Luke 10:38-42 http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=51963661
In Time Magazine July 30th, 2007 issue an article by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen appeared with this same title as a response to the cry of the liberal catholics about the Pope freeing the use of the before rationed Tridentine Mass, which of course was in Latin. A photocopy of the article in question will be in the back of the Church for you to pick up. Actually, thank you to the three people who took the three copies of my sermon last week, I was moved, there will be more this week.
So I was curious at this article I Confess I Want Latin. I thought is was going to be humorous rebuke of the papal decision. But I was impressed by its originality and candor. The author is the result of the marriage of an Irish ex-priest and a Japanese Buddhist woman. The offspring of a strictly observant Roman catholic family who with time and maturity kind of fell of the wagon, sort of, but considers herself a progressive Catholic.
I was shocked not only about that but also recently the Pope reinstated a Vatican Council II hidden-somewhere-piece-of-doctrine that says that in non-roman catholic churches the true Church founded by Christ does not subsist fully (as it does in the Roman Church). To say it simply, we all, children of the 16th century Reformation, with all of our different varieties, are ecclesial communities rather than full churches in the Roman sense. Nothing new about that, in fact in the sixties that was considered an improvement from the Council of Trent, the same Council who approved the mass in question, who condemned the Reformation as pure heresy, worthy of the Inquisition's human barbecues, in the name of Jesus.
I was, no, I am shocked about this Pope statements, back in May he also praise the coming of Christianity to Latin America and described the fruit of the cordial encounter as beneficial to local Indians. That raised more than eye brows, among none other that maverick Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez who demanded an apology. The encomienda system which was supposed to be a trusteeship whereby the colonist will receive a group of Indians to educate them in the Christian faith. In exchange for colonist "services" the Indians will pay with their labor working either in the mines or tilling the land. Reality it amount to slavery with a sactimonious excuse. To this day Latin American "Indians" are paying the price of the violence met by the conquistadors in the name of Jesus.
An Iraqi Kurdish woman by the name Banaz Mahmod, 20 years of age, was subjected to the 2-1/2 hour ordeal before she was garroted with a bootlace. The perpetrators were her father and brother and some other associates. The reason for Banaz's "honor killing" was because she had fallen in love with a man other her husband from an arranged marriage when she was 17. This happened in the United Kingdom, in the name of Allah.
When on behalf of organized religion crimes like these were committed and continue to be committed, why then are we surprised that the author of Time's article and indeed many, many other people have chosen to stay away. Why are we surprised that in Ireland in one single year only four priests were ordained. Which begs the question who is going to sing the Tridentine mass in question? and in Latin?. There is not a simple answer to that, indeed their is a host of factors. The introduction of the car and with it the mobility and choice provided to American families. The availability of television and telephone as an alternative both of entertainment and social networking. the sexual revolution of the sixties will be some of the outside social forces contributing. But the church's paralysis in the face of these challenges and outright lack of creativity other than "elevator music" of the seventies and eighties were not a good defense. The author, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen describe her experience of church as she says "There were times I thought I would pass out from boredom. There were times I probably did". And did all in the name of Jesus.
Before I continue, let me say that the Martha and Mary story of this Sunday is one of the famous one, like last Sunday Good Samaritan and because of that, is somewhat beat up. I want to say a few things in terms of biblical scholarship first.
The story places Jesus, a single male, in a house with two single women, one of which owns the house. Some commentators, claim that possibly there were other people in the house because that was usual in Palestine many siblings living under one roof, but that is not what the text informs us. Martha the owner welcomes Jesus in her abode and goes to prepare for her guest according to custom, while her sister Mary sits at the feet of Jesus, in the position of a student listening to an itinerant rabbi, which was not according to custom. Mary is listening, in the wrong room, since parlors were for men and kitchen for women, while Martha scolds disrespectfully a male, a rabbi and a guest. “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” telling him what to do. There is as I said a violence and disregard of pre-assigned spaces and roles, gendered as if it were. The whole staging of the story breathes danger and rupture of patriarchal and nomadic tradition. Communication between male and female, when they were not close relatives, was not acceptable, still the case in the Solomon Islands where do you have to pay money if you do, in other places can cost a woman's life. Women were not supposed to become disciples nor they were supposed to scold and boss around a guest rabbi.
In terms of application to modern day Christians, even renown author Barbara Crafton falls for the busyness application when commenting this passage. We could not understand busyness in Palestine 1rst century, simply because our busyness most of the time is borne out of excess of wealth and time. We plan to get busy because our machines, washing machine, dishwasher, PDA-cum-smart-phone save considerable amount of time and we are left so restless by the efficient capitalist mode, we acquire so much speed transferred to us from our machines, we want to emulate them so much, the push our interaction so fast, that we can not conceive doings things at a slower pace. In agricultural Palestine, when you plant you have no choice but to wait and hope that water and sun and the will of God will bring about the seasonal miracle of a plant coming out of a seed. It is in this wating where the yearly cycle of ruin or salvation of subsistence farmers were made.
Busyness in Jesus's Palestine is nothing like our busyness nor Mary's listening has nothing to do with our need for slowing down and become introspective. People in Palestine, like in today's poor nations have to get busy to survive. Martha and Mary for me are study in the powerful and deeper countercultural message of Jesus. Both Martha and Mary equally do what they were not supposed to do, from the start. The whole story is terrible scandalous and defiant of conventional wisdom especially as it has do with gender roles. The story is about patriarchal societies that have defined specific roles for women, fencing out large group as someone inferior and subservient, which are supposed not to be seeing nor heard. And when those boundaries are broken, they should be put back in their places at all cost, even if it requires killing, like in the story of Banaz Mahmod. And let us not get high and mighty vs Islamic societies, we have done and continue to do even worse.
What is surprising is that Jesus engages Martha like an equal and defends Mary in her mischief, he deals with them both as he will do regularly with his male disciples. Correcting behaviour and calling Martha to higher and loftier goals, beyond pans and pots. Telling Martha that things of God are also for women in spite what her father told her, that God is always the better part.
This brings me to our article in Time magazine, Lisa the author explains why she wants the Tridentine Latin mass back: "It almost goes without saying that as a young, progressive-minded American Catholic, I'm at odds with many of the church's rules and with much of its politics", so why Latin, why the old rites and she tells us: "I want to hear Mass sung in a language I don't understand because too often I don't like what I hear in English". I am ambivalent about Lisa Takeuchi piece. She like Mary is on her knees at a literary confessional, then like Martha she is telling this archetypal parish priest her conditions for coming back. She wants to privatize religion, make the church deft and mute, andf stripped to be a ritual society. She says In a world unmoored by violence and uncertainty, there is something deeply soothing about participating in ancient rituals practiced by so many.
On the other hand, I like Lisa because she is what many women both in America and the world would love to be, like Martha telling the church/mosque/synagogue like it is. I may not like what she says, but it could be the start of an interesting inter-generational conversation. She also raises the issue of ancient rites as central and important for this new generation born in a world "unmoored by violence and uncertainty". The fluidity of our social cultural paradigms at the moment (which i suspect will become more so with rapid advance of technology) evokes more sociological approaches to the question of ritual beyond personal preferences as containment of meaning discontinuity, if one is to think of Lisa as representing a general angst in American society.
Clifford Geertz called culture a web of meaning, inherited patterns of our creation from where we hang. Rappaport considered them so powerful as to make us slaves of their pre-established responses, even when our very survival is at stake. Jesus did not hesitate to go against the social mores of his time, have no problem of accusing his own culture of betrayal of God, have no problem breaking barriers when these were in the way of meeting and enabling people, no matter who they may be, to become his disciples, to become lovers of God. Martha and Mary represented just one of those groups. He demanded consistently a stripping away of the layers of rabbinical interpretation when necessary to make God available to common people. People who were illiterate, poor or belonging to groups considered inferior by his own culture. Samaritans, sinners, women, children, sick, poor were welcome to his table.
Lisa, the Eucharist you want sang in Latin is not ordinary meal offered by an ordinary host. This is a meal where all are invited to take part, even those who were not schooled enough to appreciate ritual mambo-jumbo that will soothe their souls in the face of "this unmoored world". For the 3/4 of today's world have lived and died in such a world and for them, the Eucharist as feast for all those rejects called by Jesus to sit with dignity at the Table of the Kingdom must be comprehensible. George Herbert, the great Anglican poet, once pictured himself coming to Communion and feeling uncomfortable by the attention given him, he was uncomfortable because equality at the Table of the Lord has been superseded by cultural understandings of his importance. Precisely, ritual without meaning or significance.
This dinner Table has a name card in every place that says "you are my friend", we are called from isolation into gathering, from loneliness into community. Our host, has set the table, offered Himself as meal and expands his table to include everyone, even those who could not tell Latin and Mandarin apart. He, the Lord of the Eucharistic Table has chosen you and you and you and me to come and sit and dine and have a merry heart. The price pay was very high, since he offered his life on the cross to validate his message of inclusion and healing.
My niece in Cuba, she is about thirty and she had a mastectomy, she said she did it because she wants to look after her children and when she found out that she had a growth in her left breast that turned up to be malignant, she said she did not have to think too much. It make me think of Jesus being the bread that came from heaven and the incredible power and responsibility of nurturing those to whom you have a duty to. How God was able to sacrifice his own self for the salvation of the world. Jesus seemingly feeds us with nothing better than his own self, in the most common but also the ever present at the dinner table "bread". He is the manna that will feed the people of Israel as the walk away from "Egyptian slavery" to the true freedom of the messianic promised land. Paul writing to the Church in Galatia says, quiete rightly:
You are all sons (and daughters) of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.,
