Occupy Lent: Homily from the Feast of the Annunciation

Homily from the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25 2012

Beloved,

As many of you know, I believe the Liturgical Calendar is a powerful transformative tool – a continuing cycle, or spiral, where the Eternal meets the temporal, where the Pleroma manifests in the midst of the Kenoma, where kairos intersects with chronos.

Real observance of the calendar has fallen by the way in many corners, and many who do take note of the Feasts and Fasts tend to refer to them as “religious obligations,” particularly the Lenten Season. I believe that Lent isn’t a religious obligation, but a spiritual opportunity. One that we miss too often. And the Feast of the Annunciation that we commemorate today, coming just before Palm Sunday and Easter, is a call to embrace that opportunity.

I want to take a closer look at part of the reading from the Lectionary today, the song of Mary, called the Magnificat.

Towards the end of the Canticle, Mary, a young unwed Palestinian who’s just found out that she will give birth to the Messiah, says:

He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

This song declares that God scatters the prideful, dethrones the mighty, and sends away the rich. The God that Mary sings about is one that takes sides, lifting up the oppressed, providing a banquet for the poor.  This sentiment is echoed in what is, according to the writers of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus’ first sermon, where He declares:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He has anointed Me
To preach the gospel to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed;
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

This acceptable year was the Jubilee, a time when debts were to be canceled, slaves freed, and foreclosed land returned.

And in the twenty fifth chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus takes it a step further. He doesn’t just side with the oppressed; he says, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me,” explicitly identifying Himself with the downtrodden, the poor, and the imprisoned.

If we want to know see Christ is in our midst, we have to see Him in the family being being thrown out of their home because of predatory lending, in the innocents killed by drone strikes, in the children massacred in Afghanistan, in Trayvon Martin and Shaima Alawadi, and in those who are tortured in the pits of Guantanamo and Bagram. Those who give the orders to kill and oppress, whether in board rooms, military posts, or the Oval Office, target Christ Himself.

The Magnificat echoes through the ministry of Jesus and through the lives we are called to live as well. It signals a redemption, the defeat of the powers of this world, which has already been accomplished, but continues to manifest to the extent that we have the courage to take up the words of the Gospel and live out a radical commitment to the words of the Living Jesus, God of the Oppressed. A passage in the Gospel of Truth, thought by some to have been penned by the Holy Valentinus himself, and quoted in the closing words of our Liturgy, compels us: “Make sure-footed those who stumble and stretch forth your hands to the sick. Nourish the hungry and set at ease those who are troubled. Foster men who love. Raise up and awaken those who sleep.”

The Theologian and activist Walter Wink writes, “God at one and the same time UPHOLDS a given political or economic system, since some such system is required to support human life; CONDEMNS that system insofar as it is destructive of fully human life; and PRESSES FOR ITS TRANSFORMATION into a more humane order.”

This involves, first of all, and to the extent that we are able, not to be accomplices in the crimes against the poor and oppressed. As the philosopher Albert Camus said, “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” More to the point, John Howard Yoder, in The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, writes, “The believer’s cross is, like that of Jesus, the price of social nonconformity.”  This is difficult, as we all live in a world where the Archons of Greed, Hatred, Racism, Imperialism, Sexism, and Exploitation have built complex structures that we encounter every day.  But we do have an obligation to withdraw our assent as much as we are able, and to work to build lives and communities that embody and press for the transformation of these oppressive structures.

Secondly, we are called to speak prophetically against the oppression, and to demand liberty for the captives; to say, as Moses did to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, women and men who devoted their lives to doing just that: Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, Archbishop Oscar Romero, to name just a few. The great Eastern saint, John Chrysostom, was deposed from his position as Archbishop of Constantinople for his denunciation of the corruption and excess of the wealthy. May their wisdom, prayers and examples strengthen us as we continue to follow in the footsteps our Our Lady and the Divine Soter, proclaiming the “acceptable year of the Lord.”

But I want to take another look at these words from the Magnificat because there is a deeper call here – not just to Occupy Wall Street, but to Occupy Lent.

Mary’s words, “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty,” speak not only to external political, economic and social realities, but to our inner condition and the work and opportunities presented to us by the Lenten Season.

To clarify, let’s look at a passage from the Gospel of Thomas, one that we quote in the Liturgy during the Confiteor:

Jesus said: “I rose up in the midst of the world and I appeared to them in the flesh.
I found all of them intoxicated;
I found none of them thirsty.
And my soul became afflicted for the children of men,
Because they are blind in their hearts and do not have sight;
For empty they came into the world
and empty do they seek to leave the world.
But for the moment are they intoxicated.
When they shake off their wine,
then their minds will be transformed.”

The mighty and the rich Mary sings about are also those who Jesus says “are blind in their hearts and do not have sight.” They are intoxicated, caught up in the distractions and cares of the world, chasing after status, comfort, and amusement, striving to possess the things of this world instead of the things of God.  Too often we are so full, so attached to these things, that we cannot even hear the call of Holy Wisdom; we are the ones that the Magnificat speaks of when Mary says “the rich he has sent away empty,” because we are so full from consumption and self-gratification that we cannot be “poor in spirit.” We fritter and waste the hours on things that are transitory and cannot find time for eternal things – standing in line overnight to get the newest gadget that the people on TV have told us we must have, while we can’t seem to find a minute to tend to the spirit. As the poet says:

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…”

The Season of Lent is an opportunity for us to re-assess our commitments and priorities; to do the work that must be done if we’re going to experience the kingdom here and now. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, “If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the kingdom. If you do not observe the sabbath as a sabbath you will not see the Father.”

This statement isn’t a chain to bind us to a legalistic, external practice. Modern Christianity, infected by a punitive theology based on the Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin, presents asceticism as something masochistic and punitive. But there is a different model of salvation, known as theosis, a path of radical transformation, becoming divinized through the infusion of Grace. And this requires work.

Ascesis originally referred to the training of an athlete, and when Jesus says “If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the kingdom,” He’s not laying down an empty religious practice; He’s like a coach saying, “If you don’t run every day, you’ll never be ready for the marathon.”

This is the call of Lent: to prioritize, to get back into training, to take up the regimen of liberation and transformation. Fasting, prayer, and meditation aren’t ends in themselves; they are exercises for the training of the spirit, for building up what the Apostle called “the inner man.” They are methods for breaking the attachment to illusion and self-gratification that keep us from seeing the Kingdom.

In just a few days, we’ll mark the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.  We’ll speak more about that event next week, but it’s worth noting now that Jesus rode in on a donkey;  the victorious entry is only possible after the work of subduing our lower self, what St. Francis of Assisi referred to as “brother ass.”  Following His entry, he overthrew the tables of the money changers in the Temple – a powerful statement about commerce and corruption, but also a call to overturn those things in our inner Temple that prevent it from being “a house of prayer.” 

We have only a few days left before the great Feast of the Resurrection – if we’re going to participate in the Feast, we have to go through the Fast; there’s no Resurrection without the Crucifixion. This “fasting from the world” can take many forms: literal fasting, which is a practice dating to the earliest days of Christianity; giving up amusements in order to spend extra time in prayer or meditation; taking money that you might have spent on yourself and instead giving it to an organization that serves the poor and oppressed; and deepening the practice of nepsis, the watchfulness of the human heart. The point is to take the opportunity these days offer us, to prepare our hearts to say, as Mary did in response of the Annunciation: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”