Ordinary 16B

Every once in a while, my uncle in Galway, Ireland, would refer to a particular type of priest as a “boy-o”: “Yeah, he was a real boy-o.” After many visits to his farm and endless badgering, my uncle finally told me what he meant, reluctant though he was to say anything disrespectful of “the priests.” A boy-o was the kind of priest who, if he saw that you had two fine geese, would say, “That’s a fine goose you have there,” and expect the other to be delivered to his door on the morrow. A boy-o always made you feel like an imposition, so burdensome were his tasks. A boy-o came to be served rather than to serve...

To review the assertions of these disturbing readings and today’s gospel: both readings from the Hebrew scriptures declare that God’s work in the world finds its representatives (“shepherds,” to use the metaphor of these readings) even in future generations, as current ones falter; all who find their relationship to God through Christ are equal within the Body of Christ; God’s work in the world can be done by anyone– it is done and spreads without discrimination. These radical assertions always challenge human assumptions and structures, even the church itself. But they are always also the source of constant, immediate hope.

I’d also like to tell a story which I have gleaned from Chris Hedges’ book War is a force that gives us meaning. Hedges is a war correspondent who covered the Bosnian war extensively, and he tells of meeting the Soraks, a Bosnian Serb couple in a largely Muslim enclave. The couple had been largely indifferent to the nationalist propaganda of the Bosnian Serb leadership. But when the Serbs started to bomb their town, Goražde, the Muslim leadership in the town became hostile to them, and eventually the Soraks lost their two sons to Muslim forces. One of their sons was a few months shy of becoming a father. In the city under siege, conditions got worse and worse, and in the midst of this Rosa Sorak’s widowed daughter-in-law gave birth to a baby girl. With the food shortages, the elderly and infants were dying in droves, and after a short time, the baby, given only tea to drink, began to fade. Meanwhile, on the eastern edge of Goražde, Fadil Fejziæ, an illiterate Muslim farmer, kept his cow, milking her by night so as to avoid Serbian snipers. On the fifth day of the baby having only tea, just before dawn, Fejziæ appeared at the door with half a litre of milk for the baby. He refused money. He came back with milk every day for 442 days, until the daughter in law and granddaughter left for Serbia. During this time he never said anything. Other families in the street started to insult him, telling him to give his milk to Muslims and let the Chetnik (the pejorative term for Serbs) die. But he did not relent. Later the Soraks moved, and lost touch with Fejziæ. But Hedges went and sought him out. The cow had been slaughtered for meat before the end of the siege, and Fejziæ had fallen on hard times. But, as Hedges says: When I told him I had seen the Soraks, his eyes brightened. “And the baby?” he asked “How is she?”

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includes reference to Bartimaeus

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