December 17, 2000
© 2000 Grant M. Gallup
Zephaniah 3: 14-20 Don't Worry; Be Happy.
Psalm 85, Benedixisti, Domine, or Canticle 9 Ecce, Deus
Philipians 4:4-9 Let your gentleness be known to everyone
Luke 3:7-18 John said: Be Socialists!
Al Gore won an election, but lost the electors; the U. S. Supreme Court, appointed by the President, returned the favor and appointed a President. Ralph Nader won no electors, lost an election, but won the contest--for his grand itique of the System by wich the Rich and Powerful rule the land and appoint the emperor. The people, enthralled by the propaganda of Empire, like the way the Rich and Powerful rule them through the TV and the Press--it's called a kakistocracy, or Rule of the Worst Citizens. The people get to think they are really in charge, and the two candidates, already chosen by the kakistocracy, let them believe they offer the people a real choice. They both promise to join together after you opt for either one of them, and both promise to smooth over the wrinkles. In a few months, you won't know the difference. Does it matter which one wins? The people lose interest in politics once the choice is determined--it could have been made as well by reading the entrails of an ox.
John Baptist only lost his head, for his denunciations, in which he got at least as personal as Nader. Both are subversives (that is, those who come to over turn and under turn the System, to plow it under). Because supremacists (that is, those on top, those who are opposed to change from below) are also in charge of the ever-growing number of jails, J.B. goes to jail, Nader only to political limbo. But millions of little people will suffer and die as the juggernaut of Empire rolls on in tranquillity. In Nicaragua, the U.S.-designated government of Arnoldo Aleman orders expulsion within 24 hours for Dorothy Granada, a northAmrerican nurse--an Anglican--who has worked with the poor in Mulukuku for a dozen years. She is being hidden by sympatizantes in the campo.
And Herod Antipas is in bed with his niece, former wife of his half-brother. J.B. didn't even know enough to shut up about the personal sins of the powerful, and he blew the whistle on Herod Antipas. Then, as now, those who uncover the scandals and denounce them are denounced, persecuted, jailed. The prophets call for repentance, and the press says, "Let's get this disagreement behind us. Let's move on. Let's unite the country." John said, "The Revolution of God starts now." And Herod Antipas says, "Let's save the electoral college--it keeps the Empire working on behalf of the few" Let's expel the truth.
John said, "The axe is laid to the tree's roots" and Herod Antipas says, "Put that axe on that radical's neck and bring me his head on a platter"
So we hear questions from jail this morning: all over the world there are jail houses with John Baptists in them, but we can't hear their cries. In Israel,where the response to dissent is rubber coated bullets, cloud control gas, spin control in a world press controlled by the few Media Murdochs. The view from the Palestinian people is not looked at. CNN presents various points of view, but no class analysis, and no voices from the jail houses of our society. The Muslim world is dismissed as "terrorist" and the Me First Christian and Jewish World decides what the world will hear, and decides how the story is told.
In the U.S. there are John Baptists in jail, people like Mumia Abu Jamal, who shares death row with J.B., and asks: "Isn't it odd that in this nation, the majority of the population, Christian adherents, claim to pray to and adore a being who was a prisoner of Roman power, an inmate on the empire's death row. Yet these adherents of the crucified god strenuously support the state's execution of thousands of its imprisoned citizens." And good Christians go to church and pray for the prisoners and captives whom they have by capitalist punishment laws destined for death and destruction.
Our brother Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his wonderful questions to the clergy of Birmingham, Alabama, remember, from the jailhouse there. The question that always comes to Jesus from jailhouses is this: "Are you the One who is to come, or do we look for another? Are you the one whom we are looking for, or do we have to wait for someone else to help us escape?"
John sent word by his disciples (maybe Andrew and our other friends were in this group) to ask Jesus a big question. It was a question of confrontation, John's specialty. Remember he had baptized Jesus into the Movement, and called him "The One", the "Lamb from God" and "The Chosen One." Now he seems to have doubts--maybe it's somebody else. Jesus went away and hid after John baptized him--he went on retreat, or into the closet--he didn't do perhaps what John expected him to do at once. John maybe was disappointed in Jesus, who didn't seem to be organizing the rebellion, or laying the axe to the root of the tree, nor did he appear to have grasped the wheel of time and forced God to act on behalf of the Coming Age. So John might have questions in his mind; Does he think: "Now we've got to wait for Robespierre, or Karl Marx, or Frederic Engels, or Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov to change his name to Nikolai Lenin, or Fidel Castro Ruz, or Huey Newton, or Nelson Mandela, or Jesse Jackson. Some revolutionary who has his axe ready, or his pen, to topple all the Herods of history, all the empires and imperial presidencies, Batista and Somoza, Marcos and Reagan and the Bush League. Who will bring in the Kingdom?
Millions around the world, from the ghettos of Manila to the cane fields of Nicaragua, from the cotton fields of the Georgia to the Arabs in Jerusalem jails, from Puerto Ricans in Leavenworth to Iraqis dying without food or medicine, are looking and asking, "Do you have good news for us? Are you Jesus people the answer? Are you, O Church, the Ark of Liberation after all? Can you make a Revolution? Are you the One who is to come, or do we have to wait for others?"
Jesus' answer to John is the same answer Jesus sends now to the underside of history: It is the same message Jesus sent to Nelson Mandela, the same one he sent to the Soviet jails, and the same one he sends to U.S. penitentiaries, the one he sends to us:
What you see is what you get. Go and tell what you see. And Jesus says that this is what is happening in his movement: Blind people are seeing again. Those who were in the dark are moving towards the Light. Those whose eyes were closed are seeing again, those with a dead conscience are coming alive. In Jesus'time, the blind were considered specially cursed--remember Jesus once asked about a blind man, "Who sinned? This man or his parents, that he should be so cursed?" Jesus declared it wasn't a curse, but an opportunity. And he opened his eyes. He enlightened him. He raised his consciousness, dipped him into the bath of truth.
When the blind (yes, the physically blind, too) are cared for by a caring society--that's a Sign of the Kingdom. But when the spiritually blind are enlightened---then those who have blamed themselves for the BIND they are in begin to see that the glory of God is being shown even to them, and the BLIND see. Now the Kindom! Now the Sign!
Lame people rise, hobble, walk, then run. People who have been dropped into the dustbin of history are snatched out--the permanent underclass, the generationally unemployed. Our parking lots in the Me First World all have a few slots and stalls for the "disabled" and our whole society has alloted special dumping grounds for those who are to be permanently locked out or locked up. But Jesus says, these will walk in the kingdom, leap like ballerinas, dance like dervishes. Go tell John that in the Revoluton that Jesus brings, no one, not even the crippled (we even deny by our polite words that we have done more than "challenge" them) will be excluded.
Lepers are cleansed. We don't see much leprosy around us--although here in Managua we still have a leprosarium--and the specific illnesses formerly listed there are no longer grounds for excommunication as they were in Jesus' time. We now have AIDS to stigmatize with our morality. Jesus says that it's a Sign of the Kingdom when people with stigmatized diseases get care and attention. In capitalist society, health care is a commodity for sale and is given to those for whom it is cost effective to care. Jesus says it's a Sign of the Kingdom when the Cubans offer it to everyone free. Faithful Fidel Castro offers it for free to Black poor people in Mississippi! Every effort is to be made to restore the sick to the community.
Deaf people hear. In our society, none of us gets to hear very much. Obfuscation is the method of the media, not communication. Reagan, now babbling in senescence, was wrongly called the Great Communicator because he had mastered propaganda styles. Our society seems to thrive on misinformation, and glories in calling it "spin doctoring." But Jesus promises that one of the Signs of the Kingdom is speaking clearly, talking directly to issues, like Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky would readily recognize, like John the Baptist, that for finding your voice in the wilderness "there are advantages also to being outside of the system of privilege and domination. . . [but] Very little is done individually. It's usually done in groups by collective action and interchange and critique and challenge, with students typically playing an active and often critical role. Part of the genius of the system of domination and control is to separate people from one another so that doesn't happen. We can't consult our neighbors."
But a sign of the Kingdom is neighbors consulting with each other. In the Nicaragua of the 80's (before the U.S. guillotined the revolution) neighbors consulted with each other, and formed a new society of compañeros, and changed their world a while. El Pueblo unido jamas sera vencido! "The people united can never be defeated." In the long run. But in the short run, beheaded, deported.
We are deafened by the cacophony of idiot boxes, ghetto blasters, boob tubes, all of them the noise pollution of consumer capitalism. They take the place of town meeting, of consulting our neighbors. We have been made deaf and dull by lies. My copy of the Prayer Book , printed by the Oxford University Press, has a misprint in it which reminds me of the purpose of much religion, when I find myself praying on Saturday evenings that I may be "dully prepared for the service of your sanctuary."
The dead are being raised--those buried in the underside of the age. The thousands marytred in Guatemala are coming out of their graves, including the young daughter of the Hicho family I stayed with in Guatemala in 1989, when I drove from Chicago to Nicaragua. A university student, she was abducted, raped and "disappared" by the military, in the hire of the U.S. project to keep communism at bay. But she, being dead, yet speaketh. The hundreds of Palestinian youth being murdered by the Zionist project to steal their homeland are speaking from their tombs. Zionism, itself in thrall to U.S. oil interests, has murdered the dream of a democratic homeland for all Mid Eastern peoples. In Chile, the murders of Pinochet begin to ricochet! The dead are raised up to confront their murderers.
The final, wondrous, ultimate claim--the messianic claim indeed--is the fantastic asserton that "the poor have the gospel preached to them." That's the miracle of miracles, the title deed of the Kingdom, the certificate of its authenticity, the touchstone of the truth. The poor hve good news coming to them.
Jesus decisively and definitively places the movement, his commitment, his kingdom (to use the language of that age) this revolution (to use the language of our own) Jesus places himself on the underside, on the side of the poor--and takes an option for the poor.
And Jesus says, "Blessed are you if you are not offended by my option for the poor. Blessed are you if you are not so tied up yourselves in the ways of oppression, blessed are you if you do not have a vested interest in the class system, blessed are you if you find nothing offensive in my option to help people blinded by the lies of agitprop to see and analyze and envision a new future." George Orwell once wrote, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." J. B. thought he had such a right, and used it. But he was arrested as a terrorist; indeed, all good preaching is terrorist preaching, to the status quo.
Gore Vidal asks: "What is a terrorist? Well, anyone who objects, say, to our support for Israel. To dramatise these enemies we put snarling faces on them. Enemy of the Month Club. Arafat for a long time. Gadaffi, whose eyeliner still offends American manhood. Nasser, who died. Noriega, who got kidnapped. Saddam, who got away, if not with Kuwait, with his defiance. Now Osama bin Laden of Saudi in Afghanistan."
The U. S. has frequently put people like Big Bush and Little Shrub in charge of foreign governments, as puppet masters, as satraps and surrogates for U.S. hegemony. Now we are likely to get one ourselves, indeed, imposed by ourselves upon ourselves. “In all cases where the U.S. put ‘its man’ in office,” said Ramsey Clark, “the people wound up worse off than before. Think of what Mobutu did to the Congo, what Pinochet did to Chile, and that under the U.S.-backed governments after the Sandinistas in Nicaragua that country was reduced to one of the poorest on the earth."
Gringo promises to develop Nicaragua were never kept, and instead Taiwanese bankers and industrialists were given a free hand to exploit Nica workers in our little Zonas Francas--“free-trade zones,”--weatshops to earn money for the Free Market investors all over the world.
For Jesus, what validates his ministry and ours is this: the poor have gospel preached to them. Without this criterion, the church has no future, and when the question comes to us from the jails of our time, from the forerunners of gospel in our own age, we have no answer as a Jesus people, as a Christian community, but the one that Jesus gave:
GO AND TELL them what you see, as it happens. Wherever and by whomever the option is taken for the poor, blessed are those who welcome this gospel.
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