SacraConversazione: Second Sunday after the Epiphany Year A

Monday, January 3, 2011

Second Sunday after the Epiphany Year A

Second Sunday after the Epiphany
Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 40:1-12; I Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42
Revised Common Lectionary

"My cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God.... the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, has chosen you." Who are the pronouns in these passages from Isaiah? Israel? The prophet Isaiah? A future anointed One? Who is God's instrument? Who is God's object? Texts escape simple readings. They can confuse, frustrate and even seem intentionally ambiguous, but they always instigate interpretation. Perhaps Isaiah is providing a summons that can be relevant in many situations, past, present and future. Perhaps his saying is relevant to any individual or group who seek to know God and follow God's ways with commitment.

The Psalmist is offering personal testimony to a relationship with the Lord our God. God's teachings are buried deeply in him, as the text of an autobiography. The Lord has given him a "new song."

In his salutation to the congregation in Corinth, Paul reminds the recipients of his letter: "God is faithful; by him you were called...."

As usual, John differs from the synoptic gospels in provocative ways. He emphasizes John the Baptist's testimony about Jesus, not any ritual of baptism. He lists Andrew, one of the Baptist's own disciples, as the first to follow Jesus. It is Andrew who recruits his own brother, Peter, to follow. John's gospel highlights that Andrew, whose seeking after God under the leadership of John the Baptist led him to Jesus. Then a brother brings a brother along. Seeking and relationships can bring us near God's anointed Ones.

In The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, (1997), John Caputo quotes Derrida's definition of his deconstruction project: "To prepare oneself for this coming (venue) of the other is what can be called deconstruction." Then he continues: "Derrida is dreaming of what is not and never will be present, what is structurally to come (a-venir). He is dreaming and praying over an 'absolute' future, a future sheltered by an absolute secret and absolved from whatever is presentable, programmable, or foreseeable." "Dreaming and desiring, praying and weeping, on the other hand, are a passion for the beyond, (au-dela, the tout autre, the impossible, the unimaginable, un-foreseeable, un-believable, ab-solute surprise, which is absolved from the same." (p.73) At the conclusion of his study, Caputo reveals: "I have all along been trying to cross the wires of deconstruction with the prophetic tradition...." "The lines of this alliance are traced outside the space of cognition. For Derrida as for the prophets, what is at issue is not a cognitive delineation of some explanatory principle like a cause prima, not some being or essence marked off by certain predicative traits, but something, I know not what, that emerges in our prayers and tears, that evokes our prayers and provokes our tears, that seeks us out before we seek it, before we know its name, and disturbs and transforms our lives." (p.337) This quest is our salvation. This passionate seeking puts us in the proximity of God's Anointed Ones. It even causes us to wonder who sought whom first: we after God or God after us?

"Sacra Conversazione"

Fra. Angelico, a member of the preaching order of the Dominicans, is credited with introducing into the Western imagination the conceit of "sacra conversazione." Saints from the Bible, the past and the near-past are shown together in animated convrsation around the Madonna and Christ Child. In the "Angelina Altarpiece" in the Convent of San Marco in Florence, he depicts St. Peter Martyr a dynamic preacher ranked with Dominic himself and martyred in 1251, Saints Comas and Damian twins known for their gifts of healing and martyred in 303, St. John the Evangelist, St. Lawrence martyred in the persecutions of the Emperor Valerian in 258 and St. Francis of Assisi. Holding their texts for ready reference, they speak, listen and respond to each other in a timeless conversation initiated by the scriptures.

"Other voices are at once the past and future of my own voice. The past because they have always already called me and even named me, they have already addressed themselves to me, and through their immemorial past, immemorial as far as I am concerned since they preceded the I, they have always already gathered lights, no matter how obscure, in the place that becomes, little by little, my place. Future of my voice also, since it is only through them that I can learn to speak and to say something"

Jean-Luis Chretien, The Call and the Response, (p.81)
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"You may say something new and yet it must all be old. In fact you must confine yourself to saying old things-- and all the same it must be something new! Different interpretations must correspond to different applications. A poet too has constantly to ask himself: 'but is what I am writing really true?' -- and does this necessarily mean: 'is this how it happens in reality?' Yes, you have to assemble bits of old material. But into a building."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, (p. 40e)
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"...'[D]econstruction' has this peculiarity: if we look back at its origin in the text of [Heidegger's] Being and Time, it is the last state of the tradition-- its last state of retransmission, to us and by us, of the whole tradition in order to bring it back into play in its totality. To put the tradition into play according to deonstruction, according to Destruktion, (a term Heidegger was determined to protect against Zerstorung, i.e. against 'destruction,' and that he characterized as Abbau, 'taking apart') means neither to destroy in order to form anew nor to perpetuate-- two hypotheses that would imply a system given as such and untouchable as such. To deconstruct means to take apart, to dissemble, to losen the assembled structure in order to give it some play to the possibility from which it emerged but which, qua structure, it hides."

Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, (p. 148)
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"Is not our expectation and our readiness to hear the new also necessarily determined by the old that has already taken possession of us?"

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, (p.9)
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"'Wisdom is grey.' Life, on the other hand, and religion are full of color."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p.62e

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SacraConversazione

Monday, January 3, 2011

Second Sunday after the Epiphany Year A

Annalena Altarpiece, Convent of San Marco, Florence

"Sacra Conversazione"

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