Subversive Protest

“Subversive Protest”

Sermon for MCC New Haven

March 29, 2015

Rev. Brian Hutchison, M.Div.

Texts:

Mark 11:1-11

Mark 14:1-15:47

         Who doesn’t love a parade? It’s a time when we can see all the local organizations and businesses that do good for our community marching down the street together. We have a huge St. Patrick’s Day parade here in New Haven every year. One could view the parade as a celebration of Irish pride, but it often just becomes an excuse to drink in the morning. Unfortunately, LGBT pride parades too often seem like the same. Don’t get me wrong- I love a good party. But we should never forget that our U.S. pride parades started with protest marches just a few decades ago. We can never forget the sacrifice that LGBT people made by showing their faces in Gay Liberation assemblies in a time when they could be put in jail and fired from their jobs for being gay or trans. And even today, LGBT people around the world face the fear of death for participating in LGBT pride events.

Today’s LGBT pride parades are often criticized for being overly sexual or perpetuating stereotypes. Even I have said at times that we should drop the colorful beads and streamers and pick up picket signs until we have full equality. But there must be a balance to life, a “Middle Way” as the Buddha would say. The middle way is a queer mix of celebration and protest. In the LGBT community, we have both separately. We protest for our rights and we celebrate the diversity of our community through parades. We walk down the center of our towns and cities with our queer siblings, not to “rub it in people’s faces” or to “recruit” as some accuse us of, but rather to remind the world that we are still here, that we matter, that we contribute greatly to the betterment of society, and we deserve equal rights. That’s it- no more, no less.

         Jesus’ brief ride into Jerusalem was a queer mix of protest and parade. He was parading in with a theatrical demonstration of humility. As theologian John Dominic Crossan describes it, in mockery of the Roman Pontius Pilate who was possibly entering Jerusalem on a warhorse on the West end of the city, Jesus rode in on a borrowed donkey. While Ego rode in with armed soldiers and gold emblems lifted high in praise of the Empire, Love Incarnate rode in with shouts of “save us!” from the poor and the outcast who threw their tattered and torn garments beneath him.

         There is a terrible misconception about this scene in scripture. The misconception is that the word “hosanna” means “praise God,” as the word “hallelujah” does. No, “hosanna” means “help, save!” These people were suffering terribly under the oppression of the Roman Empire. They were overtaxed, overworked, restricted in rights, and unfairly punished. The Romans kept the Jewish people in constant fear by leaving a row of crucified bodies just outside of the city walls. Jesus surely saw that carnage as he entered the city and could predict what was in store for him. But he proceeded anyway, because as Love Incarnate, his call was to nonviolent resistance of oppressive power.

         Jesus didn’t go easily. It took a lot of chutzpa to enter the city in protest as he did. How he avoided immediate arrest is unbelievable. But Mark tells us that Jesus turned over the moneychangers’ tables, and then taught within the city against the misdeeds of the religious leaders in their neglect of the marginalized.

         This kind of protest was relived in 1965 when Civil Rights leaders led a protest from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, seeking voting rights. “King had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and his higher profile would help draw international attention to Selma during the eventful months that followed. On February 18, white segregationists attacked a group of peaceful demonstrators in the nearby town of Marion. In the ensuing chaos, an Alabama state trooper fatally shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young African-American demonstrator. In response to Jackson’s death, King and the SCLC planned a massive protest march from Selma to the state capitol of Montgomery, 54 miles away. A group of 600 people set out on Sunday, March 7, but didn’t get far before Alabama state troopers wielding whips, nightsticks and tear gas rushed the group at the Edmund Pettis Bridge and beat them back to Selma. The brutal scene was captured on television, enraging many Americans and drawing civil rights and religious leaders of all faiths to Selma in protest.

King himself led another attempt on March 9, but turned the marchers around when state troopers again blocked the road. That night, a group of segregationists beat another protester, the young white minister James Reeb, to death. Alabama state officials (led by Wallace) tried to prevent the march from going forward, but a U.S. district court judge ordered them to permit it. President Lyndon Johnson also backed the marchers, going on national television to pledge his support and lobby for passage of new voting rights legislation he was introducing in Congress. Some 2,000 people set out from Selma on March 21, protected by U.S. Army troops and Alabama National Guard forces that Johnson had ordered under federal control. After walking some 12 hours a day and sleeping in fields along the way, they reached Montgomery on March 25.

Nearly 50,000 supporters–black and white–met the marchers in Montgomery, where they gathered in front of the state capitol to hear King and other speakers including Ralph Bunche (winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize) address the crowd. “No tide of racism can stop us,” King proclaimed from the building’s steps, as viewers from around the world watched the historic moment on television” (History.com).

This month, for the 50^th anniversary of the march, many of the original Civil Rights leaders joined thousands of people to march once again across the Edmund Pettis Bridge. It was a reminder to the world that freedom and equality have not yet been fully realized here. Racial discrimination has been against the law since the 1960s, but the law did not end racism. We still have a long way to go.

         This past week, we witnessed the passing of a so-called “Religious Freedom” bill in Indiana. This bill was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but we did not fall for the trick. The proponents of this bill argued that businesses should have the right to discriminate against LGBT people, based on religious grounds. The bill passed and the governor signed it, but not without protest and consequences. LGBT leaders around the country are now calling for a boycott of Indiana. We will not hold conferences there, buy products made there, or visit there. Several large companies have already canceled events in Indiana. The “queer dollar” is powerful and we should not be ashamed to use it wisely. Bigots must be shown that they cannot discriminate against us without consequences. Some say that doing so is bullying. But I care to differ. Our spiritual ancestors demonstrated non-violent protest and we follow in their footsteps by doing the same. Today, we wave our proverbial palm branches in the streets of Indiana, shouting “Help us, God! Save us from oppression!”

Jesus’ counter-cultural actions of Holy Week did not stop at his protest march into Jerusalem. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus acted very scandalously when he got down on the ground as a slave or a woman in that time, and washed the disciples’ feet as a demonstration of what God’s love looks like in action. Jesus queered the hierarchy of power of his time in any way he could. In the words of the Apostle Paul, (Galatians 3:28), “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” In his final days, Jesus broke down societal boundaries by demonstrating with his male body what it meant to give up male privilege, what it meant to be humble by looking with pure love into the eyes of the sick, the poor, and those condemned as “sinful.” In contrast to society, Jesus affirmed their sacred worth as blessed children of God.

Many begged Jesus to save the Jewish people by overthrowing the government. But Jesus knew that’s not why he was there. He was there to transform lives, to establish a counter-reign, the Reign of God or Kin-dom of Heaven. We call Jesus “the Christ,” “the Anointed One,” and “Messiah.” These are not titles of a far-off deity sitting on a cloud, waiting to end the world. No, these titles tell us of a subversive carpenter who embodied the call of the Divine to give up Ego completely and instead show his world the greatest possibilities of humanity. I am a follower of Jesus Christ, not for afterlife fire insurance, but because I see in Yeshua of Nazareth the depth of the human experience lived out fully. In a short three years, Jesus gave Life his all, and while he lost his own life, he gave Life to countless others. His words and Spirit still give us life 2000 years later.

We know of modern prophets that followed very similarly in the footsteps of Jesus. After decades of serving the poor and demonstrating nonviolent resistance against the British Indian Empire, Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated by shooting in 1948. The icon of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. followed in the way of Jesus and of Gandhi in using nonviolent resistance against police who defended Jim Crow laws. After his own sort of march into Jerusalem (the March on Washington in 1963), King was also assassinated in 1968 in Memphis, TN. Also, openly gay City of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk led protest after protest for gay rights in the 1970s. He too was assassinated in 1978. We also remember that in 1998, gay college student Matthew Shepherd was beaten and left to die on a wooden fence, a scene eerily similar to crucifixion. But Matthew is only one of thousands in the US and around the world who have been crucified by the bigots of our world. The truth is that Matthew’s murder became well known because he was the image of privilege in this country: a white male. So we in MCC choose to never forget the countless others who dared to be themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people of color whose lives were ended much too soon by hatred and violence.

At the end of the road to the Cross, at Calvary, we stand with the tearful women and men who loved Jesus as his family. And as if we were there, we look up and see the reflection of our own suffering there with him. We see the Christ covered in Kaposi’s Sarcoma sores, body wasted from battling AIDS. We see the Christa, bald from chemotherapy, breasts removed by mastectomy. We see the Christ Child, dying of starvation. We see the Christ full of bullet wounds, or wrists slit, or victim of so-called “legitimate rape.” Why do we see these things at the Cross? Because in the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew (25:45), “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for the least of these my sisters and brothers, you did not do for me.”

What the life and death of Jesus, Gandhi, King, Milk, and others teach us is that freedom is costly. Each of those great prophets knew that their own lives were at stake. But for the holy purpose of peace and justice to which they were called, they faced the Empires of their day and gave up their lives that others may live. May it never be misunderstood: Divine Love never desired any of them to suffer or die as they did. But since God has no body but ours, it is our life’s meaning and purpose to fulfill the Reign of Love in our time and place.

I believe that the Cosmic Christ stands with us, working in whatever ways possible to manifest justice and peace. So whenever you see injustice at work, allow Christ to lead you into holy protest.

I pray each one of you have a blessed and prayerful Holy Week. Remember, it is not a time of intentional sadness, but it is a time to mourn what has been lost so that come Easter morning, we can fully embrace the power of resurrection. And so it is. Amen.