Roger Ray, pastor
April 7, 2013 Easter 2
Acts 5:27-32 27 When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them,
28 saying, "We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man's blood on us."
29 But Peter and the apostles answered, "We must obey God rather than any human authority.
30 The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree.
31 God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.
32 And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him."
American history was never a subject that captured my attention. As a Biblical student, my attention was always focused on the Ancient Near East and American history seemed like a matter of modern interests. But during my time in the Boston area when I was a fellow at Harvard, I took some free afternoons to ride my bike over parts of the route where Paul Revere rode a horse. I visited Bunker Hill and Beacon Hill and walked the Freedom Trail.
In that small area around the bay where the Boston Tea Party started the Revolutionary War, I listened in on tour guides speeches who were not always fawning nationalists. It turns out that while there was a lot of general unhappiness with the British rule of the colonies, what it took to actually get settlers, merchants and farmers to show up and fight and die to liberate the colonies from British rule was not all that noble.
That is to say, as frustrated as most of us are at the lies that were told to the American public to get us into a war with Iraq, those lies were nothing compared to the whole cloth fabrications told to American settlers to get them to come out and muster to fight the British.
Samuel Adams turned out to be such an outrageous propagandist and character assassin that I have never again been able to enjoy the modern product that bears his name. Crazy, stupid lies were told to the people in order to get them sufficiently angry or afraid or both in order to do what, eventually, turned out to be in their best interests.
I'm not historian enough to argue whether we should have revolted against British rule or not.... Let's just assume for the sake of argument that it was manifestly the best thing to do. For good or for ill, evidently, the colonists were not motivated to fight in sufficient numbers until they were tricked, lied to and manipulated into responding with some force.
I suspect that we could go through the historical record and find no small amount of that sort of deceptive propaganda in every great military battle. We sometimes like to remember WWII as being the "great war" or the "good war" because in it we were fighting against evil nationalistic forces in order to liberate the Jews from concentration camps. Sadly, stopping the holocaust was more of a by-product than a motivation for entering the European war.
The truth is that the American government turned away boatloads of Jews seeking refuge in America and even sent out the Coast Guard to make sure that no one jumped off those boats and tried to swim to shore. I wish that it had been different but it wasn't.
A hundred years passed from the end of the Civil War in America before the Civil Rights movement began in our nation. Blacks were oppressed in ways that may have been more cruel even than slavery for generations.
In many ways, it was the employment opportunities created by manufacturing during WWII that created a black middle class that then pushed up leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. who made Civil Rights a successful cause. The subsequent impoverishing of the black population in the past two generations is the best reason why there has not been another Martin Luther King to arise in this generation.
When people are beaten, impoverished, oppressed, it is very difficult to persuade them to find the courage, the energy, the nobility to organize, to fight back, to stand up to their oppressors. People will stand by and watch horrible tragedy until they are prompted by self-preservation or personal profit to roll up their sleeves and get involved. The single most disappointing aspect of church life to me, during my years of serving denominational churches was that no matter how hard you worked, how much you did to serve a congregation, that when someone tried to wring me out in a public meeting, in almost every case, the board would sit and watch like sheep watching one another eat grass.
The author of the book of Acts tells stories of heroism among the earliest disciples in order to inspire similar devotion to the cause among later generations. We have good reason to read Acts with a great deal of skepticism about its historical veracity but, assuming that it is a product of the early second century, it is written after the persecutions of Christians had become very violent in certain parts of the empire.
One of the few evidences of the spread of the church from antiquity is found in a letter written by a Roman governor, Pliny, to Emperor Trajen asking for clarification of his orders to persecute Christians.
He asks the Cesar, "but do your instructions apply also to those who are no longer Christians, for many of them say that they have not been Christian for years." Being a Christian when it meant being a part of a loving community that liberally shared its food and thumbed its nose at the empire was one thing, but when the empire began to grind the young church under its heel, many were all too willing to resume their former more pluralistic lives.
A great deal of the New Testament is written in a way to encourage readers to have the courage to face martyrdom, torture, threats and oppression. Because, men and women, then and now, the reflex reaction of almost everyone in the world is to grumble quietly but do nothing to fight an oppressive government, employer, spouse, parent or church. We just watch and even if we are mad about it, we do nothing.
The Nobel prize winning author, Elie Wiesel, explained in his acceptance speech that the holocaust only happened because the world was willing to sit back and watch. He told his audience that they must choose to take sides in matters of ethical importance because neutrality always serves the oppressor and never serves the interests of the oppressed. By turning away refugees, Americans and Europeans were not morally different from the Nazis who imprisoned and killed the Jews.
He said that you could distill the ethical teachings of all of the Bible down to a single sentence, "Thou shalt not stand idly by." We took that simple statement of truth and put it on this worship banner when we started our church.
The winged lion is typically the symbol of the gospel of Mark but we adapted it to stand over this central truth for our church.... A solemn pledge that we would not stand idly by.
The church in our age is facing extinction. The cathedrals of Europe have been turned into warehouses, office complexes and shopping malls. Those that remain open as church have tiny gatherings comprised largely of tourists. On the east and west coasts of the United States, other than a few mega churches that offer a cultural religion entirely unrecognizable to those who are actually interested in the teachings of Jesus still exist.
Among main stream churches in the United States, the average Sunday attendance is fewer than 40 as aging congregations try to keep the lights on long enough for the church doors to remain open for their own funeral. And, honestly, for the most part, I can say, "good riddance."
The church that stood silently by while women had to fight for the right to govern their own bodies and to fight for equal pay for equal work.....
the church that stood idly by and watched as black Americans were set upon by racist police, dogs, water cannon and tear gas.....
The church that remained silent in Argentina during the "Dirty War" and in Guatemala during the time of the disappeared and in Nicaragua during the Contra war.....
the church that encouraged discrimination against gays and lesbians while hiding sick pedophilia in their own ranks....
The church that abandoned their inner city, turned their backs on the poor and used their resources to build obscene monuments to the pretense of their own importance....
The church that sat in silence while the income gap between the poor and the rich grew wider....
The church that virtually applauded the recruitment of our nation's poor sons and daughters to be put in uniforms and sent to kill the poor sons and daughters of Iraq and Afghanistan......
the church that has patiently and silently sat on the sidelines and watched our environment being spoiled, our schools crumbling and our black young men being imprisoned while our gay sons were literally pushed into suicide....
That church can go to hell.
The church with the government, the two great guardians of the status quo.... The apologists for corruption in the economy, the military, religion and education, flogged the apostles and told them to keep quiet and, I must beg you to forgive me for saying it twice, the apostles told the authorities to go to hell.... They said it lovingly, I'm sure
We will not always be right.... But we will not be silent out of fear of being wrong. We will not often have our way in matters of public debate and ethics but we will not be a silent co-conspirator with oppressors. We are not many in number but we will not be intimidated into silence. We are not rich, we are not powerful, we are not located on a major highway nor do our pageants require TV news coverage but I don't have to wear a clergy collar when I go to a city council meeting because of who we are, I stand out like Ralph Nader in an automobile plant.
The church that deserves to survive the rapid changes in religion is the church that has a meaningful voice.... It is the church that opposes war and works for peace....
It is the church that doesn't just use the poor as a backdrop for a foot washing ceremony but that actually works for justice, fair wages and access to health care, education and housing.
It is the church that defends the environment and is unafraid to demand alternative energy sources and protection of our air, water and soil.
It is the church that is willing to tell the truth about government protection of Monsanto and their Frankenfoods, the abuses of the oil and coal industries and the sociopathic insanity of the NRA.
Because we know from experience that if we don't do it that the whole world will be silent and we know that it is our calling to never stand idly by.
I am proud to be counted among your number.
