August 19, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Book of Common Prayer Lectionary
Jeremiah 23:23-29 Am I a God near by, and not a God far off?
Psalm 82 Deus stetit
Hebrews 12:1-7 (8-10)11-14 Looking to Jesus the pioneer
Luke 12:49-56 I came to bring fire upon the earth
Revised Common Lectionary (trial use):
Isaiah 5:1-7 I will remove its hedge
Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18 Qui regis Israel
or
Jeremiah 23:23-29 see above
Psalm 82 Deus stetit
Hebrews 11:29-12:2 So great a cloud of witnesses
Luke 12:49-56 see above
The mystic Baba Kuhi of Shiraz wrote: "In the valley, on the mountain, I beheld only God. In hardship I saw Him by my side. In ease and well-being I beheld only God. Like a candle I melted in His flame. Amid the sparks of the flames, I beheld only God."
At the first mention of FIRE in the Bible it clings to the sword that the Lord placed flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life, at the east of the garden of Eden, and it sent us all at last to exile in the Free Market Economy. Close by and smoldering now are the embers of that FIRE which rained with sulfur onto Sodom, out of heaven, to condemn its inhospitality and injustice. Then there was the FIRE which Abraham carried, along with the knife, to Mount Moriah, when Isaac brought the wood and we learned just in time that God had ordered an end to human sacrifice. We still don't believe it. At Horeb, the mountain of God, an angel appears to Moses in a flame of FIRE out of a blazing bush and behold it was not consumed, but the Ten Words we learned there burn like candles, brightly still. When Moses goes to frighten Pharaoah on the Nile, he stretches his staff toward heaven and the Lord sends thunder and hail and FIRE flashing continually in the midst of it.
To escape from Egypt, the people follow a Pillar of FIRE by night, and when Moses came down from Sinai, his brother Aaron --the first "kohen," the first priest, the first clergymammal--explained lamely the origin of idolatry: he had told the people "whoever has gold, take it off, so they gave it to me and I threw it into the FIRE, and out came this calf.!" Aaron's sons, whom he had ordained in the apostolic succession, died in the wilderness of Sinai because they had offered strange and illicit FIRE before the Lord. (Perhaps it was some stolen fire. Zeus, a mountain-dwelling cousin to Yahweh, had a son named Prometheus ("think ahead") who is famous for stealing FIRE and sharing it with us mortals.)
When Elijah got to Horeb, the mount of God, the word of the Lord came to him, but not in the wind or the earthquake, and not in the FIRE, but in the still small voice, and inquired of him why he had come. The Bible is full of FIRE--'though not that much brimstone, in spite of the Bible-thumpers,--and a good concordance will lead you through it all, to John Baptist who promises to cut down and throw into the FIRE every tree that does not bear good fruit, and where the apostles in their Acts find tongues of FIRE dancing on their heads. In the Apocalypse you will see one like the Son of Man, clothed for the heavenly eucharist, with a long robe and a golden sash, with eyes like a flame of FIRE and a face like the sun shining in full force. .
Louis MacNiece asks us:
Do you rememer when you were six year old
The text in the parish church at Christmas,
'Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men,'
And Christ's lips moving in the stained glass window?
There were no lipreaders present
But I can tell you what he said.
'I come bringing not peace,' he said, 'I come
Bringing not peace but a sword."
All to their posts. The drum is beating.
In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus said "I have cast fire upon the world, and
see, I am guarding it until it blazes." Swords and FIRE seem everywhere in
religion weapons and warnings, signs of power and presence, of
dedication and purification. The first time I ever saw fire in church was
when I went as a child to my mother's Wisconsin Synod Lutheran church of
St. Peter and saw there a statue of Jesus on the altar, standing admidst
the candlesticks as in the Revelation, and the candles were flaming with
FIRE. And then I went to St John's-by-the-Gas-Station Episcopal church
and saw my first thurible--an incense pot, and a young man in a long white
robe and a golden sash was lighting FIRE and sprinkling incense onto it.
When I went to the Easter Vigil and saw the Blessing of the New Fire and
the Lighting of the Paschal Candle, and a Deacon named Fred sing a song to
it, I began to get illumined, and like John Wesley my heart was strangely
warmed as well, by that Fire. At First Presbyterian church where I went
as a boy, there were no candles and no incense, except it was rumored
that Wise Men brought it at Christmas, and the only fire in the place was
the one I lit each Sunday morning in the coal furnace a few hours before
the service. But at Second Temple in Jerusalem there was a pillar of
cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Our religion now is somewhat
banked in a corner of the firebox, and there is no Christian holy day to
commeorate the Holocaust, unless it is Good Friday.
We toast marshmallows in the embers in our autumn evenings. A tame toasting indeed for a religion kindled as pentecostal, by a pyromaniac Pneuma. Our world nevertheless returns to the brazier when it confronts dissent---from Fox's Book of Martyrs to the fire into which we threw the Branch Davidians there is evidence of the old pyromania. Our nation was forged in the fire, and we sing of it in the Battle Hymn of our republic: "He hath loosed the fatal lightning of His terrible swift sword: I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps, I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel." Thus our violent truth marches on. .
Bruce Chilton's new book, "Rabbi Jesus" surprised me with the news, which had never occured to me, that in the Second Temple "a cavalcade of animals was tethered, trussed, and slaughtered" every day. The altar where they were cooked "was enormous, according to Josephus, a square structure of unhewn stones, twenty-three feet high and seventy-five feet in both length and width. . . the Altar was the center of the Temple and the focus of much of Caiaphas'attention. He was the master of what we can think of as an incredibly complex barbecue pit. . . despite the altar fire's huge size, it had to be carefully managed by the priests for the different tasks of burning, cooking, and parching." The fat tail of the sheep, what we know as its "touchus", Chilton says was "Yahweh's special delicacy." Their were rubrics for all the process. The Temple Institute, a Zionist group in Jerusalem, has plans to rebuild it one day, and re-institute the bloody sacrifices and the barbecues. But they will need to clear out Temple Mount's present Islamic inhabitants and the Great Mosque. Meanwhile they publish colorful books illustrating what they have in mind. Fundamentalists are constrained until it happens.
Cooking meat, parching grain, sizzling frankincense, blood, wine, and olive oil, combined to make the "reach nichoach," the aroma of pleasure that the Torah said swelled open God's nostrils. Opened his nose, like perfume. Withal, the smoke rising from the Temple as from the chimney of a civilization, must have rivalled the smog of Sodom. Or more likely, the west side of Chicago on a Sunday afternoon in summer, when a thousand barbecue pits are roasting ribs of the forbidden pig, now baptized and confirmed, for soulfood picnics.
But the smoke of the Temple's altars did not rival the smog of the ovens of Auschwitz, the holocausts of the Third Reich which burned European civilization to the ground and scorched the earth. And not the unquenchable fires of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the still smoldering holocausts which Gringolandia burned to sweeten the nostrils of its god of Manifest Destiny. The smoke of those fires rises forever to offend the One God, who is living and true, but who has not spoken too loudly to us since those Incendios. The prophet Amos heard God say "I hate, I despise these festivals, I will not smell your solemn assemblies. . . I will not accept them, I won't even look." So maybe this is why the U.S. still thinks God is too distracted, or too far away to notice how we settle our affairs on this planet. Our selected leaders believe that we freedom lovers have a free hand here in our free market, in our free world of freebies, that we can rehearse our mayhem in Iraq and permit our surrogate states to murder without fear of censure from our common docile dieties who were born in the Fertile Fiery Crescent but have since been taught their manners. Timothy McVeigh learned his doctrine of excusable collateral damage from Free Fire Fields in Vietnam. It's hard to teach an old god new tricks. But Jehovah had no nose for barbecued pork, and our Jesus has no nose for burning human flesh.
Robert Frost evidently heard some rumors, for he reported
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
to say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
A few years ago while I was in the U.S. one August for my regular visit to
the haruspices, for all kinds of procedures that end in "oscopy", the house
I had in Managua burned down to the tierra, destroying most of its
contents, and with the photo albums many of my memories. Only scorched
concrete walls remained, holding up a cerulean blue sky. What the fire
didn't take, the neighborhood thieves helped themselves to. All that was
left was the English language library, and most of the books were badly
damaged--not by the Incendio itself--but by the firemen's hoses, in their
attempts to keep the fire from spreading they thoroughly drenched the
books. Weeks of paper-towelling and years of rebinding have followed. For
me, it was Holocaust Lite. Only one life, that of my parrot Rosa, was lost,
but there are often reminders of the event, each time I open a book and
find singed end-papers and water-marked bindings, flecks of ash and
cinder. Hanging on the wall in the library is a framed calligraphic
rendering of a paragraph from Clarence Day:
"The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man; nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out. After an era of darkness new races build others; but in the world of books are volumes that live on, still as young and fresh as the day they were written; still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead."Render the paragraph into inclusive language and it too will live on, in telling the hearts of women, too, and children, of the hearts of millions of our companions forever on the way as everything else we build passes into memory. . The cosmic physicists tell us that it will all end this way at last, flecks of ash and cinder at the end of an alley in the Milky Way.
But hope perches in the soul. Ricardo Morales Aviles was a Nicaraguan poet, one of the young geniuses murdered by the Guardia Nacional in defense of U.S. hegemony, on September 18, 1973. Carved in one of the doors at Casa Ave Maria are lines from his poem "I have no peace," written when he was in the prison of La Aviación in 1971.
I had in my heart a dream made of stars
water for bread and love
and a way of speaking like a bell.
I want you to know that even this sadness
I have filled with banners
and that my love is a pure and crystalline force
without knots or dams,
I expect from the sun when it dawns
A bundle of wonders and delights
And an eternal way of kissing the stars. *
Jesus is the pioneer, the pattern, the modelo, the template and perfector
for us in this expectation, and the writer to the Hebrews (and to us)
tells us that Jesus aimed at joy, and held in contempt the shame of the
cross; he "endured the cross" but the translation is too weak which says
"he disregarded the shame".
He did not scorn the cross--the way of suffering--but instead scorned the shame, and in the alchemy of God it was turned to glory, as fire forges gold. When we threw him into the FIRE, as we do our heroes, our expectations were as always, idolatrous. But out came this Lamb. Our God is a consuming Fire, but God is our future, beyond the Fire. How I am constrained.that it be kindled.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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