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Advent I Year C Nov 30 2003
H
o m i l y G r i t s
The First Sunday of Advent
Year C - November 30, 2003
(St.
Andrew's Day is transferred to Dec. 1st)
(© 2003 by Grant
Gallup - permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation
)
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put
on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your
Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last
day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the
living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who
lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for
ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Zechariah 14: 4-9 When that day comes, Yahweh will be unique and his name
unique. (Jerusalem Bible translation)
Psalm 50 or 50:1-6 Deus deorum - The God of gods has spoken
1 Thessalonians 3: 9-13 How can we thank God enough for you?
Luke 21: 15-31 Hold your heads high, because your liberation is near at
hand.
¶ Revised Common Lectionary -
Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25:1-10
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 as above BCP
Luke 21:25-36 as above BCP
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
Jer 33:14-16 as above RCL
Ps 25:1-10 as above RCL
1 Thess 3:9-13 as above BCP & RCL
Lk 19:28-40 If anyone asks you, you are to say ' the Master needs it.'
¶ Roman Catholic Lectionary -
Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25:4-5, 8-10, 14
1Thessalonians 3:12-4:2
Luke 21:25-28, 34-36 as above BCP, RCL
¶ Cries of Advent - Jim Cotter (1)
(For each day of December until Christmas Eve)
EACH DAY - Amen! Alleluia! Come, Jesus, Messiah!
You are the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and
the end.
Come! say the Spirit and the Bride. Come! let each hearer reply.
Come forward, all who are thirsty! Accept the water of life, a free gift
to all who desire it.
You are the descendant of David, the fulfillment of human hope,
the end of the darkest night, the bright star of dawn.
The giver of this testimony speaks: Yes, I am coming soon.
Amen! Alleluia! Come, Jesus, Messiah!
1st O Living Word, proceeding from the mouth of God, penetrating to the
ends of the earth,
Come and pierce us with the sword of truth.
2nd O Wisdom, dwelling in he womb of God, generating the nurturing the
earth through nights of darkness,
Come and cherish in us the seed of wisdom.
3rd O Adonai, ruler of ancient Israel, appearing to Moses in the flame of
the burning bush,
carving in him on Sinai the words of living law,
Come, etch your holy way even into the lines of our faces.
4th O Tree of Jesse and Flower of Jesse's Stem
lifted high as a sign to all the peoples, before whom even the
powerful are struck dumb
Come and save us and delay no more.
5th O Key of David and Sceptre of the House of Israel, opening where none
can shut
and closing what none can open,
Come and free us, trapped in illusion and the lie.
6th O Bright Sun of Justice, Judge of all he world, seeking to straighten
out what is crooked, and put right what is wrong,
Come with dread power and stark mercy to our reluctant hearts.
[to be continued in each Homily Grits of the Advent season]
¶ The Coming: R.S.Thomas (2)
Wales, 1913- . An Anglican priest considered the leading twentieth
century Welsh poet in English, Thomas has devoted a lifetime of poetry to
meditating on 'the hidden God.' In tune with the stark Welsh landscape
and harsh living conditions of his rural parish, Thomas writes a
primarily dark poetry, pained by God's apparent absence.
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows; a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
¶ Through our long exile: Conrad Noel (3)
But what if the world crumbles to dust with the vision unfulfilled? What
if the City of God should never descend upon this earth? Countless
thousands have hoped for its coming and have died in disillusion. And
yet it is a city that hath foundations whose maker and builder is God, a
city which must remain unshaken, for it is built upon the eternal
principles of mercy, justice, and generosity, which are the abiding
qualities of the Godhead.
The learned and the unlearned alike, though they seem to perish in the
dust, are the citizens of that heavenly Jerusalem, where the happy
dear-bought people go wandering far and wide.
It was no illusion on the part of Peter Abelard, who had all his life
striven for the truth of things and sought for reality beneath the
outward shows, when, at the end of a lost battle, he sang his swan song:
Now in the meanwhile, with hearts raised on high,
We for that country must yearn and must sigh,
Seeking Jerusalem, dear native land,
Through our long exile on Babylon's strand.
Low before him with our praises we fall,
Of whom, and in whom, and through whom are all;
Of whom the Father; and through whom, the Son;
In whom, the Spirit, with these ever One.
¶ Hunger is my Native Place: Dag Hammarskjöld (4)
Hunger is my native place in the land of the passions. Hunger for
fellowship, hunger for righteousness--for a fellowship founded on
righteousness, and a righteousness attained in fellowship.
Only life can satisfy the demands of life. And this hunger of mine can
be satisfied for the simple reason that the nature of life is such that I
can realize my individuality by becoming a bridge for others, a stone in
the temple of righteousness.
Don't be afraid of yourself, live your individuality to the full--but for
the good of others. Don't copy others in order to buy fellowship, or
make convention your law instead of living the righteousness.
To become free and responsible. For this alone was man created, and the
one who fails to take the Way which could have been his shall be lost
eternally.
You are all familiar with the old Advent hymn which sings:
You better be good, You better not cry
Ýou better watch out, I'm telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town.
He knows when you are sleeping, He knows when you're awake
He knows when you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!
Or the contemporary holiday songs of Tom Lehrer:
Hark! The Herald Tribune sings
Advertising Wondrous things!
God rest ye merry merchants;
May he make the Yuletide pay.
Angels we have heard on high
Tell us to go out and buy!
So let the raucous sleigh bells jingle,
Hail our dear old friend Kris Kringle,
Driving the rainbow across the sky
Don't stand underneath when they fly by!
The God of a US Christmas time, the jolly rotund red fraud called Santa,
is not an evil god at all, just the wrong one for believers., His
songs and carols are right in their reminding us that Someone is coming,
that it is Arrival time for the God of love and good gifts, and he can
serve in a pinch as a metaphor for generosity and secret
benefaction. The joke that he carries also a bag of bituminous coal
for the fireplace stockings of bad boys and girls is a tolerable joke for
Double Presdestinarians. The gospel lesson for First Advent
is not helpful for this kindly Calvinist Santa myth, however:
"You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, relations and
friends." Yes, I remember when as a toddler I was not given
the presents that I had hoped for, from any of them, for I was the
Depression years child of a poor iron miner Michigan's Upper Peninsula,
and our Santa recycled the clothes of older siblings, and at
Christmas time gave socks, hankies, and shirts, or games like Chinese
checkers, but never electric trains or the pedal-powered child-size
automobile I lusted for. To my mother's chagrin, a
twice-married Aunt named Annie, whom I loved ardently, always brought
packets of Juicy Fruit chewing gum to distribute to us kids when she
visited at holiday time.
( She was said to use it herself to cover the traces of Four Roses whisky
on her breath.)
Paul writes to the believers in Thessalonica that Timothy has returned
from them with good news of their faith and love, which news has been a
great comfort to him in the midst of his own troubles and sorrows: he
can breathe again, he says, knowing that they are holding firm. "May
the Lord be generous in increasing your love and make you love one
another and the whole human race as much as we love you." This abundant
love seems strangely scarce in these days when the whole human race is
obviously not in love with the whole human race. Who is, indeed, in such
a place that they may be said to "love the whole human race"? Little of
this appears in our pre-Advent talk about the coming "holiday season."
Now a lively discussion has taken place on one of our Internet lists
about the appropriate colors for Advent candles: how many violet, how
many, if any, pink? And the colors for vestments--the purple of
penitential bruises or the blue of Mary's heaven. We have not been sure
of what we are supposed to do with Advent. Is it to be a little Lent
before Christmas, with flowers forbidden and fasting enjoined? Or is it
the celebration of Theotokos and her pregnancy, the time when the whole
world is "charged with the grandeur of God", ready to "flame out like
shining from shook foil"? Is it the season of breathless
anticipation of the coming of the Child, or a season of abject shame and
horror at our unpreparedness for judgment? Sometimes the purple of
penitence seems appropriate for Advent, and sometimes the celestial blue
of comforters and quiet nights under star-filled skies . All of this
seems lofty and theoretical in the face of the fact that the day after
Hallowe'en (an imported and alien festival here in Nicaragua) the fake
tinsel Christmas trees of North America appeared in the stores, and
Gringo Christmas songs in English squawl out of radios and TV sets. It's
shopping time, even in impoverished Managua.
Or the trouble may be that we have all thought of Advent as an analogy
from Lent. But the keeping of Advent is older than the Feast of
Christmas. While Lent began as a season of preparing those who would be
baptized at Easter, Advent began as a season of preparation for Baptisms,
too-but the baptisms were to be held in January, at the time of the
Epiphany, an older time than Christmas. In the sixth century Advent was
called St Martin's Lent, because it began on the feast of that saint on
November 11, and forty days were observed in the weeks between Martinmass
and the Epiphany. Late in the 6th century when the great Church at Rome
adopted Advent, they made it a liturgical preparation for Christmas, but
added Alleluias, and reduced it to a month. So Advent became in some
places a season which shared the joy of Christmas, 'though the older
emphasis was heavy on Judgment, and on preparation for Baptismal
regeneration. Today, Zechariah foresees a time when "Jerusalem will be
safe to live in" and even Luke, though the pericope from his gospel
foretells betrayal, arrest, imprisonment, indeed a " time of vengeance",
the destruction of the capital city, world-wide destruction,
nevertheless promises narrow escapes for the faithful and bids that "when
these things begin, stand up tall, hold your heads high, because your
liberation is close at hand." Christ is about to return as Liberator.
Jesus is not coming back to us as a Baby again. Not as the Infant of
Prague or the Divino Niño of Latin America. The New Testmaent generally
casts his coming again to make the hydrogen bomb look like a fourth of
July firecracker. And the Bible promises here that this generation will
not pass away till all be fulfilled, till all has taken place. It gives
us some signs of the end times.
One day a generation ago in Advent a "chittlin'" first arrived on my
breakfast plate one Thanksgiving morning on Chicago's west side at the
home of an African-American parishioners named Clyde and Minnie Belton.
They told me chittlins were soul food. Up till then, I thought that only
grits was soul food. But chitterling it's spelled; chittlin' it's
pronounced. The lining of a hog's guts, scraped and cleaned for ever and
boiled for hours, filling the house with slaughterhouse smells. After
stewing and seasoning, they are to aficionados delectable, and to others
detestable. After trying them, I knew that the Bible was right, for :
my generation had indeed not passed away, and yet all had been fulfilled.
Every generation passes away, while we aren't looking. Every generation
since the time of Jesus has been tempted to believe that the generation
referred to in apocalyptic literature is its own, that now indeed we are
living in the "last times." It will now only be a few days, or weeks, or
months; and in every century since, groups and sects have gathered around
their visionary leaders and gone to mountain tops to wait for the Coming.
And in each as well "some foul beast, his day come round at last,
slouches towards Bethlehem to be born," to parody, blaspheme, and betray
the promise. Today, Palestinian children are the holy innocents
slaughtered for the Zionist parody of lebensraum in the West Bank.
A few years ago, it was a group that called itself "Heaven's Gate," but
they turned it into Hell's Gate for those who abandoned hope and entered
there. Today, one of the saner groups--the Seventh Day Adventists--are
among the fastest growing religious groups in the U.S., and while I
believe that they're right about Saturday as the Sabbath, they must
surely be wrong to abandon the soul food of chittlin's or the pork which
Jesus declared kosher, or Sunday as the First Day of Forever. Each
year on the Sunday nearest St. Andrew's day, all of us turn into
Adventists for a season--First Day Adventists, indeed, celebrating the
day beyond days, a day of continuous day, and "light at evening time."
Which is why we are here on the First day of each week--to hold each
other up, to see each other face to face so that each may supply what is
lacking in the other. The Puritans liked to name their children out of
the Bible, and our epistle lesson from Thessalonians supplies one such
name: May the Lord make you "Increase" and abound in love. (Thus one of
the Mathers was named an Increase.) In Advent, we look back to Jesus'
first coming, and forward to his birth in each other's lives. Paul prays
that we may increase and abound in love so that our hearts may be
"established", with no need of alibis, and inculpable before God, Jesus,
and the saints. We shall all be involved with each other's version of the
facts, face to face. "Cara a Cara"--Face To Face-- the revolutionaries
here in Nicaragua used to call their chats with their political leaders.
No holds barred, all faces unveiled. In these meetings, obreros and
campesinos addressed the president of the Republic as an equal-- as a
"Compañero." I remember once in those days I heard a poor woman talk
face to face with Daniel Ortega, president of the republic, at a public
meeting where she sat next to him as a compañera of the Revolution.
The gospel tells us that merely historical phenomena will not presage the
end, that the end times will be signified and dignified also by cosmic
collapse and chaos: signs in the sun and the moon, serious disorders in
nature. But with all of this, it encourages us: Sursum Capita -- "Lift up
your heads" (not lift up your capitalism!)--instead, lift up the part you
think with. Because your liberation is near, Look Up. Sister Penelope
of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin wrote in her little book "The
Coming", that "human beings are rational animals, built [physically] to
look forth beyond themselves in soul and body." We are called "homo
sapiens"-- upright higher mammals. We stand up on our legs and look Face
to Face at each other, "till we have faces" wrote C. S. Lewis, to look
God in the eye. Jesus tells us to look up and raise our heads, not to
cower or look away shifty-eyed and ashamed. As a child, I never thought
much of slouching in a pew, bowing the head and pinching the bridge of
the nose as the calisthenics of prayer. But thus I was trained in what
was called Sabbath School on Sundays. It was years later that I learned
at mass instead: Stand up, SursumCapita, and Sursum Corda. Heads up!
Hearts on High! The day of the Lord is to be searched out, looked into,
sought after, watched for, with lifted hands and hearts.
"Still shine the stars." The sun and the moon and the stars will be
missed by many who never take time to Sursum Capita. We still live in a
world of nature and of grace, and Life is a Miracle. Don't get drunk with
occupations, don't let money-grubbing and even earning a living and
"killing" your time weigh you down. Jesus' coming will then be a snare
instead of a liberation. Jesus says, Look at the fig tree, for example.
You can tell when it's coming into blossom that summer is near (or
whatever tree you have, Luke adds for those far from figs). Look at the
Evergreen of the North, the mango tree of Managua: --in Chicago, when you
see truckloads of balsams, you know Christmas is near, and the return of
old Sol. In Managua, when you see carts full of mangos, you know that
Semana Santa is not far off, and the Risen Lord. Jesus says there are
also vital signs that Jesus' Second Time is about to burst upon us.
Some years ago in Chicago, just after Thanksgiving, two little boys,
eight or ten years old, nearly knocked me down as they flailed their way
out of a revolving door in a downtown department store. They and the
security guard who pursued them knocked over the fat red kettle of the
Salvation Army Santa Claus out front. His bell, and the kettle's crash,
got everyone's attention as the urchins vaulted like tiny reindeer--"On
Comet! On Cupid! On Donder and Blitzen!" I was secretly glad they got
away. Their grand theft announced to me that the Holiday season had
arrived. Again this year, the TV news assures us that all is going
smoothly--sales are up in all the stores. Shoplifting is merely an
alternative form of shopping--a variant form of consumerism. Shopping
is the chief sacrament of consumerist culture and stealing is attendant
to it, as Lying is attendant upon political campaigns. The shoplifting
of mischievous kids is as nothing to the thefts on the scale of the Enron
scandal and the continuing theft of the world by capitalism.
John Paul II wrote years ago (in 1988) in his encyclical Sollicutudo Rei
Socialis (4:28): "All of us experience firsthand the sad effects of this
blind submission to pure consumerism. In the first place a crass
materialism, and at the same time a radical dissatisfaction because one
quickly learns, unless one is shielded from the flood of publicity and
ceaseless, tempting offers of products, that the more one possesses the
more one wants, while deeper aspirations remain unsatisfied and perhaps
even stifled."
Paul wants us to have an increase this Advent time, and prays that the
increase will come in the love we have towards each other and towards all
human beings, not an increase in material goods (not for ourselves at
least, who have so much) but an increase in, an abounding abundance of
love. And Paul wants us to have blameless hearts. I now have had a
total of seven coronary bypasses, so the analogy of hearts has made more
and more sense to me each year. The ancient world believed that the
heart was the center of emotions--whereas its relationship to the
circulatory system is nowhere set forth in the Scriptures. But they do
set forth that it had something to do with the center of life and
feeling. They knew it could be choked with the cares of the world and the
fat of the land, though they didn't know about cholesterol. The prayer of
the apostle is that our lives may be capable of taking on an increase in
love, that we have our hearts established, that is, strengthened, and
blameless; that our stress tests will show that it is functioning just
fine. The surfeit of consumer goods in our lives blind us to the
scarcity and hunger all around us, usually out of sight. "One of the
greatest injustices in the contemporary world," John Paul continues in
Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, "consists precisely in this, that the ones who
possess much are relatively few and those who possess almost nothing are
many. It is the injustice of the poor distribution of the goods and
services originally intended for all." The vast expenditures of the Me
First World on armaments and weapons systems, symbolized by the security
guard outside the Christmas windows at Marshall Fields, becomes a part of
the consumerist system. As Paul talks of our hearts, Jesus talks about
our heads: "Sursum Capita" --and we sing our response: "We lift them to
the Lord." Lift like bread and wine our brains and thoughts. Our
human-ness, our reason, our critical faculties, our analysis of history
and current events. John Paul calls us to be in solidarity with our
neighbors everywhere in the world with a solidarity that is "not a
feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so
many people both far and near" but is instead, "a firm and persevering
determination to commit oneself to the common good."
To lift up our heads enables us to see beyond our own plates, which
already have too much upon them. "Heads up!" to look out how we may do
justice, look out actively for ways to DO the gospel, and look for the
Second Advent.
The events which Jesus describes as being a sign of the coming of the
Child of Humankind are really things that happen in every age of our
history. Eclipses, solar and lunar, comets, meteors, occur in every age.
There is political dislocation in every century, nations in perplexity,
elections in peril. Hurricanes and typhoons and terremotos and volcanoes
in them all. There is the phenomenon of human failure and despair and the
"very powers of heaven" are shaken, and the faiths and religions of
earth. Empires perish, philosophies that shaped the centuries are
toppled, and certainties that comforted the masses are snatched away.
But Jesus says that is in these events and through them that we may
always discern a human future-- "the Son of Man"--or "the truly Human
One" means that at least--that we may discern a new humanity on the
way, 'though in a cloud, and with strength and authority from beyond.
The winter solstice, on December 21st, when the day is shortest and the
night longest, is when the turn-around happens, and it is Christmas time,
when the old world draws on through the first of shortening nights
towards the Dayspring from on High. The prophet Zechariah spoke of the
day of the Lord as one in which the cold and frost will be gone--that
there will be Day, and "light at evening time". We accomplish that easily
enough by falling our clocks back in the Fall, and springing them forward
in the Spring. These too are symbols for the coming of the Lord, and his
return with all he saints to take part with us in a new way of relating
to each other in the human community, a new way of being which does not
have to do with getting and spending, but with loving and being. When you
see these things happen, then you can know that the Reign of God is near.
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 3rd series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
(1) from Prayer in the Morning: A Book for Day's Beginning. Jim Cotter.
Cairns Publications, Sheffield, 1990. Copyright Jim Cotter.
Copies available from Cairns Publications, 47 Firth Park Avenue,
Sheffield s5 6hf. England.
(2) from Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry,
assembled & edited by Robert Atwan, George Dardess, Peggy Rosenthal
Oxford and New York: Oxfod University Press. 1998.
(3) from Jesus the Heretic, by Conrad Noel. London: The Religious Book
Club, 1939.
(4) from Markings, Dag Hammarskjöld, translated from the Swedish
(Vägmärken) by Leif Sjöbeg & W.H.Auden. New York: Alfred A Knopf. 1964.
Appeal for Your charity in solidarity with the ministry of Casa Ave
Maria.
Budget cuts amongst donors who have long generously paid the small
salaries of the teachers in our Escuelita, our "little school" next door
to the guest house, have now compelled me to ask for the financial help
of those who receive Homily Grits or benefit from someone else having
read, marked, learned, or inwardly digested them. Many of you know the
work of the Casa in this poor barrio, and the classes we offer free to
neighborhood youth, in English, computers, piano, guitar, singing, and
dancing. And the ministry of healing we offer in helping people with the
costs of medicine and dentistry. And the hospitality we offer to
pilgrims and solidarity workers, along with the opportunity to enter into
the life of the plain people of Nicaragua, our solidarity with
Nicaraguan artists, artisans, poets, musicians.
Some of you know also of my own devotion to the struggles of the
Palestinian and Arab peoples, and of my pilgrimage with Chritian
Peacemaker Teams to Hebron, and to the ancient holy land of Abraham and
Sarah, in Iraq, a year ago. I would like very much to continue these
various ministries, and as I enter my 72nd year in January I want to go
back to Cuba with the usual suspects, who are old friends. So this foot
note is a blatant appeal for dollar charity in solidarity with these
requests. I put all of my begs in this one askit. Checks by the usual
routes, or to me directly: Casa Ave Maria, Box # (Apartado) RP-10,
Managua, Nicaragua, C.A. Hasta la victoria siempre. GRANT IN MANAGUA