Speak up. Step up.
Yesterday’s attack on the United States’ Capitol building by rioters seeking to disrupt the work of the American congress, egged on by months of the president’s unhinged rhetoric – and perhaps more immediately by Rudy Giuliani’s call for “trial by combat” – is over. But the spiritual realities that nourished it remain.
All this on the western Christian feast of Epiphany, whose central act is the visit of the Magi, first to King Herod and then to the little family in Bethlehem.
That visit is followed closely by the first attempt on Jesus’ life, by means of the extra-judicial murder of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two. As was the second – and successful – attempt to bring about Jesus’ death, Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents” is driven by fear and expressed as rage. Jesus survives because his father has fled with Jesus and his mother to Egypt. But the families of Bethlehem’s toddlers are shattered.
I began the day as I have begun every Epiphany since 2003 – reflecting on the murder of Emmett Till and the courage of his mother, Mamie. I start the day this way because it was on January 6, the western feast of Epiphany that I first heard Mamie’s name and her story. It was the day she died. “Epiphany” is a word that means “a revealing scene or moment” (Merriam-Webster). Its attachment to the visits of the Magi is usually limited to the “revealing” of Jesus to the gentile magi. It also reveals, however, the toxic brew of fear, rage, power, and death in the world into which Jesus is born.
Epiphany’s connection in my spiritual reflections to the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 begins with the coincidence of Mamie’s death on January 6, but goes wider, deeper and longer.
Emmett Till had travelled from Chicago and was visiting his Mississipi cousins when he was lynched at the age of 14 on August 28, 1955 in Money, Mississippi. His killers were two white men, one of them the husband of a woman claiming that Emmett had “made advances” to her in the grocery store she and her husband ran. The killers beat and mutilated him, shot him in the head, wound him in barb wire and sank him in the Tallahatchie River. When his body was found three days later, Mamie insisted that it be returned to Chicago for burial. She left his casket open for the visitation and funeral, and tens of thousands of people walked by his bloated body and saw his unimaginably disfigured face. Years later, when Jesse Jackson reflected on the legacy of Rosa Parks, who began the Montgomery bus boycott one hundred days after Emmett Till’s death, he told Vanity Fair: “Rosa said she thought about going to the back of the bus. But then she thought about Emmett Till and she couldn’t do it.” Emmett Till’s funeral was an epiphany. Rosa Parks spoke up in the moment and stepped up for life, a powerful witness in the civil rights movement.
Yesterday in Washington DC was certainly “a revealing scene or moment”, Herodian to its core. As legislators met to count the votes of the electoral college, including for the first time, the election of a racialized woman as vice-president, the white, frightened, defeated and raging president empowered a white audience – an audience that he had conditioned through years of fear, rage, and resentment – to attack the Capitol with the avowed intent of preventing her election, and that of her presidential running mate, from taking effect.
Years after the early and unsuccessful attempt on Jesus’ life, the authorities separate him from the protection of the “hosanna” crowd by arresting him at night, and hustling him out in front of a very different crowd – the “Crucify him” crowd.
Put up to it by frightened, enraged civil and religious leaders the crowd wants none of Pilate’s words, “I find no guilt in him." Nor I suspect would they have been moved by the witness of over sixty courts that “There is no evidence.” Goaded to fear and rage by their leaders, they shout at Pilate, “Crucify him!” And “We have no king but Caesar.”
It’s hard to miss the goading president’s stoking of a crowd whose fear he has nurtured for five years, whose capacity to turn that fear into rage in a heartbeat is his signature public style. It is hard to see any spiritual difference between “Lock her up!” and “Crucify him!”, both shouted in the face of no discernible evidence. It is hard to see any spiritual difference, either, between “We have no king but Caesar” and “We will have no president but Trump.”
Jesse Jackson tracks the roots of the civil rights movement to Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to open the secret of her son’s mutilated body to the world. Mamie didn’t just “have the moment”, though. She dedicated her life to fighting racism and fostering Black education, working for over thirty years in the Chicago School Board. She spoke up in the moment and she stepped up for a lifetime.
What is happening in these moments in the United States is not new. It is at least as old as Herod. It is ancient and recurring. And it begs of us that we speak up in the moment and step up for a lifetime whenever we witness the toxic power of fear and rage in events like those we witnessed yesterday. Speaking up is truth. Stepping up is hope.
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