Community Christian Church of Springfield

The American Ideal and the American Real

July 17, 2016 Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor “The American Ideal and the American Real”

~ Walt Whitman ~ Leaves of Grass

"Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others,
Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people.

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young, and with the mothers or families.

Re-examine all you have been told
in school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem…

And have the richest fluency, not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
and In every motion and joint of your body."

I think that my high school literature teacher may have been a communist, or an atheist, or an anarchist, or some kind of philosophical gadfly. She seemed innocent enough at the time but at some point she had us read portions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, that poem by a mid-nineteenth century humanist who, while embracing all religions, didn’t believe in any of them. A probably gay, certainly uninhibited man who dropped ideas on the American public intended to free them from being controlled by religious doctrine, financial exploitation, or dominance by an educated elite.

He invited his American peers to fall in love with animals and nature and to despise the rich and powerful.

He asked us to question everything we had been told either in church or in school, and he insisted that there was no one so humble that they should either doff their hat or bow to the wisdom or power of anyone else.

That Mrs. Hahn would just drop a piece of literature like this in a rural Kentucky community classroom and not comment on it at all must have been at least subversive, and I think that I like her more now than I was smart enough to cherish her then. Still, without commentary, this poem slid right over the clean waxed floor of my young mind. I could read the words. I could memorize them and repeat them. But I was powerless to see what the implications were.

American, it seems to me, has always suffered from a deep divide between the idealism we claim to cherish and the reality with which we are willing to settle.

We sing songs to liberty, to the concepts of equality, freedom, and opportunity but, in spite of our noble values, it doesn’t seem to take much to scare us.

You know, I hope, if you don’t let me say it plainly and I hope you hold onto this:

Fear is the root of anger. Anger is almost always, a fear inspired emotion. This is nowhere more true than in the angry political rhetoric we hear in an election year. Politicians use fear to make people give up their rights, to abandon their freedoms, to sacrifice their liberty in order to made to feel safe. When someone identifies themselves as a “law and order” candidate you can take it to the bank that they are playing on your fears in the hope that voters will install them as a tyrant.

People will accept the rule of a tyrant only when they are frightened. So the news feeds us a steady stream of reports about the civil war in Syria, the coups in Turkey, the massacre in France, and the murder of police in Dallas.

I am concerned, there are good reasons for serious concern, over the military unrest in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Turkey but I want to pull out a couple of threads that the media tends to blend in with these national actions. There is a huge difference between an individual and an army. There is a vital distinction to be made between a single criminal and a criminal institution or government.

Turkey has the second largest army in NATO and the only way to have a bloodless coup is to make it very quick and total… which has not happened in Turkey, and if this very large army in a country where the USA has a nuclear armed military base turns on itself, we can brace ourselves for some horrifying news.

But I want to separate that kind of thing from the horrible event in Nice, France this week, and the police shooting in Dallas the week before. Both of these events were carried out by single individuals, driven by their own demons of fear, maybe religious fervor, or maybe just rage at the injustice they feel in life. But it was not Islam-writ-large that drove that truck through a crowd in Nice, and it was not Black Lives Matter with assault rifles that killed those police officers in Dallas.

The fact that there are people who are so marginalized, whose souls have been so insulted, that they have somaticized their rage in such a way that it comes out as mass murder is a complicated one which can only be addressed by making the world a better, more inclusive, more fair, more just world.

My fear is, in America, in France, in Belgium and elsewhere, is that fear generated by either a single angry person or a small handful of organized terrorists can make people forget about the kind of liberty, freedom, independence, and civil rights that we have to either protect or we will lose them.

With your permission, I would like to take a few minutes to consider a single incident in our news cycle that illustrates my concerns.

(Show first frame of Power Point) This is Alton Sterling. Like a lot of us, he was not a saint. He had both good and bad qualities. But he entered into the news cycle when, on Tuesday, July 5^th, he was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

You will have seen some of the video that shows Alton Sterling lying on the ground, being held down by two officers, and then he was shot several times, both in the back and the chest, at point blank range.

There were three video recordings of this incident. There should have been five. Both of the police officers were wearing video cameras on their uniform. The officers claimed that they fell off before their confrontation with Sterling. There was a video made by the security camera at the convenience store where Sterling was killed. The store owner, Abdullah Muflahi, (show second slide) a friend of Sterling, also shot a video on his phone, and there was another bystander, an unidentified woman, who also shot video on her phone.

I will not show Abdullah’s video because it is simply too graphic to see in church. Abdullah has said that he has no idea why the police attacked Sterling in the first place and that during the time that they were throwing him up against a parked car and then slamming him to the ground, Sterling was crying out, “What did I do? Why are you doing this?”

When the police became aware that Abdullah had witnessed these events, they handcuffed him and put him in the back of a squad car for hours, refusing even to allow him to use the restroom. While they had him restrained, they went in his store and took his security camera and recording over his objections. He demanded that the police produce a search warrant but they ignored his objections and simply took the store’s security system and that video has not been released to the public.

He was not permitted to call either his family or his lawyer during this time. Abdullah has speculated that they did not know that he had videoed the event on his phone or they would not have given his phone back to him when they eventually released him without ever arresting him or charging him, or giving him any excuse for having been illegally imprisoned for several hours.

The other video you may have seen was captured on the phone of a woman in the parking lot who then sent it to Chris LeDay (show 3^rd slide) who has a popular social media presence. LeDay is an Airforce veteran who worked on Dobins Airforce base in a civilian position. The day after he posted the video of the killing of Sterling on line, Sherriff’s officers showed up and arrested him, they said, on an assault and battery charge. They handcuffed him and put manacles on his legs and led him off the base.

In the end, they admitted that there was no assault and battery charge but he did have several unpaid traffic tickets which, when he managed to pull together the money to pay them, and he was released from prison. There is, of course, no precedent for this kind of arrest and manacling for traffic tickets.

What I’m saying here is that even in the face of regular news of police killing of unarmed black men in our country that the only real prosecution seems to be coming down on witnesses and protesters, even going a thousand miles away to arrest and harass a man who had posted eye-witness video of their crimes.

I do want to take just a couple of minutes to show you some video of riot police in Baton Rouge breaking up a protest of the Sterling killing just so you can see why I am so concerned about the prospect of the death of our American idealism:

(show 7:38 to 9:30 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9kkuHoPwZ0)

There is good reason to believe that there was little to no reason at all for the police to have any contact with Alton Sterling that day. There was clearly no legal justification for arresting or harassing Chris LeDay and Abdullah Muflahi, and there was no legal justification for simply stealing his store’s security camera.

But these are all aspects of what we saw in this video of a line of police looking like a military invasion force, pushing American citizens who had simply expressed their right to protest wrongs onto private property and arresting them. This is what a police state looks like and if we let it happen with the tacit approval of our silence in Louisiana, then we can surely expect it in Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and Mississippi, and those of you who do not live in the south should not assume that cancer never spreads.

But I will not leave you without a word of hope and encouragement. In fact, though you may think that you have heard me say it before, this time it is different.

I am in love and I can honestly say that I have never felt this way before. I am in love with a young nurse in Baton Rouge whom I have never met and who I will probably never meet but I just wish that I knew what address to send the flowers and jewelry to.

(show fifth slide)

Ieshia Evans lives with her son in Pennsylvania but came down to Baton Rouge to participate in her first demonstration. She saw a protestor being arrested and she decided to step out into the street and simply stand in silence against the abuses of the police.

We will see this picture of her for the rest of our lives, alongside the picture of the man who stood before a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

She says that God put her in that place to use her to bear witness to the fact that black lives matter. For me she represents how God needs for all of us to have the courage to stand up for what is right. To stand together with the victims of violence, poverty, discrimination, and abuse.

Men and women, don’t give up on the idealism of our great nation. Don’t trade your liberty or your freedom for anything, not security, not safety, not a sense of revenge, certainly not for your white privilege, and absolutely not to bolster the power of a tyrant.

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young, and with the mothers or families.

Re-examine all you have been told
in school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem…

And have the richest fluency, not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
and In every motion and joint of your body."

Sunday, July 17, 2016