare for, and the US has prepared not for the completion of a democratic project in history, but for the catastrophic end of imagined enemies, and rushes towards a doomsday, carrying the world with it as John Baptist sings out instead, "Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord". Fill up the valleys of poverty amongst you, pull down the mountains of privilege and selfishness and greed around about. Whose way are you preparing in your own life, with your own resources, your own skills and gifts, your own commitments? Are you preparing a Way for the Lord? Are you preparing the way instead for continuing racism, continuing class oppression, continuing theft of your own taxes to slaughter the world's innocents, to fund the military monster? If so, you are preparing for death and hell. John Baptist sings his solo across the ages, and across the stage to the privileged main floor seats and numbered boxes where we sit: "Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord." Paul writes to us today a lot of words, his usual words, in the epistle lesson: grace, peace, joy, partnership, good works, defense, confirmation, affection, love, knowledge, discernment, excellence, purity, blamelessness, justice, glory, praise. We shall pick just one from the banquet's buffet table: one of the words we don't often hear, or think of as a particularly religious word. Discernment. It means insight, but the Greek word there is aesthesis, our word aesthetics. We associate the word with good taste. Aesthetics is the discipline concerned with recognizing the good, the true, the beautiful. What is it that makes some people able to recognize that Pablo Picasso was a great artist, and Norman Rockwell a good illustrator? Discernment tells us the difference. What is it make us recognize Jerry Falwell as a pathetic ignoramus, Billy Graham a superannuated tub-thumper, and Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela as saints and angels? Why is it that it is Nelson Mandela who has called the world to fight against HIV-AIDS, but no word from the Bobble Belt? Discernment. What is it that makes some people able to recognize that Nicaraguans preferred Sandino to Somoza as their Saviour? Discernment. What is it that makes some people able to see that it was Salvador Allende and not Agosto Pinochet who was the Good Guy of Chile, that it is Simon Bolivar and not Uncle Sam to whom Latin America looks for liberation? What is it that makes some people able to see that Stevie Wonder and Johann Sebastian Bach are musicians, and that most of what you hear on the radio is noise? Discernment. It is a gift > from God which helps us to appreciate the gifts of God, and it helps us to see not only into such things as beauty, but into goodness and truth as well. Bishop John Robinson said that the Christian was equipped with a set of invisible antennae that twitched so as to inform her or him of the moving of God's spirit in a matter. That's discernment. Without it, there will be little growth, and no growing up into the maturity that God lures us to. The word from John the Immerser is PREPARE. The word from Paul the Preacher is DISCERN. Figure out what is going on around you, inside you, and in your world. Figure out where God's Spirit is leading you. Finally, from Bruch, the secretary of Jeremiah, there is the third Word to take home today and chew up and ruminate on like a kindly cow today, along with the other two, for an Advent Sunday supper. CHANGE. It's in the other readings too, for John the Immerser calls us to repent, and Paul uses many words for it: improve, increase, deepen. Baruch was writing for a people about to return from a long Exile, from the Diaspora that most of us will experience in some way in our lives, geographically or psychologically, or politically: being away from home. In the US we have been away from home for a long time. We long ago abandoned the charters and covenants upon which our republic was founded. How wonderful it would be if we could summon up today along with John Baptist the spirit of John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. Poor old Tom Jefferson died poor, for he had to sell his library to the government to have enough money to live on in his old age. He had gone broke as a public servant, before the days of bribes and favors from contractors for politicians, and his library became the Library of Congress. At Christmas 1985 his last bottle of wine got sold for a couple hundred thousand dollars, more as a souvenir than as a selection of the Wine of the Month Club. Wouldn't it be a good thing to have some revolutionaries back in Washington, like Tom Paine, who would get along fine with Fidel Castro and invite Daniel Ortega to the White House. Jesse Jackson would probably be named Secetary of Peace, and would be helping out all the people that the Bush boobs tried to haul off to Guantanamo Bay in the dark of the moon. Baruch says to us we need to change some of our ways. He wants us to take off the clothes of sorrow and distress, the flight-suits and the night-suits and put on some beautiful clothes of glory, a cloak of integrity, a new diadem of life for the new and coming age. Since God means to show our splendor to every people under heaven. Well it isn't the splendor of the US that's being shown now, it's the underhandedness, the meanness, the selfishness, the cruelty, the bullying, the war crimes of the age. That's what we show now to all the world. Baruch says "change your clothes." Peace through Integrity, Honor through Faithfulness. Get up, Jerrusalem, Get up State of Israel, get up United States of America, and turn around and take a look. The nations must come back to themselves as peoples, not as selfish states. God says that 'though the values of the people have gone into exile like prisoners roped together in a chain gang, they will come back like royal persons sitting in the State Coach, like queens and consorts in sedan chair splendor. For God has decreed the flattening out of the high and mighty and the lifting up of the low and humble, so that there will be safety and equality, and God will guide the people in joy, with mercy and integrity as their escorts. There'll have to be radical change in the way we're doing things now as a people. Three witnesses: John the Immerser, Paul the Preacher, Baruch the Prophet's Pal. And three words: Prepare, Discern, Change. Swallow their words with the Sacrament today, take them home in your innards and digest them. Be nourished. Grow. Radicalize. 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 (1) The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, Vol.One, translated & edited by M.F.Toal,D.D. San Frandcisco, Ignatius Press. copyright 1996 by Preservation Press, Inc.Swedesboro, NJ. (2) Jim Cotter, Prayer in the Morning, Sheffield, England: Cairns Publications. 1989. (3) Chris Glaser, Reformation of the Heart, Seasonal Meditations by a Gay Christian. Westminster John Knos Press, Louisville, 2001. (4) The Life and Letters of Kenneth Escott Kirk, Bishop of Oxford 1937-1954. By Eric Waldram Kemp, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1959. ____________________________________________________________________________
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