Sunday’s first reading uses a dominating tree to symbolize Yahweh’s protected empire and the submission all will one pay to the deity, “Every tree of the field will know that I am the Lord.” Jesus has no interest in empires, their borders, or their violent warlords who protect and sanctify it all. He acts to replace them. This Sunday he replaces the symbol of a dominating tree with a vulnerable yet powerful “mustard seed.” It will grow “and become the largest of plants… so that all the birds of the sky can dwell in it.” Jesus replaces bordered empires for chosen people with borderless communities for all people.
The U.S. Empire has chosen people fearful about its borders and fearful about the people they charge with violating them. Their racist immigration policies are ironic. The U.S. has long been violating borders to enslave and colonize areas of the world, especially those inhabited by people of color. U.S. violations cause suffering and death and prevent humanity from living together peacefully. The U.S. has partners in its global terrorism; big (G-7/G-8, NATO, The Nuclear Club) and small (local despots) and the more brazenly brutal who are becoming closer allies (Putin, Erdogan, Duterte). Through political, financial, and physical border ignoring warfare, the U.S. is the prime cause of people currently fleeing their homes; resulting in refugees and asylum seekers emigrating. it is a continuation of the empire’s decades long colonialist racist warfare against indigenous Latinos and Central Americans through invasions, raids, United Fruit, NAFTA, et al. It exists along side decades of such racist warfare against Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East. Racist and warring tactics have been causing massive population hemorrhages across the world. Those who most vigorously claim, “This nation is a nation of laws” consistently draft supremacist laws and dodge egalitarian laws to ensure that population displacing warfare is waged by the U.S. across any border on earth. Admonished from making Hitler and Nazi comparisons does not alter their truths. Indigenous Latinos, Mexicans, and Central Americans are the Gypsies of the U.S. Empire. Immigration and Customs Enforcement act as this Reich’s brown shirts. Deporting, incarcerating, and killing people in flight for their lives, women and children especially, and housing some in military installations aka concentration camps, is an apt mimicking of the anti-Gypsy operations of the early SS (SchutzStaffel, “Protection Squadron”). Arabs and Muslims are this Reich’s Jews, judged less than human and deserving of stereotype and violence. The U.S. has spread out the old Reich’s oppression and 4 years of incendiary ovens into decades of oppression and incendiary weaponry. It is matching the deaths of 6 million Jews with just as many slaughtered Arabs and Muslims. The U.S. Empire has been normalizing its racism with euphemisms like immigration, exceptionalism, safe borders, Minutemen, Second Amendment rights, Oath Keepers, alt-right, and more. Worse than normalizing the racism is sanctifying the racism. Every Sunday, self titled Christians in the U.S. today, like self titled Christians in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, pray for ‘our brave troops’ who are violating borders to dominate across the world. When will the church goers pray for vulnerable peacemakers to gather together all people of the world?
Institutional christianity in the U.S. tends to support the empire and often reflects its racist premises. It explains Jeff Sessions’ and Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Biblical/Yahweh based bordered empire instead of Christ’s borderless Community. An exception might be The Summit. It is convened yearly by the D.C. based Sojourners community and gathers diverse people from across the U.S., doing so this past week, June 12-15, 2018. Peacemakers gathered around the theme of being Radically Rooted, thus being open to shifting from the dominating tree metaphor to the vulnerable mustard seed metaphor. Sojourners at large and The Summit in particular, are bringing together social activists and artists as powerful group of seeds. “From the roots of our faith and commitment to one another, a new future will emerge. For, as the proverb says, ‘They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”
Prayer: Radical Spirit, renew us as radical and vital seeds, small yet powerful energies able to grow a peaceful community amidst a violent empire.
Question: What can I do this Father’s Day weekend and beyond to be a seed?
June 17, 2018 Gospel Mark 4:26-34 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time