Classmates of mine were children of refugees who had fled the terrors of the Nazis and the Communists. Others had parents who had fought to free them from those terrors.
Both kinds of parents were zealous patriots, firm in their belief that our nation was indeed the land of the free. But these parents were not always consistent in fighting oppressions, especially those faced by our black classmates. Our state, while not officially segregated, was also not free of racial oppression.
The 60s and early 70s were tumultuous times, marked by pitched battles over Vietnam, racism, and economic disparity. My high school had its own version of a race riot – while small in scale, it was divisive and bitter. “Outside agitators,” local leaders said dismissively, not admitting to homegrown troubles.
My former classmates recall another student uprising, when they protested a teacher wrongly fired. Our class was fully capable of speaking out against oppression. Was this second uprising easier because it was someone else’s fault, not their own? I am troubled by how no one mentions the racial conflict. Leave well enough alone, people say. But is it really “well enough”?
As a teenager, I was galvanized by fights against both spiritual and societal oppression in my world, and I was certainly proactive, at least concerning the former. Named student leader in a citywide religious outreach, my first flight, on a prop plane, was to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. We were an advance team scouting out the evangelist coming our way.
I was also beginning to think about what should be done about other forms of oppression. I liked to think that if I had been just a little bit older, I would have marched side-by-side with Martin Luther King, Jr. Those glory days had already come and gone by the time I was of age, or so it felt. King was assassinated when I was only 13.
But hindsight is as deceptive as it is simple. Saying we were too late to join in is pure excuse unless we instead fight the battles reserved for our own generation.
In two days, we in the U.S. will commemorate Veterans Day, a holiday shared by other nations as well, especially those who suffered through and fought the last century’s world wars. November 11 marks the end of World War I – 79 years ago.
Today is another anniversary. The Berlin Wall fell 35 years ago in 1989, signaling the end of an age. Soviet Communism had locked whole nations and millions of people inside the Iron Curtain, less to keep invaders out than to keep captive populations in.
The Berlin wall was in Germany, a thousand miles from Moscow. The German capital had been divided along with the rest of Germany following World War II. The French, British, and U.S. sections of both capital and nation had united as a free West Germany. The Soviet-held quadrant remained conquered, with free Berlin stuck deep inside. On East German maps, West Berlin showed as a blank spot, a blaring void.
To keep captives in place, the Soviet puppets erected walls. West Berlin became a locked-down island inside a locked-down East Germany, cut off from the rest of the free world for four decades, except via air transport. As the old Soviet empire crumbled at the end of the 80s, so did the Berlin Wall. The two parts of Berlin as with the two parts of Germany were finally reunited in 1990.
If the Berlin Wall symbolized the conflict between freedom and tyranny, its demise symbolized the triumph of the human spirit. Human beings can remain oppressed for generations. But there is something deep within the human spirit which yearns for freedom that will not forever be denied.
Witness the millions who have been fleeing Africa or the Middle East for Europe. Or the millions from around the world trying to reach the relative safety of U.S. soil, just as they have done for generations. We may write off much of the contemporary worldwide refugee crisis as economic opportunism, but however you spin it, most are oppressed peoples seeking freedom.
I see this quote in The Atlantic magazine and ponder: “Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society.”1
The author is writing of China. They could have been describing any number of places in our world past or present. We ask why the Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe were passive, revealing our naivety about countless stories of subterfuge, industrial sabotage, and rescue operations conducted by Jews themselves.
As U.S. citizens, we celebrate our own success at throwing off the shackles of British colonial tyranny, yet often diminish the efforts of people around the world to do the same against their own colonial oppressors. Certainly, rebellion by enslaved Haitian Blacks shortly after our own revolution scared the wits out of slaveholders in the South, leading them to inflict even greater repression their own enslaved.
We think of Southern Blacks in the U.S. as passively accepting enslavement and segregation; the sheer number of rebellions, protests, escapes, migrations, and freedom songs tells a very different story. We whites speak of how we bravely fought Native Americans who were violent towards us as pioneers, blinded to the fact that they were defending their own land and way of life – and their very lives. These were not passive responders.
Even as Black South Africans were entombed in apartheid, individuals and groups continued to fight – witness Nelson Mandela who remained unbroken in prison for 27 years until freedom came. Witness the story of the South Sudanese, or of the rebels in Myanmar, or of countless other peoples around the world who yearn – and work – for freedom.
Many of these battles for freedom have been won through armed conflict. But lest we think it is all guns and no roses, some of the greatest victories have been won by the likes of Gandhi and King, people who espoused a proactive passive resistance.
My own faith tradition, Pentecostalism, was deeply rooted in pacifism in its earliest days. These forebears, as well as other religious groups that remain peace churches, have not been weak-kneed in their commitment to freedom or their willingness to fight oppression.
I have family members who have fought for justice in war with guns and family members who have fought for justice while rejecting guns. What they all share is an undying commitment to do as the prophet Micah declared, when he said, “What does the Lord require of you?”
The answer, Micah shouts back, is “to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”2
That phrase translated in the NIV as “to act justly” can also be stated “to do or practice justice.” However it is said, the idea is not some passive sitting-in-your-recliner response. It is a call to rise up and throw off injustice wherever it may be found and however it can be done without creating new injustices.
I love how the prophet Amos puts this call to justice. Having spoken fiercely and lengthily about how we humans have oppressed others – ripping off the poor, trafficking women, being exploitative in financial dealings, mistreating enemies, grabbing land not our own, to name but a few sins – he then declares: “But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.”3
What strikes me about both these passages – in Amos and in Micah – is that the prophets are explaining this call to fight for justice within the context of worship. The Israelites thought that true worship was in making sacrifices, what Norman Snaith describes as when “the aim of hymns and songs and music generally becomes aesthetic.”4
There is nothing wrong with hymns and songs. They are lifeblood to us, especially as they call us to recognize we are not gods but instead bring us to worship the God whose aim is to set people free. As we worship, we follow God into battle – fighting on behalf of those who are spiritually, emotionally, physically, socially, economically, and culturally oppressed. Moreover, if we read these prophets of old correctly, our acts of justice-making are as much worship as the songs we sing and the sacrifices we make to God.
You can’t have one without the other, something the Freedom Fighters in the American South recognized as they sang and prayed their way across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and onto the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
To put a finer tune on it, another prophet, Hosea this time, declares in the voice of God, “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.”5 Notice what Hosea is saying: true worship is acknowledging God. When we come face to face with God, as was the case with yet another prophet, Isaiah, our response is, first, to become aware of our own unworthiness, to which God brings cleansing and healing, and, second, to say yes to being commissioned by God.6
Commissioned to do what? To declare and demonstrate the Good News of God’s grace and mercy, of course.
There is Moses, hiding on the backside of the desert because he killed a man trying to set another free, and now he is afraid for his own life. He’d had the right idea, fighting injustice, if the wrong method. But God, who sees Moses’ heart, knows that it is tender toward his fellow descendants of their Father Abraham in Egypt. God, who self-identifies only as “I am,” says to Moses, “Now is the time and this time let me show you how to do it right.”
God then tells Moses, “Get up and go face the oppressor and tell that oppressor that it is time to let my people go!”7 God wanted his people free, not just to run around becoming oppressors themselves, but to worship – that is, acknowledge – God. To come face to face with God, become aware of their own fallenness, receive cleansing and healing from God, and then go and do as Moses had done.
That was the mission of the newly freed Israelites – that in shaking off their own shackles, they would learn to break others’ chains.
To those who say, “America is blessed” (to which I affirm), it is not so we can wallow in our own excesses even as we turn a blind eye toward those who remain oppressed, or to oppress others with those very same excesses. We are blessed to set others free, and to continually do so until all peoples walk in the freedom God has envisioned for us as human beings.
If we truly believe that God hates sin and that we must treat our fellow human beings as made in the image of God, then we will be moved to do everything in our power to break the chains of oppression and set God’s people free. Whatever thrills of liberation battles we missed in previous generations, every generation has fresh opportunity to let justice roll down. We too are called and sent by God to declare and set captives free. The question is not whether, but how and where.
As these holidays and anniversaries come, I encourage you to renew your commitment to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God, just as Micah said.
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Public Domain photo: East and West Germans, Brandenburg Gate, Berlin Wall (1989)