Sunday Sermons

Complaint received, taken seriously

2008-02-24T17:07:00.001-06:00

Third Sunday Lent has Jews thirsty in the desert, complaining to Moses. Fearing violence to himself, M. asks God what to do. God says, hit this rock with your staff, and make sure the elders of Israel are watching. Do it and from the rock will come water. He did it, and out came the water. They had quarrelled with Moses and tested God; so the place was called Massah (testing place) and Meribah (quarreling place), apparently as a memorial to the experience.

The second reading, Romans 5:1-2, 5-8

Brothers and sisters:
Since we have been justified by faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have gained access by faith
to this grace in which we stand,
and we boast in hope of the glory of God.

And hope does not disappoint,
because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
For Christ, while we were still helpless,
died at the appointed time for the ungodly.
Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person,
though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die.
But God proves his love for us
in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.

is not a commercial from Barack Obama, nor did he approve this message, about hope — though there are times when some of us think he thinks he did.

Tomfoolery aside, this hope business is very important. Believers can be cast down by their belief, holding for God and afterlife but either giving up on Him and it or nervously putting them out of our minds. This from Paul is to buck us up. Jesus died for the ungodly, he says. That’s us.

The third reading, from John 4, offers high drama in its account of Jesus talking with a low woman. It has one of the top Gospel punch lines, when after Jesus tells her to call her husband and she says she has none, he replies,

“You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’
For you have had five husbands,
and the one you have now is not your husband.
What you have said is true.”

The air fairly crackles with tension. What can she say? Nothing in direct response, but instead a shot at religious history:

“Sir, I can see that you are a prophet.
Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain;
but you people say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem.”

How this much-wed woman getting water at the village well knew enough to say this — just the right thing to advance the discussion — is better left unwondered at.

Jesus goes on to predict a new way to worship, on no special mountain but “in Spirit and truth.” He tells her he’s the Messiah. Convinced, she runs to tell others, just as his followers arrive, amazed that he has engaged her. You can see the movement, the stage business.

The followers can’t even get him to eat something. “I have food to eat of which you do not know,” he says, on a roll now with his coy semitic folk talk in which questions call forth riddles. The harvest has arrived, etc.

Meanwhile, the people of the town are convinced he’s the real thing. He is “truly the savior of the world.”

Flash back to the desert, Moses trying to corral his reluctant fellow travelers on their way to the promised land. We are supposed to get a connection here. This is Jacob’s well, in Samaria. The woman calls him “our father Jacob.” It’s all one history, John’s Gospel tells us, as the other gospels and epistles also say. It’s bigger than all of us. Let’s get off our high horses and act that way.

. . . and Weekday Observations #2

2008-02-21T12:33:00.001-06:00

SCRIPTURE . . . Leviticus 19 — "You shall not bear hatred for your brother in your heart. . . . . Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against your fellow countrymen. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD" — is expanded by Luke 10 <http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/luke/luke10.htm#v29> to include everyone, not just your landsman.

Jews were to be loving and forgiving at least to their own — as a starter, you might say. It’s a habit that’s hard to learn, and for that matter sometimes it’s hardest when it’s your own family you have to love and forgive. "You always hurt the one you love," went the old song <http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FYou_Always_Hurt_the_One_You_Love&ei=uxC7R>.

Now, thanks to Jesus, compliments of Luke, we are to love and forgive every Tom, Dick and Harry we run into. Such a goal.

Then there’s Jesus telling his followers <http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/matthew/matthew25.htm#v31> that at Judgement Day it’s how we treat the least among us — see losers of a week ago <http://www.blithe-spirit.com/> — that will separate the sheep and goats, because that’s him we are treating. Hmmm. It didn’t look like him, say the goats on the Last Day.

PURE POLITICS . . . Rush Limbaugh says Sen. Obama says nothing better than anybody else has in a long time. As Richard J. Daley once said of someone else, he rises to higher and higher platitudes. He’s Chauncey the gardener, from the Peter Sellers film "Being There," <http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.imdb.com%2Ftitle%2Ftt0078841%2F&ei=s529R9eoDIauiAG_6v2_Cg&usg=A> who with no real-world experience could put Hallmark to shame with his every gnomic utterance. So it is with Our Man O., on his fast track to becoming leader of the free world.

Elsewhere in or re: Dem-land, C. Krauthammer says super delegates won’t ignore vote from their districts, in John Lewis’s case two to one for Our Man O.; so Our Girl H. (as in "Go, girl") won’t ride a wave of super-d enthusiasm to take the Dem nomination. Ah, but non-office-holding super-d’s outnumber the office-holders, 434 to 317, for what it’s worth, which means they have no immediate constituency from which to take their cue, only party powers that be. They could yet be swayed by the people, but not as certainly as every-two-year vote-seekers.

Conservatives argument vs. McCain is that a lib republican in White House takes party down primrose path. The four-year victory won’t be worth it.

However, say McCain supporters, alternative is very bad. Obama, for instance, is extreme left-wing, with advisors to turn your hair on end. For now he’s the Wizard of O[bama]; in due time he will be exposed, and we will find empty suit, ready to be filled either way, with first choice the left turn. Other than that, he’s teflon, bringing us together as Congressional majorities dictate, which means Republicans, get out of the way, here comes the juggernaut.

LITERARY MATTERS . . . In her memoirs, A Backward Glance <In her memoirs, A Backward Glance, 22>, Edith Wharton speaks of a "blind dread of innovation" among merchant-class New Yorkers of 1820. Their fathers and grandfathers had been bold, but they were consolidating gains.

As a child, W. read a lot early and mused on what she read, as in deciding that "adultery" was expensive when she saw a ferry boat sign, "Adults 50 cents, Children 25 cents."

Myself, reading in the Trib of "rape," I looked it up in the best table dictionary I could find. It meant "seize," I read. So why all the fuss, I wondered.

MORE SCRIPTURE . . . Today’s Scripture <http://www.usccb.org/nab/021208.shtml> — 2/12/08, Tuesday, 1^{st week of Lent, A-cycle — is about words. Isaiah 55 hits us with the word as possessing concrete reality that goes beyond our symbolic notions — the Semitic concept of "dabar," I learned in theology. God says through Isaiah that his word "shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it."}

This is word as agent, which makes Western sense metaphorically, in that words are powerful. That "dabar" idea backs up our symbolism.

What then of praying as Jesus tells us to pray? "This is how you are to pray: Our Father who art in heaven . . ." Matthew reports. Do it this way, he says, and we do. Little kids learn the Lord’s prayer, as ours did in their religious-ed classes 20 years ago in a liberal parish. But not the Angelic Salutation, "Hail, Mary, full of grace . . ."

Asked about these and other omissions that occurred to parents from Catholic schooling of 40s and 50s, the religious-ed (RE, once CCD) teacher acknowledged the problem. Some do want more of "Catholic culture," she said, treating it as a question of taste.

Oh my. It was a time of reaction against form, and our kids were getting a sort of raw Christianity — with much good emphasis on liberal virtues of tolerance and the like. I hope that nowadays the pendulum swung back a little, and little kids are being told also how to pray with the Lord and his church.

THE WORLD OF NEWSPAPERS . . . Northwestern U.-Medill journalism dean John Lavine — on the hot seat for using blind quotes in a promotional piece <http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-northwestern-dean_14feb14,0,7274825.story> — gave an underwhelming talk to the Midwest Writers Assn. <http://midwestwriters.com/> meeting in Glenview 10/19/06, pulling an old unprepared-speaker trick by asking us what we wanted to hear from him — before saying a word of his own. (He might have discussed it with the program chair.)

We were professional free-lancers. He chose to deal with us as he would a class of undergraduates, asking for raising of hands, possible answers to questions he raised, etc. — a contrast to the many editors we had heard who were happy to tell what they were buying, etc. Came across as cocky.

Another journalistic speaker, another audience: Chi Trib’s David Mendell did not help his career at the Trib with his Obama book <http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FObama-Promise-Power-David-Mendell%2Fdp%2F006085820>, he told Society of Midland Authors 11/13/07, whereas at Wash Post and elsewhere, he would have been applauded for it. This is Chi Trib culture, I think, playing it very close to vest.

It’s a stiff culture, but it has been upright (they go together sometimes). So one may ask if new-owner Zell effect is in play in its recently giving top op-ed space to Rep. Jesse Jr. <http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-oped0212delegatefeb12,0,4373892.story> and Mayor D <http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-oped0213daleyfeb13,0,4892131.story> . on consecutive days, to toot their horns. (And misstate the situation, as Reader writer Ben Joravsky says Daley did <http://blogs.chicagoreader.com/politics/2008/02/13/truth-and-taxes/>in the matter of property taxes.)

Have Daley et al. found their soul partner in bottom-liner Zell? He’s apparently a Philistine, as we may judge from his trashing, or at least storing out of sight, of the newspaper mural <http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=4&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blackenterprise.com%2Fyb%2Fprintarticleyb.asp%3Fsection%3Dybaa%>on the concourse ceiling of the once Daily News Building, 400 W. Madison St., now the concourse entrance to the Metra tracks. The mural was ripped down and stored somewhere.

Meanwhile, Chi Trib has copy-editing issues, as in the free-lanced story on Old St. Mary’s church <http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-relig_oldstmaryfeb15,0,6744791.story>. Carefully equipped with "street" and "avenue," beyond what man on street requires, the story says the church was once at "Madison Avenue and Wabash Street," neatly mixing things up. Attn. copy desk: Madison Avenue is in Manhattan, a borough of New York City. It’s famous for its ad agencies. Chicago has Madison Street, famous once for its Skid Row. Pass it on.

And there’s a sort of live-action copy editing missing on radio and TV, where people keep telling me I know something when I don’t. They sprinkle their commentary with a note of presumed self-assurance — "you know" — which is rather a cry for help from the diffident seeking affirmation. Can’t help you, poor soul, I mutter, between whispers that I don’t know and sometimes out-loud pleas to stop telling me I do. Now and then this "you know" is OK, but a panicked sprinkling in every sentence? It’s, you know, irritating.

THE WORLD OF BOOKS . . . In hand is Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism <http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FFaith-Reason-War-Against-Jihadism%2Fdp%2F038552378>(Doubleday), by the prolific George Weigel. Among preliminary reviewer-conclusions is that he tends to scold the reader, as in telling us (p. 13) that certain "glib . . . usages must stop," because they constitute "an impediment to clear thinking." It should suffice to point out such glibness.

In addition, W. depends heavily on authors such as Bernard Lewis <http://books.google.com/books?as_auth=Bernard+W+Lewis&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=author-navigational&hl=en>, dipping into them frequently. Excellent sources, but the sense of being taken along for a ride through W’s reading is strong, as opposed to the synthesizing process that demonstrates mind at work, as opposed to note-taker.

Also, W. demonstrates what I call a busy mind. He’s something of a head-tripper, and one lacking crystal clarity at that. The busy mind would explain the lack: it’s too busy to work for or achieve crystal clarity.

Finally, there’s something unrelenting about him. He’s too firm a believer, I firmly believe, in the importance of being earnest.

That said, his findings are important. He’s in the business of demonstrating the dangers to the world of Muslim religion as such, as it has taken hold of millions of believers around the world.

He opposes "genteel secularity" as our "analytic default position" or accepted starting point in facing up to the Muslim threat. Think religion. If we fail to do so, to think in terms of God and Satan, we fail to understand our enemies.

Nor should we allow ecumenical wishful thinking to blind us to crucial differences between Christianity and Islam. The Jesus of the latter, for instance, "Jesus-Issa," is not the Christian Jesus. Nor is Islam the fulfillment of Judaeo-Christianity, as it claims — "one of the three Abrahamic faiths."

Nor do the three faiths view one another in comparable terms. Christians recognize divine revelation in Judaism, for instance, but Islam recognizes it in neither Judaism nor Christianity. Rather, Islam claims to supersede Christianity. This Islamic "supersessionism" is a main distinguishing feature of Islam. Sobieski’s Poles coming to the rescue of Vienna in 1683 were "the people of hell." (As are we of the U.S. today.)

Being a religion of the book does not mean the same thing either. The Quran is a book, but with God as direct author, dictating word for word, as opposed to the Bible, which has men as inspired authors. You don’t "wrestle" with the meaning of the Quran: Paul counsels a woman about wearing a veil during prayer, but Allah commands it directly. There is no mediation.

There is no fatherhood in the God of the Quran, who has no feeling and (apparently) is not a person at all but a force. The Quran’s God is "only Majesty, never Emmanuel" ("God with us"). His unitarianism allows for no intimacy or even association of any kind with creatures, unlike Christian trinitarianism, which has "with" as part of the definition of God.

As for governance, dictatorship is the Islamic ideal. There is no church-state separation, nor church as separate entity. The non-king (the pope) humbled the king (the emperor) at Canossa in 1076, establishing separation definitively.

— More more more on Weigel and Islam as religious enemy —

Sunday Sermons . . . and Weekday Observations

2008-02-10T11:33:00.000-06:00

First Sunday of Lent, A-cycle:

A story of ingratitude: Adam and Eve had everything, under one condition — enjoy your garden except for that tree. Along came a talking serpent who persuaded them to violate the condition, or persuaded Eve, who found Adam an easy mark, her co-conspirator in the betrayal of the whole human race.

They did not know how good they had it, were insufficiently grateful for their situation. She and he listened to the con man singing a siren song and lost everything. Men have jumped off buildings for lesser catastrophes.

But the Supreme giver, fully entitled to keep his angry word, backed off. The serpent would be thwarted. Good times would return. He would not forever be angry, which is where Jesus would come in, as Paul elucidates . . .

* [Bonus sermon:] Fourth Sunday in ordinary time, per Roman Catholic practice, but 4th after Epiphany per Episcopal Church U.S. practice, which I prefer.

It’s same text, however, gospel being sermon on mount, about lowly inheriting the land, etc., and other readings about the lowly having nothing to be ashamed of, in Zephaniah and 1 Corinthians. This resurrection of the lowly from insignificance touched with obloquy is crucial to the Judaeo-Christian message.

Apply it geopolitically at your peril, however, keeping Antonio’s comment in The Merchant of Venice about the devil quoting Scripture for his purpose. Nonetheless, it is in such Bible passages as these that Judaism and Christianity laid the groundwork for favoring or at least treating kindly the loser.

Liberation theology veered too closely to Marxism, said popes and others and “preference for the poor” might have meant preference for state action over private enterprise — Dorothy Day wryly cited devotion to “holy mother the state.” But down deep we have conscience in the matter: Losers matter.

Weekdays:

* George Orwell had the young Graham Greene pegged as an adherent of the “soft left.”

* Aristotle the philosopher has drawn attention away from Aristotle the biologist, who described “birds, bees, and torpedo fish” based on “caefully sifted accounts” of travellers and fishermen. To Charles Darwin, an inveterate sifter and describer, he was “old Aristotle,” who paved the way for Darwin’s “two gods,” Linnaeus and Cuvier, whom he considered “mere schoolboys” in comparison.

Top Soviet genetics researchers were imprisoned or poisoned. Some of today’s researchers worry about pain inflicted on Zebrafish in experiments but console (excuse) themselves in that z-fish eat one another. “Do unto others as they do unto themselves?” asks the reviewer, who was feeling neither their nor the Zebrafish’s pain.

He is John North, author of such studies as God’s Clockmaker: Richard Wallingford and the Invention of Time, reviewing Jim Endersby’s A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology: the Plants and Animals Who Taught Us the Facts of Life in Times Literary Supplement, 1/25/08.

Noting that Endersby wouldn’t eat genetically modified (GM) crops even though he considered them not harmful, because biotech companies do not have “society’s best interests nor the environent at heart” (North’s words), North adds, “This sounds rather like another inversion, that of the story of the Garden of Eden,” which for present purposes I will take as cold ingratitude towards God’s gifts even when modified by fellow human beings, though I can’t be sure North means it that way.

Finally, North notes the misquoting of Occam’s principle (his “razor”) and misspelling of his name — as “Ockham,” on more than 14,200 websites. “We all know that the species Copy Editor is going the way of the dodo,” says North, adding, “May we hope for a genetically engineered substitute?” To which I add, Hope all you want, you dodo, it ain’t gonna happen.

* Chicago being quite a university center, it should be no surprise to find riches such as were displayed Saturday night 2/2 at DePaul’s concert hall on Belden Avenue — a chapel converted from long-gone McCormick seminary days Presbyterianism. There you found or would have found and heard the “opening gala” performance of a month-long “Hommage a Ravel,” DePaul Symphony Orchestra front and center, Cliff Colnot conducting and Eteri Andjaparidze at the piano for Ravel’s Concerto in G Major. It was the middle of three pieces, sandwiched between R’s “pavane for a dead princess” and his “Daphnis et Chloe, Suite No. 2.”

It is not praise from Caesar when I say it was good, I being one who lacks cachet in such matters. But I tell you, it was a joy to sit in that converted place of worship and let such glorious sounds wash over one. Its charms soothe even such a savage breast as my own. And free of charge. See here for coming events, including weekly Ravel excursions, Thursdays at 8, in February, except for the last at 5:30 in the next-door recital hall.

* Benedict XVI-slash-Joseph Ratzinger is a theologian but also a “referee” since he became Defense of Faith prefect some years back and more so now he’s pope. In Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday), however, he’s again a theologian, a “player” as reviewer Peter Cornwell, says in a TLS review 1/25/08. Cornwell, “attached priest” at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic church, Bath and formerly vicar of (Church of England) University Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Oxford, finds much in this book to feed “heart and mind . . . prayer and preaching.”

In it Benedict/Ratzinger seeks to demonstrate the historical Jesus as identical with the Jesus of faith, not a “Hellenized” personality, a product of early-church philosophizing. He seeks this furthermore not by jettisoning the historical-critical method of contemporary exegesis, which he calls “indispensable.” Cornwell finds the book technical but not indecipherable by the lay reader.

But B/R delivers swipes along the way at “liberal scholarship” that are more befitting his referee status, says Cornwell, delivering “papal lamentations [rather than] calm scholarly judgments.” For example, the villainous servants of the vineyard parable become at B/R’s hands — “a remarkable interpretation” — not religious leaders but “this modern age.” The official church goes free of blame.

“Woes” pronounced against clergy who ask too much of their people are ignored by B/R. So is the cleansing of the Temple. The Holy Spirit loses the wind-like quality of blowing where it wills and becomes instead the soul of God’s church, which becomes a sort of ecclesiastical Holiday Inn, free of and immune from surprises.

* For Gerald O’Collins, SJ, on the other hand, love is the answer. His quest is Jesus the Redeemer (Oxford paperback), the love of God made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth and in those inspired by it. This is the way it’s supposed to be, says O’Collins. (and Cornwell the reviewer), as opposed to making “hard theories” of “great biblical images,” as Mel Gibson did in “The Passion of the Christ,” with its emphasis on the quantity and severity of Christ’s suffering rather than on the quality of his mercy.

Neither was Jesus a Sidney Carton at the guillotine, doing a “far, far better thing” as substitute for the guilty one. There is no justice in such “penal substitution,” argues O’Collins, who recognizes no “dominating theory” of redemption but rather a “mosaic” in which might be seen Jesus the savior. Look, he says, beyond theology to art and literature, including a film which he thinks does Jesus justice, Pasolini’s “The Gospel according to St. Matthew.”

By such art, O’Collins says in a phrase that a genetically modified copy editor might flag for English-language usage, we “encounter everywhere the Holy Spirit active to relate ‘the whole of humanity to Christ.’” Breathes there a Christian with half a heart who can say nay to that sweeping sentiment? Indeed, if enthusiasm be at issue, we are to engage in “the human struggle for a better society [and not run] away from political responsibility.”

This book has “a good word” for “unfashionable Catholics, including liberation theologians and the ebullient Frenchman Teilhard de Chardin,” and Cornwell welcomes that. In addition, O’Collins shows a “robust earthiness,” locating “ecology in the map of salvation,” but with an eye to the after life and “resurrection of the body.” He touches the bases, to be sure.

“No earthly utopia” is proclaimed in this book, however, nor “neglect of . . . Church and sacraments,” says Cornwell. Rather, he adds, God’s “saving activity [is] everywhere.” Thus, says O’Collins, into the whole world is inserted the “saving event of Christ,” who as redeemer embraces “the joy and the hope, the grief and anguish” of what Cornwell calls “a battered world.”

This veers dangerously close to boilerplate goo-gooism, even with utopia-rejection. Don’t judge a book by its review, but this one sounds like bad poetry.