“Freedom through Defiance” January 20, 2019 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
In the 1970s, Pete Seeger was invited to sing in Barcelona, Spain. Francisco Franco's fascist government, the last of the dictatorships that started World War II, was still in power but declining. A pro-democracy movement was gaining strength and to prove it, they invited America's best-known freedom singer to Spain. More than a hundred thousand people were in the stadium, where rock bands had played all day. But the crowd had come for Seeger. As Pete prepared to go on, government officials handed him a list of songs he was not allowed to sing. Pete studied it mournfully, saying it looked an awful lot like his set list. But they insisted: he must not sing any of these songs.
Pete took the government's list of banned songs and strolled on stage. He held up the paper and said, "I've been told that I'm not allowed to sing these songs." He grinned at the crowd and said, "So I'll just play the chords; maybe you know the words. They didn't say anything about you singing them." He strummed his banjo to one song after another, and they all sang. A hundred thousand defiant freedom singers breaking the law with Pete Seeger, filling the stadium with words their government did not want them to hear, words they all knew and had sung together, in secret circles, for years. What could the government do? Arrest a hundred thousand singers? It had been beaten by a few banjo chords and the fame of a man whose songs were on the lips of the whole world.
For both recording reasons and copyright laws, our internet audience rarely gets to hear what our musicians do here but for those of us in the Springfield “seated” congregation, it is not my preaching and theological insights that created this community of faith, at best, I have simply been the partner to a group of amazing musicians who put into passionate words the liberating and compassionate message the church was founded to prophetically proclaim.
In the case described in our wisdom lesson today, we see a solid historical example of how the saying on the tee-shirt is literally true. Pete Seeger had the courage to go and perform in Spain in the 1970’s when Franco’s fascist government still held power. Government censors showed up at the concert and handed Seeger a list of his popular songs that he was not allowed to sing publicly in Spain.
It would have been one kind of moral victory if Seeger had just decided to ignore the censors and forge ahead and sing his protests songs. If he had, the concert probably would have been stopped and Seeger might have disappeared into a prison from which he would later mysteriously have emerged as a corpse.
What he decided to do was so much more powerful and it sent such a compelling message to the fascists in Spain that it did change history. He just started to play the chords of his songs on his famous banjo and the stadium full of eager fans started to sing the songs themselves. It wasn’t that a heroic Pete Seeger came to liberate Spain in a single defiant act, it was that the Spanish people had been listening too, singing, memorizing these protest songs for years. The ideas in the songs were in their hearts. The ideas, which may have also come to them from poets, preachers, priests, philosophers, and revolutionaries all found expression and power in the songs.
One of our former members used to publicly lament during classes and after services, “All you do is talk about these things but why don’t we do anything?” Well, we do some things . . . we feed the homeless, care for domestic violence victims, resource the unsheltered, and provide food for the poor . . . we sometimes march, protest, call our legislators, or humiliate them in the opinion pages of the newspaper, but still, I understand her complaint. Mostly, I just talk.
My hope is that I talk in something like the way that Pete Seeger sang. I keep planting the ideas in people’s ears, reassuring them that they are not alone, encouraging them to be brave, so that when there are enough believers, when the conviction is strong enough, a fascist like Franco finds himself to be no longer in charge of the people’s hearts and minds.
Two weeks ago, I told the story of a young slave who ran away from the service of the first president of the United States and spent her life as a fugitive. I talked about slavery as America’s original sin. I had discussed that our musicians at the time, uncertain whether we should call slavery America’s original sin or was the genocide of Native Americans our original sin? Both historical horrors deserve that designation though I think that the sequence of events might slightly favor slavery for that designation but, who wants to win that contest anyway?
But a part of my premise in the sermon about Washington and the fugitive slave, Oney Judge, is that there were people all around Washington who were very articulately advocating for the liberation of the slaves. Washington was not just swept along by the white supremacy of the prevailing culture into being a slave owner. He made the decision to be a slave owner, and a participant in the literal breeding and working of slaves for his personal profit and comfort.
I’m not saying that he didn’t do great things in his life, I’m just saying that he had a glaring moral flaw that he had ample information and opportunity to have risen above.
And today I want to say, in a similar vein, that this was also true in the other great American original sin, the genocide of Native Americans. There were about 90 million Native Americans in North America when white Europeans began their push to take control of the continent. There are about 4 million today, only one third of which live on reservations in intentional Native American communities. As bad as the holocaust in Europe was in the 1940’s, as horrible as the images that come to us from movies and museums, the death toll of the Jewish holocaust was dwarfed by what was done to the American Indian.
You could look at any number of incidents of broken treaties and intentional spreading of disease among Indian populations, but I want to pull out one of the most egregious examples today, a massacre at Sand Creek that took place in the fall of 1864. While the Civil War raged on in the eastern states, gold had been discovered in the Colorado Rockies and though this was Indian land belonging to the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, troops were forcing the Native Americans back to make way for the gold miners.
But there were two officers under the command of Chivington, Captain Soule and Lt. Cramer, who ordered their men to refrain from attacking.
They confronted Chivington the night before the massacre began and pressed their case with such ferocity that Chivington threatened to send them back east in chains but in the end, he relented and agreed not to attack the Indian village. He was, of course, lying. After the massacre, the soldiers returned to Denver, displaying the scalps of men, women, and even of infants, expecting to be greeted as heroes. And, initially they were. But Soule and Cramer reported the real events to congress, sparking a Congressional investigation that turned the Massacre at Sand Creek into a national embarrassment, and so began the loss of appetite among Americans for the Indian Wars.
Soule and Cramer were a part of a culture that had dehumanized Indians, that thought that killing Indians was patriotic and even a holy endeavor but somehow, they thought their way out of that culture to a better and higher place and they held a mirror up to America to let the whole nation see how ugly we had become. Prejudice doesn’t die overnight. A great society is not birthed in one incident, but it takes the leadership of a few prophets to show us what we can become.
Rapone’s reaction to his disappointment in finding out how he had been tricked and lied to in military brainwashing may have been extreme but it was not quite as thorough going as Pat Tillman’s brother, Kevin Tillman’s, response.
Pat and Kevin joined the army together, shortly after 9-11. It was a patriotic decision for them to defend their nation against attack from foreign terrorists. But their education in international affairs didn’t begin in earnest until Pat was killed by friendly fire on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2004. Two years later, in 2006, an awakened Kevin Tillman said this in an essay that was published in honor of his slain brother:
I will read only a few pieces of essay. You can find the whole of it on Truthdig.com under the heading, “After Pats Birthday.”
Kevin writes:
Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.
Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military. . .
Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes. . .
Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.
Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.
Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.
Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.
Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.
Somehow torture is tolerated.
Somehow lying is tolerated.
Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.
Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.
Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.
Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.
Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.
Somehow this is tolerated.
Somehow nobody is accountable for this.
In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.
That essay is now 19 years old and we still have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. I trust that I do not need to point out to you the moral connection between the hundreds of thousands of civilians we have killed in Afghanistan and Iraq and the massacre at Sand Creek a hundred and fifty-five years ago.
I appreciate that you may have learned a bit of history when I told the story of Oney Judge two weeks ago. You may not have known the story of the massacre at Sand Creek, Colorado before today, but we don’t come here for history lessons. We come here to hear the voices of people like Captain Soule and Lt. Cramer in the music of Pete Seeger and the memorial musings of Kevin Tillman.
We want to stand in the breach of military propaganda and cleaned up public school history to offer a prophetic and honest voice to train the conscience of the next generation of decision makers. I don’t know where Pat and Kevin Tillman went to church, but I feel like their church let them down, allowing them to be sucked into the military propaganda machine, leaving them to learn the sorry truth on a battle field in Afghanistan.
We don’t ever want to make that mistake again.
