Prophets in the Graveyard
A bullet in the head, now he’s dead
A friend of a friend, someone said
He was an activist with a very short life
I think there’s a lesson here — he died without a fight
In the war over land where the world began
Prophecies say it’s where the world will end
But there’s a tremor growing in our own backyard
Fear in our heads, fear in our hearts
Prophets in the graveyard
— Lyrics by Amy Raye, from Jonas & Ezekiel as performed by Indigo Girls
In my last article, the week before Christmas, we talked about Jesus. We brought in Marshall Rosenberg’s work on Nonviolent Communication and Alfie Kohn’s work on rewards and punishment, and we used that work to discern the religion OF Jesus from the religion ABOUT Jesus. From your feedback, that seemed to resonate with y’all… so we’re going to try something similar today in honor of MLK Day, which was this past Monday.
Now, I propose to you that the same injustice done to Jesus by his followers is paralleled in the way we typically celebrate MLK Day. MLK was a prophet who put the movement and the truth and the message and the people he served above his own needs and his own safety. Yet, the holiday has devolved into a celebration of his personality, into turning him into a safe idol of ‘black excellence.’ To be sure, Dr. King was both black and excellent. But, I also think that, like Jesus, he has been neutered and idolized in the retelling, in the reinterpretation. We have drawn a box labeled ‘Civil Rights Leader’ and put him inside that box, keeping his prophecy racialized and his contributions confined in racial terms. As long as Dr. King is simply a spokesperson for oppressed black people, he is relatively safe. So we have reduced him to that and tried to keep him there.
Let’s hear a bit from Dr. King, in his own words, in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination, “(Ours) is a climate filled with heavy torrents of false accusation, jostling winds of hatred, and raging storms of violence. It is a climate where men cannot disagree without being disagreeable, and where they express dissent through violence and murder… So in a sense we are all participants in (these) horrible act(s)… By our silence, by our willingness to compromise principle, by our constant attempt to cure the cancer of racial injustice with the vaseline of gradualism, by our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim, by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing, by allowing all these developments, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes.”
Let’s go back to Jesus for a second — if his murder, his assassination, is supernaturally required by the story we tell about him… then it isn’t a tragedy anymore. It isn’t an act of malice and cowardice and bile and villainy… it literally becomes a part of the act of salvation. I reject that. His assassination was just that: the politically motivated murder of someone who’s influence and message about the transformational power of love made him dangerous. And so he was murdered — not murdered to save our souls, he was murdered in the self-serving and venal interests of those who claimed as their birthright, the right to subjugate and exploit other human beings. And so it was with Dr. King, in my humble opinion. Having garnered some victories on the civil rights front, his attention began to turn to America’s economic system of exploitation. He began to see and to speak about the evils of poverty, the evils of a system that uses racial division to distract attention from the classist exploitation of poor and working people, regardless of race. He began to see and to speak about the evils of militarism and the use of violence against human beings in both domestic and foreign contexts. He began to see the deep truth of Jesus’ wisdom, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” There is no freedom for any of us greater than the freedom of the least of us. It cannot and will not be otherwise, despite our protestations and illusions and wishes to the contrary. You will not find peace while your siblings are being slaughtered in Ukraine and Gaza and Chicago.
In Dr. King’s words, from his address to Southern Methodist University in 1966…
God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men, but God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and the creation of a society where all men will live together as brothers. And every man will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. And so that is the need to stand up, that is the need for all people of goodwill in this nation to become involved participants.
For all too long we have had silent onlookers, but now there must be more involved participants who solve this problem and get rid of this one huge wrong of our nation. There must be a kind of divine discontent.
You know there are certain technical words in every academic discipline which soon become stereotypes and clichés. Every academic discipline has its technical nomenclature. Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is the word maladjusted. It is the ring and cry of modern child psychology, and certainly we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. We all want to live a well-adjusted life in order to avoid the neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But I must honestly say there are some things in our nation and the world for which I am proud to be maladjusted and wish all men of goodwill would be maladjusted until the good society is realized.
I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to a religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, leaving millions of people smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.
Now, with this in mind, I want to share with you again, the words from Amy Raye:
A bullet in the head, now he’s dead
A friend of a friend, someone said
He was an activist with a very short life
I think there’s a lesson here — he died without a fight
In the war over land where the world began
Prophecies say it’s where the world will end
But there’s a tremor growing in our backyard
Fear in our heads, fear in our hearts
Prophets in the graveyard
That lyric comes from the song Jonas & Ezekiel by the Indigo Girls, and it wasn’t written about Dr. King. It was one of two songs (the other being Chapel Hill by Sonic Youth) written about the murder of Bob Sheldon on February 21st, 1991. Bob was a peace activist who ran a well known bookshop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina called The Internationalist. During the first Gulf War, Bob — an outspoken critic of the war and community organizer — was murdered while closing up his store. The killer was never found. Many suspect assassination.
Here are Bob’s own words, I believe that they echo the direction Dr. King was headed in before his own assassination, “We are dedicated to the position that we have no country: we do not support mindless patriotic pleas for ‘national unity,’ nor are we interested in keeping America number one. We support the unity and liberation of oppressed people worldwide and are working toward the day when all oppression and inequality will be removed from the earth.”
I want you to hear these echoes:
From 1963: “(Ours) is a climate filled with heavy torrents of false accusation, jostling winds of hatred, and raging storms of violence. It is a climate where men cannot disagree without being disagreeable, and where they express dissent through violence and murder.”
From 1991: “there’s a tremor growing in our backyard, Fear in our heads, fear in our hearts”
These words, these sentiments, they are as palpable and relevant today as they were the day they were written. One could argue that they will always resonate, because people are people, because we’re ‘only human.’ I hope that you, like me, experience a deep revulsion toward that idea. An innate sense that it is not only untrue, but that it is toxic to the healing that we need with and from and among each other.
Maybe there are only a few Buddhas and Jesuses and Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King Juniors, but there are hundreds of thousands — maybe millions — of Bob Sheldon’s out there right now. People working in their communities to promote a culture of love and respect and mutual interdependence. And, like Bob, many of them are killed for it. And it is them who we honor as Prophets in the Graveyard.
In my reading of history, there is another observation about our murdered prophets that I want to share… The assassination of prophets is effective at stalling our collective progress and healing. It delays our ability to create the better world that we dream of for our children. For every disciple or follower who steps up in the wake of those murders to take on their own prophetic mantle, there are hundreds and thousands who lose hope, who lose their way, who just can’t muster that vision of the brighter future that the prophet helped crystalize for them. This is not to fall into the trap of dividing the world into ‘prophets who matter’ and ‘followers who don’t’ — it is simply to recognize that our gifts, no matter what they are, are both rare and necessary.
Okay, I’ve got one more thread I want to tug on before we wrap up today. (Shout out to San Gabriel UU’s DRE Corinna Whiteaker-Lewis.) Let’s use the allegory of the story One, by Kathryn Otoshi, (if you don’t know the story, you can pause and watch the link) to excavate some deeper truths that might be getting in the way of the healing we need, that might be keeping us stuck in these resonant patterns of toxicity and fear and violence…
All right, at the core of our story we’ve got Red. Red… Am I right? Can you think of a few people who Red reminds you of? So insecure that they try to make themselves feel bigger by putting other people down? Try to tell themselves and others stories about why who they are and what they are like is better than everyone else, is the best! Now, in Eckhart Tolle’s work we’d call this ego… and that is insightful and helpful. But, I want to push us in a direction that ties more deeply into our theme this morning, to do that I’m going to call on the work of Ernest Becker and his most influential book The Denial of Death. One of Becker’s prime insights was the concept of an immortality project. This is the idea that we displace our fear of death, our fear of nonexistence, our fear of not mattering, onto some project or organization or identity that we see as deathless… If we become identified with that thing that isn’t going to die, then we have, in essence, dodged our own death. So, instead of the individual ego, we develop a collective ego instantiated as an immortality project. So, ‘America Number One’ turns the nation-state into an immortality project — and we hear narratives about the inferiority of everyone who isn’t American, and we hear narratives about what people are like who are Real Americans, and all of this is happening with that same toxic intensity that we sensed from Red’s character in the story… Why? Because we have become alienated from death, alienated from grief… We don’t know how to die, so we either kill or are killed. We don’t know how to live, so we put all our eggs in the basket of our country, or our political party, or our workplace, or our church, or our town, or our state, or our favorite sports team. We pick something we think will last, and we lash ourselves to the mast, hoping to weather the storm of cruel mortality. But, what we need, in order to sit at the feet of our prophets instead of hanging them on crosses, is to come to accept our own finiteness, our own temporariness… then, maybe we can learn to build institutions that also know how to die, and thereby understand better how to serve the life that we are. I don’t want an America that lasts forever — I’ve read enough speculative fiction to know the recipe for dystopia when I see it. I don’t want a Unitarian Universalism that lasts forever. I want these things to live their best lives, and die their best deaths, and to leave the nutrients in the soil that are needed for the next things to grow. And that is one of the beautiful things about this story, Red loses his overinflated sense of entitlement and finds a place among the other colors and numbers… He isn’t cast out, he isn’t murdered, he’s integrated into the community… and I think we all have a lot to learn from that…
— Article adapted from a sermon delivered at San Gabriel UU Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas on Sunday January 21, 2024.
