January 28, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Jeremiah 1:4-10 Predestination
Psalm 71 In te Domine, speravi
I Corinthians 14:12b-20 Five words with my mind
Luke 4:21-32 They drove him out of town
The story of Jeremiah's calling to serve God is the story of your own calling to be an Epiphany of God. Each of us is to be a manifestation of the divine, to "god" as a verb, as Carter Heyward is fond of saying. There's a scene in the movie "Out on a Limb" where Shirley MacLaine dances on the beach yelling "I am God!" --even Oprah didn't like it, said Modern Maturity magazine. Shirley really believes it, 'though. But it's not all "self-help boosterism", for each of us is called to epiphanize the Holy One.
The story of Jeremiah's calling shows that predestintion is to service, not to salvation. Anyone of us who has lain awake at night knows that it's a time for review, a time for worry, a time for plotting the future. Monsignor Ronald Knox when he was a little boy suffered from insomnia, and was told that once he was asked how he managed to occupy his time so quietly at night, when no one in the family heard a peeop out of him all those sleepless hours. He was told that he replied "I lie awake and think about the past." The word of the Lord comes to us in vigils, and someone has noted that it may be the only time God can find us alone and can get our attention for a chat. God comes to us in dreams, and sometimes wakes us up to talk back. God bids us lie awake and think about the past--and the future. The word of the Lord thus came to Jeremy, and said, "I knew you before you knew yourself" and the word there is yahdah, used in the Bible also for sexual intercourse. God is there in everybody's immaculate conception, in the beginning of every life, and sets each of us apart for God's purposes at that time. Are you waiting for ordination? To election to the vestry? To membership in the Guild? God says, you've no need to wait, each of you has an appointment I made with you in the womb. You've been set aside for prophecy, priesthood, power and joy. To be an epiphany of God.
Saint Luke's knowledge of the geography Palestine was sketchy at best. It probably wasn't taught at his local academy. Geography is a subject not much taught in schools these days either. I suppose there are few who could tell us where Burkina Fasso is, or that its capital is Ouagadougou. I remember once in high school civics class when the teacher asked where Tanna Tuva was and my hand shot up as I exclaimed "It's in the mountains of Tibet." It so happened I had read the stamp collectors' column in Sunday's Tribune, the day before, and so could astonish the school. I hadn't learned it in school. Saint Luke was a cosmpomolitan man, a world traveller, familiar with Greek cities, and may have gone to Rome with St. Paul. He had been to Jerusalem, too, but just as not everyone who has been to Chicago knows about Maywood, St. Luke knew nothing about Nazareth. He tells us that Nazareth was built on a hill, but if it was, it has moved since then. It's on the slope of a hill, actually, and nestled amongst surrounding hills. Luke is writing theology more than geography and his story today about Jesus' rejection by hiw fellow villagers is a "preview of the coming events" of Holy Week and Easter. There is not much time left now in the Christmas-Epiphany cycle, and we are being revved up for a change of gears that will come as Lent shifts in. Luke wants our theology to be larger than our geography. We have come today to a preview of Good Friday and Easter, and of the mission to the nations after the rejection of Jesus as national saviour.
Jesus' teaching in the synagogue at Nazareth was the theme of last Sunday's gospel and today we continue in course reading to find that it all turned sour. His first reception by the poeple ofhis own community was astonishment and delight. "All were amazed at the gracious way he spoke." At once the surprise and esteem turn to anger and envy: "Hey, wait a minute. Isn't this the old carpenter's son, old Joseph with the child bride? Isn't this the woodworker turned wonderworker from down the street? Where does he get all this? Who does he think he is?"
Jesus'preaching there is not exactly calculated to make friends, or to provide him with a pulpit in this town for very long. He says, "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking of that old proverb, 'Physician, heal yourself.' We heard what you did in Tulsa, we saw you on TV, but what can you do for us here in Gravel Switch?" They taunted him, he said, with what he he was reputed to have done elsewhere, "You're a doctor? Heal yourself, then!" These are the same words used at tend of all the stories when Jesus is hanging on a cross outside the capital. "Healer, heal yourself."
And so Luke deliberately introduces the same taunt and jibe that will be hurled at the crucified one. This rejection by his own friends in Nazareth is the first of his crucifixions, and Luke speaks of the brow of the hill to remind us of Calvary, and the threat of what will happen on that hill. The commentators tell us that the hills surrounding Nazareth are riddled with caves, and that this may explain how it was that when the crowd surged to the brow of one of these hills intending to throw Jesus from a cliff he was able to slip away and hide, to "pass through their midst and go away." He simply hid out in a cave, as he would again on Holy Saturday. So there is a suspicion that Luke is again writing a theological statement, that Jesus in spite of all the crucifixions, that the truth of God, in spite of all rejections, passes now through our midst serenely and out of our grasp and slips away, when we have said No Thanks, and shown our option for something less.
And this also is the point of what Jesus preaches that day in the synagogue. He tells two stories not calucated to make friends amongst a proud and nationalist people, like the proud and nationalist Israelis in Tel Aviv, the arrogant hawks in the U.S. who rejoice that Colin Powell and his threat of massive force has returned to replace Madeline's doctrine of limited mayhem. "What do you suppose God was up to, what do you think was happening, dear friends, when back there in the days of Elijah and the great famine which hit the land, Elijah was sent to a starving woman in the land of Sidon, the widow of Zarephath, and it was only she who got help from God's prophet." She got fed, an alien woman, not one of our suffering own, not a church member, not a citizen, as you might expect. But an Arab, a Palestinian, a heathen. And how about the time of the prophet Elisha, his successor, there were lots of folks with leprosy right around here, in Israel, sick as dogs, covered with sores, nasty. Pious people, God's own people, but God's mercy went instead to Naaman the Syrian, covered with sores. And he got the miracle instead of one of our own.
This preaching of Jesus is like telling U.S.A. denominational Christians that God is as likely to bless Muhammar Khadafy as he was to bless Archbishop Carey, to choose Slobodan Mislosevic as he is to anoint Billy Graham. `God is free to pass a miracle on the poor old widow in Communist China or in Fidel's Havana as he is to pass a miracle on a clergy widow in the Church Home for the Aged. These alarming illustrations of God's universal love and providence are not acceptable to people whose religion has made God small enough to sit in their churches or synagogues, indeed small enough to package and peddle at a charity bazaar. Most human beings are content to settle for a God smaller than any of the ones in the Bible, some of whom the prophets describe as portable and potty-trained. Like shopping for a comfortble divan or lounge chair, we first measure the space avilable in our living room, or our lives, and then pick out something that fits between TV and stereo. The folks at Nazareth were quite content with a Nazareth-sized God, one who snuggled in as they did amongst the surrounding hills, and who knew everyone there.
How does our religion compare with that of the folks in Nazareth? Are we at all aware of the dimensions of our God when we look at and set down the dimensions of our commitment to the gospel? In setting up our budget for the coming year, have we already decided that the God we are going to serve in the coming year is of necessity going to be scaled down? One that will fit the budget? One that will fit our middle class theology, our middle class agenda? A religion that will indeed comfort in time of illness, provide an amiable preacher and some prayers at sickbed? Pour water on the baby, rub healing oil on granny, cast sterilized sand into a few graves? Is our God too small? Jesus thinks so. Our little Galilees of local limitations send God away. Is our theology only ready for miracles to happen somewhere else, or in bibles or old books of the saints? Only those certified by clerks in the Curia?
Paul's first letter to Corinth is, by God's will and the church's lectionary, also an undated letter to us.
We are faced with a profound need of God's special blessing, for miracles of providence and of healing, our larders and pitchers are far from empty in north America, but our vision and imagination are depleted. Our blindness to the world's pain needs healing, our deafness to the cries of the starving begs to be cured.
The capitalist system is destroying the very basis of life on the planet. We all contribute to it. Our housekeeper, Silvia, a poor woman herself, was nevertheless upset when she found Gracie the cat eating Purina chow from Mary the dog's dish, and begged me to put Meow Mix on the shopping list. Today I read that the total expenses for pet food in the USA and in Europe are higher than what is being spent to fight famine in the "third world". North Americans spend 8 billion dollars every year on cosmetics, Europeans 11 billion dollars on ice-cream. More than would be needed to give basic education, drinking water and toilets to two billion people.
Is this to be a Jubilee year for us? An acceptable year, with eleven billions for ice cream for our European neighbors, but not a cent for a little girl's supper in Nicaragua? "Since you are eager for manifestations of the Spirit," brother Paul writes us, "strive to excel in building up the people of God." The people at Corinth's church had always supposed that the "spiritual gifts" that they had were the chief ones necessary; they got high in church--they spoke in tongues. They were crazymatics. Did they have beehive hairdos? That doesn't happen to be the kind of spiritual gifts we have around the sacristy table or the adult Bible class over here in Ecclesia Anglicana. But the principle is the same: almost every congregation assumes, like the people at Nazareth, like the folks at Corinth, that their gifts (whatever they are) give them a handle on what is necessary, whatever is really essential for the church, and don't bother us with the fact that God may have another agenda. But the world we live in here is a tiny corner of only one remote universe, where there may be "a million alien gospels," as Alice Meynell wrote. Paul speaks of the church of larger dimensions; indeed, oikoumene--the inhabited world. And says that all the gifts are for edification, for building; not the kind done through the building fund, with its concern for roof and rafter, doorstep and dining table, altar linens and paper towels. All housekeeping concerns and many of them needful. But the central goal of all our life, "the meat and potatoes" of our Christian life must be our concern that the community we are growing is an inclusive one, expansive and exciting and embracing. It is a heady task, a vocation that makes us tipsy to think about, to realize that we are called to be more than custodians of a lodge hall on the edge of bourgeois life. "Look, I have put my words in your mouth" God said to Jeremiah, and so God says to us: "I have set you over nations and kingdoms, to pluck up, to demolish, to destroy, even to overthrow governments." We've managed to do a few of those in the last decade, and are working on a few more. But even here, in the midst of demolition derby, destruction and change, we are called to scratch a space to plant. It is with these words that the reading from Jeremiah ends, and our participation in gospel starts: build and plant. Move on, and say AMEN to each other's ministries and gifts, in the service of the God who is not too small.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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