Sound the trumpet! Unfurl the banners! Sing Regina Coeli! Chant the rosary: "Hail, St. Mary's, full of grace, the Lord is with you, has been with you, fifty--even seventy-six--years long!"
A Homily preached by The Rev. Marilyn McCord Adams on the Feast of the Assumption, 1995, at St. Mary in Palms, Los Angeles. That year marked the 50th anniversary of St. Mary's incorporation as a parish and 76 years since a group of Episcopal Churchwomen met in Culver City to form St. Mary's Guild, a meeting to which St. Mary's traces its roots.
Isaiah 61:10-11, Galatians 4:4-7, Luke 1:46-55
Sound the trumpet! Unfurl the banners! Sing Regina Coeli! Chant the rosary: "Hail, St. Mary's, full of grace, the Lord is with you, has been with you, fifty--even seventy-six--years long!"
In Los Angeles, jubilees are rare, centennials only beginning to be heard of! After all, we are a frontier people; our history is short. Besides, with earth quaking, statues toppling, neighborhood changing, traffic jamming, world transmogrifying, we are so busy maintaining, pressing forward, that we have little time for retrospectives. Aren't jubilees, like all anniversaries, backward-looking affairs?
Not to worry! Los Angeles may be the most "wide open" place in the world. In the City of St. Mary of the Angels we can dare to be different, because in Los Angeles anything goes! St. Mary's is above all a Eucharistic parish. For fifty years, we have made it our business to meet almost daily, to remember the mighty acts of God, to give thanks, and to break bread. We tell the story, how Israel was a slave in Egypt, but God brought them out at Reed Sea crossing; how Our Lord Jesus Christ was betrayed, crucified, dead, and buried, but God raised Him up with honor to everlasting life. For fifty years our prayers have woven the "up's and down's" of our lives, the apocalyptic and humdrum of world events into these plot lines. We love to tell "the old, old stories," and on behalf of this city, we have prayed them into our own.
Today is special for its scope and focus, as we reach back, re- collect memories--tall tales, even legends--accumulated over our own local, yes peculiar, fifty years.
Today, we imitate Bible-story writers, pooling memories that define us as parish and people, legends that shape our caravaning together, articulate our own canon of the mighty acts of God!
Surely--the '28 Prayer Book has taught us--"it is meet and right so to do!"
Or is it? If you turn in your Bibles to Leviticus 25 (and no, Bible-flipping during the sermon is not a St. Mary's tradition!), you'll discover that Jubilee is not a day of remembrance but a year of social renewal and political reform. The Bible tells how God welded a motley crew of slaves into a people and set them up in utopia: a land of milk and honey, each tribe with turf enough to guarantee prosperity; all Israelites free, of unsurpassed dignity as chosen of God! But God knew how wilderness veterans could not trust in plenty, how fear would set up competition, how the stronger would grab the weaker's, boasting that only the fittest should survive. Jubilee instituted mid-course corrections: every fiftieth year, debts would be cancelled, leases expire, all indentured servants be freed. Jubilee meant a restoration of true equality, to allow those who fared least well a fresh start.
Unsurprisingly, Jubilee legislation was never enforced in Israel. It's a fallen world. With such an arrangement, who could get people to put their best ideas to work, lend money in the fortieth or forty-fifth years? Who would persuade them simply to give up all they had schemed for with an "Oh well, it was nice while it lasted!" Yet, Jubilee legislation remained on the books as a standard of Divine judgment on human social and political institutions, condemning inequalities, contradicting their assumption of scarcity, insisting on Good News that God's world does contain enough life and love, food and shelter, time and space to go around.
Jubilee, then, is no nostalgia trip, back to the Golden Age of silent movies, church growth, or fifties' simplicity. To celebrate Jubilee is to commit ourselves to human dignity and social justice. Happily, St. Mary's traditions make her a Jubilee people: Holy Eucharist has trained us to Jubilee habits; Mother Mary has taught us Magnificat, her Jubilee song!
Daily mass teaches us that socio-economic differences cannot make us better or worse than other people. For God is infinite and eternal; in relation to Him we, whatever differences we manufacture between us, are teensy tiny, almost nothing. Holy Eucharist celebrates how God crossed class lines to become a creature, conferred on each and all the mind-boggling dignity of adoption as His children, making us coheirs with Christ, participants in the Creator's wealth. When we come to daily mass, baptism is our admission ticket; we are forced to check our social pretensions at the door.
Holy Eucharist is a Jubilee feast, the Messianic banquet, a sign of plenty. For here, God makes us guests of honor, serves up the Body and Blood of Christ, His very self, our totem meal. Even our doctrine of real presence, arcane theories about how God is whole in the whole and whole under each part of the hosts, are meant to reassure us: no matter how many fragments Eucharistic bread is broken into, no matter how tiny the piece we get, each receives the whole Christ, really present, loving each one into fulfillment, keeping us in eternal life beyond the grave. Our God is "into" milk and honey, will not rest until each cup is full, running over, forever.
Yet, Holy Eucharist is not for polly anna's. For here we show forth the Lord's death, daily re-present God in Christ crucified, casting His lot with the worst that we can suffer, be, or do. Here the human race stands under judgment, forced to face how fear-ridden choices, witting and unconscious, individual and collective, have cruel and long-lasting consequences. Jubilee legislation already warned us, our own life experiences bear witness, forty-nine years is a long time for injustice, greed, and terror to reign. Holy Eucharist proclaims loud and clear, what we do to each other, what we suffer matters... enough that God will not let us forget it... so much that God took it into His very own self.
Precisely because Holy Eucharist demands to be realistic, it is a school of forgiveness. Fear of human fragility makes us underestimate the harms we receive, the injury we cause. We prefer to condone, excuse, pretend that everything is pretty much okay. At the same time, and inconsistently, fear of retribution drives us to hold grudges as a hedge against deficits: whatever offense we have given, can't add up against the extent to which we have been wronged. Here at Holy Eucharist, secure on the lap of Mother Jesus, we come to feel loved enough to tell the truth, pour out our tears and guilt and outrage, until we let go, enter into God's view of the matter, return to our busy-ness, comforted and restored.
Holy Eucharist teaches us to adopt God's "family values," of freedom, dignity, concrete well-being for all. Confident in Emmanuel, encouraged by God's Love with and for us, we dare to become partners in the family business, take our stand at the margins with the poor and the powerless, whomever our social order is currently leaving out. Holy Eucharist sends us out to offer cups of cold water, lunches in waiting rooms, seed-money for missions, meeting space for AA groups, sponsorship and housing. Holy Eucharist raises our voices with Mother Mary's, crying not only to God but to newspapers and government officials, shouting persistently, "Your time is now! Do something! They have no wine!"
Friends, we are entitled to our Jubilee celebration, because St. Mary's has always been a Jubilee people... every day looking backward and forward, re-presenting God's mighty acts in Christ Jesus... in many and various ways, pestering, demanding full consummation: "Good news to the poor, release to the captive, the Reign of God, the Jubilee year!"
