Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers." Mignon McLaughlin
It will soon be two years since this world lost one of our truly bright lights. Nelson Mandela died as the beloved former president of South Africa, the first national leader of that country who was of black African descent. Trained as a lawyer, Mandela worked against the colonial policies of the white minority government of South Africa.
During the sixties, when we were trying to break down the walls of segregation in our schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and churches, in South Africa, the machinery of Apartheid was being strengthened. Here, a majority white population was just starting to come to terms with their abuse of an impoverished and vulnerable black minority.
In South Africa, where whites were in the minority and the sheer population of Blacks was so large, the white government sought to violently and with uncommon cruelty, to keep the black majority in poverty and in submission.
Nelson Mandela's brilliant opposition to Apartheid made him a target of the government. He was put on trial in 1962 under the charge of trying to overthrow the government. He spent 27 years in prison on an island where the temperatures were almost always over 100 degrees. He did manual labor in that sweltering heat and his eyes were so damaged by the bright sun shining on the rocks that he had to wear sunglasses, even indoors, for the rest of his life.
Most of his fellow prisoners died in that nightmarish place. Mandela endured, with nothing but a bucket for a toilet, no bed but the concrete floor, he survived their brutal torture and starvation. Peace activists around the world advocated for Mandela's release and the government finally offered to release him if he would take an oath never to resort to violence in the pursuit of black liberation.
Let me tell you, after a week on Robben Island, I would have taken any oath to get free. But Mandela refused to swear to something that he did not mean, and he could not revoke the black African's right to fight for their freedom.
In the end, he did not have to. When he was released, working with such amazing peers as Bishop Desmond Tutu. In 1993 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2002, President Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
You probably knew all of that but what you may not have known is that the United States kept Nelson Mandela on the official terrorist watch list until 2008. President Bush removed him from the list to avoid the potential international embarrassment of still having him on the list when he died.
Both President Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared him to be a terrorist because he opposed the white Apartheid government of South Africa, and both the United States and Great Britain were heavily economically invested in South Africa. Anyone who threatens our profits can easily be seen to be a terrorist.
Even though there were many votes in congress during the 70's and 80's to oppose Apartheid, those efforts failed, in large part due to the tireless opposition of then Congressman Dick Cheney. . . . that man has been charming for decades!
Our church is very young, just seven years old this month, but the month before we held our first service, Nelson Mandela, one of the most beloved international heroes of peace and racial harmony, was still on our terrorist watch list.
Folks, the Apartheid government of South Africa was guilty of all kinds of violence that could easily be seen as terrorism... terrorism against the majority of the people in South Africa but our government called Mandela the terrorist and supported the white Apartheid regime.
When you think about the heroes of modern times... Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, the Berrigan brothers, Oscar Romero, all of these people were labeled as communists, socialists, anarchists. All of them spent time in prison. Most of them were tortured and several were murdered. During their active life time, the established powers of government, banking, and even of the church labeled them as being dangerous, as terrorists, and criminals.
It is only in history that they are redeemed and remembered as being the transformative characters of our age. They had to be willing to be reviled, threatened, alienated, lied about, smeared in the media, and abused and to still stay faithful to the cause of justice and liberation.
Mandela was kept on a rock in the ocean where he was not even allowed to have access to news.
They would sometimes manage to steal a bit of an old newspaper and they passed it around among the prisoners like it was the most precious of commodities. They wanted Mandela to believe that the world didn't care, that he had been forgotten. They wanted him to believe that what he said, what he did, didn't matter... that no one noticed, that the world had not changed and would not change.
27 years, and he kept the faith. I can't think of anyone in the Bible whose story would compare to the story of Mandela. He was a modern saint but to our government, he was a terrorist and we should never ever forget that.
The British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, said: "A reasonable man adapts himself to the world, and unreasonable man insists that the world adapt to him. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."
The unreasonable women and men of our current history may be the ones we will later recognize as the most important thought leaders among us. Of course, what I really hoping is that one of you will be sufficiently unreasonable that you will be that person.
I don't want to use the pulpit to encourage cynicism but I do want to foster skepticism. I know that those two might sound an awful lot alike but I want to take just a couple of minutes to try to make an important distinction.
Cynicism can become its own reward. Cynicism, as Father Henri Nouwen said, can paralyze an otherwise generous heart. Cynicism can quickly excuse you from any responsibility to care.
You can decide that the church is corrupt, that politicians are corrupt, that corporations are corrupt, you can literally say, with B. B. King, "Nobody loves me but my mama, and she might be jiving too!" That gives you permission to just exit from concern. You can stop going to church, you can stop voting, you can give in and shop at whatever store sells what you want at the cheapest price without regard for how they treat their employees or if their products you are buying were harvested or manufactured by virtual slaves.
Cynicism is the modern sacrament... you can declare yourself a cynic and official stop giving a tinkers damn about anything or anyone.
Skepticism, on the other hand, is the active employment of critical thinking. As a teenager, I watched the evening news and when they showed President Nixon looking square into the camera and saying, "I'm not a crook," even then I was thinking, "I bet you are a crook."
I had been raised by a WWII vet who took patriotism seriously. But I read the articles written by draft protesters who were in federal prisons or who were in exile in Canada, and even as a pre-driving teenager, I could see that the war in Vietnam was being sold to my country under false pretenses.... That the people in the government were wrong and the people in prison were right.
But I didn't stop loving my country. I didn't stop voting, I didn't stop caring, and I didn't stop working to make my country better.
When I was a child in Glasgow, KY, we had a fiery prophet as our pastor at the First Christian Church. In the late 1950's, he was working to integrate the schools, to end capital punishment, and finally to organize labor unions in the local sewing factories.
Church members muttered about him, including my parents. They call him a communist. They accused him of spending more time on politics than on faith and they fired him but even as a child, I could see that he was right and my church, even my parents, were wrong. But in honor of Brother Paul Duncan, I didn't give up on the church that fired him. I went to seminary and I resolved to make my church better.
Cynicism gives you permission to head for the exit. Skepticism means telling even the nation that you love, the church that you love, the family that you love, that you just are not going to believe their lies. Cynicism gives you a reason to throw in the towel and give up, skepticism can open your eyes and give you the motivation to double down.
In 2003, I was the senior pastor at National Ave. Christian Church, and when Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and when President Bush was leading our country into war with Iraq, I spoke out against the war, and led public protests.
The phone rang one morning and I took the call from a dear, sweet, loving, older woman in the church who had been a faithful supporter of mine in a sometimes-unsafe church environment. And with the sweetest of southern charm, Ann said, "Now Roger, I know that you are a very smart man but do you really believe that you know better than President Bush about whether we should go to war with Iraq."
I hesitated. I loved Ann and she loved me. And pride and arrogance are like cancer in the parish ministry. After and uncomfortable silence I said, "Ann, I don't have the benefit of the classified briefings of the President but I have reason to believe that he is lying to the American people and I am confident that my position is right."
I don't want to give into cynicism. I don't believe that our government always lies to us. I don't believe that all corporations always decide to do what is most profitable and never to do what is just right. And even through I have been fired and treated badly by my former denomination, I don't want to let myself dismiss the whole lot of them as being either moral cowards or mafia styled criminals. Several of them are but not all of them.
We have reason to be skeptical when politicians want us to go to war with Iran. They have lied to us about Vietnam, they lied to us about Iraq, and though there are things that concern me about Iran, if you wanted to put a nation on the lists of sponsors of terrorism, the USA has objectively earned a spot much higher on the list than Iran and if we are concerned about terrorism, we need to get our own house in order before we invade anyone else.
Be skeptical, but don't be cynical. Be critical thinkers, but don't criticize if you are not willing to work to make things better. And above all, be unreasonable people.... Reasonable people always just go along with the lies and the majority and you will never do any good that way.
