Book of Common Prayer lectionary
Ecclesiastes 10:(7-11)12-18 Alas for you when your ruler is a slave--"What, me worry?"
Psalm 112 Beatus vir
Hebrews 13:1-8 Remember the imprisoned, the tortured, the married; keep free from money love
Luke 14:1, 7-14 Shun seats of privilege.

Revised Common Lectionary (trial use):
Jeremiah 2:4-13 J'accuse: Has a nation changed its gods?
Psalm 81:1, 10-16 Exaltate Deus
or
Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 10:12-18 The Lord overthrows the thrones of rulers or Proverbs 25:6-7 Better to be told 'come up here' than to be put down.
Psalm 112 Beatus vir
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 The sacrifices of good works and sharing are pleasing to God.
Luke 14:1, 7-14

"Alas for you when your King is a slave", or in another version, "a child." It is more accurately translated, "You're in a fix when your ruler is an ignoramus." Childood and slavery were frequently synonymous--the words are equal in ancient Greek. And anciently children had no more rights or responsibilities than household slaves. In the U.S. of A. as well as the C. S. of A., "boy" did not refer to Tarzan's ganymede but to any Negro male regardless of age. And grown Black women who clean house for white folks are sometimes still called "girls." Diminishment is the language of oppression. The Wisdom literature knows enough to advise us not to look for leadership amongst the childish and immature, and alas for us when we have chosen to pretend that a lame brain is our leader. It's becoming clear he was selected for his tractability and if he can follow orders from the oligarchy's point man, Dick Cheney, he will manage to keep his rubber duckies in a row. Every few days someone sends me another e-mail anecdote or contrived comic story to illustrate how dim-witted the President of the Republic is perceived to be. But this may be a way of disarming us, and disguising the real danger of this dingbat by giggling about him. Charlie Chaplin made Hitler look funny, too.

The Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pennsylvania recently published results of its four month study of the intelligence quotient of George Dubya Bush, which says that of the 12 presidents in the last 50 years, based on scholarship, writing. amd facility in public speaking, scored in the Swanson/Crain system of intelligence, Dubya ranked lowest with an IQ of 91. IQ doesn't measure Boy Sprout rectitude, for Bill Clinton was our smartest president, with an IQ of l82. A doctored cartoon of Alfred E. Neumann of MAD magazine, morphed into Dubya for the cover of the November 13th issue of THE NATION, can be seen at http://www.thenation.com -- What, we worry? But there's an element of low cunning and social turpitude in his frat house wisecrack to a reporter, on the Fourth of July.. Bill Hangley, a news writer, had a chance to walk up to President Bush in Philadelphia on Independence Day and to shake his hand. He said what any of us would have said on such an occasion: "Mr President, I hope you only serve four years. I'm very disappointed in your work so far." Hangley said that Bush "kept smiling and shaking my hand but answered, 'Who cares what you think?' His face stayed photo-op perfect but his eyes gave me a look that said, if we'd been drinking in some frathouse in Texas, he'd've happily answered, "let's take it outside."

"Alas for you when your leader is a fool." .

There are several lessons in the gospel, all of them drawn from the dinner table--another of the Symposia which we are all so fond of-- and a couple of other lessons dropped from the pericope en route to the dining room and in commentary on the RSVP's who send their regrets. The gospel introduces all of them as "On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath."

We Christians almost all of us threw out the Sabbath, while many protestants revived its oppressive aspects--few of its joyful ones--and transferred them to the Lord's Day. My mother's pietistic Lutheran family kept a Sunday Sabbath so far as the kitchen was concerned, but it was still she and her mother who had to cook all their Sunday food for seven men the day before and clean up the day afterwards.. Adventists are right to revive Saturday, but they throw out the Day of Resurrection instead. Holding church services was never thought to complete the holiness of Shabbas. The Talmud more fully expressed its liberative and joyful aspects, its special food and clothing, music, study, candlelight, drama and song. Sabbatarian abuses, such as refusing to heal a sick person on that day, were abnormal, and Jesus points out how ridiculous it is to fail to do rescue work because of ritual strictness.

Tradition thought of the Sabbath as a foretaste of the Olam-ha-Ba, the world to come, and so a day of rest and joy. It was a Mitzvah to invite guests that day, to serve with the best dishes, and to invite some poor people. Perhaps this is why the one suffering with dropsy was there that day with Jesus at the house of his pious host and fellow Pharisee. The Sabbath was a day for no work, but for good works. The arrival of the Sabbath was compared to a Queen's arrival, and its departure called Melavveh Malkah--the leavetaking of the Queen. They said it wasn't that Jews had preserved the Sabbath, but that the Sabbath had preserved the Jews. Can we revive all that without blue noses and blue laws? So would Jesus the joyous Jew be welcome at our solemn joyless sabbaths? Talmudic scholars were not so nasty as the impression given by our anti Jewish traditions in Christendom. "Rabbi Hisda and Rabbi Hamnuna said that it is permissible to make plans for good deeds on the Sabbath. . . Rabbi Eleazar said that one may arrange alms for the poor on the Sabbath. . . Rabbi Johanan said 'One may transact business which has to do with the saving of life or with public health on the Sabath, and one may go to synagogue to discuss public affairs on the Sabbath'. . . . Rabbi Jonathan said, 'One may even go to theatres and circuses on the Sabbath for such a purpose. ' . . . 'In the school of Manasseh it was said that one may talk about the future marriage of one's children on the Sabbath, or about the children's education, or about teaching them a handicraft, for the Scripture forbids only 'THY business.' Whatever is God's business is permitted." (Shabbas, 150a).

Mark Twain said that American prechers had taught him to abhor and detest the sabbath day and to hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it. More sweetly, Emily Dickinson, another soul abashed by yankee puritanism, found that

                    Some keep the Sabbath going to Church--
                     I keep it staying at Home--
                    With a Bobolink for a Chorister--    
                     And an orchard for a Dome --
                     Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice--
                     I just wear my Wings--
                     And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
                     Our little Sexton -  sings.  
                     God preaches, a noted Clergyman--
                     And the sermon is never long,
                     So instead of going to heaven,at last --
                     I'm going, all along.

Was this on all their minds when Jesus, seeing him sitting there in his swollen and sabbatarian rejection, asked the bluenoses, "If one of your kids or your jackass tripped into a pothole on the Sabbath, would you wait till a weekday to pull him out?" The Damascus Rule, found at Qum Ran, forbade helping an animal to give birth on the Sabbath, or lifting it out of a cistern if it should fall in, but allowed the use of a ladder or rope to pull out a person who had fallen into fire or water. Here, Jesus interprets the exceptions broadly, so he "took him and healed him and sent him away" -- we wonder what he did for his dropsy? Squeeze the humidity out of him and hug him goodbye? He returned to the table to notice the guests jockeying for seats of honor at the banquet, maybe having taken the place the host had intended for the guest rabbi himself. At Casa Ave Maria, invited guests eat at the same table with our staff, and we all keep our elbows off the table and say together "Danos corazones agradecidos, Padre y Madre Nuestro, por todos tus bondades, y haznos conscientes de las necesidades y los derechos de los demas." In Robert Frost's "A Mask of Reason", Job's wife asks Jehovah if he would accept a prayer addressed to The Lord God of Hostesses. Here in Managua, a couple of women guests suggested amendments to the table grace, from one in the Common Prayer, so that it is inclusive not only of God our Mother, who is our Hostess in Creation, but it also asks that we be aware of the Rights as well as the Needs of others, usually not on the menu. Table manners at Eucharist ought to reflect the Table manners of the celestial banquet, but that would mean also how we figure the food budget for the family of humankind, and how we get food to the absent, to the starving, and how we share the leftovers. There are harsh words in the New Testament for failure to discern the Lord's body at this meal.

This is as good a place as any for Luke to lodge his appropriate parable on places of honor, which has repercussions beyond all our dining rooms, all our socializing, all our hospitality--indeed all our hospitals--and our failure there to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, to come and give us their blessing by their inability to pay. I was amused by the list in the Epistle to the Hebrews for whom we are bidden to show hospitality: those in prison, as though we were in prison with them, those being tortured, as though we ourselves were in their bodies, and then suddenly, "Let marriage be held in honor by all", which is not always a non sequitur I suppose to imprisonment and torture. Fornicators and adulterers get an appropriate Tsk Tsk, but then "Keep your lives free from the love of money"--which is not ever a non sequitur when we're talking about betrayal and adulterated loyalty.

Jesus says it is only they, the maltreated and malnourished, who can repay us at the day of Resurrection in those endless Sabbath the blessed ones see. I suppose that the descapacitados of the land will forgive us for not asking them to our tightass teas, if it will be awkward for them to manipulate their prostheses in our pretty parish halls, mostly unequipped for wheelchair access, and thus unable to welcome the blessed lame. In Jesus' time the lame and the blind were excluded from entrance to the Temple--doubtless they would distract the pious from their prayers--and they could not join religious communities like Qum Ran. For centuries, the Church excluded the blind or handicapped from ordination, or from religious vows, and of course no sexual outcast need apply, 'though Luke's gospel specifically mandated their acceptance on the wilderness road to Gaza, where Philip met the shorn lamb in his humiliation and preached to him Isaiah in his chariot. Those with crushed testicles, or none at all--like half the human race--were always (well, not always) checked out and sent away.

The parable on places of honor has some hermeneutic perhaps as well to offer to us in the "mesa de la Creación" -- the table of Creation, where we in the West have arrogantly assumed the highest place of honor amongst the world's religions. Everyone knows the "long road from Pentecostal to Episcopal, " that Richard Niebuhr wrote about in "The Social Sources of Denominationalism." But think also of the class system whereby we classify our sister religions of Judaism and Islam, to say nothing (as we usually don't) of Sikhs, Parsees, Buddhists or other religions, some of them older than God. Rank the religions you know of, for your invitation list to El Banquete de Dios. We suppose that a baptized and confirmed Jehovah has also authorized us to assign lesser seats to the lesser breeds without our law. 'Though all of us critters in creation have been bidden by the same divine Hostess to her table, and she furnishes us all with abundance throughout the planet and even beyond, venture capitalists are even now casting covetous eyes at the vast resources still unmined in space.

*Hoy me levanto muy temprano,         Today I get up very early 
ya me espera la comunidad,            for the community is expecting me
 voy subiendo alegre la cuesta,       I'm gladly climbing the hill 
 voy en busca de tu amistad.          I'm looking for your friendship  

Dios invita a todos los pobres        God invites all of the poor 
a esta mesa común por la fe,          To this table of common faith
donde no hay acaparadores             Where there are no hoarders   
y a nadie le falta el conqué          And no one lacks what is needed

 Dios nos manda hacer este mundo      God sends us to make this world
una mesa donde haya igualdad;         a table of equal sharing 
trabajando y luchando juntos,         working and struggling together 
por el bien de la humanidad.          for the welfare of humankind.  

Vamos todos al Banquete, a la mesa de la Creacíon.  . 

GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni

• The Series: Father Gallup's "Homily Grits": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/grits.html
• The Series "Joy Anyway!": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/joy.html
• Louie Crew's Anglican pages: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/rel.html
• Louie Crew's home page: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew
• Send mail to: lcrew@newark.rutgers.edu

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