Eyes Wide Open: Awakening to the Atrocities
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
October 13, 2019
1 John 3:14-18 (NRSV)
4 We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death. 15 All who hate a brother or sister[e] are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them. 16 We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 17 How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister[f] in need and yet refuses help?
18 Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
I want to begin this morning by asking a question. Have you ever had your eyes opened to a new way of thinking, a new perspective, a new reality?
Now, I know most of us have had that “aha” moment, where things clicked into place and we found clarity, but what I am talking about this morning is a little different than that. I am talking about a moment when you thought you knew what was going on, you were comfortable and content, and then, all of a sudden you were not, something was stirred up that didn’t settle. Maybe you even had some doubts, questions, or simply needed to go on a discovery.
As I have been prepping for this sermon, I have realized that, for me, many of these moments have come while reading books. Actually, one of the earliest memories of having my eyes opened, was late in high school when a teacher challenged me to read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. How many of you have read that book?
The main character Holden Caulfield a troubled teen facing psychological troubles and expelled from high school at the age of 16 was just the opposite of everything I was and stood for in high school. It opened my eyes to seeing the pain and struggle of others my age different than me. Today, Catcher in the Rye is one of the most well-known banned books. I am glad it wasn’t banned when I was growing up, because it helped me see from a different perspective.
This all had me thinking as I sat in my office this week and perused the books on my shelves. Soon, I had a stack of books on my desk that I consider to have opened my eyes, that have changed my perspectives, that have given me a new reality. Some caused me some anguish and I really had to wrestle with them, even put them down or throw across the room - only to pick up later (probably because I wasn’t ready for what they had to say at the time). Once I read them though, I walked away asking different questions about everything from the church, the world, relationships, and yes, even God.
The first book I pulled off my shelf just happened to be by Quaker Richard Foster. Foster’s book, Streams of Living Water, had me wrestling with the idea that all the different Christian traditions have something to offer to one’s overall faith experience. For the first time, I realized that I might have missed out by not exploring traditions other than the one I had grown up with. Later on, I would be introduced to another book “A Generous Orthodoxy” by Brian McLaren that would expand these thoughts even further and help me see value in faiths outside the Christian traditions.
Another book I pulled off my shelf, was one I was given over a lunch with a colleague at Huntington University. Unbeknownst to me, this book would have me searching inwardly for answers about violence and how I might respond. The book’s title alone, If a violent person threaten to harm a loved one…What Would You Do? by John Yoder drew me in. For the first time, I was challenged by the idea of pacifism and non-violent responses as a valid and even biblical way. Hard to grasp for someone raised to accept capital punishment, just war, and domination of one’s enemies.
The next book I pulled off my shelf, was a suggestion from my friend, Jesse (who you may remember from our Labor of Love celebration a couple years ago). He had mentioned this intriguing title, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And other Conversations on Race by psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum. Until reading that book, I didn’t realize the impact of racism all around me, and how much personal work needed to take place.
In October of 2006, I remember being glued to the TV as news of a horrific shooting of 10 schoolgirls took place in a surprisingly shocking place, Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania in the heart of Amish country. Within that year I was reading the book, Amish Grace, written by three professors of historic peace universities. The book disrupted my understanding of grace and forgiveness. It sat me down and made me take another look. For the first time, I wasn’t sure how forgiveness could transcend tragedy, or if I wanted it to, even though the Amish had showed the way. That book ended up on the pile.
Out of this struggle on forgiveness and grace, I happened upon a book, If Grace Is True by a Quaker guy that many of us know named Phil Gulley. Many of you have read this book, and it changed your life, or at least it opened your eyes wider to wrestle with universal grace for all. Not easy for someone who was taught that their faith tradition was the true faith and most, if not all others, were wrong and that hell and fear tactics were ways to keep people safe and in-line.
All of a sudden, my office desk was completely covered with books. Here are just a few other titles that opened my eyes wider…
· Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith by Rob Bell (this was one of the books I threw across the room and put down several times before realizing the wealth of wisdom inside).
· A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans challenged the way I saw the role of women in the Bible.
· Chasing Francis: A Pilgrims Tale by Ian Morgan Cron had me seeing the challenges of a pastor who began seeing things differently and the toll it would take on him.
I could go on and on with book after book…but for this sermon I would like to focus in on one book that really opened my eyes wide. That book was Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. No book, at that point in my life, had opened my eyes as wide. Actually, I related to what Hampton Sides wrote in the new forward to the book. He said,
“It was as if someone threw a switch….it was as though Bury My Heart had caused Americans to rethink everything, to reset the moral compass, to start over again.”
That described my experience well. I will never forget being on vacation in Friendship, Wisconsin with our young family. The cabin we were staying in had no T.V. or internet (actually we didn’t even own smart phones, yet). Sue and I had put our young boys to bed and settled for the night in a couple of comfy chairs with the books that we had brought with us. I had become accustomed to bringing a book to read on vacation for several years, but I had no idea what I had gotten myself into with Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
Now remember, I grew up right here in Indiana. I visited Chief Little Turtle’s grave when I was in grade school. I learned of the Miami Indians that originally settled the territories that make up parts of Indiana and Ohio. I learned of the conquest, the struggle of the First Nations people, and even experienced the reservation system in Oklahoma while working in Texas, but what I was not ready for was the role Christianity and the Church played in the removal and genocide of the Indians from their land in America.
Just as Dee Brown began chapter one, I want to take us back this morning to what opened my eyes so wide, and that starts with Christopher Columbus. I find it ironic, that tomorrow, Monday, October 14 is a holiday in our country – for some it is Columbus Day and for a growing number of folks it is Indigenous People’s Day. Dee Brown introduced me to why a growing number of people are not so fond of celebrating Columbus’ discovery.
To understand Christopher Columbus’ mission a little better, we have to go back a few years and read the papal (the pope’s) proclamation of 1455 that empowered Christian kings of Europe to enslave, plunder, and slaughter in the name of discovery. Here is how it reads,
invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wherever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.
This was the basis for what we commonly call the Doctrine of Discovery. This papal proclamation is what created Christianity’s justification of colonialism.
On a side note...take a moment to think about this…not only is it quite ironic that we have a steeple on our Meetinghouse when George Fox and early Quakers railed against such things, it is even more ironic that as Quakers we sit within a building which is considered “colonial” in style, with pews facing forward, and a pulpit – all symbols of the deep colonial influence on our recent past. Something we may someday want to rethink about this space.
Now, back to what I was saying…as I continued through the atrocities being exposed in Dee Brown’s book, I simply found myself in tears, sometimes in shock, and often wondering how people who had come to America for Religious Freedom, even called themselves Christian, could be so far from the way rooted in love which Christ taught and lived.
What the early Christian settlers did on Native Land and to native people in the name of God made me sick.
But then, I began to notice that history repeated itself.
We don’t have to look hard to find what was named the Crusades in our history books. The Crusades were the papal proclamation in real-time. (My Christian grade school mascot all through from Kindergarten through 8th grade here in Indiana was a Crusader – on my school gymnasium wall was a picture of a knight in armor on a horse with a huge sword with a cross on it. And we didn’t see any harm in that image.).
At the same time the Native American Tragedies were happening in America, stories were being reported of Christian atrocities happening in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America as well. For that matter they would continue in America to only get worse for the First Nations tribes with the Trail of Tears, Abraham Lincoln’s Mass Execution of 39 indigenous people in 1862, the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, and then Wounded Knee.
And this supremacy in America didn’t stop there, the Christian Church would continue and be very involved with the African slave trade which was not only in America but throughout the world. Brian McLaren points out that Pope Urban VIII (8th) even realized the atrocities that were set in motion and reversed the proclamation declaring slavery unacceptable in the mid-17th century, but the majority of Protestant Christians in America and in other countries considered slavery and white supremacy to be absolutely consistent with “biblical” Christianity.
What reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee did for me, was open my eyes wide to the church’s involvement throughout history of removing people that did not fit the mold or would not conform or be “converted” to the form. Where was the way of Jesus rooted in love?
I sat crying in the cabin in Friendship, Wisconsin because as I looked around me (and sadly as I look around me still today 10+ years later) I see the church falling utilizing those same power moves. We have just moved on to another people group…from the Samaritans back in Jesus’ day, to the Muslims and others that were obliterated during the crusades, to our own First Nations people, Africans Americans, the LGBTQ Community, the elderly, the mentally challenged, even Democrats (or Republicans), you name it today – anyone that this type of Christian wants to control, dominate, and force to conform are targets.
Brian McLaren tells a story in “The Great Spiritual Migration” that really emphasizes what I am talking about, He introduces it by saying,
“Christianity, we might say, is driving around with a loaded gun in its glove compartment, and that loaded gun is its violent image of God. It’s driving around with a license to kill, and that license is the Bible, read uncritically. Along with its loaded gun and license to kill, it’s driving around with a sense of entitlement derived from a set of beliefs with a long, ugly, and largely unacknowledged history.”
Then Brian tells the story.
____________________
“All of this became disturbingly clear to me several months after September 11, 2001. I was lecturing at a famous seminary in a famous city. As I walked from the subway to the school in the golden late-afternoon light, I noticed that the neighborhood around the school was populated primarily by Hindu and Muslim immigrants. With images of 9/11 still in my memory, I couldn’t stop wondering if there was any neighborly interchange between the Christian seminarians inside the walls and the Muslim and Hindu mothers, fathers, kids, and grandparents I passed on the sidewalk outside. In my lecture that evening, the memory of their faces drew me off script, and I said to the seminarians and faculty present:
If I were a neighbor of this seminary, one of the Muslim or Hindu people who live their lives just outside your walls, there is one question I would have in my mind about you. It is not the question of what your doctrines are. It is not the question of what your religious practices and rituals are. I would only have one question.
Then, for a dramatic effect, I pulled out my wallet and from it extracted a credit card, which I raised above my head:
I would want to know if you at this seminary keep the genocide card in your theological wallet in your back pocket. I would want to know if there are any circumstances under which you might, in God’s name and on the authority of the Bible that you are here to study, sanction the killing of my wife, my children, my parents, and me – as infidels, heathens, pagans, the unsaved, the unredeemed.
As you’d expect, a rather confused silence followed. I added:
In an age of religious violence like ours, people care much less about what you believe, and more about whether you will kill for what you believe. So if you haven’t figured out what you’re going to do with passages like Deuteronomy 7 and 1 Samuel 15 and Paslams 137:9, you still have some important work to do. If you haven’t grappled with these passages and other like them, your Bible is like a loaded gun and your theology is like a license to kill. You have to find a way to disarm your faith as a potential instrument of hate and convert it into an instrument of love. You have to convert Christianity from a warrior religion to a reconciling religion. Otherwise, your neighbors around this seminary will tolerate you the way they might tolerate a chemical plant that could at any moment blow up and kill them all.
There was a big crowd that night, with some students sitting on the floor. Immediately, a student named Gavin near the front quite dramatically rose to his feet. He too pulled out his wallet and he too pulled out a card and waved it for dramatic effect. “I strongly disagree,” he said. “If something is in the Word of God, then we must keep it in our pocket at all times, including passages that reveal God as violent. If the Bible reveals that God is violent, and if God commands us to do violence, it must be a just and holy violence, so I will defend it with my life.” Some students nodded affirmatively as he sat down. A few may have even clapped and said amen. Others grew wide-eyed, as they had no idea what was going on, except that it wasn’t what usually went on at their seminary.
Bang. There it was. You can be a good Christian, at least in the minds of some seminarians at some highly regarded schools, and boldly uphold the right to kill people of other religions in the name of Jesus, because you can justify it with a chapter and verse in the Bible.
Although I think Gavin was dangerously wrong, I’m still grateful to him for speaking up. He did everyone present an important service that night. His courage to say out loud what many people quietly think forced everyone in the room to give the relationship between Christianity, love, and violence a second thought.
_________________
As Quakers, I think we need to ask ourselves, do we carry a “genocide card” in our pocket or a “loaded gun” in our glove compartment? Do we somewhere deep down believe in a violent God who promotes just and holy violence? Do we ever use the Bible as weapon?
I hope that as Quakers the answer to those are all “no.” But let’s be honest, there have been times when we have failed. There were Quakers who owned slaves – while Levi and Catherine Coffin were working to set them free. There were segregated Quaker Meetings where blacks were only allowed to worship from the balcony. There were and still are Quakers who oppress women in leadership rolls and Quakers who believe Islam and Muslims are all like their extremist factions. There are Quakers who believe immigrants and refuges need to stay out of our country whether in danger or not, that LGBTQ folks have no place in a meeting unless they make a change. And there are Quakers who are in favor of gentrification and the moving out of brown-skinned people out of neighborhoods without even knowing what they are doing.
But at First Friends and throughout Quakerdom, my hope is that instead of being a people who pull out “genocide cards” or seek to discriminate in the name of God for power or profit, we would be constantly seeking a return to that Quaker way rooted in love - or as our own Faith and Practice says, “God’s Law of Love.” Just listen, in light of what I have shared this morning, to two short sections of our Faith and Practice.
The Friends “…conception of a Light Within as an endowment of persons makes it impossible for Friends to draw lines of distinction in capacity or privilege between different races or nations.”
Friends believe that any racial discrimination is essentially a violation of God’s law of love, whether legal enactment or by inequitable practices which interfere with democratic liberties or cultural or economic development. To dwell together in friendly relations on a basis of mutual respect, courtesy, and understanding works toward the fulfillment of this law of love.
The atrocities of our past, do not need be the atrocities of our future. In a world that still is buying into Doctrines of Discovery and Dominion but not into the stewardship and care of our neighbors and the earth, Quakers must show the way. It is our time to be an example of voice again, to live by “God’s Law of Love” and reverse the patterns that many Christians and even Quakers have and continue to buy into.
As we enter into waiting worship, I want to read to you and those listening online the queries for this morning:
What lately has caused my eyes to be wide open?
Do I carry a “genocide card” in my pocket?
What atrocities are we facing, today, and how might the Church help instead of hinder? What might be First Friend’s role in addressing these atrocities?
