An Afternoon in a Refugee Camp

The refugee camp in Bijelo Polje, 2004.

When I was fifteen, I visited a refugee camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I don't remember much about it--- I think the people there were refugees from Kosovo maybe? I don't remember much what the camp director told us about how the camp ran, how many people were there, how long people could expect to be there. But I do remember the children in the camp. How we tried to play games with them but really the kids were clinging to us so tightly we could barely move our arms to toss a ball, and the ball would come right back to us. My sister, who was fourteen then, said she still remembers the face of the little girl who held her hand the entire time. She remembers trying to get her to play but she'd just smile, shake her head and just hold her hand. I remember not all the children had shoes, but perhaps it was just because it was summer? I remember the concrete everywhere--- different from the images of tent cities with blue UN tarps like we usually see on TV nowadays. But this camp was concrete encased in a chain link fence. I remember the faces of the children pressed into the fence as we left.

The woman who translated for us while we were in Bosnia went on to work in a local school there and I remember her telling me that the children at that camp went to her school. So these refugees had different opportunities than ones crossing the sea or living in a tent on a border somewhere. But whenever I hear about refugees in the news, I remember the feel of tiny hands gripping mine with fierce longing. I remember the faces of children so desperate to be treated as something other than a criminal or a burden or unwanted that they were willing to attach themselves to a stranger like me who could not even remotely speak their language or, let's be realistic, throw or catch a ball.

And so when the president of my country issues an executive order banning refugees from entering the country for 120 days--- except those from Syria who will be banned indefinitely--- I get angry. How dare we prioritize a mythical concept of safety over the lives of children? I remember the faces of the kids watching us leave--- those were not the faces of terrorists. Those were not the faces of threats to our national security. They were the faces of children wondering why they lived in a cage. Wondering when they would have a home. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, 65.3 million people around the world have been forced from their homes, including nearly 21.3 million refugees. Over half of refugees are under the age of 18. These are the people we are really rejecting.

So let's stop allowing our politicians to feed us lies about our safety and instead embrace our fellow human beings. Call your representatives. Financially support organizations working with refugees. Reach out to local organizations that help with resettlement (if you are in the Baltimore area, check out the Refugee Youth Project). Pray and work for a world where people are not forced from their homes in pursuit of peace and stability. Remember that it is not our safety that is a concern but the safety of these children in camps.

Rebuilding a Temple of Praise

After the tragedies this week, preaching was a daunting task. Even with the further edits I have made to the sermon (even after it was preached this morning at Presbury United Methodist Church), it does not not specifically educate about #BlackLivesMatter as I would like it to. But I hope it still speaks to the truth of God's dream for creation, standing up to the violence we have experienced. 

Scripture: 2 Samuel 7:1-17 (NRSV)  
Now when the king was settled in his house, and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies around him, the king said to the prophet Nathan, “See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent.” Nathan said to the king, “Go, do all that you have in mind; for the Lord is with you.”
 
But that same night the word of the Lord came to Nathan: Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the Lord: Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?” Now therefore thus you shall say to my servant David: Thus says the Lord of hosts: I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep to be prince over my people Israel; and I have been with you wherever you went, and have cut off all your enemies from before you; and I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth. And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more, as formerly, from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. When he commits iniquity, I will punish him with a rod such as mortals use, with blows inflicted by human beings. But I will not take my steadfast love from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever. In accordance with all these words and with all this vision, Nathan spoke to David.
 
Sermon: Rebuilding a Temple of Praise
Let us pray:
Patient teacher, if we were you our patience with the world would be wearing a little thin this morning. And perhaps your patience is. But, as you did with King David, you are reaching out to us this morning, reminding us of your mighty power and your steadfast love. Through the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts break open the boxes in which we have tried to imprison you, and point us to your power and love yet again. Amen.

David wakes up one morning and he is overwhelmed by the way God has loved him. I don't know if you have ever felt that way, when you wake up one day, the sunshine kissing your face, feeling rested and full and content. There isn't always a reason, you know. Just sometimes you get caught up in beauty and realize how beloved you are.
 
This is how I see this scene in 2 Samuel. King David has successfully and somewhat peacefully brought together Judah and Israel, scattered, fragmented tribes of people who have dispersed since being led into this land of milk and honey from Egypt. He has suffered persecution, and also already committed some evils or at least questionable acts. But he has also felt overwhelmed by the presence of God in his life, and I don't mean overwhelmed in a bad way. I mean completely covered by the beauty of God's presence. And so we read today how he gets caught up in that moment, looks at the richness of his own life and wants to praise God! In the Robin Mark song we have been singing to conclude worship, he describes David as rebuilding a temple of praise in his time. That seemed like a pretty good message for us in our time too.
 
And then I heard about what happened to Alton Sterling.
 
And then Philando Castile.
 
And then police officers in Dallas.
 
I said to God, “How can I talk about joy and praise this week? How can I talk about anything besides the ugly racism that cripples our country and our bloodthirsty desire for revenge? How can I preach without acknowledging the fear that so many of our families are living in--- both the fear that their black or brown children and grandchildren will not come home one day because they held their held their hands in their pockets too long, and the fear that their spouse or friend or family member who is in the police or the national guard will be killed on duty out of spite? How can we experience joy and praise when our world is aflame in violence and hatred?”
 
But these days are not so different from the days of God's servant David. Frankly, as much as we praise David for being a man after God's own heart, a giant-killing hero, or a beautiful wordsmith as evidenced by the Psalms, David often had more in common with both the sniper who murdered those police officers and the police officer who murdered Alton Sterling right on the sidewalk as though he was an animal. David was a mercenary in his early years. He works for the Philistines who, in much of the Hebrew Bible, are the Big Bad (see 1 Samuel 27). When he became king, David gave up innocents for slaughter to placate kings he was trying to ally with (2 Samuel 21:8-10). He did not raise a hand against his son for raping his daughter (2 Samuel 13:21-22). And really, David was a rapist himself, or don't you remember Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11:1-5)?
 
I say this not to rip your image of hero David out of your hands but to remind you of David's very deep sin. But we must also remember that he was a victim of sin as much as a sinner himself. He spent much of his early adult life hunted by Saul, the king who became increasingly unstable and vicious (starting with 1 Samuel 18:10-16). David lost his best friend Jonathan, one of the only people he ever truly loved (2 Samuel 1). He lived through war as much as he waged it. His world was one in which blood frequently ran through the streets just like it does in ours. He was complicated just like we are.
 
And yet. In the middle of this life so twisted by sin, just as our lives are so twisted by the sin of racism right now, he stops. And he remembers beauty. He looks at the palace he lives in, the house of cedar he references, and truly sees the goodness in his life that has happened in spite of the violence and tragedy. And he decides to make an offering to God.
 
He asks Nathan what to do first. Nathan is a fascinating man we too often forget about; he is a prophet. You will notice if you read through the Old Testament especially in Samuel and Kings, that prophets accompany kings. Prophets are supposed to keep kings honest. We see throughout David's rule that though he can be corrupt, he does listen to and take the advice of the prophet Nathan. When he does this time, he learns through Nathan that God refuses David's gift.  

Here we are in the midst of a story of violence, we have a glimmer of joy and peace, but the attempt at praise, the attempt to praise God by building the Temple, is shut down. Could this mean that our attempt to praise God today in the midst of the violence around our country could be shut down? The tradition is to read this scripture as God deciding David is not the best person to build the Temple because David has too much blood on his hands. But that is not because God does not love David because of how twisted he is by his own sin and other's sin. No, God loves us, no matter what. God sees our humanity in spite of our sin, God sees glimmers of beauty when we do not. Why God rejects David's gift, as I read it, is less because of David's sin and more because David misunderstands, just as so many of our ancestors in faith did, and just as we do, what God's purposes really are.
 
You see, God says to David:

“Hey! Did you hear me complaining about living in a tent? No, I prefer being mobile, flexible, responsive, free to move about, not fixed in one place.” God then turns the tables on David and says, “You think you're going to build me a house? No, no, no, no. I'M going to build YOU a house. A house that will last much longer and be much greater than anything you could build yourself with wood and stone. A house that will shelter the hopes and dreams of your people long after 'you lie down with your ancestors.'”¹

David misunderstood that praising God wasn't about building a building but building a life through which God could live and move. So God reminded him, by covenanting with him, choosing to make a house for him in the form of a dynasty rather than a house of cedar, a house that will shelter hope and dreams of a better world, one not so wrought by violence and hatred. One that retained the beauty of that moment when David woke up and felt compelled to do something in praise. And one that can teach us in these days too.
 
Because we are that house God covenanted with David about. Yes, I am drawing from our Gospel today when Jesus describes his own body as the Temple. But I also understand God's promises to David to not be limited, contained by one biological bloodline. God tells David that though David's son will build a Temple, the house God will build is one that can shelter the dreams and hopes for the kin-dom of God is within each of us. Rev. Steve Garnaas-Holmes, a United Methodist pastor and blogger explains:

You are a house. God has chosen you as a tent to move about and live in. Your opponents are also houses of God. And we all are a house where God lives, not in any of us alone, but in the sacred space among us. Be mindful of this mystery, for it is the foundation of a great and powerful dynasty.²

In this sense, praising God is not as easy as building a physical Temple would be, even if we are not to be trusted with power tools. Because when we truly praise God, it is when we recognize God dwelling in another human being. 

Hear this again: when we truly praise God, it is when we recognize God dwelling in another human being. When I listened to the news this week, what I heard over and over again were things like what my friend Janessa posted from a community police listening session in Phoenix: "It doesn’t matter what your training module is. You cannot be trained to protect and serve me if you don’t see me as human."³ What happened to the Dallas police was absolutely tragic, but it stems from a frustration and brokenness over people of color not being seen as a human beings. The police officers who shot Alton Sterling and Philando Castile saw them as animals, as less-than human. Consistently throughout our history, people of color are not seen as human. None of them are seen as dwellings for God. And yes, in retaliation for years of being seen as subhuman, some will start to see the oppressors not as human beings too but as monsters. And our recognition of one another is what we have to change.
 
So as we continue asking ourselves where God is calling us as a church, let us turn to the hard work of praise. The hard work of recognizing God not where we want to--- in beautiful sacred buildings or even in the beauty of rainbows and mountains--- but within the hearts of other human beings, particularly those who are marginalized. This hard work includes listening, especially if you are a person with race and class privilege as I am, and it includes reaching out, even if that makes you uncomfortable. 
 
Next week, our youth will be in Sullivan County, Tennessee, building houses. And even though that is work building, as David wanted to do building a Temple, it is more about doing the hard work of recognizing God within the hearts of human beings, more about doing the work of building the kin-dom of God than it is about wood and stone, fascia and decking. When we go to Appalachia, we are going to a part of the world that seems so different than Edgewood. People talk funny. The poverty there looks different than the poverty here. On TV, Appalachia is usually a place of ridicule, poor backwards rural people. Yet on this mission trip, I saw our youth doing the hard work of recognizing God in our host families in spite of the stereotypes that tried to define them. I watched as our youth bonded with our family over their pet bunny rabbits, how by the end of the week the little girl on our site was laughing and carrying on with the youth even though she had been so shy before, how the woman whose home we were working on started to help us work on the house even though she had physical limitations just because she liked spending time with us. These were the ways both our partner families and our youth--- and the adults--- recognized God in one another.
 
But we don't have to go on a mission trip to start the hard work of recognizing each human being as a Temple, a House for God. We can start right here. In an attitude of prayer, I invite you now to reach out in signs of peace and love to those in worship here today.

1Kate Huey, “Wherever You Are,” Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Weekly Seeds, Congregational Vitality and Discipleship Ministry Team, Local Church Ministries, United Church of Christ, 22 July 2012, http://www.ucc.org/feed-your-spirit/weekly-seeds/wherever-you-are.html 2Steve Garnaas-Holmes, “I will make you a house,” Unfolding Light, 20 July 2012, http://unfoldinglight.net/?p=1353.
3Posted by Janessa Chatain, 9 July 2016, on her personal Facebook page: "Important conversations today at a community police listening session in PHX. Wish more of last night's protestors were today’s participants. One statement that struck me: 'It doesn’t matter what your training module is. You cannot be trained to protect and serve me if you don’t see me as human.'"

"Avenge Our Blood": Martyrdom and Empire Building in Revelation 6:9-11

This paper was written for Dr. Moore's class on Revelation almost a year ago now. I was thinking back on it, hit by a wave of nostalgia for my academic days at the same time I have been reading up on nationalism and martyrdom again. So I decided to post it! 

"When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given; they cried out with a loud voice, 'Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?' They were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number would be complete both of their fellow servants and of their brothers and sisters, who were soon to be killed as they themselves had been killed."

-Revelation 6:9-11¹

The year is 1389, the place is Kosovo, and Prince Lazar is leading his people against the forces of the Ottoman Empire to defend the independence of his people. He is killed, delivered into the hands of the enemy by one of his own and from then on, so the story goes, Serbs become a martyred people of sorts, people we see in Revelation 6:9-11 under the altar crying out, not for independence, but for vengeance. This was not always the story in Serbia, of course, but it is one that came into being in the nineteenth century, and so even today this defeat more than six hundred years ago, it is a battle that is remembered.² During the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, war criminal and then-president of Republika Srpska within Bosnia, Radovan Karadžić, used to appear publicly with what were essentially bards who sang, “Serb brothers, wherever you are, with the help of Almighty God / For the sake of the Cross and the Christian Faith and our imperial fatherland / I call you to join the battle of Kosovo.”³ Within this one folk song, we see both the imperial imagination of Greater Serbia and the explicit call to join this 600-year old battle in the name of the suffering of the cross. Lynda E. Boose explains, “Not many nations celebrate a defeat as the cradle of their nationhood, but by doing so Serbs seal their history within a mythic imaginary in which the Serbs are forever victims, situated for perpetuity in the place of resentment and unassuaged revenge within a story that promises to confer heroism in the present only through return, repetition, and revenge.”⁴ In this paper I posit that Revelation also serves within a mythic imaginary to present Christians as forever victims in such a way that God's vengeance becomes more important than freedom in the construction of Christian identity just as revenge was more important in the construction of a Serb nation than independence. “Martyrdom was--- and continues to be---” as Elizabeth A. Castelli in her work on martyrdom and collective memory asserts, “such a critical building block of Christian culture.”⁵

I want to stress here that the relationship between Serbia and Yugoslavia is different than the colonial power of Rome, for example. Though there is a very strong sense of the process of empire building in the Serbia-Yugoslavia relationship, there is less an understanding of Serbia as a colonizing power during the conflicts in the 1990s. Yet I was intrigued by reading Revelation next to Serb nationalism because, to add yet another layer, I think this relationship will bring into focus the way that Revelation is used, particularly in more fundamentalist contexts, to negate the hegemonic power of Christianity in the USA and claim an oppressed experience.⁶ As Castelli points out, “The politically right-wing Christian Coalition mastered the use of the language of religious persecution and martyrdom to deflect and defuse virtually any critique lodged by any opponents of its theocratic political project.”⁷ This is, of course, a paper that merely wades into a much deeper, vastly more complex discussion, but I see it as an important process of connection to use as a tool to counter cries of “Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?”

Revelation is written for and about martyrs; it is a textbook for martyrs.⁸ In Revelation 6:9-11 we see glorified slaughtered bodies and, as I have already suggested, are invited to ask for vengeance alongside these bodies. These verses are not the only ones that glorify martyrs, of course, for Jesus himself is the “Chief Martyr figure:” “The earliest description of Jesus in Revelation occurs in 1:5 when he is called 'the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings on earth'. These titles are especially appropriate in a work concerned with martyrdom.”⁹ Thus, the martyrs beneath the altar are following in the footsteps of Christ, sharing in Christ's work and purpose. So too, Serb nationalists using myths like the defeat at Kosovo and the novels of Ivo Andrić (1892-1975), portrayed themselves as Christ-like. There is a conflation of Serbian ethnicity and Christianity (specifically Serbian Orthodoxy) called Christoslavism, that stresses Serb Christian suffering at the hands of Muslims/Turks. Andrić, writing just before World War II, gave Serb nationalists an incredibly gory image of martyrdom in the fictional description of a Serb peasant being impaled by Ottoman authorities in his novel The Bridge on the Drina. This description is explicitly like Christ's crucifixion scene.¹⁰ Castelli writes of early Christian martyrs what could be written of Serb nationalists: “by aligning themselves with Jesus' own victimhood, they claimed as well the immediate divine vindication that Jesus himself, according to Christian teaching, enjoyed.”¹¹ Thus, when John is glorifying the martyrs under the altar, he is putting into sequence a chain of events that not only links but begins to conflate the suffering of the martyrs with the suffering of Christ. Their deaths become part of the divine project. So too, by placing the impalement of a Serb alongside the crucifixion of Christ, Andrić has conflated Serb suffering with Christ's suffering, making their suffering divine. 

What is interesting is that despite real experiences of martyrdom, the two images of martyrdom I mentioned above, Revelation 6:9-11 and Andrić's The Bridge on the Drina, are fictional. Castelli reminds us, “Martyrdom as a product of discourse rather than of unmediated experience.”¹² Martyrdom, then, does not have to be factual, but is constructed to create identity. It, as identity is, is imagined, but this imagined quality does not have a less real effect on bodies. Benedict Anderson in his work on nation writes that a nation is a fraternity of individuals, and “Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as to willingly die for such limited imaginings.”¹³ Anderson's phrase “limited imaginings” is in reference to the fact that a nation is inherently limited as nations are constructed in opposition to an Other; yet, limited imaginings in identity construction through martyrdom has another connotation as well, one in which identity is caught in a non-life-giving way. Martyrdom here offers not comfort in the face of or resistance to oppression but just death, an ideology of death.¹⁴ In the case of John's revelation, some of this limited imagination comes from the fact that John's paradoic mimicry of Rome has continued to such an extent that he cannot escape a vision that does not critique the structure, only replaces the Head. Stephen D. Moore explains, “Yet the difficulty of effectively exiting empire by attempting to turn imperial ideology against itself is regularly underestimated, it seems to me, by those who acclaim Revelation for decisively breaking the self-perpetuating cycle of empire. To my mind, Revelation is emblematic of the difficulty of using the emperor's tools to dismantle the emperor's palace.”¹⁵ John's mimicry is trapped within the cycle of empire, unable to imagine a new way to form identity, left only with an ideology of death.
So John's martyrs are dying for the same system that kills them, only Sovereign Lord, holy and true, is the tyrant Caesar now. In a similar way, Serb nationalism trades places with those they claim are the oppressors, Turks who impale innocent Serb peasants, by becoming génocidaires. The focus on vengeance that we see in the martyrs' cry seems to be one of the focal points of this failure in imagination, beautifully summed up in Moore's own questioning of the martyrs' lament of how long:

“But what does the cry for vengeance from under the altar, heard and heeded by the one seated on the throne, actually effect?...An eye for an eye? No, not an eye for an eye. What Revelation seems to be saying is this: If you gouge out the eye of one of God's witnesses, or even refuse to heed them, God will gouge out both of your eyes in return. And not only that but he will puncture your eardrums as well, and tear out your tongue, and sever your spine, and plunge you into a timeless torment. Or, what amounts to much the same thing, he will have you tortured for all eternity in the presence of his Son and his angels (14:9-11), the smoke of your torment ascending like incense...It's the 'forever and ever' that seems to make the punishment spectacularly incommensurate with the crime...”¹⁶

This is a cycle of a failure of imagination, a cycle of ever-more violence that can only end when all the Romans/Muslims are slaughtered. And perhaps then someone new to slaughter would be created; how else to maintain restrictive and totalitarian power? Mitchell G. Reddish uses Donald W. Riddle's work, to claim “that the functional purpose of both apocalyptic literature and martyrologies is social control of the group in a time of persecution.”¹⁷ We could lop “in a time of persecution” off of that sentence. Unfortunately, what has happened is that Revelation and the national myths of martyrdom have been used as forms of social control to accumulate more power in the hands of the oppressors rather than offer comfort the the oppressed. Returning to Castelli's critique of the Religious Right quoted at the beginning of this paper, tales of persecution and martyrdom serve to “deflect and defuse” real critique and real attempts at imagining new ways to relate together. 

Moore begins his own exploration of the “self-perpetuating cycle of empire” with a quotation from Eusebius' Life of Constantine in which “those ministers of God” supped with the Emperor in his innermost apartments, sharing with him at his own table.¹⁸ Here, the empire that John has written against becomes the empire for which he prays. Those martyrs had rested long enough, it seems, to see their blood avenged as their own took the seat of power and promptly began the Crusades, etc. as the firsts of many militarized horror fantasies to keep them in power.¹⁹ When Slobodan Milošević became president of Serbia in 1989, he announced Serbs no longer had to rest a little longer. In Kosovo on June 28, 1989, exactly six hundred years after Prince Lazar's defeat, the Patriarch of the Serb Orthodox Church lit candles to remember the martyrs and Lazar, who is often depicted as a Christ figure, was pictured in icons next to pictures of Milošević himself.²⁰ What ensued was the vengeance the martyrs cried for; vengeance, not justice, not the pursuit of independence and freedom from dictatorships and Western Euopean-imposed boundaries, but vengeance that allowed Milošević to remain president until his arrest two genocides later in 2001. 

Of course, it gets a bit slippery to hold the threads of Serb Christoslavism with the false USAmerican fundamentalist sense of oppression with the martyrs of Revelation 6:9-11, and I do not want to give the impression that these three threads are the same, or to conflate the three. Rather, the parallels, the eerie echoes in these three diverse places, demonstrate that Revelation is a text of terror. Perhaps martyrdom is not always about the maintenance of power in the hands of the unimaginative; yet stories of martyrdom seem to be used very effectively not to counter empire but to build it. As Castelli admonishes, “One should worry about the staid, venerable, and ancient tradition that insists that death is a meaning-producing event, that truth and violence inexorably imply each other--- and that, indeed the first requires the second.”²¹ Again, it seems that to name Revelation as liberative is to sanitize its violence as redemptive without analyzing the horrific ways such violence has been realized historically and to subsume the cries of the oppressed beneath the so-called martyrs' cries for vengeance.
 
1Revelation 6:9-11, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 2006).
2See Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (University of California Press, 1996); and Lynda E. Boose, “Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory,” Signs 28.1 (Autumn 2002): 71-96.
3Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 50.
4Boose, “Crossing the River Drina,” 80.
5Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 4.
6I am relying on personal experience here, though there has been work done on the ways in which Christians falsely understand themselves as victims. My partner grew up at a Southern Baptist mega church in conservative, rural Harford County Maryland, and every time I have attended his church I have heard at least once throughout the service something that indicated that Christians are oppressed by the broader USAmerican culture. Most recently, this sense of victimization has centered around issues of reproductive rights and marriage equality.
7Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 199.
8Mitchell G. Reddish, “Martyr Christology in the Apocalypse,” Journal For The Study Of The New Testament no. 33 (1 June 1988): 86.
9Ibid.
10See Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina, trans. Lovett F. Edwards (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 37-52. Cited in both Boose and Sells.
11Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 51-52.
12Ibid., 173.
13Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised edition (New York Verso, 1991), 7.
14As Tina Pippin writes, “The ideology of death— that death and martyrdom are valued and valuable for citizenship in the city of God— is throughout the apocalyptic vision.” “Eros and the End: Reading for Gender in the Apocalypse of John,” Semeia, no. 59 (1 January 1992): 196.
15Stephen D. Moore, “'The World Empire Has Become the Empire of Our Lord and His Messiah': Representing Empire in Revelation,” Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Publishing, 2006), 114.
16Stephen D. Moore, “Revolting Revelations,” God's Beauty Parlor: And Other Queer Spaces in and around the Bible (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 198-199.
17Reddish, “Martyr Christology in the Apocalypse,” 91.
18Moore, “'The World Empire Has Become the Empire of Our Lord and His Messiah',” 97.
19As Moore writes, “The Crusades, the Inquisition, and even the Holocaust itself (the smoke rising day and night from the ovens of Auschwitz and Belsen) are but some of the more notable manifestations of the militarism that animates Revelation. Indeed, anyone of these campaigns might have claimed a warrant for its genocidal fantasies in the sinister logic of this most dangerous of biblical books.” Moore, “Revolting Revelations,” 188.
20Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 68.
21Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 196.

Works Cited
Andrić, Ivo. The Bridge on the Drina. Trans. Lovett F. Edwards. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.
Boose, Lynda E. “Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory.” Signs 28.1 (Autumn 2002): 71-96.
Castelli, Elizabeth A. Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version. San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 2006.
Moore, Stephen D. “Revolting Revelations.” God's Beauty Parlor: And Other Queer Spaces in and around the Bible. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. 173-199.
---. “'The World Empire Has Become the Empire of Our Lord and His Messiah': Representing Empire in Revelation.” Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Publishing, 2006. 97-121.
Pippin, Tina. “Eros and the End: Reading for Gender in the Apocalypse of John.” Semeia, no. 59 (1 January 1992): 193-210.
Reddish, Mitchell G. “Martyr Christology in the Apocalypse.” Journal For The Study Of The New Testament no. 33 (1 June 1988): 85-95.
Sells, Michael A. The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. University of California Press, 1996.

On Summer Thunderstorms

I wish I had been posting more this summer, like I did last summer with my Beatitudes Fellowship blogs. Unfortunately, though I have one reflection and a sermon up I have not even posted once a week! I have been working as an intern for the Communities of Shalom in York City and Delta, Cardiff, and Whiteford for five of six weeks now. I have been writing a lot, journaling way more than I normally do, but I have felt like posting little of it. And I don't know how much of my final reflection I will want to post either. But I do want to share my reflection from last Monday because last week was a powerful one for me, and I think this reflection captures some of what I have experienced.

11 July 2011

All I wanted today was a piece of pizza. Actually, I don't like paying for food if I can help it, but I need to go talk with folks about what they see as needed in the Delta community, yet instead I've been piddling around. As I did again today. See the two pizza places I was going to go to are closed today! But I walked a ways from Delta United Methodist Church to Delta Pizza, and what I learned then was worth the failed attempt to get some pizza.

It was actually pretty horrifying. I was walking up the street, watching the sidewalk because it is in really bad shape (apparently the borough got some money from the state to fix it but they declined as it would mean they would have to put some of their own money into it as well), and on one of the slate slabs of sidewalk was written in big chalked purple letters, “FAG,” right in front of a house. And then I noticed that again it was right in front of another house written on a telephone pole. And another place where blue chalk outlined something about someone fucking someone was being worn away. This normally would not have horrified me except that the word “fag” is so ugly and used so violently in this community. And it was coupled with a picture that Richard had painted for us today in bible study.

I started the day in bible study at the Senior Center. It was a beautiful group of folks, most of whom I met at church or the senior center already. We read Matthew 25, the parable of the bridesmaids, the parable of the talents, and the judgment of the sheep and the goats.But in the beginning we went around and talked about those blessings we have seen in our lives. Richard said that Sunday morning he woke up and went outside to go to church, only to see that his car was egged. This upset me--- it is different when kids egg each others' cars, or when kids egg someone's car who they don't like, but a stranger's car? Maybe Richard isn't a stranger, but I can't imagine how he would have contact with some kid and incur their wrath enough to have them egg his car! I just shiver to think about how people do certain things to one another, how they think it is okay to egg a complete stranger's car? This is what went through my mind. But Richard saw it as a blessing. He said on his drive to church he saw a car where someone had thrown rocks and not eggs and the windshield was broken. Still, I am left with the fact that there is so little to do around Delta that kids see their only outlet in such destruction, and in the violence of the act of labeling someone as a fag so publicly.

I spent the evening in York with kids who are being kept busy, given an entirely different task than those in Delta. Asbury United Methodist Church, in collaboration with First Presbyterian Church and Yorkshire United Methodist, was hosting 67 youth for the York Mission Week, a week of working on homes and community gardens and at soup kitchens, reaching out to do mission close to their own homes. The bishop and the cabinet were working at the York Mission Week, which is how I got involved. Each night after dinner, they have a time of sharing, a few group games, and then worship. I went today to the time of sharing, listening as the kids talked about what they had done that day. I am certainly not called to youth ministry because I have very little patience for 13 year old boys, but there were a few moments in this time of sharing where some of the kids did voice meaningful experiences and others tried to but couldn't really articulate what had happened. But such moments are still beautiful.

When we were sharing, one of the girls talked about working on a fence to keep a big dog in on Chestnut Street. I told them I had talked to that woman several weeks ago at Northeast Neighborhood Association. She had talked about submitting the application. She said she was glad she had the opportunity to get some help, but she hated to let her landlord get out of his responsibilities. She said she wanted to hold him accountable, but at the same time, she needed her fence fixed. I don't think this story really resonated with the kids at my table, but I think it is a story that is important to remember. We as the church can't just go around fixing stuff without holding the principalities and powers accountable. Otherwise, we are always about being bandaids, which means we aren't really living the kingdom of God!

The powerful part of the evening, though, was when we went out on a silent walk circling around the church, taking the time to really look at these neighborhoods they are working in, rather than narrowly focusing on our tasks which is so easy to do. And the kids really were silent, really were keeping their eyes open. But the sky was getting darker and darker and we heard thunder and began to see lightning. And yet, I couldn't turn back. So I continued to lead the kids until suddenly the sky poured water down on us and so we ran down a little back alley to get back to the church. But after the long hot day, our bodies welcomed the rain, I think. People ran smiling into the building.

When Kristin, one of those the mission week, had us all back and dried off in the sanctuary preparing for worship, she spoke of how when things like this happen, we just have to laugh in the devil's face and not let it get us down. Now, that is not my theology, and I think it would have been better to lead the kids in thinking about all those homes they were in today, how those roofs were holding up, or in thinking about all the people living without homes in this city. But even beyond that, I saw the storm to be of God. Here we were, eyes opening to the neighborhoods around us, and it was as though God sent this rain to wash us. To wash the dirt from our eyes so we could better see around us. To cleanse us from the old way of doing mission, to cleanse us of our savior complexes, and rather invite us to enter into a different attitude for the week. One in which we were open for transformation, open to the ways God would work in these young people's lives.

And that same rain fell in Delta, washing the glass out of the street, the chalk off the sidewalk, the egg off the cars...maybe even bringing those kids some relief from the heat, a smile to their faces.

I did not get to go back to the mission week, so I do not know how the rest of the week went or if such transformation took place. Too often in my own week, I was not open to transformation in my own life. But I can still feel that refreshing rain on my face. And I know God is still working within me to change me.

My Brother's Keeper

God of love, we have sinned
replacing You with our fears, values, prejudices and our laws.
Move us from hardness to compassion,
from guilt to forgiveness,
from apathy to action,
from complicity and silence to justice.
Heal our brokenness and the wounds of your creation. Amen

This we prayed on November 20 at the symposium on hate crimes held at Grace United Methodist Church, 125 W 104th Street, New York City. It was a beautiful church, and throughout the day we watched the sun shine through the stained glass dove above the altar as we sat together and confronted what it means and what it would look like to commit ourselves to the work of ending hate violence. The symposium, called My Brother's Keeper: People of faith confront hate crimes, was sponsored by the Conference Board of Church and Society, the NYAC Immigration Task Force, the NY chapter of the Methodist Federation for Social Action, Methodists in New Directions, the Conference Commission on Race and Religion and the Conference Committee on the Status and Role of Women.

The symposium was so beautifully woven together with lecture, worship, discussion, and art. We began with worship, opening with a song whose lyrics were "I am not forgotten; God knows my name"--- a powerful reminder of those communion of saints for whom we gathered today to stand up against the violence that makes people "forgotten."

For there are indeed so many who are pushed into forgotten-ness. Dr. J. Terry Todd, Drew professor and member of the keynote panel "How is the Hate Sponsored in Church and Society? How is the Hate Countered?" along with doctoral biblical studies student Rosario Quinones and civil rights lawyer Fred Brewington moderated by Dr. Traci West, spoke about the three periods of anti-immigrant fervor in the USA, weaving political cartoons from the 1880s with pictures from Tea Party rallies to reveal how the same rhetoric gets repeated again and again. And though he began by focusing on immigration, he reminded us that it is not coincidental that the rise of the Klu Klux Klan coincided with the period of anti-immigrant fervor from 1880-1924.

He ended his part in the lecture, though, with the adoption in 1972 in the United Methodist Church of what we call the incompatibility clause: "homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching." Originally the Committee on Christian Social Concerns wrote a sentence to declare acceptance of people of all sexual identities, recognizing everyone's sacred worth, but on the floor the language was changed to "incompatible." Fred Brewington said during his part of the panel that the incompatibility clause turns the bible into a weapon. And that, we began to see, is hate speech.

The day really centered around showing us of the intersectionality of anti-immigrant, racially-based, and homophobic hate crimes, as you can see from the keynote panel. The literature also reminded us about those hate crimes against Muslims in the city this year, though it was not covered as much throughout the day. There was a theatrical performance brought to us by the Teatro Experimental Yerbabruja out of Long Island, that spoke to us of the real-life events of the murder of Marcelo Lucero, thus documenting how hate crimes happen. Here, we kept hearing the words so prevalent today in our own anti-immigrant fervor: "It's not about race, it's about rule of law." And we kept seeing the bodies of immigrants broken and bruised alongside these words, proving how empty those words really are.

Bishop Jeremiah Park, who I was very proud to see there as too often bishops avoid events like this, brought us a letter announcing the coming statement from the Council of Bishops that says:

"We as people of faith are charged to build the beloved community because Christ has broken down the dividing walls and ended the hostilities between us. Yet we continue to build walls in the church and in the world, which separate us and cause our hearts to grieve...In the United States, there has been an escalation of violence, related to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religious preference. This escalation included personal attacks, bullying and vicious criminal acts of violence to the mind, body and spirit of persons. These actions diminish life for the victims, the perpetrators and the total community. They are ultimately insidious and irreverent attacks on the sacredness of God given life."

We as people of faith, must work to build this beloved community, one free from hate crimes and hate speech.

To educate yourself more, visit the Center for Preventing Hate and join the conversation on the My Brother's Keeper Facebook page.

As Rosario Quinones said, the blood of those impacted by the hate is, like Abel's, crying out from the ground. We must move, as the prayer says, to compassion, action, and justice to repent from this sin of fear.