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HOMILY GRITS 28C: November 18, 2001
H O M I L Y G R I T S
Twenty Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
(Proper 28C)
November 18, 2001
©Copyright 2001 by Grant M. Gallup
Book of Common Prayer lectionary
Malachi 3:13-4:2a,5-6 The sun of justice shall rise with healing in its wings
Psalm 98 Cantate Domino: Sing to the Lord a new song
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 Anyone unwilling to work should not eat
Luke 21:5-19 Do not be terrorized
Revised Common Lectionary (trial use:)
Isaiah 65:17-25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together
Isaiah 12 Ecce, Deus. The first song of Isaiah.
or
Malachi 4:1-2a as above
Psalm 98 as above
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 as above
Luke 21:5-19 as above
--------------------------------------
"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 it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice."
Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice" seems more and more apt, for we have now
arranged the world so that more and more now it ends in flames for many,
and millions more know the killing frost of hate. We nightmared for years
that the fire of nuclear holocaust would destroy us all and little
suspected that the smaller fires of pirated jets crashed into buildings
would suffice for the perishing of our Proud pentagon and towers of power.
If it comes to that, a nuclear holocaust will be followed by the icy
blast of a nuclear winter which little of the planet's life would survive.
"The day comes burning like an oven when all the arrogant and all evildoers
will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of
armies, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch." Malachi's
vision of the Day of Judgment is ancient, borrowed from the Iranian
ancestors, who saw the world ending in fire. Malachi doesn't see an end
to everyone here, but a surgical strike in which only the unjust and
arrogant will be laid low. When Raging Reagan surgically struck Libya, he
killed Muhammar Kadafy's little baby girl, and when Junior Bushman aimed
at Kabul, he killed one of Bin Laden's children, too. Not to worry--he has
lots more, by fifty wives in veils. But Kadafy and Osama Bin Laden are
unscathed. In both cases, these millionaire terrorizers ended up or
began on C.I.A. payrolls. Malachi's vision is of a fire which is more
accurately aimed, and delivered. The fire burns away the stubble which
hinders growth, and leaves no root or branch of evil to survive and
propagate. What remains? "You who fear my name--for you the sun of
justice shall rise, with healing in its wings".
The prophets often preach and write as if their times were Last Times. But
they also see beyond
the cataclysms to a world made new by the goodness of God. A few years ago
Francis Fukuyama almost persuaded all of us that the triumph of the U.S.
and its imperial capitalism had brought us to "the end of history." Nothing
of importance could happen any more. More recently, Samuel Huntington has
written woefully of the "Clash of Civilizations" and racist doomsday seers
fortell a Holy War (or misspeak themselves and call it a Crusade) of the
West against an impertinent Islam. All around him in the world Malachi saw
the worship of Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, and the image of he
Egyptian sun god, the golden disk-- a sun of justice, with therapy in its
wings. Charles Wesley used the phrase in his Christmas hymn, "Risen with
healing in his wings, light and life to all he brings, hail the Sun of
Righteousness, Hail the heaven-born prince of peace."
The two images reminded me strongly of a phenomenon I did not fully grasp
as a child growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In the autumn
days when "frost was spectre gray", the time was called "Fall", and soon
after the spectacular cascade of colored leaves, the fields and farmlands
have a blasted look, bleak, covered with stubble and withered cornstalks.
The trees, as Shakespeare wrote, are "bare ruined choirs where late the
sweet birds sang". Winter comes not far behind, and covers all with tall
drifts of snow, and "blood is nipped and ways be foul". In Springtime,
after great thaw, the stubble however remains, and before new growth can
take place in the farmers' fields, across the hills and meadows there were
the Spring burn-off fires, when the Volunteer Fire Departments of the
villages round about supervised the deliberate torching of these stubbled
hills, that they would be burned clean of the old and made ready for new
growth. From our back yard, I could look around see the thrilling and
terrifying panorama of the hillsides aflame--fires rising as if in a
snapshot of the Day of Judgment. But the point of it was not destruction
for its own sake, but to make way for the New, so that the Sun, now
beginning its Ascent, could send its healing rays once more into the earth
and bring forth the life stored there below. This was the Baptism of
life-giving fire. The seeming destruction, frightening and spectacular,
hid a secret new life, about to rise, as resolutely as the fire fighters
had come to set the fields aflame.
Nowadays when we think of the judgment of God and the coming of the
Commonwealth, we think first of alarm and disaster; we think indeed of "the
end of all things." But this leaves us terrorized, and most believers have
for centuries lived in horror of the Eschaton, or as Muslims call it, "The
Final Scream". But the first Christians lived in glad expectation of the
Judgment and the coming back of Christ in triumph, because they thought
beyond the Spring burn-off to the New Life, the new planting. They were
aware that the world could only be rearranged according to the mind of
Jesus if the world as it is would give way to the world as it will be, and
had been baptized with fire. Nowadays the only believers who seem eager
for the End Times are self-destructive fanatics, Adventist wackos from
Waco, or off-the-wall heretic Muslims eager for a fools' paradise beyond
their oblations of blood and fire to an Angry God.
Like Holy Rollers waiting for the Rapture, they imagine mass murder will
leave the saved unscathed and they will be given quit-claim deeds to parcel
out the forsaken acres the rest of us leave behind. The apostles and
evangelists instead saw a New World coming, and the letter to the church at
Thessalonica corrects some of them who thought this meant they could give
up worrying about this world any more. Some had already decided not to
participate in the present
world, and had given up their jobs. "We order you to keep away from any
member who is living in idleness, loafing--for you never saw me
lollygagging or freeloading when I stayed with you" he writes. "We worked
for a living, that we might not be a burden--I give you this principle to
work on, If anyone would not work, neither should they eat." Now this
obiter dictum is much cited by right wing religionists to condemn the
unemployed, or those on welfare, and those who cannot find work in the
capitalist system. This false preaching turns the Scriptures on the
victims of capitalism who are kept out of work by a system that manipulates
the labor of human beings as a commodity, and keeps many of them stashed in
the slave cabins of unemployment. Like the welfare velveeta cheesefood
stored in our mountain caves to keep dairy prices up and to hell with the
hungry. The Apostolic letter did not aim this teaching about the value of
work as a shotgun at those who could not find work but levelled it at
those who were idlers, pimping off the sweat of others, parasites living
off "the surplus value of the labor of the proletariat."
All the wealth of nations--including that of all millionaires and coupon
clippers--is produced by the workers of the world. Nothing is produced by
money itself, which is a substitute for the barter of goods and services,
and it is the working woman or the working man (or the working child!) in
the factory or on the farm or at the file cabinet who produces all the
wealth--not just the miniscule subsistence taken home in the wage envelope
but also all the money that pours into the parasitic accounts of the
capitalists. Market manipulation moves money, but does not produce wealth.
A famous encyclical of U.S. Roman Catholic bishops fifteen years ago
declared "There is nothing wrong with being rich, so long as there's nobody
poor." If capitalism is so good for everyone, why isn't it working for the
poor?
One night in a taxicab in Chicago, returning from the airport after my
first visit to Nicaragua in 1985, I talked with the Syrian driver, who told
me he had been born in Damascus. I gave him the address, in the Black
ghetto where I lived at St. Andrew's vicarage. He was reluctant to go
there. "You live in that neighborhood?" he asked. Then: "Those people don't
want to work. . . they are just lazy." I shot back, "That's a lie that
white racists have told you, and they say the same thing about you. Our
people are kept from work because they are Black, and have you heard the
other lie they tell about Arabs? That you are all terrorists." This was a
long time ago, in 1985, and it's still true. The true terrorist then was
Reagan, who put guns into the hands of Iranian children, and then guns into
the hands of the Taliban to oust the Communists, and now the U.S. puts
guns into the hands of the Northern Alliance youth that they may kill the
Taliban youth, whose guns it also paid for.
Now let's look beyond the fundamentalist application of Scripture to the
true meaning of the oracles for our time. The fire of God's judgment that
is coming does not terrify us who believe. And Jesus tells us in the
gospel that the institutions we have come to believe are permanent ones are
not in fact so. The disciples thought, as did everyone, that the Temple
would last forever. It was still being rebuilt in Jesus' time, with the
services of thousands of workers, for forty six years, and when it was more
or less completed in the early 60's 18,000 people were put out of work,
helping to provoke the Jerusalem revolt that led to its destruction. Ann
Wroe, in her "Pontius Pilate", writes: "It was disconerting proof of Jesus'
radicalism that he seemed to take pleasure in imagining it wrecked, even if
rebuilt afterward."
Its facade was decorated with slabs of polished white marble, and gold
plating flashed brightly in the sun. The 'temple' itself was contained
within a complex of courts, cloisters, and chambers which Herod
embellished. "The size of these perfectly cut stones can astonish a
twentieth century visitor who has seen the Manhattan skyline just as it
amazed the rustic Palestinian Jews of the first century", wrote A. N.
Wilson, in his "Paul: the Mind of an Apostle." It was built on the
highest point of the hill now occupied by the Dome of the Rock, with its
flashing gold cupola over the Mosque whence Muhammad flew to heaven. The
work was so holy that all the masons were consecrated as priests. Yet it
had been rebuilt by Herod, the ambitious Arab, with money from the Romans.
It didn't match the 3 billion dollars a year that the Empire now sends to
its client ruler,
Ariel Sharon, but it was a substantial patronage.
And it was ruled over by a high priest who was a client ruler, exercising
power on behalf of the Empire. Augustus sent gifts to decorate the
sanctuary, and Tiberius paid for bullocks and lambs to be sacrificed there
daily with prayers for his safety. Rather like the current liturgies at
the National Cathedral, as the worshippers gratefully sing the Battle
Hymn of the Republic, with George W. Bush seated in the first row of chairs.
Yet all but Jewish males were excluded from its precincts, and 'though
some thought the head of an ass was worshipped in the Holy of Holies, it
was in fact bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. The business of all temples
everywhere in the world, dedicated to whatever deity, was the labor of
abbatoirs and shambles, sacred slaughter houses. Christians would replace
the sprinkling of animal blood there with the drinking of human blood in a
mystery, from a common cup, by common folk, in a commonwealth of God, at
every common table in the Empire. Common-ism.
The crucial thing for you to rememer, Jesus says, is that this is a time to
make your witness. This will be the time of sociological and political
revolution. The natural phenomena that frighten us
--earthquakes, floods, famines, the pestilence of AIDS, the horror of
anthrax--do not signify "The End". Don't make the mistake of thinking
that's the way the end will come. The End that is promised by God is an
End to the way the world is organized politically, sociologically,
ethnically. Jesus talks about arrests, courtrooms, prisons, and
witnessing. He talks about trials and testimonies and resistance,
eloquence and defiant speech in the witness stand, the rearrangement of
loyalties, betrayals and endurance, ruptures of friendships and relations,
and the triumph of the faithful.
Emanuel Swendenborg declared that the Last Judgment had taken place in
1757, the year in which the poet William Blake was born, and so the idea
appealed to him, too. Swendenborg's New Jerusalem Church declared the Old
Church dead, its faith abolished, its Bible shortened, Death abolished and
the Second Coming begun. The enchantment didn't last, and he finally saw
that Swendenborg was "wrong in endeavoring to explain to the rational
faculty what the reason cannot comprehend." Charles Taze Russell's
"Jehovah's Witnesses" have also frequently had to revise their dates and
reschedule the End of All Things. As did Ellen White and her 7th Day
Adventists, and every other sect that has a date and time for the Eschaton.
The whole point of stories of Judgment is the opportunity to be called as a
witness. It is a time to call attention to what it is in our civilization
that needs to be clashed with, that needs to be burned off, raked, and
removed. It is a time to direct our attention to what among us must be
set afire,
what must indeed be torched. "Prepare ye the way of the Lord," John
Baptist will be yelling at us in a week or two, in Advent as in the End
Time.. And in these last days of the year Jesus says "This is our chance
to witness to the Coming Age. By your endurance you will win true life for
yourselves."
In these days, after I watch the dismal news on television, more dismal
and mendacious on CNN than on BBC or DeutscheWelle, by the way, I am
sometimes relieved when the thunder and lightning of our Nicaraguan winter
suddenly strikes dumb the tube and the fan, and dims the lights. I must
then go sit at the open door if I am to have light and share a graceful
breeze from the mango tree, and watch the cleansing violence of the
relampagos and the rain as they slice and sluice into the patio. I do not
think thunderstorms a sign of God's wrath or of the end times. Instead, I
see with Gerard Manley Hopkins that
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur", 1877, 1918)
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 2nd series now on-line: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits