October 7, 2001 (Proper 22C)
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Habakkuk 1:1-6 (7-11)12-13; 2:1-4 A work is being done in your days that
you would not believe if you were told.
Psalm 37:1-18 or 3-10 Noli aemulari - Do not fret yourself
2 Timothy 1:(1-5) 6-14 God did not give us a spirit of cowardice
Luke 17:5-10 The apostles said to the Lord, 'Increase our faith'.
Revised Common Lectionary (Trial Use:)
Lamentations 1:1-6 The Lord has made her suffer for the multitude of her
transgressions
Lamentations 3:19-26 The stedfast love of the Lord never ceases
or Psalm 137 Super flumina - By the waters of Iraq we sat down and wept
or
Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4 as above BCP
Psalm 37:1-10 as above BCP
2 Timothy 1:1-14 as above BCP
Luke 17:5-10 as above BCP
Each week we hear read to us three different Scripture lessons ("pericopes"-- clip arounds), we hear three voices speak out of the distant past. One of them is always from the Hebrew Bible, our "old" bible, or as we call it sometimes in a dismissive phrase, "the Old Testament". It's the only Bible Jesus knew, or anyone in the church knew until we added, haltingly and still imprecisely, in various canons, some of the Greek Scriptures, which we perforce called "New", and some "Deuterocanonical." The 'old' shaped the community of which he was a member and it shaped his own understandings of God and the meaning of life. He sang its hymns, which we call psalms, learned its Law, told its stories, and memorized its proverbs. He had doubtless heard the first reading today, from Habakkuk, who is writing about events of 600 years before the time of Jesus. Jerusalem was about to be invaded by foreigners--an ancient predecessor of the Iraqi army--and Habakkuk sees violence and strife in society about him, law as "effete", and justice as "perverted" He sees the overwhelming power of the foe, "those whose might is their God", for they have made their military power the object of their confidence. It all sounds so contemporary.
At first the prophet sees the invading Babylonians (from the land of Saddam Hussein today) as a scourge from Yahweh--punishing his own Jewish tyrant, King Jehoiakim. He welcomes the vision, chapter 1: 5-11, as the poor of Afghanistan welcomed the Islamic warriors to deliver them from the atheism of the Soviet invaders. But then there's a shift, and the prophet sees that Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian too was a tyrant, as the Afghans (and even the Gringos) have come to see that the Taliban (whom they at first welcomed -- and paid -- to overthrow the communists) are worse tyrants than the Reds. It's all there in the book we call Habakkuk. That he who runs may read.
The prophet is in despair, and rebukes God: "Why do you look on faithless people," he prays, "Why are you silent while the evil swallow up those who do justice?" It's a question God's people have never stopped asking. Some of God's people, at least, asked it several centuries ago when other of God's people took four million Africans into slavery--they were God's people, too. We asked about God's silence while millions of Yahweh's Chosen People, along with Poles, Slavs, gypsies, and gay people, were taken into concentration camps and extermination camps in the 1940's. We asked about God's silence when the nations of Eastern Europe suffered for decades under Soviet tyranny, and we asked about God's silence as Black Africa and Latin America and the Phillipines suffered under the imperialism of the North. With the prophet, we shouted "Violence!" at the heavens, and God did not save them, so that we could notice. "Destruction and violence are before me, strife and contention arise." "How long shall I cry for help, O God, and you will not hear?" I asked it after living for a generation amidst the poverty of Chicago's west side. I ask it now in a poor barrio of Managua, where I have lived for thirteen years. Surely the people of lower Manhattan asked it on September 11, and the people of Hiroshima each year on August 7th. And we cry with the prophet, "What shall I do?" The question of the ancient prophet is as pertinent today as the day it was uttered. But we are also in solidarity with Habbakuk as he says, "I will take my stand to see if God answers my complaint."
We don't know who Habbakuk was, or how this prophecy got his name, an Akkadian word for a garden plant. The book is perhaps a compilation of two prophetic voices with two different views, and maybe a third voice, the editor. The prophet said that God did speak to him indeed, and said, "Write the vision, write down what you see: so that the messenger himself can read it: as he runs. If God's answer seems slow, wait for it, for it will surely come, it will not delay. . . when it comes there will be no time to linger. The reckless will be unsure of himself, while the justice doer shall live by faith."
Thus, by being faithful persons (not by "having faith", as an item) by living a life-style of faithfulness, we are the ones God will take the part of. Now that's a very old answer for some very new dilemmas. The commentaries say that this discussion of "faith" in Habbakuk is the first place in our Bible where the ways of God are questioned, where someone dares to ask God, "Why do the good suffer and evil people have it easy?" "Theodicy", this discussion is called. Believers in the United States asked it when the jetliners crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and thousands of innocents perished. Believers in Chile asked it when a U.S. sponsored a coup against the democratic government of Salvador Allende, murdered him and another 30,000 people, orchestrated by Henry Kissinger and Agosto Pinochet. How is it that war criminals live in health and sip drinks on talk shows, and the poor of the earth starve to death in the wastes of Afghanistan? How come my prayer list is so long, and my resources to help so short?
The answer of Habakuk, still writ large enough for us to read, is "the Vision waits its time" -- it is hurrying on its way, 'though it seems slow to you. Wait for it, it will not be side-tracked. The people of justice shall in the mean time live the life of faithfulness.
We turn now to the younger Bible: what we hype as the 'New' Testament, the 'Nuevo Alianza', as if we were all Marcionites or window dressers. The apostles came to Jesus with this same word on their lips, 'faith'. Luke says they thought of faith in quantitative terms, commoditized into parcels, rather than as a life-style. (In the news this week Tony Blair, the Brits' prime minister, spoke of the current struggle with terrorism as a struggle to defend our 'way of life.' I don't think he had in mind Luke's idea of Biblical faith as a lifestyle. It may be that he was thinking of the neoliberal project of the affluent life of consumer society, and individual freedom, which the West has succeeded in helping itself to at the expense of the inhabited world, the oikoumene.) The disciples apparently thought it could be had by the pound, like the New York Times Sunday edition. "Increase our faith" they asked. "Give us more of it." We don't know the occasion for the request, for Luke inserts it after the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man, which we had last week, and after the teaching about forgiving those who offend us as many times as they offend.
But it doesn't seem to be connected to those readings. The apostles may simply have got up one morning and said (as I have done some days, and you no doubt as well) "O God, I wish I had more faith. Give me more of whatever it takes to strap another day on my back and haul it around till bedtime. More faith, dear God." I have a cat named Gracie who at mealtime always says, MORE, although the catdish is full, or so it seems. The apostles were cats like that; they came to Jesus and meowed for more. And Jesus is sarcastic, or should we say ironic. For he comments, "MORE faith? You're not using the faith you've got now! If the faith you had now were as big as a mustard seed, you could put it to work planting mulberry trees in the Mediterranean!" That's what he said, isn't it? "You could say to this tree, 'Go jump in the lake' and it would do it!
MORE faith? You haven't yet put to work the faith that is yours, for faith is a style by which life and work are done, it's not a warehouse of expendable resources. Faith is not a fossile fuel, that must be hoarded and marketed. It is a way of seeing and a way of being. And that is why Jesus then immediately changes the subject from faith as quantity to faith as quality. He tells the story of the unworthy field hand. As a good Democratic Socialist I have been nervous about the Bible's metaphor of the master-slave relationship to model our relationship to God. I know that Jesus used images drawn from the life of first century Palestine as he lived it. Chattel slavery was as universal in his time as wage slavery is in ours. Jesus talked about and used the life of those around him to talk about the Commonwealth of God and its eternal truths, its Infinite Justice, which is not that of CNN and its subsidiary, the Bush public relations office. So he asked, "Which of you upper middle class folks, who have employees or subordinates, say unto them when they've finished their work, 'come in now to my office and sit down and I'll get you a cheeseburger and fries?' Or, 'Let me whip you up a cappacino,' or 'The sun is over the yard-arm, here comes a pitcher of martinis'. Will you not rather say to your gopher, your flunky: "Hey, when you finish that chore, how about running down to the deli for me? " Or, "How about one of you GIRLS making a pot of coffee?" Or, "Can we have some service at this table, please?"
Jesus asks, "Does anyone in the domination system thank the flunky because the flunky does what flunkies are for? Does anyone thank the gopher because they brought the coffee?" When you've finished all your work in this domination system, you are still good-for-nothing. You only did what was your job.
A rather harsh and dreadful God, if we're talking about God. But we're not. We're talking about a lifestyle of faith, faith as a way to do our work, as committed to Liberation as we have been committed to Domination. Faith not as done for merit badges, but faith as acted out for the joy of it, knowing whom it is we serve. To make faith quantitative is to make it a parable of our wealth before the world, but it is instead qualitative, and a parable of our poverty and the nakedness of our service before God.
A saying of Jesus in Arabic Islamic culture has Jesus address the twelve: "O disciples, be satisfied with what is vile in this world while your faith remains whole and sound, just as the people of this world are satisfied with what is vile in religion while their world remains whole and sound." [Abu Baker ibn Abi al-Dunya, d. 894, in "The Muslim Jesus" ed & trans by Tarif Khalidi, Harvard University Press, 2001]. If Jesus didn't say it, he might have: He did say You cannot serve God and property. And: Make friends for yourselves by means of vile property, that when it fails, your friends may welcome you.
Faith is looked at even a Third Way in the the reading from the second letter to Timothy. The writer of this letter, an old cleric by the name of Paul, or in the name of Saulos/Paulus, writes a letter comparing the faith of young Tim with that of the apostle, and says he is reminded that Tim's grandmother, Ms Lois, and his mama, Ms Eunice, were strong churchwomen, and that little Tim has the same sincere faith that lived in those women. And he says, 'You can't live on their faith' What was in the family tree in Eunice and Lois has got to live in you if it's going to do you any good.' Christian faith was your family tradition, but you can't live in the family tree. An awful lot of church members in the congregations I've known had the idea that if only one family member made it to church on Sunday, that would work for the whole tribe. Worship seemed like a convention to which they sent delegates. "I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands." Sacramental grace is a gift, not an ornament. Faith is not an achievement, but a treasure that you must unwrap and use, an inheritance to be worn; still, it is not a commodity. It cannot be enshrined or folded away like a flower pressed in the pages of the family Bible, or stowed in the attic like an heirloom, to be tarted up for important weddings and funerals. I was once shown a scrapbook by an old parishioner who had taped into it sixty years before the wafer bread from a First Communion--a shocking but hilarious example of the fetish that faith becomes in superstition.
Faith's form may come to us in patterns, it's true. We can see how Faith was worn and tailored to the lives of those who have gone before -- "the pattern of sound words which you heard from me, in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus." But the writer reminds Timothy and all of us, in a pun on his name, 'Your name is Timothy, not Timidity.' Don't be timid about your faith. 'Timothy' means 'God- Fearer'. The person who fears only God should not be afraid of anybody or anything else. God does not give us a spirit of Timidity, a spirit of being afraid. Faith means not being ashamed of witnessing; it means a spirit of power, of love, of self-control, of willingness to suffer for the gospel, in the power of God.
So we've hard from three Bible chapters, three Bible witnesses. Habakkuk, Jesus, and the old Paulist cleric. Each has spoken to us of Faith. Habakkuk says we can read the billboard on the highway as we drive by: HANG IN THERE, HELP IS ON THE WAY. God will help the oppressed and defeat the oppressor. And Jesus says, Faith is the Life we are called to as Friends of God, not flunkies. Faith does not come in sizes, but in styles. And the old Paulist cleric says Faith is not an attic, but a house afire. It is not a commodity, but a community. WE are not keepers of a sacred flame but arsonists of a conflagration, and how we are constrained till it be kindled.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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