MANNERS AT THE ROYAL TABLE

Proper 17C September 2, 2007

Luke 14:1-14

There was a funeral for an Englishman that lived in the US for most of his adult life, a prizewinner journalist and peace activist. He used to come to the noon service in Spanish, language he mastered. The funeral was not fully formal by any means. However, a good number of people came dressed in black, both men and women. The people in attendance one could say was as in any funeral a mixed bag, but I will be tempted to say that mostly were middle class and educated. At the end of the funeral and interment, there was food and we have to serve it in the yard due to the construction in the parish hall. The weather was perfect, the sun was slowly setting in the horizon, and people were engaged in friendly conversation. When all of the sudden I see, horrors of horrors, the people of the Spanish Alcoholic anonymous emerging from their meeting and going directly to help themselves, somewhat hesitantly, others not so hesitant, of food and drink of this gentleman’s funeral meal.

I was uncomfortable, they did not belong there, there were out of place, chattering loudly in Spanish and mingling with the fury of life with a very different crowd. For a moment, the English group looked upon them with curiosity and surprise, although not for long, they returned to their conversations, elegant, quiet and interesting. While crisscrossed by Hispanics talking to each other not about the meaning of life and death, Bush and Hilary, but about parties to go to, anniversary dinners, others meetings and family problems.

I stepped back to watch, to observe the different reactions, just in a few cases, the boundaries between the two groups were open and exchanges took place, but for most each group although mingled physically, remained separated both socially and culturally. Each of the groups assuming that the other was suffering from some form of social autism and therefore incapable of communicating.

In Driving Miss Daisy, Hoke (Morgan Freeman) the black driver of this Jewish white educator (Jessica Tandy), two social rejects themselves, drives his boss to a dinner offered by the progressive, educated classes of Atlanta to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to listen to him speak. Miss Daisy rationalizes why Hoke, the black driver, should stay in the car while she, a white woman, comes in to listen to this leader of the disenfranchised blacks. He surely will feel uncomfortable. He will be out of place. She does it for him, to avoid him trouble.

Very liberal white Canadian theology school classmate of mine, now a priest, invited both Adria and myself to dinner on Thanksgiving, that was our first year in the country and we were not missing anything because we knew nothing of the occasion. By the way, Hispanics in the US call Thanksgiving Turkey Day -El Dia del Pavo- and a story has developed in which a turkey saved the first pilgrims, warning them of an Indian attack. In Thanksgiving, the savior turkey then becomes food, in a Eucharistic way, but I digress. During this very traditional dinner, with pumpkin pie, horseradish, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and gravy.

Back to my liberal white schoolmate, he was lecturing me on things I will need to be in the lookout for during our stay in Canada. He suggested that I should buy plastic boots for winter weather. At this point, his wife interjected and asked him. Will you wear them yourself? That was a rhetorical question, which she answered herself, no, you will not. Then she proceeded to tell me what kind of shoes we would need for the winter, regardless of their price.

We never felt so uncomfortable and hurt, in Cuba, we were second-class citizens because of our faith; we were second-class in Canada because of our social class and ethnic origin. It was the first time –we had arrived in September and Thanksgiving in Canada is the second Monday in October- and it has stayed with us not with resentment, since I realize that, my schoolmate was trying to be helpful while simultaneously not able to help to feel superior.

Teenagers at school live in a constant popularity contest, group exclusion and inclusion is one of the sources of power in an otherwise powerless situation. School divides along clear lines of power, adults are in charge and students are not. Teachers stand, while students sit.

If you find yourself on a bed in a hospital, you have relinquished control to the medical profession, who stands while you try to make sense of what they are saying about you, lying on your back.

Not only we are all in power relationships, but these are also acted out, played out in smaller theatricals units, improvising in the societal microcosm, larger “texts”, and larger politics of exclusion. These rituals not only reinforce but also contain the inherent and obvious inequality on the power balance, helping in its perpetuating.

This morning Gospel is not about good manners at the table, but quite clearly, about the nature of the relationships of power in the Kingdom, in the rulership of God, in God’s government if you like. The table at which Jesus was seated, hostile by all records, he turned into a map of the Kingdom, of the Reign to come, the one we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer, your Kingdom come, your will be done in heaven as on earth.

Theocracy is a bad word this days, and all examples we ever had of it has end up always doing the opposite of they proclaim, does not matter which religion. We religious people have consistently twisted the words of our scriptures to justify violence and policies of exclusion. Richard Dawkins has argued, with historical evidence at his disposal, that religion breeds hatred, because religion by necessity needs to exclude. That is, two truths could not co-exist, either one is correct and the other wrong.

I prefer to talk about the Kingdom, the Reign of God as an eschatological, that is -of the last things-, the end of the world- event that places in the horizon of history and avoids our intervention and therefore our control of its meaning. I become troubled when I hear both right and left speaking of bringing the Kingdom about or hastening its coming. For me it rest in the initiative of God over which we have no control. Jesus spoke of it as eschatological event and as something that erupts among us, which takes places within the cobweb of our relationships.

What we have of the Kingdom is what Jesus preached about, mostly in metaphor and image, escaping the precision of ideas confided to text and liberating it into the world of images, far more flexible and with greater possibilities of sustaining hope.

One of my problems with Dawkins is that he teaches at Oxford, I presume with a good salary, that allows him to ponder meaning and allows him to engage the world without a Utopia, since his paycheck or pension are secured. For two thirds of the population of the world that is not an option. The presumption of Dawkins is that all can be resolved, that the actual root cause of all is the holding of ideas, even in the form of Cartesian clear and distinct concepts. I believe that outside the Eurocentric paradigm that is as foreign as it could be. The embodiment of belief is not simply a textual creed that is subscribed to, but rather a far more complex and rich interaction of ritual, culture and art. I cannot think what will be more helpful to the Market, whose law of offer and demand is one of the few left intact in the post-modern world, that a world without hope. A world was finally –having- is all that matters, and –being- is just a lost memory.

In Israel, the meal table played a very important role, not only in the family, but in society as well. When an Israelite provided a meal for a guest, even a stranger, it assured him not only of the host’s hospitality, but also of his protection.

Also in Israel (as elsewhere), the meal table was closely tied to one’s social standing. “Pecking order” was reflected in the position one held at the table. The meal was one those theatrical instances where power relationships were played out, the meal therefore partook of the policies of exclusion agreed by all.

Let us examine the passage in question today, Jesus is not among friends –leader of the Pharisees- and –watching him closely- will give it away. The parable is said as the result of Him seeing the guest, violating norm, helping themselves to the seats of honor, instead of waiting to be invited to be seated by the host - he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor-. The parable then is rather a not so oblique insult to his table companions, and Jesus does using Scripture Proverbs 25:6-7 advises: “Do not put yourself forward in the king's presence or stand in the place of the great; for it is better to be told, ‘Come up here,’ than to be put lower in the presence of a noble”.

The second portion of the text is mostly advice to the host, in terms of his guest list. In the first portion, he shames the guests, in the second he embarrasses the host. In a way, -you had it coming- by the crowd that you invite, instead of inviting - friends, brothers, relatives or rich neighbors- you ought to invite - the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind-. If you notice, the guests offered by Him intentionally are equal in category number to the ones that the host has invited, as no leaving any doubts about his demand for a total replacement.

This was no ordinary meal, this is the Sabbath meal. Meals of this nature were special, were influenced probably by the symposium, a Hellenistic gathering of males, of high upbringing, and educated who gather after a meal to listen and to talk about the arts. Equality of its integrants is very important, through this form of bonding, the Polis was controlled from Homer onward and its influence was widespread in the Mediterranean.

Therefore, it is to this symposium of Pharisees, well versed in Scripture, righteous males, educated and perhaps relatively well off whom Jesus disqualifies and introduces societal scum as the would-be members. It is like Julie inviting the winos of Athena Park to her daughter’s birthday party. What they will be doing there? How could they converse about the Scriptures, politics and society? What they would know? I mean the lame, the blind, and the poor? What would they contribute to this gabfest of the spirit? The symposium will be effectively terminated, ended.

The Kingdom as Jesus conceived it will be -tabula rasa- as flat as the table, where social conventions of exclusion will be ignored, where the purpose of meal sharing is the sharing of people themselves, not what they can contribute, not what they can bring. Whether it is power, riches or intelligentsia.

That the sick, the lame, the blind, the poor are not so because God willed, but rather because we did.

yee sung

yee sung, originally uploaded by lotusutol.

Jesus's wedding Banquet

Antique Festival

Antique Festival, originally uploaded by benthomasrockstar.

This is the the goal set up before the masses, one to aspire to, a wedding banquet without guests

2/12 lunch

2/12 lunch, originally uploaded by Janakay.

This is American society version of the Kigdom Wedding Banquet, one step away from war rations

I do not know you Luke 13:22-30

The front cover of Time magazine this week present us with a smile-less photo of "the saint of the gutter" with the title -the secret life of Mother Teresa-. I bet that some people thought this was some saucy expose of the private life of Mother Teresa. I confess to be less of a fan of the nun, now in her way to sainthood, thanks in part to the revelation by one of my professors at University in Canada about an encounter with her in which she behave in what my professor -a nun herself- described as -irrational commandeering attitude- the excellent article by David van Biema is a reflection on the book by the principal advocate for Mother Teresa's cause of beatification The Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuck. The book is called Mother Teresa: Come be my light and will become available in September.

The book is the publication of the would-be saint personal letters to confessors and superiors. For over fifty years she complained bitterly about Jesus absence in her emotional and spiritual life. She felt like a spurned lover. She writes "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet [ a spiritual confidant at the time]. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand.". As I continued reading the article I kept looking for the scandal that the title seems to promise and increasingly I realized that there was none. The title was made for the American public by some commercially savvy editor but whoever is on a spiritual path knows that doubt and faith are twin sisters. Whoever had a superficial knowledge of the Christian mystics knows that the term "Dark Night of the Soul" came from experience of the 16Th century saint John of the Cross of profoundly arid and unemotional faith journey. Eventually towards the end of the article the writer eventually makes the point that for the mystics, this kind of language was not new.

It is Rene Descartes himself, the father of consistency in western thought who said If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. Mother Teresa seems to have done just that, but if one is to believe the article in Time, she did it most of her professed life as nun, as founder of her order and as a spiritual guru of our time. She lived, not just between doubt and faith liminal as if were, but she was fully on the "dark" side. For some it will be a monumental fiasco, because in today's society we have relegated God to a feeling, something warm here in our hearts that happens from time to time. A personality like her now confesses that for most of her religious life she felt just a terrible and frightening emptiness.

We all know, I think what is like feeling empty, or in the dark, or profoundly lonely. have you ever been in a party full of people, music and food and at the same time feeling incredibly and astonishingly alone?. Have you ever in your life, consider your mistakes and find your life meaningless and without a purpose. That is what people in profound depression claim to feel. For some is just too much. Life without a purpose or meaning for some can lead them to self-destruction. When confronted with pain and suffering of untold proportions, we doubt if there is a good loving God watching over us.

Today's gospel speaks about rejection of Jesus of those who did not aim at the narrow door, the evil doers that will be shoot out of the party of his company, the left out. This is a word of judgement. We want to think that God is nice, I said last Sunday that we in America had confused Nice with Love. We would like, as Ben Franklin did when took all miracles out, edit out all the words of judgement of the Gospel. To take away all the grittiness of the Gospel and turn it into a smooth surface, like God was a lovely Golden Retriever sitting on our lap slobbering when we call Him and away when we shoo Him. God at our beck and call.

Last Sunday we heard Jesus promising not peace but sword, this Sunday we hear him speaking of exclusion. We all know what our narrow door should look like since we have chosen at one time or another chosen to stay way from it and chosen the wide door of sin and falling away from God. There is a bridge built in the middle of a field in Sicily that unites nothing, it just stands there in the middle of a field, no river or road underneath, not two parts in need of union, it is just there, a monument to unscrupulous use of public money. It is called the bridge to nowhere. That is the alternative door to the narrow door, the door to no where, the monument to the pilfering and wasting of our personal lives. This incredible gift that we call life gone down the proverbial drain.

yet even when we feel we have chosen the narrow door, we have been in the straight path, we have turned our lives around, yet the we feel that God ignores us, that Jesus does not respond to us, that feel nothing in out hearts, no warming feeling, no tear, no conviction, no faith. In many ways that was what Mother Teresa confessed to feel in these private letters that now are made public for most of her life as a religious, as care giver of the dying and the poor, for him she took considerable offense in a country like India where Christians are small minority. The recognition she received was no always universal, specially at the beginning she was antagonized by the Indians themselves, whose traditional dress she adopted as the uniform of her order, it is said that a high caste Indian once saw her begging for money for her "place of death" and spat on while he abused her and she quietly clean herself up and looking at him attentively said, that was for me but do you have something to give for my poor? meanwhile she agitated her collection tin.

This woman, holy by all accounts, felt always rejected by Jesus, left out of the party of his presence, tortured in her very self by doubts, lacerated by the seemingly silence to her prayers. How come then this small woman of wrinkle face was able to live for fifty whole years getting up at 4:30 am in the morning, spending countless hours praying on her knees, serving the dregs of humanity? The poor of the poor was her mission, the dying who had no one to help them to die with dignity. That was the center of her ministry in Indian Calcutta. She could expect absolutely nothing from these people, who often had no family to look after them in the first place. Nor, she said she got anything form Jesus himself in her life time. No words of encouragement, except when she said, Jesus called her to India to be his light in 1948. After that no other word.

John of the Cross, we mentioned before wrote about this stage in the spiritual progress of any person, when the prayers become just empty words, when the heart does loves no one, when the soul gasps for air of the spirit, when our spirit is permanently hungry for the divine presence, when our intellect is full with questions and no answers. He called it aptly the "Dark Night of the Soul". That spiritual journey where it is eternally 3 am. Arid time, wasted sleep, forecast of a confusing day ahead. Mother Teresa wasn't "feeling" Christ's love, and she could have shut down. But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, "Your happiness is all I want.

A Fr. Larry chaplain at a federal jail receives a group of high schoolers, perhaps brought there for some preventive work, and the young people ask Fr. Larry how many inmates you have turned around? He responds, well it has been 15 years that will be about 6, 000 inmates I have been in contact with, about six I think! Next question. Why you do this? because Jesus told me to, next question.

Why we do the things we do? what sustain each one of us when there is so little to go on. Mother Theresa had nothing to go on except her duty to others even when that duty was not pleasurable or she did not felt motivated. She walked for a dark valley for many many years and yet she continue walking, she could not talk about what she felt with honesty but she knew that her experience or lack of it, will not stop her in serving others, her emotions will not be a deterrent.

She was like Peter in his single mindedness and like him had moments, in her case that lasted a lifetime. She was in forefront of the most terrible poverty, she served the poor of the poor, and she served among these the ones that were dying. What is surprising that she did not had a nervous breakdown yet she continue in her march often questioning herself about where was she going and more importantly what was the purpose of her going.

Her persona, small as it was, has just got bigger for me, even bigger than it was when she died because i can see myself in her struggle. Because sainthood has become available to you and to me and to all of us.

She was no hero, she was a saint, no hero that needed airbrushing dirty facts, but with all the grit of truth in her, no exceptional, but common, one of us, gone to God's heart for ever.

A saint that shows its darkness and emptiness, allowing us through them to see God with clarity, they become like a clean and empty glass. Arid and empty for the love of God, not depending on their feelings or emotions, but depending completely in the Beloved. I thought reading the Time article that she seems always even in her emptiness and darkness to be in relation with other person, one that she could not see or feel, but one that sustained her through her darkness. She has left the games of the mind, the games of the ego, to rely totally and absolutely in God. Teresa was sustained not by emotions born from within but the a Divine presence borne from without, that was her learning that in sometimes in the absence of God and goodness, one must trust one way or the other, stumbling with the big question in the way, capital HE will bring us home again and again.

Loreena McKennit, who I saw playing her harp in the Saint Lawrence market in Toronto a grey dark day of winter, and now internationally acclaimed singer and composer, reflecting of the John of the Cross's "The Dark Night of the Soul" composed this song where these words come.

Upon a darkened night
the flame of love was burning in my breast
And by a lantern bright
I fled my house while all in quiet rest

Shrouded by the night
and by the secret stair I quickly fled
The veil concealed my eyes
while all within lay quiet as the dead

Chorus
Oh night thou was my guide
oh night more loving than the rising sun
Oh night that joined the lover
to the beloved one
transforming each of them into the other.

how to interpret the present time?

Luke 12:49-56

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice shows us England in the 1700s. It was a stable society. People knew their place in society’s pecking order. People accepted who they were, which was determined by birth. Because of the bartering of money and titles, marriage was the only possible way out of your pre-assigned place. Families were everything and, along with family came their heritage, their own particular history.

The capitalist class was made of emergent successful merchants without a noble history or name. On the other hand, bankrupt nobles may have had more history than money. Stability in society means there is clarity on the rules of engagement. In 18th Century England, there was a cohesive – perhaps even suffocating— web of meaning.

I have said before that we all live within webs of meaning. Values like Pride or Prejudice, Freedom or Homeland are part of that web we have spun and from which we all hang. (Weber/Geertz). On my recent trip to Rome, I was staying in a 16th century palazzo fitted as a hostel for clergy, frequently getting lost in that old quarter of the city. There were churches and trattorias on every corner, and I would read how many times the properties, be that churches, palazzos or hotels changed hands since the 16th century, and the influence needed to do so.

Our webs of meaning are like an old city: they took a considerable amount of time to lie down. Properties have changed hands many times and have been reshaped. The palazzo is now a clergy hostel. The hospital for lepers is now a hotel, though I am not going to tell you the name. The layout makes sense for the locals and appears chaotic to the outsider, just like you who came from orderly subdivisions in suburbia may think when faced with NY City. In order to navigate the old city of Rome, you need a map, or better yet, a GPS giving you directions, or you need to stop and ask. However, a need for internal cohesion amidst the chaos of accumulated meaning is always a necessity, as it is at the same time the opportunity for renewal and rebuilding and creating new in an old city.

I was watching on YouTube a video clip of Tim Lahaye, who co-wrote the Left Behind series of best-selling novels about the end times. There is a movie and a controversial video game. The core belief is that the saved will be taken out to heaven by God -without clothing- in the blink of an eye, regardless of whatever they were doing (piloting a plane, doing surgery, driving a 16 wheeler truck in the highway). The movie, the novel and the video game are all about the tribulations that will be visited upon those who are Left Behind, the unsaved, not necessarily godless criminals, but Joe Blow’s who were not with the program.

He said something that for me is critical. “People need certainty, and I provide that.” The need for certainty, for something that is indisputably right and true, against the other possibilities and variances of meaning that have been at the heart of the humanity since we learned to speak to communicate. Together with language emerged the possibility of deception and lies, and ever since we have been in the search for certainty.

Science – at least after the 17th century, and perhaps until this day – for some provides that element of certainty. For others, especially religious people, the revealed word, especially revealed texts, provide an alternative source for certainty.

There are times when the old city of meaning is flooded with the new. The River Tiber is closed in by the old city in Rome. Buildings have collapsed and new ones are built within the walls of the existing web of meaning. Society’s anxiety for certainty increases. That is how Hitler made it to Power in the 1930's. An educated mass of Germans elected a megalomaniac because they were certain no more.
Today the international networks enabled by the technological revolution are like the River Tiber in Rome. These networks have flooded the American web of meaning and the anxiety for certainty has risen to unprecedented levels. All of our values we have cherished and we inherited from our ancestors are up for grabs. Think of gay marriage: who could have ever thought of it? Or who could have thought, in Jane Austen’s England of the 18th century, that women, commenting after listening to a boring sermon, would have discussed that Hilary Clinton was running for President? A Hilary? President? Running?

In times like these we have to be careful as we choose the maps that will help us navigate the flooded city. All markings are under water and people have no time to explain. We all have become tourists in our own city.

It is easy to use the Bible as a map. It is text, which facilitates our going back to it to check and re-check. I use the Bible here as text, as a cultural artifact in its own right, or you may choose the Word of God and do not mean the text, but the living presence of the Word, the Logos, the Christ to guide us. We may choose to use a map or to use a person.

The same way a map is less than a city, the text of the Bible is less than the person of Christ. A map is a proportional representation of the buildings and streets, while a guide, although more expensive, knows the meaning of each one of them, which trattoria cooks the best carbonara, where Claire of Assisi stayed until her death. A text gives the assurance and respectability of the printed matter; a person requires, on the other hand, the development of a bond of trust.

I am not surprised that the Lahaye novels about the rapture were popular because that is what people is looking for. But our task, my task, is to do what I think is right, even when it is not popular.
Not everything new is good, but not everything new is bad either. The world has transcended those childish dichotomies. I hope it requires new approaches to old questions. In Jane Austen’s novel the role of women as an oppressed and excluded segment of society guarantees “the peace.” But it was more like a peace of the cemeteries, a peace of death, done at the expense of human beings endowed with everything the Creator has given for the well being of the community, just like men.

For England of the 18th century Hilary would be like gay marriage is for us, a novel and dangerous idea that further threatens our web of meaning, our old city. And yes, we may see buildings fall, and a foundational shake may go through our collective spines. The questions is whether the change is life affirming or not.

I know it is difficult to discern even that, especially today for us, since change is the byword of our society. Just like the article in Time magazine, “I Want Latin,” that was written by the Japanese-Irish lapsed Catholic, we may need the soothing whispers of an ancient (only 17th century) language you do not understand to deal with the feeling of being a boat without rudder in the midst of the storm.

I was thinking last night as I agonized (I always do) over my sermon this morning. I am supposed to say something meaningful in 15 minutes about the end of the world, and I came to realize that simply it was an impossible task. At least for me. I will tell you, though, that between me and an otherwise meaningless world stands the person of Jesus, which the text talks about but which the text cannot comprehend fully.

Yes, the world looks in terrible shape. But it has before, you know. Still, I know that always our disaster is the greatest because it is ours.

Jesus in the passage today talks not about bringing peace like the world knows. He talks about bringing peace that is beyond our understanding, a different kind of peace, one that takes the shape of a sword and cuts the bonds that kept people enslaved in the name of cohesion, of meaning, and clarity of understanding. Jesus’ peace is one that furthers, like a wild fire, the displacement of values and commotion of our accepted truths, but it is one that is necessary for the sake of the life-affirming values of the Gospel.

In middle class America, we are very used to a God who must be nice. I was told once in St Leonard’s Church in Toronto to always smile, like I was in a perpetual visit to the dentist. It shows that God who is nice has to have ministers with well-pressed suits who wear a perpetual smile. I heard once in meeting a priest who literally said, “I chose to preach that sermon angrily the week before.” I do not program my feelings that way but I have news for you: God is not nice. Today’s passage does not fit that image of the God sitting in our lap like a Labrador, but one who is roaring like an angry lion.

Our freedom of choice can bring permanent disaster to the world, since we are the only species on the planet capable of killing all life-sustaining systems and we are working at it in earnest. Global warming is just the last one to enter our common awareness. What use is to have atomic bomb shelters, if there is not going to be life worth living? God is angry at how we have abused the bounty he has given us: this world, our own personal lives, the lives of others we have damaged and hurt unnecessarily.

God cannot be nice, because nice is the antithesis of love. God is loving, but not harmless. Nice is deceptive, but Love is real. Nice has invaded our understanding of Love so much that we have to give Love surnames, like Tough Love. God is loving, which also means God is passionate about us, and because he is passionate he sent his Son to die for us a cruel and bloody death on the cross. A “nice” God would not bring Himself to offer his most precious possession, a part of his very own Self, to nasty suffering, pain and death.

We are bringing the end-times on ourselves, on our children and our children’s children, and He is not happy about it. He is not happy about the silences in families that perpetuate the oppression of its members in the name of peace and stability, the peace that covers up and perpetuates abuse. He has not come to bring that kind of peace, a cemetery peace. He has not come to bring that kind of certainty. He did not leave us a book, but He lived a life. He told us not to fear the confusion of the city, for in the midst of havoc you have me as your personal guide. He has come more like a sword to liberate and to challenge and to shake and to consume what is worthless in his fire.

No, God is not nice, God loves you.