“They Didn’t Know We Were Seeds”

“They Didn’t Know We Were Seeds”     Easter, April 21, 2019     Dr. Roger Ray

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Violet and the Undercurrents are the composers/performers of the music lyrics used in this sermon:

“We Are Still Here”

They tried to bury us, they try to sweep us under

They try to silence us, they try to scare us with thunder

But after thunder comes the rain and after rain comes the pain

From the pain a seed will grow taller than the sky and stronger than you will know

We are still here, and we are stronger than fear

Yes, we are still here, yes, we are stronger than fear – we’re stronger

They try to teach us our neighbor is our enemy

Here, swallow this pill we have the best remedy

But as you swallow you feel it go down, you feel the room spinning around

Before you know it is too late because you could have chosen not to swallow hate

We are still here, and we are stronger than fear

Yes, we are still here, yes, we are stronger than fear – we’re stronger

Don’t believe everything that you read, don’t believe everything that you read . . . 

The 2005 movie, V is for Vendetta, is set in a dystopian political future in which the government maintains a fascist control of the people through control of the media in a constant barrage of lies and propaganda. I trust my love for this film requires no explanation.

The plot revolves around a character who wears a Guy Fawkes mask who is planning to complete the gunpowder plot of 1605 and succeed in blowing up the Parliament building in order to awaken and unite the people to stand up to their fascist government. 

The subtext of the narrative is that Fawkes can still inspire action, even 400 years after his execution. The main character of V knows that he will die in the process of carrying out his plot, but he is assured that his survival is irrelevant. The point is the idea of the revolution that needs to happen, the idea of freedom, democracy, justice, and as such, it is an idea that cannot be killed… ideas are bulletproof. 

Though entirely fictional, martyrdom in order to immortalize an idea has many historical precedents. Many of us here can remember June of 1963, when the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thích Quang Duc, burned himself to death at a busy intersection in Saigon. His public martyrdom drew attention to the injustice of the Vietnam War and was, at least a part, of the turn of public sentiment from support to protest.

I was in my first year of seminary in the spring of 1980, having only been introduced to liberation theology, when Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by American trained and funded political assassins in El Salvador. One of his aids came and spoke to us in the Vanderbilt chapel the next month, giving us an eye-witness account of the murder of this liberation theology icon. The progressive priests of Central and South America were systematically captured, tortured, and murdered in the years that followed, all with the blessings of a conservative Vatican that chose to ally itself with brutal dictators out of fear of socialism. 

The current pope, though he was a part of the machinery that silenced liberationists in Argentina, is now trying to assuage the Catholic Church’s collective guilt by having Romero canonized as a saint, which, of course, he would not have wanted, and which entirely misses the point. But, as I have observed before, if all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. The Catholic Church is guilty of having cooperated with the arrest, torture, and murder of their own priests and rather than confess their own sins, they want to elevate the first well known martyr to sainthood.

Not at all unlike the way our country has treated the 1964 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. We cannot canonize saints but we can make his birthday a federal holiday and then name all of the most dangerous, crime riddled streets in major cities after him. Now even conservative politicians try to use King’s name and quotes to polish their own reputations while trying to ignore everything he said, but, ideas are bullet proof, and even from his grave, King still speaks to our hearts.

Of course, we are gathered here on Easter, following the traditional observance of the events of the Christian Holy Week in which the world’s most well-knownmartyr is remembered. The oldest biblical accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus were actually recorded by Paul, a zealous believer who never met Jesus in the flesh and who knew very little about the real story, but even as a zealot, Paul never implies that there was an empty tomb or that anyone had seen Jesus after the crucifixion in any way other than as a vision. 

The first canonical gospel, Mark, speaks of an empty tomb but no appearances. The Gospel of Thomas, which probably predates what we have in the New Testament, does not mention a resurrection at all. At the end of the first century, the early church added narratives about a physical resurrection as the message of Jesus was being tamed and transformed from a message of liberation theology, a message of revolution against an evil empire, and into an illusory promise of eternal life after death. The church, conspiring with the political authorities of the day, tried to kill the idea of radical compassionate revolution and to replace it with what Marx accurately described as being the opiate of the people . . . a religious narrative intended to keep the poor and enslaved quiet and cooperative. 

I know that many of my peers in the traditional church think that I am somewhat uniquely radical in my re-presenting of the Jesus narrative but I will leave it to Thomas Jefferson, who, in a 1814 letter to Horatio Spafford, said it better than I ever could:  the priest has been hostile to liberty. he is always in alliance with the  Despot abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. it is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them: and to effect this they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man, into mystery & jargon unintelligible to all mankind & therefore the safer engine for their purposes. 

 

Some months ago, David Ketchum and I were attending an organizing event for Transgender rights, and we heard Violet and the Undercurrents sing just a couple of songs, but when I heard the line:

They tried to bury us, they try to sweep us under

They try to silence us, they try to scare us with thunder

But after thunder comes the rain and after rain comes the pain

From the pain a seed will grow taller than the sky and stronger than you will know

I turned to David and said, “There is the real meaning of Easter: They tried to bury us but they didn’t know we were seeds.” A government killed Jesus and the church tried to bury his message in magic and superstition, and yet, thousands of years later, some still can hear him calling us to revolution. A government killed Dietrich Bonhoeffer and generations of seminary professors have tried to make his message tediously boring, but his death reminds the church that it is our job to stand up to fascism. 

Our government, working with a despot in El Salvador, killed archbishop Romero, assassins killed Gandhi, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. but ideas are bullet proof. They tried to sweep them under. Since they were killed, governments have tried to silence their voices, tried to scare us with thunder, they buried them, they just didn’t know that they were seeds. 

We are not the keepers of a dead religion, encased in magical thinking and silly, childish promises of some kind of literal heaven or frightened with the fires of an imaginary hell. We are the one thing that governments and churches fear the most, we have an idea and we have refused to be freighted, to be silenced or even to play dead. Because they know, all that stands between us and the end of fascism, what has kept us from real liberation, is that we were not united and aware. Whether our generation will awaken from its childish indifference or not remains to be seen but this much I know, the world is ripe for a revolution, a reformation, in economics, in government, and in religion. Whether it will happen in my life time or not, I cannot predict, I just know that it should:

“Because We Aren’t Done Yet”

“Eyes on the Sky”

Don’t turn around. Don’t stop now.

There’s something on the horizon.

Don’t close your eyes, don’t look away.

There’s something to keep your eyes on

And don’t ask me how I know, I just know these things sometimes

And don’t ask me how I know, I just know that it’s right

And don’t ask me how I know, Just keep your eyes on the sky

Don’t waste your time on trying to compare yourself to the ocean

Cause if you try then in due time you’ll forget what set this boat in motion

And don’t ask me how I know, I just know these things sometimes

And don’t ask me how I know, I just know that it’s right

And don’t ask me how I know, Just keep your eyes on the sky

Because it is Easter, it is unavoidable that we think of martyrdom and consider how even execution or murder has not ended the influence of some of our most inspiring statesmen and prophets. But, realistically, if Easter is only meaningful for martyrs, then this becomes far too much of a history lesson and idolizing of past heroes and not nearly personal enough.

Sure, an assassin killed Martin Luther King, Jr., but long before James Earl Ray did what he did, the FBI, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, was bugging his hotel rooms and building a file of mudslinging evidence of affairs, alcohol abuse, and they even were trying to tie him to the Soviet Communist Party. For the most part, governments, the church, corporations, and political parties, don’t so much assassinate their opposition literally, they do it through character assassination, through rumors, insults, inference, and lies. 

I suspect that even most of you felt some satisfaction in the arrest of Julian Assange, because the United States government has spent more than a decade trying to tell you to despise him and have heaped up false or exaggerated allegations to turn the public against him. And, even trying to read between the lines, it does seem like he has been a real jerk in many ways and over years of unjust virtual incarceration in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, he has accepted an unholy alliance with the propaganda arm of Russia. 

But I would beg you to consider two things: First of all, he became an enemy of the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations because he was revealing factual truths about government abuses that our government didn’t want the public to know. First and foremost, beyond all personal foibles and mistakes, you have been asked to hate him because he revealed the truth about illegal spying on American citizens and for war crimes that involved multiple murders of journalists and aid workers. And as painful as it may be to consider, far beyond whatever Assange has done wrong, the real criminals in this play are George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. 

I know that is so different from almost everything else you have ever heard that it is likely difficult to believe so let me just quote the guy that many of us have acknowledged to be the smartest man alive in the world today: Noam Chomsky. 

Well, the Assange arrest is scandalous in several respects. One of them is just the effort of governments—and it’s not just the U.S. government. The British are cooperating. Ecuador, of course, is now cooperating. Sweden, before, had cooperated. The efforts to silence a journalist who was producing materials that people in power didn’t want the rascal multitude to know about—OK?—that’s basically what happened. WikiLeaks was producing things that people ought to know about those in power. People in power don’t like that, so therefore we have to silence it. OK? This is the kind of thing, the kind of scandal, that takes place, unfortunately, over and over.

The second thing I want to say about this is that the government always goes after the low hanging fruit in order to open a door to a new universe of abuses. Assange is not innocent of wrong doing and he has been successfully smeared in the minds of the public to make his arrest acceptable and even laudable to most people. But please don’t kid yourselves, we have an administration that has been busy building a fascist government for two years, in part, through attacks on legitimate journalism of all sorts, including threats to sue or imprison journalists for telling the truth. 

Do you think the Trump administrations whitewashing of the Saudi torture and murder through dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi was out of loyalty to Saudi royalty absent a real and palpable envy? Don’t you see that he would very much like to do the same thing to annoying journalists in the United States? 

You may be hearing it here first, but you will hear about it a great deal more in the future. The arrest of Julian Assange is the precedent for arresting and harassing more and more journalists to silence the criticisms in the media of dishonest and probably treasonous president. I take no pleasure in being right about this, it is just a painful truth. 

In our day, it is legally difficult to crucify, assassinate, or incarcerate our prophets but character assassination is alive and well and reaching a point of artistic perfection.

Dr. Paul Thomlinson and I have just returned from a 10-day road trip to deliver lectures and provide consults in 8 different events in South Carolina and to add to the exhaustion we also took side trips to Asheville, NC, Charleston and Hilton Head, SC and Savannah, GA. But the best part of the trip for me was getting to spend days in conversation between two old friends who have seen one another through all of the successes and failures that life has dished out to us over the past 25 years. 

Paul very articulately came to my defense a dozen years ago when I was being tried in a Kangaroo Court dismissal from my former denomination, and I championed his prospects of becoming the next director of Burrell Mental Health before a 3^rdworld style coups of heart breaking proportions saw him both passed over and then unemployed. In both of our cases, people we had worked with, trusted, and loved, conspired to end our careers through falsehood and manipulation but, as Paul summed it all up, “We ain’t done yet.” 

We both suffered months of unemployment and then dramatic reductions in compensation but, folks, freedom is not free. Our liberation came at a price and there has been a lot of loss of sleep and some real emotional trauma but we are both more effective and have a larger impact than we ever would have had if we had not been kicked to the curb by people who, frankly, didn’t deserve our service.

The metaphor of resurrection is not about a literal empty tomb from which a formerly dead prophet came back to life to live forever in the clouds. The real power of resurrection is possibly expressed better in the prophetic words of Chumbawamba:

 “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down”

The hope inherent in the Easter message is not that you will one day be issued a pair of wings and a harp and you will never have to suffer again. The hope inherent in the Easter message is that neither bullets or nails, not divorce, unemployment, bankruptcy, heart break, cancer, old age, or being outnumbered uninformed, uneducated, mouth breaking, knuckle dragging, political fascists, will silence us as long as we refuse to be frightened or turned against one another.

Resurrection is at the heart of a revolution that will change Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, it will change America, England, Europe, it will be the downfall of despots and dictators, ideologues and greedy hoarders of the world’s goods. 

As Pete Buttigieg said so well this week: we are not trying to merely win an election, we are trying to win an era. We are not interested in just impeaching the Clementine Caligula, we want to save the planet from destruction. We don’t want to be forced into the false dichotomy of choosing between rebuilding Notre Dame or giving the yellow vest protestors a living wage, there is no reason not to both value humanity and cherish human accomplishment. We’re not going to be fished into a false battle between traditional democrats and democratic socialists, nor are we going to lower ourselves into blaming immigrants and terrorists for our country’s serious economic disparity. We are either here to change the world or we came to the wrong party. 

As our friends sing very prophetically:

“Cuz, you’ve got the magic it takes and you know it….

Now there’s nothing that’s gonna slow you down.”

"Are We There Yet"

are we there yet

cuz we've been out here for so long

got blood and sweat 

in the fabric of this song

and you could get caught up by right or wrong

but you can bet you're gonna come back strong

chorus

cuz you've got the magic it takes and you know it

you've got the magic it takes

are you listening?

cuz they are talking to you now

what you're sensing is gonna show you how

and it is fitting that you just found out

now there is nothing

that's gonna slow you down

chorus