Victory

Acts 5:27-32

When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, saying, ‘We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.’ But Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than any human authority. The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Saviour, so that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.’

There was a video that went viral on my Twitter feed last week—it was a video of a group of young adults singing a Christian praise song thousands of feet in the air to a captive audience on a packed airplane. Now, the people I follow on Twitter are primarily comedians and other progressive Christian pastors, so by and large, the reactions were a mix of people making fun of these young Christians, and people decrying the them as arrogant and obnoxious. And I have to agree for the most part, not even as a Christian, who generally abides by Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:5-6: “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others.”

, but as someone who doesn’t want to be subjected to other people’s taste in music when I have literally no place to escape it. And then just imagine how people feel who not only don’t want to hear that generic acoustic guitar strumming, but are also not Christian, or maybe have been hurt in some way by Christianity in the past. But there was one tweet I read that made an excellent point, and that works perfectly for this passage today—the tweet pointed out that the group of Christians who forcefully serenaded this captive audience, and then posted it on Twitter—they weren’t really looking to convert anyone. They were looking to play the victim. They wanted to be made fun of and cyber-bullied by all these internet comedians. They wanted to be able to cry persecution. And they wanted all these things because they misread and misunderstand passages in the Bible like this one.

One can read this passage and take it at face value, and believe that it means we should pay no heed to modern social norms or the emotional comfort and safety of others, and rather, do as we believe God has instructed us, and spread the Gospel no matter where we are. “We must obey God rather than any other human authority,” Peter proclaims. And yes, Jesus did tell the apostles to go out and spread the Good News, to tell everyone that he rose from the dead, as we celebrated last week, and did so after experiencing all our pain and grief. But also, as we talked about last week, Christianity was never meant to be a religion of the powerful—so we are preaching and worshipping and evangelizing in a very different context today; when some people today, in a country dominated by Christianity, read so much instruction in the Bible about spreading the Good News and the persecution that receive from it, they seem to believe that, despite the fact that the context in which we preach is now very much changed from what it once was, that persecution, or at least perceived persecution, is an integral part of Christianity. But what is the point in suffering for the sake of suffering? The part of suffering that’s integral to Christianity is suffering in solidarity with others—and suffering is a strong word, so maybe it’s better to think of it as sacrificing in the solidarity with others.

We also have to look at the reasons that people are being persecuted, or the reasons that people in power are threatened by certain movements. The apostles in these early days of this Jesus movement, they weren’t only spreading the news of Jesus’ resurrection—they were healing people. They were helping the poor, the sick, and the lame. They were performing all the miracles that Jesus gave them the power to perform. And whether or not you believe in miracles, whether or not you believe that the apostles actually had these kind of divine powers that Jesus bestowed upon them (for what it’s worth, even believers like Paul struggled with these stories of miracles, and advised against putting an emphasis on things like magical healing and speaking in tongues), the fact is, is that the apostles were helping the oppressed. They were using their powers to help the little guy. The apostles were helping the people that the Roman Empire needed to keep down in order to maintain power and control.  And so they were threatened. Because what happens when an army of people you’ve subjugated are all of a sudden well enough and confident enough rise up against their oppressors?

Those folks singing on the airplane weren’t trying to bring down any kind of immoral status-quo, they weren’t trying to actually change the things that are wrong with the world. Singing a Christian song out loud in a country in which Christianity is the dominant religion, and the religion of the powerful at that, is not doing anything but feeding into this false victim mentality that some Christians really thrive on—and I get it, in a way. As we’ve talked about a ton, being a real Christian, doing the intense and difficult work Jesus calls us to do, is so, so hard in this world. So if people can find some easy ways to feel like they’re doing what Jesus calls them to do, without actually risking or sacrificing anything (aside from maybe some dignity), without actually doing the hard work, I mean, they’re gonna give it a shot.

As usual, the lectionary leaves out a couple verses that I think really give some more perspective to the scene here—those verses are verse 26, right before the passage starts, and right after this passage ends, verse 33. 26 reads, “Then the captain went with the temple police and brought them, but without violence, for they were afraid of being stoned by the people.” And 33 would end the passage with, “When they heard this, they were enraged and wanted to kill them.” This is what the apostles were up against—violently angry, incredibly powerful people, who felt threatened. But the movement was gaining so much popularity, that the cops had to make sure to not use their usual violent force with the apostles because of the backlash it would’ve had.

If only the powerful were still so scared today. If only movements that truly help the poor and the forgotten could gain enough traction that next time a person of color is pulled over for a routine traffic stop, the officer might think for a minute before being needlessly, and sometimes fatally violent. Have we gone so far backwards since Biblical days, to the point where the powerful and violent aren’t afraid to be publicly violent against those who pose no real threat to them? Against those whose place on a lower tier of society as them means they maintain their power and privilege.

Didn’t we just see, a week and a half ago, the depths the Roman Empire would sink to in their torture of a man who did nothing but help the poor and begin to make people think a little differently about power and faith. And yet, in this moment, the Romans are clearly dealing with a backlash from their treatment and execution of Jesus. Jesus and his movement is so popular, they can’t risk escalation by being equally as violent to the apostles, even though it’s very clear they would love to.

Up in here today, we still have this beautiful flowered cross—this thing that was once an instrument of torture and death turned into a thing of beauty and hope. But just because it’s covered in flowers, just because we have this beautiful reminder, doesn’t take away what happened to Jesus. In one of my clergy groups last week, one of my colleagues said something really beautiful and profound that I feel like we can all kind of relate to in this time of perpetual COVID. We’ve been waiting for this ultimate victory over the virus, right? But it hasn’t come, and I think we’ve all been facing and grieving that fact that it really won’t. My colleague, on Easter, had preached on John’s telling of the resurrection—in which Mary Magdalene is the first to see Jesus resurrected—Ken noted that he always read this story as this triumphant, joyful story—but this year he realized that despite Jesus’ victory over death, Mary would live with that trauma forever. Just days earlier, she saw her best friend violently murdered by the state. How does one get over that? You don’t. So yes, we see this cross here, symbolizing the Easter triumph over death, but it doesn’t change what it was or what it once did. And while I stand by this beautiful tradition, because I think the very fact that we turn this into something so beautiful and hopeful brings attention to the huge transformation from what it once was, the cross, and in turn, Christianity, in some ways, has gotten twisted into something inconsequential—in his classic The Cross and the Lynching Tree, the Black liberation theologian James Cone writes,

…during the course of 2,000 years of Christian history, this symbol of salvation has been detached from any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings… The cross has been transformed into a harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks… an easy way to salvation that doesn’t force us to confront the power of Christ’s message and mission.[i]

That quote is a perfect encapsulation of everything that is wrong with those folks playing Christian praise songs on that airplane. Because the society in which we live prioritizes things and wealth and materialistic, surface happiness, it’s completely diluted the truth and the harshness of Jesus’ message. It’s tried to squeeze the huge, all-encompassing message of Jesus preached, and the message that his apostles continued to preach—the message that promotes community and equality, and peace and capital-L Love—into this box that promotes individual happiness and salvation above the happiness and comfort of all people. It’s so tempting to turn Christianity into an easy, digestible singalong, where all we have to do is praise Jesus in the sky and know we’re getting into heaven; but that’s what those in power want us to continue doing, because when people really start doing the work of Jesus, that’s when the powerful get scared.

I realize this sermon is getting a little intense, and I’ll be honest, when I started writing this on Tuesday last week, I was not expecting it to go in this direction. Honestly, I wanted to do a more laid-back sermon on what’s usually a more laid-back Sunday, but I this was just kinda where the Spirit took me, what can I say? So to kind of temper the intensity of this, when I talk about scaring the powerful and the powerful being threatened, I’m not talking about stoning them. But I am talking about taking them down a peg. I’m talking about making sure everyone is on the same peg. This alone is what scares the powerful. Losing their influence and power, losing their riches and wealth is what scares them. And I think a lot of them are scared right now because ever since the Occupy Wall Street movement, as flawed as that indeed was, people have slowly been realizing the system is rigged. And part of rigging that system was trying to shove Christianity into that nice little box that doesn’t try to fight inequality or change this world for the better, to change this world for the little guy. If the powerful aren’t nervous, if in fact, the rich and powerful are Christian, then oof, we are doing it wrong.

So maybe we don’t have powers bestowed upon us from Jesus; maybe we can’t heal the sick with a touch or a prayer. But we do have the words and the teachings Jesus gave us. So we can’t magically make someone rise out of poverty, but we can advocate and work for things like more affordable housing, for cancellation of debt, for real, tangible changes that frighten the powerful because it means the people the powerful have put down for so long finally have a chance, and when those people get the chance, get that leg up, they’re not going to be happy with those folks who worked so hard to keep them down for so long. So let’s fight and work for change that scares those in power.

I’m up here preaching, as I often do, about huge issues, about systemic issues that often put people who fight for the poor and the disenfranchised, who fight against the powerful, in danger. But you know, there’s a happy medium between the happy Christian airplane singers, and martyrs who full on die for their cause.

There’s this spectacular book I read last year, called The War of the Poor by Eric Vuillard. It’s a slightly fictionalized take on mostly forgotten German Peasants’ War of 1525, and their leader, theologian and radical Thomas Muntzer. Muntzer, after this uprising, was indeed martyred, killed by the nobles, and the uprising was quashed. So you know—let’s not scare the powerful by these violent means. because, as Vuillard writes at the very end of this book, “Martyrdom is a trap for the oppressed. Only victory is desirable.”[ii] So let’s work for victory. Amen.   

[i] James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011).

[ii] Eric Vuillard, The War of the Poor (New York, NY: Other Press, 2020), 79.