Four of my students in China in 2002 asked my help to arrange and produce a choric reading of Dr. Martin Luther King's speech, "I Have a Dream." . They knew the events surrounding King's 1962 letter from the Birmingham jail1. We learned together how our nation rose to the moral challenge of segregation. They were impressed with the history. I was proud to be an American.
Prominent Christian leaders had urged Dr. King to stop demonstrating. They hadn't understood the brutality, the urgency of those suffering. The government and media had resisted the truth. Dr. King was arrested and jailed on charges of rioting and leading a demonstration without a permit. The law was imposed, and he was found guilty. In subsequent events, Dr. King's lawbreaking was vindicated; the ugly face of segregation was unveiled and God's Way prevailed over racial segregation in our nation. I was there in Mississippi in the 1960's, when Dr. King was assassinated; I saw God work amazing changes through citizens who looked to Him and His Way through Jesus. Citizens stopped treating blacks like rats.
Under pressure from the newly informed free press following the massive crackdown against Dr. King's organized civil disobedience, our government began changing laws. Instead of using the courts to oppress the message and the messenger, government found new respect for the Bill of Rights of the Constitution, and protected the victims of segregation2. More importantly, the rights of informants to reveal the secrets of the brutality and economic deprivation were protected. Racial hatred, greed, hunger, sickness and imprisonment were dealt a devastating blow in America. Righteousness and the way of God scored a victory. Advent progressed into Christmas, and God's truth began to be credible again. Remember? We forget so easily….
Case 1: Killing Rats
We never told anyone. In fact, we brothers never mentioned it after the event. Raised in a hunting family, we knew better than killing for fun. Dad, had he known, would have punished us.
Back in the early '50's one January the price of corn went up. We had a grain bin inside our barn with tight walls and a concrete floor. We had shoveled it full with ear corn that fall, because Dad said the price was too low to sell. Now was time to sell that corn. The John Deere B's clutch pulley was linked by flat belt with the pulley of the staked-down elevator, and all three of us brothers shoveled several truck loads of that ear corn out of the grain bin until we got blisters.
I remember the mice running first. Our dogs had fun, and got full. But when the corn was down to the last 20 bushels or so, we began seeing rats. A dog caught one, got bit, and quit chasing them.
One of us got an idea, but the terror that happened bothered me. I won't admit it was my idea: "Shut the door and block it so the rats can't escape!"
We kicked the small pile of corn, the rats ran and panicked because there was no way out. We smashed them with our steel scoop shovels. We each got one or two, then the rats quit trying to escape. They stood, looked us in the eye, and attacked back, biting our boots and loose farmer overalls. In seconds my little brother let out a scream. A rat had run up his pants and fastened his teeth into his leg. I tried to help him smash the rat with my hands, but couldn't. I pulled the rat loose from its death grip on my brother's leg, got bit, and my older brother helped me dispatch that rat. My brother's pants were quickly red with his blood, and our hands were bloodied. For years I had recurring nightmares from this incident.
Here's what I learned: People are not rats. But when people secretly start cornering people, brutally exterminating their humanity, their place in their family or community, torturing them or taking their very lives, people begin acting like those rats. Jesus was such a victim. But he demonstrated God's way, a more powerful response to evil.
Case 2: Killing Jesus.
From before his birth to after his death, Jesus' home community was permeated with hatred, greed, hunger, sickness and imprisonment3. But within his faith community and family were those who hoped in God and His Way. Bible records of Advent songs of Zechariah, Simeon, Elizabeth, Mary, and Isaiah quoted by John, all focus carefully at least implicitly on these deplorable living conditions. There was hope in God. Not in the insurgency that arose from the violence of the occupation. Not in collaboration with the occupation, as led by the wealthy Jewish elite. Both these political parties had blood on their hands4.
Before Jesus' birth announcement, the message of God's Way lay quiet among these people. The time came, and the prophecies were about to be fulfilled. The oppressive "Peace of Rome" was stealthily shattered when boy babies of country parents were hounded down and slaughtered to protect government against the possibility of such a messenger arising and threatening the powerful. Jesus and his earthly parents fled to Egypt for sanctuary. The three wise men recognized Pilate's power to kill to keep secrets covered and fled back home another way. Jesus returned home after his exile, grew up, learned the power of God's Way, and at a mature age was baptized to follow His Heavenly Father's way.
Jesus' story illustrates that it's simply not possible to even quietly minister to victims of government oppression without earning the ire of that government. And when the time was fulfilled, he spoke strongly.
Case 3: Uncovering Chinese Government Secrets.
Liu Xiao Bo was sentenced to prison by the Communist government of China. His telling the truth of the brutality of the Chinese government won for him the Nobel Prize for Peace. The population of China, propagandized by media, has initially agreed overwhelmingly with their government5. The Chinese consensus: Liu Xiaobo is guilty of the crime of undermining the homeland security of China. Yes, the Chinese government still resists Advent, and has not learned from Jesus or Martin Luther King.
Case 4: Uncovering American Government Secrets.
Pfc. Bradley Manning is being held in a military brig in Virginia for uncovering military and diplomatic secrets via wikileaks. Our government and the media led by Fox News openly advocates killing him extra-judicially6. Here again is an opportunity not unlike Dr. King's letter. We can as a nation face the ugly truth of our oppressive misguided wars in the Middle East, and change the course our nation is on to shame and disdain internationally. We can rise to the truth of our great heritage, as we did in the Civil Rights era when we the people overcame the voices of fear, secrecy, violence and greed7.
My suggestion: Help strengthen America through this Advent season. Encourage neighbors and friends to live up to our heritage of moral values reinforced by Dr. King. Check out one of the thousand+ links to the info our government wants to suppress from its citizens: www.wikileaks.ch/
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1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail
2.Vincent Harding, 2010. Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement. This author, a sociologist and Biblical scholar, was on Dr. King's staff for years through his assassination. His book gives profound impetus to the passion of this week's Spirit and Dust column.
3.See my previous column, and the many sources listed therein documenting the social and political climate of Galilee and Judea in the decades around Jesus' life and ministry.
4.Myers, Binding the Strong Man. My favorite of several sources listed, detailing the conflict between the Sadducees and other collaborators with the Roman military government, against the insurgency groups, most famous being the Zealot party, of which Simon was one of Jesus' disciples.
5. http://china.globaltimes.cn/society/2010-10/582916.html The Chinese government/media conglomerate has been successful keeping the lid on the information Liu XiaoBo has researched. The government attacks the messenger who has revealed secrets threatening to the "state security." The media collaborates. They cannot focus on the information because the secrets revealed are true and cannot reasonably be discredited. See other news reports, from sources not in China. There are many.
6. Several key government officials and Fox News have joined in calling Assange a terrorist and calling for his assassination. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d36xEvVnF2I&feature=player_embedded Notably Ron Paul disagrees. http://www.ronpaul.com/2010-12-10/ron-paul-defends-wikileaks-dont-kill-the-messenger-change-our-foreign-policy/ It's also noteworthy that Nixon's secret tapes revealed that he attempted to draft Cuban expats to secretly assassinate Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. But that time, it remained secret and totally un-American to advocate extra-judicial killing of a messenger. Fox News and some in our government/media conglomeration are way off the mark of pride in American values.
7.Harding, ibid. See also the sources listed in my previous post.
Further comments:
Sensitive potentially libelous information was redacted by Wikileaks. Unfortunately, the happened without military or government help. Our government refused requests to help Wikileaks separate legitimately secret military information from the truth of our tax investment in raw violence against innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Regardless of our political opinions, we all need to back up and take a look at our strategies for getting along with our friendly fellow citizens who disagree, and with our world citizens as well. They are humans, not rats. The survival of "we the people" of this nation is at stake.
When Jesus said truth gives us liberty, he meant for us to see the power of our choice to follow God in response to his torture and death. His innocent capital punishment, being treated like a rat by the Romans and their Jewish cronies, was the central ritual of the first Christians, and remains such today. He spoke from the cross, in the midst of his torture and terror. Early Christians learned God's freedom to be, even in the midst of such inhumanity.
Such victimizing didn't work then for that government to defeat Jesus' threat to the way of Rome. Jesus had already spent his life revealing the true face of the government's evil, both Jewish and Roman. When, after their experience with Jesus' crucifixion, the Romans finally stopped torture by crucifixion as an instrument of government policy, it was too late. The government crumbled anyway.
The world hasn't changed. Governments still torture and terrorize the world's people. They are still brought to defeat. It's in God's plan, as Jesus and the prophets foretold it, to proclaim the better Way of God to deal with evil. "Nations rise and fall, but the word of our God remains forever."
The kind of love Dr. Martin Luther King had for Bull Conner and the segregationists who tried to kill him is the same kind of love Jesus had for the Roman government leaders and members of the Jewish insurgency. It's not namby-pamby walk-all-over-me love. Jesus and Martin both confronted evil with the most formidable power in the world. That power, translated in English, "love," includes strong confrontation, and often gets a violent response from enemies. When thus confronted, evil governments fight back and lose, or else come to see the Light of the Power of God. Prophets like Jesus held up the mirror of humanity to the evil in their time, and let it be seen. Governments, wise to the looming loss, have always opposed this truth. It's the reason Liu Xiao Bo is in a military prison in China, and the reason Pfc. Manning is in military prison in America. It's also the reason Martin Luther King spent so much time behind bars, and was assassinated. True prophets have always pulled off the veil of the pretty face of government and revealed underneath its desperate brutality to suppress the truth of its illegal and abominable inhumanity against human beings.
As much as government soldiers and workers don't want it to be that, that's the "cost of freedom" they have levied when, like an adolescent in a fight, they are blind to considering God's way to combat evil. They all say, "We could do nothing else." This is the classic entrapment of fight or flee familiar to the reptile species' brain.
My bias is that the best proof of our greatness as a nation is that we—our government and our citizens—listened to Dr. Martin Luther King. We began to dismantle evil institutions and began following the Way of God because of his ministry. My greatest fear for our nation is that we will not listen to the same revelations of our secret evil in our response to our world's criticism today, and continue on the path to destruction well trod by empires of the past. Only the Truth of Jesus can liberate us from our current path. That's why our nation needs its Christian influence now more than ever. Wikileaks, while not under Christian control, is being used by God to bring His Truth to America now, this Advent season.
So what have Chinese and American leaders done when the truth is uncovered, and they find Jesus' way to be unbelievable? The same thing Romans and Jews did when Jesus' death tore the veil and uncovered the truth. They deny the truth. They try to escape the truth. And they attack the messenger, the one who uncovers what is really done and said, often without editorializing or complaining.
The messengers bringing the truth of our government's ugly face are simply carriers. They really simply transmit what others say, with a sense of reverence because God's way is to give voice to the oppressed, to set them free. For all their personal defectiveness, these three truth carriers are the instruments of the love of God through Jesus Christ. If our nation would listen again, like we as a nation did in the civil rights movement, and like Jerusalem failed to listen and Jesus wept over it, we could as a nation repent again, and survive our sin, and rise to strength and credibility around the world.
American politics has gone far into rat behavior, and far from Jesus. The media pundits and politicians with the most claims to following Him seem farthest from Him. Even most Christians in America think that Jesus' way is the wrong way, especially when it comes to really bad evil. We have a long ways to go to arrive at true repentance, and learn the Way of God against evil that besets us.
Nothing has changed since Rome. Governments desperately want to keep secret the truth of their desperate dealings with terrorized people. When torture and terror of opponents become acceptable policy, as formulated by the Bush administration and confirmed by Obama, governments want us to think everything is hunky-dory: either
1) Those people are better dead anyway, or
2) Sorry, but things happen in war. But war is necessary to destroy EVIL people/rats.
But most of all, they want us worked via the media into a frenzy of hate for the one(s) who reveal their secrets and in so doing undermine their pet theory: "It's far better to pursue terror and torture of terrorist and torturist enemies away from our land and keep our homeland secure." Note the Romans' finding of Jesus guilty by association with the Zealot insurgency, and sending the intended signal to the insurgency with the marquee on his cross, "The King of the Jews."
"Who's the guilty leaker?"
This is the only question the media/government can come up with regarding the wiki leaks, with the unquestioned assumption a crime has been committed causing human suffering and loss. And it has. That's what the leaks reveal. It's the reason they want them suppressed.
What in fact is the crime against humanity? Answer: the depredation and foolishness of our confused foreign policies, wielded by the world's most lethal military hardware.
Unlike that rat in my brother's pants, Jesus didn't attack back; the Gospels all make abundantly clear that he remained perfect in his Truth: that through Him and his way, hoped for by the prophets, we human beings have a better way to deal with the deadliness of our rat behaviors. The way of the Roman Empire to homeland security was soundly discredited. The way of the Zealots to national restoration was equally rejected. What he did is often portrayed as the "loving" way, and rejected as categorically weak. But our English word for this kind of love doesn't say it right.
In his ministry Jesus stated explicitly that Salvation constituted imitating his acts on behalf of the hungry, imprisoned, thirsty, and ill (Matthew 25). His disciples remembered and followed suit. As portrayed in all four first evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, hatred and murderous conspiracies built among the powerful, and led to his execution. After his death and resurrection many early followers were similarly executed.
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David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
