April 14, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Job 14:1-14 If mortals die, will they live again?
Psalm 130 De profundis
or 31:1-5 In te, Domine, speravi
I Peter 4:1-18 GET SERIOUS!
Matthew 27:57-66 Command the tomb to be made secure
or John 19:38-42 A hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes
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The people who love Christ are set apart. Like the soft, glorious Pleiades that keep together in the sky. --Storm Jameson |
This is the day for Jesse Jackson's mantra, "Keep Hope Alive." The witnesses to Jesus' death, mostly women, did their best to keep hope alive. They stayed together, like Storm Jameson's soft and glorious Pleiades that keep together in the sky. They hoped for a decent burial, and somehow (by the time of John's gospel) they had got together a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloe through the good offices of Nicodemus, an unlikely co-conspirator. They got a rich man out of an old prophecy to divert funds and hastily lend a Garden Tomb. And they got Pilate and the military involved, to roll a stone, and a notary public to put a seal on it. So they remembered it all, years later. Everything went according to the rubrics. And they went home because they couldn't do anything else on the Sabbath.
Mark's, the earliest gospel, doesn't go so far as John's with this longer, taller tale. He ends it with the frightened disciples fleeing from the graveyard, and the famous "ephobounto gar"-- they were afraid."
Within thirty years of Jesus' death, the Community of the Resurrection was sufficiently strong in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia that a letter was warranted, either by the Apostle Peter, or in his name, to encourage the tender planting. The terrors of imperial persecution may not yet have begun, under Trajan, and the infant church would not have had to ride a wave of televangelist popularity across the Mediterranean to get to these places--the apostles could have walked there on dry land. But they encountered opposition, and it was the way into the Christin community that sliced it: baptism made the difference. They would have walked through Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians, a name used only in this letter and in the Acts of the Apostles. Christians--the ones who have been chrismed, made Christ's own, rubbed with the oil of olives and bathed in Christ. The first Christian church was there, but it is a Muslim village now, though a well in the cave supplies holy water to both the followers of Jesus and those of Muhammad. People wash with it and drink it, too. Mass is said there on St. Peter's feast day. This letter is attributed to Peter, who would eventually get to Nero's garden in Rome and there head down was crucified in 64 A.D. Some say the Greek is too elegant for a Galilean fisherman. Well, he may have had help from Silas, a/k/a Silvanus. "I have written to you briefly, through the help of Silvanus," he says. The companion of Paul, who probably also loaned him some of his theology. I've helped Nicaraguan scriveners with their homework in the imperial tongue of English, and they have helped me tone up my tenses in Cristiano, as we call the Spanish langage here, when I want to write out my remarks. The letter was written before the church really began to get clobbered by the gummint, because its author is still naive enough to urge patriotism on his readers (as contemporary clergy do) at least towards the emperor if not those who enforce his laws (2:13-17). We choose our emperors now deliberately to dodder, so we can be amused by them and their grammar and hide the fact that they are indictable war criminals. And some of the letter looks like a hymn, a creed, a homily, have all been sent along as enclosures. Some of it may be the celebrant's part of an Easter baptismal liturgy, with remarks directed to the newly baptized and then to the whole congregation. In any case, it is a letter of exhortation appropriate for our latitudinarian religion now, which calls itself "spirituality", an era like the 60's, denominated by Lillian Hellman as "Scoundrel Time."
In this very last day of Lent, in the midst of the Triduum, the last day of preparation of the candidates for Baptism, and of the rest of us for the renewal thereof, the subject of our behavior comes up. The candidates for baptism huddle round the font -- the old Prayer Book of 1928 required that they fast before this coming plunge. They would have been light-headed from the stress. But now, it's likely they've had supper, and if our friends, a good one on Easter Eve.
The pledge cards have not been distributed yet, so is this really a good time to say "The end of everything is near--therefore get serious!" And, "You've already spent enough time in doing what the Gentiles like to do--(mind you, he's writing to Gentile converts!)--living in licentiousness, passions, drunkeness, revels, carousing, and lawless idolatry." Whoa, San Pedro. You mean we can't go back to that lifestyle now that Lent is over? Peter reminds us that some of our "Christian friends" to whom the gospel was preached are already dead--and now live apart from flesh, from sarx, like God does, in the spirit. But they can only live now in the spirit, he says, because they were already judged in the flesh--in their sarx. As we all shall be. This letter was written at the beginning of the Church's Spring time, and preparation for Baptism was indeed getting "serious." The training for Baptism was ethical, not catechetical--behavior was to be changed before the Creed was memorized. For centuries, it was not handed over (traditio) until this day, Easter Even, minutes before the Bath. Christians were to act their way into new ways of thinking, and Baptism was the seal at the end of the process of change. We have mistakenly thought we could persuade people intellectually to think their way into new ways of behaving--and that is I think called brainwashing. The early Christians understood baptism as washing away old behavior--and Peter lists the kinds of behavior washed away. In Nicaragua, the residual postponing of bathing, formerly a part of the Lenten discipline, is remembered when everyone flocks to the nation's beaches on Maundy Thursday and the nation goes bathing until Sunday. Some remember to go back to mass then.
Nowadays we expect the work formerly done by the catechumenate to be done by our "Christian culture." Television and radio, movies and videos are fatuously expected to form Christians out of the mudpies of a postChristian playpen. In the Episcopal church we have generally designed the period of formation for newcomers to be a gentle and generous exposure to liturgical living with Martha Stewart overtones. Ethics are generally avoided, and there will be no unpleasant discussion of war as criminal, soldiering as treachery to Christ, capitalist punishment as murder, or the paying of taxes to Caesar as forbidden by the rabboni from Nazareth. Pretty clear in the New Testament and the formation documents of this religion.
If renewed piety in Lent does not result in renewed morality it is a dumb show. Lent is more than rearranging the protein intake from land animals to water animals, from Toro to Turbot, from furry food to finny. It is the time of finding our new personal identity in Jesus as Christ. When we talk about new personal identity, we can nowadays talk about sex. Peter mentions it in the epistle, by the way, negatively--"licentiousness" is not new. Now it is impossible to treat sexuality (as the Pope apparently treats it) as something given to us in the Sacrament of Matrimony. We cannot act as if married people only have a right to sexual identity and fulfillment. As if, only when we get married will God for the first time notice that little boys are different from little girls. And some little girls and boys are more different than other little girls and boys. Each of us, including the Pope, has had a sex life since we were conceived in our mother's wombs. It shaped our genitals and our identity, it shaped our relationships. It shaped our brains and our bosoms and our bottoms. It, like divinity, "shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will." All of the sacraments, however--not just matrimony--sanctify our sexuality. Baptism begins the sanctification, eucharist nourishes it, penance and unction heal its wounds. Ordination too has still some discipline to lend to it, and canon law takes over in hard cases. It is easier to commit sexual sins now than it used to be, in the era when germs punished them, or so we thought. But they haven't ceased to be destructive to relationships, to identity, to personality, to our "animas". And so the apostle warns of them on the Eve of Easter. It will be impossible to have the new Life promised here without sexuality--Origen cutting off his Partes Nobles notwithstanding. We take our genitalia into the Baptismal tub with us, and carry them away dripping and slightly shy afterwards.
Thus it is, Peter writes us that "baptism now saves you--not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him."
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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