Actions Speak Louder than Words

 

It’s shocking to see a minister take a police baton in the stomach as what happened this week in Chicago.  She was protesting outside an ICE detention centre with other clergy.  Together, they asked to enter the detention centre to provide spiritual care to detainees, something that clergy regularly do in jails and hospitals across North America.  Not at ICE detention centres.  Instead, they are being shot at with pepper pellets and laughed at when they collapse in pain.  They are being arrested and accused of being violent because they have their hands up in prayer.  This is not just one incident.  These clergy are putting their bodies in harm’s way for the gospel.  They are following in the footsteps of a criminal who was so dangerous, he was publicly tortured and executed on a high hill to be an example to anyone who might try to resist evil.  This criminal’s brave action, his courage and his innocence shocked many who witnessed it.  Even the soldiers and thieves wondered what kind of man had just been killed.  That man was Jesus of Nazareth, and the people who knew him and loved him soon called him Christos, the Greek word for Lord.  Christos meant ‘anointed one’, a phrase used for King David after he killed Goliath and became the new leader of Israel.  So Jesus was seen as the ruler of the new followers of the way, and when they pledged allegiance to Jesus, they pledged resistance to hate, resistance to persecution, resistance to human rights abuses.

The erosion of human rights starts small.  Innocuously.  We don’t aim to lose our human rights, after all.  And it’s easy to ignore or pretend that an issue here and there are not a problem.  It’s not a problem to ban abortions in the 8^th month because that is extremely unlikely to happen.  But then it gets earlier and earlier until abortions are completely illegal regardless of situation or circumstance.  We see this happening down south. Human rights get chipped away gradually and subtly until all of the sudden it impacts us.  Privatization of health care doesn’t seem to be a problem when we are talking about electives, but when it’s a burn victim or someone limping from a bad hip for years because they can’t afford the extra fees, or the person who waits years for cardiologists, the slope is slippery, and we lose the battle by invisible inches.

There’s a famous poem by a German preacher,

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn't a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a trade unionist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a social democrat.
When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.

What this leaves out is the first few groups that the Nazis sent to places like Auschwitz.  They came for people with medical conditions.  They came for people who didn’t measure up to their standards of physical and mental perfection.  And they came for people, especially men, that weren’t conforming to their assumptions of what masculinity meant.  They came for gay men.  And when Auschwitz was liberated, it was the gay men, labelled with pink triangles, that were left behind in that death camp.

We like to think that Canadians are squeaky clean but our history is sprinkled with stories that prove otherwise.  Japanese internment camps, residential schools, butter box babies, the rounding up of German Canadian farmers, the denial of refuge to the over 900 Jewish passengers of the M.S. Louis in 1939.  There was forced sterilization of people living in institutions as well as immigrants from Eastern Europe and indigenous women, in Alberta and B.C. until the 1970’s.  Violence against the rainbow community was commonplace, especially since it was seen as both criminal and a medical condition.

What would Jesus have done?  What are we as Christians called to do when facing discrimination in all its ugly forms against whatever minorities are currently fashionable?  In Matthew 25 Jesus says “ ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’  Or how about Luke 6:27  ^“Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man”. Or in John 15 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you”.  Or Luke 6: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has … sent me to set the oppressed free...”

Jesus taught his disciples to choose compassion and love as the true signs of holiness.  He reminded them to stand for those who were seen as unlovable or unvaluable, the leper, the tax collector, the prostitute, the orphan, the widow, the poor, the ones who had no power or authority.  Jesus calls us to do the same.  It is never easy, but when we cry out for justice, when we write or call or e-mail, we are participating in God’s new creation. 

If we want to be the friends of Christos Jesus, there are three questions we need to ask ourselves.

1.  Why do we want to be friends of Jesus?

2.  Who is Jesus calling us to love?
3.  What sacrifice are we able to make for the people Jesus loves?

These questions may be the same, but each of us will be called to a different answer.  May we pray and listen for the voice of the Risen Christ and help bring heaven a little closer to earth by our words and actions and sacrifices. Amen.