March for Our Lives Atlanta

On March 24, 2018, March for Our Lives in Atlanta, Georgia, began at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, a museum dedicated to the achievements of both the civil rights movement in the US and the worldwide human rights movement.

More than 30,000 people took part in the march in Atlanta, joining marchers in 800 cities in the US and around the world. The people took to the streets to support a student-initiated movement to change gun laws and end gun violence in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting that took the lives of 17 students and adults.

At the Atlanta rally, teenage students took to the podium to read poetry, sing songs, and call the protesters to action. Congressman John Lewis, who was a young man when he joined the civil rights movement, was impressed by the students leading the protest. He addressed the crowd and said, “It is amazing. It reminds me of the early days of the civil movement.”

I have never seen so many elementary and high school students marching in a rally before. They carried signs that said, “#Enough,” “Not one more,” “Loving arms, not fire arms!” One particular sign captured my attention: it said thoughts and prayers are not enough, and we need policy and change.

The rally was a site for civic education. A father near me brought his two small children, who carried signs made by themselves. The family began shouting, “NRA, go away.” As we passed by a booth for voter registration, a father told his teenage daughters, “I had registered to vote. As soon as you can vote, you will register too.”

At a time when the NRA lobby is so strong, and the Congress refuses to pass common sense gun laws, students across the country marched out of their classrooms on March 14 and took part in the national protest on March 24. Naomi Wadler, the 11-year-old fifth-grader, said at the rally in Washington. D.C, “I represent the African-American women who are victims of gun violence, who are simply statistics instead of vibrant, beautiful girls full of potential.” Emma González, 18, one of the most prominent of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas survivor-activists, asked us to remember the lives of students cut short. When adults fail to protect them, children across the nation stand up. When politicians refuse to act, students march literally for their lives!



Marching down Martin Luther King Dr

March for Our Lives took place the day before this year’s Palm Sunday. As students were marching in the nation’s capital, I was reminded of Jesus’ march to Jerusalem. Jesus entered the city from the east side, riding a donkey and cheered by his followers. This was a peasant procession and Jesus came from the village of Nazareth. On the west side, there was another imperial procession. Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Idumea, Judea, and Samaria, entered Jerusalem at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers. Pilate’s march displayed imperial power and Roman imperial theology.*

Jesus’ procession was a protest march, an anti-imperial march! Many church leaders preach about the religious significance of Palm Sunday, but completely overlook or choose to forget the politics of Jesus’ march.

On Palm Sunday, I participated in a worship service with more than 2,000 people in a big church in downtown Atlanta. Most of the worshippers were African Americans. In his sermon, the preacher said that Jesus entered Jerusalem triumphantly as a different kind of king, not like the kings in the world. Jesus entered Jerusalem to fight for us, to fight for forgiveness. He did not mention the socio-political background of Jesus’ march, nor did he refer to the march that took place not far from his church the day before. He did not say a word about a march against gun violence, which disproportionately affects the African American community.

Jesus’ march and the unfolding events of the Holy Week must be seen in the larger context of political and religious terror. In The Cross in Contexts, Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb reminds us that “Jesus was not only a victim of state terror but also of religious terror.” This was because Jesus was not sentenced to death under Roman law alone, but also as a blasphemer, for he dared to challenge religious authorities. Jesus died because of religious terrorism. The cross, Raheb says, “becomes the ultimate critique of state and religious violence.”

Today, following Jesus means to confront imperial power of our time, and to oppose racism, sexism, heterosexism, bigotry, anti-immigration, xenophobia, and capitalist greed. It means engaging in non-violent resistance, pursuing justice, and working with our religious neighbors to foster peace. It means protecting the young and bequeathing our children a better world.

The children are marching for their lives! Are we marching with them or not?  

* Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus’s Final Week in Jerusalem (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 2-5.

Nurturing Cultures of Just-Peace

Just-peace in the title of this panel is not one word, but linked by a hyphen. The in-between space and the interconnection between justice and peace is the subject for our discussion this afternoon. Can we have peace that is not just? Can we demand justice and justice alone without peace? And who is to decide what is justice and justice to whom? Is peace a utopian state without war, conflicts, and tears?

We are reminded of the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when he said that he was “gravely disappointed with the white moderate … who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that there is no cheap grace in his resistance to the Nazi regime. Today Christians must come to realize that there is no cheap peace. In the Gospels, Jesus confronted the power of the Roman Empire and the religious elites of his time. He proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom of God, as a counternarrative to the imperial rule of Caesar. Instead of glorifying military might and fanfare of war, Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Matt. 5:9). He was tortured and died a political prisoner on the cross, an instrument to instill suffering and fear for anyone who dared to challenge imperial rule.

Yet throughout the age, the message of Jesus has been domesticated and coopted to serve the status quo. Time and time again, Christian doctrines and beliefs have been misused and misappropriated to justify the Crusades, the conquest of the Americas, and colonization of the world’s majority. The Christian Right and those advocating the Gospel of Prosperity have used the Gospel to bolster the 1% and to discriminate against the 99%, especially women and children, the working class, racial minorities, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Middle-class churches proclaim peace, where there is really no peace.

Just-peace requires nothing less than a collective metanoia (repentence) of our own complicity in supporting the violence of an unjust system. Our economic system that condemns one out of four young children to live in poverty is both violent and unjust. Without recognizing the terror and violence inflicted in the name of national security, bailing out the big banks, and protecting corporate interests, we as Christians will never fully understand the cost of just-peace and the cost of discipleship.

The pursuit of just-peace requires us to begin to speak divine power in radically new ways. Christian images of God are commonly shaped by dominant images of power and might. In the past, God was often envisioned as a heavenly patriarch or monarch. Divine power understood as hierarchical, patriarchal, and one-sided has been used to reinforce the powers and principalities on earth.

Just-peace requires us to see divine power in relations, in the interstices, in the spaces between us. We need to see beyond the false dichotomies of black and white and to embrace the pregnant potentialities in the gray areas. At the Episcopal Divinity School, we encourage students to say both-and and not either-or.

The question in interfaith dialogue and engagement is not to draw a simple line between Christians and non-Christians. The issue at hand is not whether people profess belief in God or not; the question is what kind of ultimate reality and what kind of power people affirm. Those who affirm power as a top-down process and those who see God or ultimate reality upholding it are closer to each other, no matter whether they are Christian nor not, than those who affirm alternative forms of power that move from the bottom up.

From understanding dialogue as service to mission in the first half of the twentieth century to the discussion of multiple religious belonging, Christian churches have changed quite drastically in their attitudes toward other religious traditions. As we face the future, interfaith dialogue must address some of the burning issues in our world, such as the rise of fundamentalisms of all kinds, the assertion of religious identity and fragmentation of community, the exploitation of religious passion for violence, the widespread suspicion of political and religious leaders, and cynicism about possible social change. Interfaith dialogue must be a force for peacekeeping. In contemporary politics there are the dual forces of politicization of religion and the theologization of politics.

In the past several years, a group of theologians have begun to explore the concept of polydoxy in order to describe the multiplicity and relationality of God and of our world. Polydoxy, as its prefix “poly” suggests, acknowledges both the internal diversity of the Christian tradition and the plurality of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions. Colleen Hartung has said, “Polydoxy, a space for many opinions about belief within a body of belief, or alternatively a place of many faiths within a circle of faith, implies an openness to diversity, difference, challenge, and multiplicity.”

Polydoxy foregrounds the diversity of cultural and religious traditions of the world, and sees such diversity as a blessing and not a curse. Polydoxy debunks the myth of the superiority of one God, one creed, and one Church, and holds multiple traditions and perspectives together when looking at God and reality. A theology of multiplicity seeks company, and does not reduce the Other into the Same.

* Remarks at a panel discussion on "Nurturing a Culture of Just-Peace: Opening Local Communities for Interfaith Engagement" at the Episcopal Divinity School on May 2, 2012. The videos of this panel are available on the School's website.

Jesus Would Have Been Born in the Camp

Occupy Wall Street. Occupy London. Occupy Harvard. Occupy your school. Occupy your office. Occupy everything.

Occupy Christmas? Yes, Jesus would have been born in the camp.

On October 27, the Rev. Giles Fraser, canon chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, spoke about his resignation because of his objection to the use of force to evict the protesters of Occupy London Stock Exchange, who have camped outside St. Paul’s Cathedral.

He said, “What the camp does is challenge the church with the problem of the incarnation – that you have God who is grand and almighty, who gets born in a stable. St Paul was a tent maker. If you tried to recreate where Jesus would have been born, for me I could imagine Jesus being born in the camp.”

Even if Jesus was not born in the camp, he would certainly join the Occupy movement, for he was part of Occupy the Temple of his day.

Really? 



Jesus and the Disciples in an Occupy Drum Circle by Sudeep Johnson

When I saw this picture with the article on The Huffington Post, I began to laugh. Yes, Jesus and the moneychangers. How could we have forgotten?

Don’t the conservatives always ask, “What would Jesus do?” Tell them, Jesus overturned the moneychangers’ tables and drove them from sacred ground. As Richard Eskow said, “It’s hard to describe Jesus’ action against the moneychangers in today’s terms without calling it ‘Occupy the Temple.’”

Now the police and officials have raided the tent-cities in the U.S. The once vibrant encampment at Dewey Square in Boston is no more. When you pass through it today, the ground has been resodded and you would have not guessed that some 100 tents were there just over two weeks ago.

So this is it? Not quite.

I went to the general assembly at the Boston Common the night after the campsite was raided at 5 a.m. on December 10 to support the Occupiers. The Dewey Square camp was the longest continuous campsite in the U.S.—for 72 days. It was a peaceful demonstration and yet the authorities would not allow it to continue. 

But the Occupy movement was never about seizing public lands and establishing tent-cities. In this new Occupy 2.0, the movement depends on community and grassroots support. In Boston, St. Paul’s Cathedral was the first to open their sanctuary for the Occupiers to meet on December 13. Dean Jep Streit said that the church is not taking sides, but wants to provide a space for the important conversations for economic justice to continue.

In England, Occupy London Stock Exchange continues to camp outside St. Paul’s Cathedral. They will remain there until January 11, 2012, when the High Court makes its decision on eviction. The camp now has about 150 tents.

Asked in Radio Times what Jesus would do in response to the Occupy group, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said he would be there “sharing the risks, asking the long and hard questions.”

At the Christ Church Cathedral at St. Louis, Missouri, the Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church, USA, also made connection between Jesus and the Occupy movement. She said in her sermon “I am profoundly struck, however, by the parallels between the Occupy movement and Jesus’ band of homeless wanderers. . . The Occupiers have shared food, cared for each other, and challenged the rest of us about justice in the size of paychecks.  Now those who have been evicted are struggling with how to continue their global demonstration.”

Churches in the U.S. have long been involved in social movements: anti-slavery, temperance, women’s liberation, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender liberation. On this Christmas day, I hope churches will provide hospitality for this movement to continue.

Occupy Boston and the Minjung

Yesterday I went to visit Occupy Boston in Dewy Square by South Station in downtown Boston. Occupy Boston began on September 30, inspired by the much larger Occupy Wall Street movement in New York.

Occupy Boston is a tent city with 40-50 tents. It has its reception area, kitchen, portable toilets, and an elevated area used as the stage. Dewey Square is filled to capacity. The attempt to expand to a second camp met with strong resistance from the police. Nearly 150 were arrested on October 11.

One of my students has camped out at Dewey Park since the very beginning. He is an anarchist and has longed for participating in a movement to bring down capitalism for more than 10 years. He cannot believe that there are thousands of people like him who want to challenge corporate greed and the neo-liberal economy.

What is most exciting for him is the leaderless, horizontal organization that is developing. During the general assemblies when they gather for discussion and for decision-making, hand gestures are used to indicate “like,” “dislike,” “yes,” “no” and so forth. This is taking a page from the anarchist’s playbook.

The media at first did not pay much attention to the Occupy movement, describing it as a movement of privileged students. But the people at Occupy Boston are much more diverse: homeless people, older people, and members of the unions. Clergy have shown up and church members have visited the site. It is a coalition of many sectors of the community. Time magazine says it represents “the return of the silent majority.”

The movement declares, “We are the 99 percent.” In the U.S., the top 1 percent gets over 20 percent of the total income.

It was amazing to see that people in more than 950 cities worldwide have organized protests on the International Day of Solidarity with the Occupy Movement on October 15, 2011. In Hong Kong, around 500 protesters gathered outside the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Most of the participants were young and they also used the “We are the 99 percent” slogan.

Several years ago, I have read Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Multitude. Instead of class, they used the term multitude to denote the heterogeneous mass of people who will rise up against Empire. The multitude is linked by the Internet, the social media, and mobile devices. Since Empire is transnational, the multitude must also be a global force and represents a new form of politics.

I thought at the time the idea of the multitude is too abstract: who will organize them? And where do they come from? But we have seen the force of the multitude several times in the last decade: during the global demonstrations against the Iraq War and now the Occupy Movement.

Will the multitude have the sustaining power to effect structural changes? It might be too early to tell about the Occupy movement. But one thing I am certain: conversations have begun in the kitchens, classrooms, and living rooms. Our school had a teach-in session facilitated by our President and another professor, who are veterans of social movements.

The Bible has a word for the crowd of people following Jesus. They are called the ochlos (e.g Matt. 4:25; 8:1). In South Korea in the 1970s, minjung theologians used this term to describe the mass of people who are oppressed by society. Minjung comes from two Chinese characters 民众, which mean mass of people. Similar to Hardt and Negri, minjung theologians do not limit minjung to the working or lower class. Women are the minjung when they are oppressed by the patriarchal society. The colonized are minjung when they are dominated by the colonizers.

Minjung theologians say that for too long, the church only pays attention to the laos (laity), and leave out from its purview the ochlos.

Minjung theology was developed during the dictatorial regime of Park Chung-hee. Today South Korea has become much more democratic with significant economic growth. I am not sure that minjung theology is as popular as it once was. Furthermore, the tactics used by minjung theologians, focusing on national political struggle, may not be adequate to fight against Empire.

We will need a more globalized minjung theology, which can speak to the issues of our time. This minjung theology must be transnational, heterogeneous, fluid, and responsive to local needs and issues. This cannot be written by the elites alone, but must be a participatory theological movement from the bottom-up.

I wonder why did Jesus attract great crowds following him? What did they see in the promise of Jesus? Why do the churches not attracting the multitude today?