First Sunday in Lent, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Deuteronomy 26:1-11 A wandering Aramean was my ancestor
Psalm 91 - Qui habitat
Romans 10:5-13 The word is near you
Luke 4:1-13 Led by the Spirit in the wilderness
Today we leapfrog over the first days of Lent, by way of the first Sunday in Lent. We do not include Sundays in the 40 days of Lent, so they are always denominated Sundays IN, but not OF Lent. Advent on the other hand has its own Sundays held tightly to its properly celebratory bosom--for a Sunday cannot be penitential, 'though you will sometimes hear a misguided proclamation to that effect. Every day we call in honor of the Sun, Apollo, or Sol Invictus, is in honor of the Son, our Domine (thus, in Spanish Domingo), our Lord, and is a little Easter, never a little Lent.
Nevertheless these Sundays are crowded about with Lent--for us now a season of solidarity. Anciently, the catechumens (always converts to the church then, not proselytes from other denominations) were admitted to the catechumentate with the ceremony of ashes, and this was years before their Baptism at a far-off Easter. If they died in faith before Baptism, they were buried as Christians, having received the Baptism of Desire. During the time of their listening, they were given moral training and expected to change not only the way they thought mythologically, that is, how to explain the world, but to change radically the way they behaved, as individuals and as a community. The creed was a secret, to be shared with them only moments before their immersion and chrismation. The gnostic heretics thought the mythologies were more fun than the moralities.
Lent, instead of being lengthened over the years, as its name would imply, eventually was limited to the forty days before the Paschal feast. It also gradually became a time for those who had fallen away from the faithful, or who had renounced or had become taitors (handers-over, i.e., traidores--those who handed over the church's sacred books to the imperium--a lesser offense than burning incense before the idols) to come on board again, and they were treated like newcomers. Back to square one. Nowadays, when someone has been away from the church for years or has abandoned the eucharist and the way of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, we don't think much of it. It is so ingrained in our minds that the church is just another organization, like the Lodge or the PTA, that so long as we pay our dues and go to annual meetings, we are still nominal members. I had parishioners even in my first poor ghetto parish who would not miss sending an annual check to pay their "membership" as they thought, and who came to services only on high feasts and bonfire nights. They were mostly working people who could not get off their Sunday jobs to go to church. But this is not church membership as it is described in the Pacto we call the New Testament, where the church is never called an organization, but always an organism--a living Body. There are no optional duties, tasks, or disciplines. Voluntary, maybe, but not optional. This is a new nationality we are undertaking, as naturalized citizens, a new family we are being adopted into, with new names and identities. The church is a polis, a city to which we have come, and so we must look on Lent as something more than an opportunity for self-improvement, like a dancing class after a day at the office, or for heroic discipline, or Stoic askesis, like spring training for your tennis skills. It is a basic training company, and together we learn to behave as a unit which will one day offer itself in combat, in la lucha, in the struggle. Now, in our communities of Christian commitment, we have hardly any catechumens--people instead make arrangements for church membership with a clergy assistant, on an individual basis, and only in some places is the catechumenate fully restored, so that we don't normally enter Lent with a view to being Baptized at Easter.
What then is the point of Lent in such a pastoral situation? I believe we have a special opportunity to use this sacred time as a season of "solidarity anyhow." Lent is a time for us to do anamnesis on our past as Wandering Arameans, remembering that our origins are in not settling down, claiming the real estate, owning the land and exploiting it, but moving in harmony with its rhythms and with its other populations, its myriad but diminishing species. We return to Eden before the greed, and find ourselves with Robert Graves "In the Wilderness" with Jesus too--it was the first time a Garden, and the second time it is a Wilderness--another parable of our having lost our way. Matthew says that angels ministered to Jesus after the temptation, and Robert Graves names them:
"Soft words of grace he spoke
Unto lost desert folk
That listened wandering.
He heard the bitterns call
From ruined palace wall,
Answered them brotherly,
He held communion
With the she-pelican
Of lonely piety.
Basilisk, cockatrice,
Flocked to his homilies,
With mail of linked device,
With monstrous barbed slings,
With eager dragon-eyes
Great bats on leathern wings
And poor blind broken things
Foul in their miseries."
Poet Graves' catalog of Christ's companions in the wilderness has been much reduced by multinational agriculture assaulting the ecosystem--the wilderness is cut down and cleared to raise cash crops ("All this I will give you if you fall down and worship me." -- The devil didn't get a taker from Christ, but he got one from Capitalist agrobusiness.) Which now claims dominion and has nearly completed its destruction.
The catechumenate of olden time consisted of folks who were together turning to the gospel for liberation: from false gods, from the violence of the world, from its values (or anti-values) of greed, self-aggrandizement, racism, slavery, abuse of slaves (servants), wives, and children. (Very little of that has changed! It's just that the church only half-heartedly smiles and suggests they're not nice.) In a word, they were turning away from the way the western world works, and were seeking liberation from the power of those ways in an EK KLESIA, a community of the called out, to board the life raft that was departing the sinking ship. Called out and away from the anti-life of the world, the world's way of what it called Life, but which the Church rightly in those days saw as Death. We now wear polaroid shades so as not to notice.
If we are to have Lent mean for us the same quality of thing, a powerful season of solidarity in the contemporary world, then we have to look again to be in solidarity with those who are turning to the true God to deliver them, those who are looking for liberation. It will be a mistake to look to the church's current praxis for models. It is, across denominational and confessional lines, tragically confused and compromised. It partakes of marketing strategies, it does not live its own truth.
And where do we find these people looking for evangel?, these entire nations of people who will want to board the lifeboat of Peter and sail away from Titanic? We do not find them very much in the churches. This may be because the Church, especially in north America, seems less and less likely to be a place where the gospel of liberation will be celebrated, or even referred to. They hear instead, mostly the SPELL, that is the cultural incantation of class conformity, of settling down comfortably into our consumerist, capitalist society and mistaking it for the koinonia of the Pacto Nuevo of Jesus. It is of course nothing of the kind.
We must look beyond the church's customers or burgesa "market area" or "target population" if we are to find those who are looking for liberation. Our Me First World populatons are probably already lost to the Utopia that must come if humankind is to downsize itself into the Creator's paradigm for a peaceable kingdom on this planet and to adopt a lifestyle that will enable us once again to go on retreat in the wilderness with bittern and basilisk, cockatrice, and the pelican, and where "none shall hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain." Reproduction control must be observed in our species, if other species are to have a space on the planet for their life, and for God's project that they delight, inspire, and guide our spirituality in the future, as they have done in the past.
We see these alterntive populations, we see these people of hope, far away in Latin America, looking for ways to express politically and economically what it is their own ancient stories and the mythology of gospel mean when it talks about liberation, of "salvation" (a word so corrupted by prostituted religion that it is practically useless) of redemption and deliverance. We see these people in Africa and Australia, struggling to put into fleshly reality the project of God, that is a community in which there is no discrimination based on race, color, caste, sex, sexual orientation, national or cultural history, or any other measure for diminishment. A human family to share the earth with other species. We see these people turning to God in many foreign places, but we don't often see it when they are closer to home. We fail to see that the aspirations of the people of north America's prisons and ghettoes and streets, for lives of meaning and dignity, for food and shelter, for health and safety, we fail to see these as people with whom we should be in solidarity. Instead, we invariably choose to be in solidarity with our own privileged class of people, burgesa or ruling class, across national or geographic or political borders. Our burgesa revolution, like Hitler's in Germany, has won the day, and has imprisoned or isolated the lumpenproletariat, and intimidated the morally upright privileged classes of pastors and teachers into acquiesence and silence. "Let's wait and see," we all whisper, "Things aren't possibly going to be as bad as we fear." Paul writes to the Romans and to us, when he says "the people who practice justice based on the law have to live by it. But the justice based on Jesus demands that we operate with proximate realities, not remote possibilities. " The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart." What is it that we have got to show in our life together, that the women and men of the world around us--the people depicted so clearly in what we see on television and in the movies--would want to be a part of? What is it that we are likely to do in Lent to demonstrate in some significant way our solidarity with their efforts to turn their lives and destinies around? What is it that we can do to tell our own names and limn our own destinty? Are we part of the problem of the wretched of the earth, or can we offer an answer? What is it that we have available to us to express our solidarity with powerless people?
The 40 days which Jesus spent in the wilderness are the days in which he was himself powerless, and at the same time tempted to show off power, and to take power from evil, and to test God's power, and to test his power over God (that is, to practice magic). "He ate nothing in those days," says Luke--the simplest and most radical rebuke to the consumer society created in the modern West. Luke speaks of ministering angels. To manipulate the power of God, and call it prayer. Jesus, the homeless, hungry one, is tempted to a capitalist, individualist solution to the problem of his own hunger: make this stone into a loaf of bread for yourself. This one stone, this one loaf. Bread for one's own hunger, not for the people's. Food for my personal menu, my breakfast tray, my din-din. "Bread eaten in secret is sweet," says one of the Proverbs of Solomon, one which perhaps the devil quoted to Jesus that day in the desert. But Jesus refuses a solution to hunger which is only individualistic, which does not change the system of providing bread for all. Food stamps for the "deserving poor" and soup kitchens for the well-behaved derelict are not the answer of Jesus. He sees that humankind cannot aim at meals on wheels alone as an economic solution, in isolation from distributive justice. Jesus would one day provide the model when he asked his disciples to take action in solidarity with the hungry: "How many loaves do you have here? HOw many fishes?" He showed that it is in the re-distribution of what is available that abundance can be had for all. The community must commandeer resources, find its own power to satisfy human needs, and have lots left over, but it is to be a community solution in solidarity with all the poor, and not an isolated indivudal running away with his sardine and his kaiser roll. One cannot say a table grace over such a meal. As an Italian prophet recently denounced McDonald's hamburgers--a highly individualized meal--as symbolic of the west's selfishness and refusal to think of food as family meal.
The devil also offers Jesus all the political power there is, over all capitalist democracies, people's republics, state houses, aldermanic offices, multinational corporations--and the devil tells him (and here, for once, he was not lying) "These are all mine; they belong to me. I offer them to you if you keep me on as your unseen partner. You do the P.R., and I'll keep books. I have the authority here," the devil says, "The EXOUSIA." Authority in our sacred writings is almost always written about as something delegated, and Jesus refuses it. What authority he would not take in a Satanic swindle, Jesus was nevertheless freely given, because Matthew tells us that after his suffering, after his supreme solidarity with the world of the oppressed, and for whom he died, he is exalted and at his installation says, "All exousia, all authority in heaven and earth--in mythmaking and in politics--has been given to me, and I give it to you, to make disciples, to teach, to model the lifesyle of the Rule of God, and immerse and bathe the world in the liberation I deliver to you: And know that I am with you all the rest of history, until the completion of the Age." Jesus fought for such authority, and struggled on his people's behalf for it, and so has shown us that AUTHORITY is not to be taken by little deals with little devils, but has been won by Him by His defeat of wrongdoing and His victory of justice.
Finally Jesus is tempted to recklessness, to throwing himself down, tempted to use religion and its institutions (and its buildings, by the way) in a reckless Adventist plan to force God's hand, so that surely God will see to it that our privatized agenda and our own clever timetable is met, once we have placed ourselves in impossible situations, like cultists in a motel or on a mountain top. Thomas Aquinas, in his discussion of the power of God, wrote that "nothing so contradictory falls under the power of God's omnipotence." Jesus said, "Don't test the limits of God's power." Jesus was strengtheed by the testing, as we are, when we are a people trusting in God and living in solidarity with the project of liberation which we call the Kingdom of God. The Evil One makes it appear that Evil has all the cards, all the authority, all the power--it so appears to us in the last days of the capitalist imperium, now devouring the world. It has pushed off the face of the earth the original peoples, the "Leavers," as Daniel Quinn names the pastoralists, succeeded by the hunter/gatherers in his novel "Ishamel", and replaced them with us Takers, who know nothing of an amicable relationship to Nature but to rape and pillage for accumulated and hoarded foodstuffs and the wealth they bring us. Jesus is powerless, the devil of our exploitative capitalist culture says, and we must take the devil's way or have no way out at all. But Jesus refuses it all and (our primal myth says) wins it the hard way. And is winning it the hard way, even now. We hope.
Just before Jesus' departure the disciples will ask for the power that the devil had offered him in the wilderness: "Is it now that you will restore the basilea, the dominion, the power and the glory, to us and to our people? Will we now get political power?" Jesus says, "Never mind the times aned seasons or places where the Holy One has decided to place his exousia, his authority, but you have already received, and you will receive, all the power you need, the DUNAMIS, the raw power of the Holy Spirit, indeeed, the miracle-working power, you will recieve this for the purpose of worldwide witness, worldwide solidarity, with me. Jesus here uses both the words authority and power--God he says has the authority, and its times and seasons are appointed. But you have the DUNAMIS, THE DYNAMITE POWER (Alfred Nobel used the word for his invention) and you are not helpless. You have all the power, all the dynamite you can use, if you are looking to have a revolution and build a new world. If you will use it in witness, if you will use it in solidarity with the Jesus Scheme, the liberation of peoples everywhere, from Nicaragua to Nigeria.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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