Thursday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 452

Before the mountains were born,
the earth and the world brought forth,
from eternity to eternity you are God.
You turn humanity back into dust,
saying, “Return, you children of Adam!”
A thousand years in your eyes
are merely a day gone by,
Before a watch passes in the night,
you wash them away...

Saint Luke tells us today that, "Herod was perplexed" about Jesus and the stories he was hearing. In Luke's account, Herod was not given to superstition. He commanded the killing of John the Baptist and saw the prophet's head given to his step-daughter. That story was finished, but who is this new prophet taking the man's place? Will the Lord never give up plaguing this Roman puppet with prophets and messiahs who only disturb the peace and upset his superiors? 

I've just finished James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. Published in 1963, it is no less prophetic today than when it was when written. The underlying spiritual issues remain. It is easy to point to technological developments and declare, "How far we've come!" But spiritual realities do not change so easily. 

Baldwin wrote: "White Americans do not believe in death and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And this is why the presence of the Negro in this country can  bring about its destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant -- birth, struggle, and death are constant and so is love though we may not always think so -- and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change.

I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths, change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not: safety, for example, or money or power. One clings then to chimeras by which one can only be betrayed and the entire hope -- the entire possibility -- of freedom disappears. And by destruction I mean precisely the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free.

The passage of time and history may give today's readers, those who remember the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and 60's, a better sense of what America is and always has been. If a thousand years are but a day in God's sight, who should expect the world to be different after a mere sixty years? 

Jesus perplexed Herod because he knew he would die. He knew his ancestors Abraham, Moses, and David had died and he would take his place among them. The Word of God knows the movement of history, and the Spirit of God draws believers into its ever-rolling stream. Assured of our death and our place in God's presence, Christians don't cling to "chimeras by which one can only be betrayed."

The desperate hope of many white people -- on the face of it, insane -- was that African-Americans and other disenfranchised Americans might mysteriously become equal without a proportionate loss of status and freedom among European descendants. Technology would make it possible. Instead of sharing their wealth, wealth would appear among the disenfranchised and equality would occur painlessly. All the boats would be raised on an ever rising tide of prosperity. Beliefs like that explain why Americans fall for Ponzi schemes. 

The Spirit of Jesus welcomes opportunities to sacrifice, atone, repair, give -- and give more. Like John the Baptist, it is eager to decrease that others might increase. That impulse can only perplex the Herods of this world. They will always murder to defend their security; they will always disappear under the flood of God's wrath.