Standing Rock (Luke 21:5-19) November 13, 2016

Standing Rock (Luke 21:5-19)

November 13, 2016

I.

As most of you know, a couple of weeks ago I went to Standing Rock, North Dakota, as part of a witness of over 500 clergy from a wide variety of denominations and faiths.  What is going on there is that fossil fuel companies are trying to drive an oil pipeline through land that was set aside for the Sioux tribe of Native Americans by treaty in 1851, and under the Missouri River.  The tribe doesn’t want it.  Some of the threatened land is sacred burial ground, and they fear for the safety of the water both of the river and the aquifer beneath the land.  Hence, in their stand against the pipeline, they have called themselves “water protectors.”

The mode of resistance adopted by the tribe is basically prayer.  They have gathered at the site of construction, on their own land, and simply prayed.  They have no weapons.  Prayer for them is singing, dancing, and drumming.

This all started last spring.  It has attracted people from many indigenous tribes all across Turtle Island, which is what they call North and South America.  In fact it is the most inclusive gathering of native peoples ever in terms of tribes represented.  Most people don’t know about it because the main-stream media is not covering it very much.  

On Thursday, October 27, the northern encampment, which was closest to the pipeline construction site, was attacked and destroyed by militarized police using tear gas, sound cannons, dogs, rubber bullets, and armored vehicles.  Many people were injured.  Over 140 people were arrested.  And all their belongings — tents, sleeping bags, personal possessions — were basically thrown into a pile, which people were still sifting through when we got there a few days later.

After that, representatives of the tribe approached the Episcopal priest in the nearby town of Cannonball, asking him to invite clergy members to come and pray with them.  He sent out the invitation by e-mail on Saturday, October 29, expecting maybe a hundred responses.  Over 500 of us actually showed up.

We came from many Christian denominations — Orthodox, Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Reformed, Baptists, and others — along with a few Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists, and others.  We were given clear instructions about what this is about and how to act.  We were invited guests of the tribe.  And the elders of the tribe would be responsible for us.  We were to maintain the prayerful, non-violent, peaceful, and lawful character of the movement.  We were to maintain an attitude of humility, and not try to take over, give advice, speak for, or otherwise upstage the tribe.  The entire enterprise, even normal life in the camp, was to be a spiritual exercise, infused with prayer.  The whole event is an offering.

II.

Early in the morning, while it is still dark, the camp is called awake by a tribal leader at the Sacred Fire which is the center of the camp.  He uses a public address system to cry, “Kik-ta-po!” with means “Wake up!” in the language of the Sioux people.  After that they broadcast the first prayers of the day.

I was moved by this invocation, to “wake up!”  And it relates powerfully to the Gospel reading for today, where Jesus predicts the fall of the Jerusalem Temple and a time of great tribulation for the world and his followers.  The disciples are mesmerized by the gleaming spectacle of the Temple complex.  But Jesus tells them to snap out of their reverie and, in effect, to wake up.  It is as if he says, “Kik-ta-po, guys; wake up, already!  This is all coming down.  All projects of human greed and egocentricity are doomed, even when they are supposedly so religious like this Temple.  They are shot through with corruption and they will not last when they collide with the Truth.  This glorious edifice was built with taxes extorted from the common people; but the main beneficiaries, as I pointed out the other day when I drove the commercial interests out of it, are the establishment: the rich, powerful, and connected.”

An oil pipeline is just a modern presentation of the same hubris and avarice, only more so, and without the explicitly religious veneer.  It fuels and feeds our excessive and wasteful lifestyle.  It increases the wealth of the already wealthy.  It scars the earth, depletes resources, and threatens the integrity of the land and the water.  

According to Genesis, the whole creation is literally God-breathed and therefore sacred.  The Temple itself represents the whole creation with the Creator at the center.  A pipeline would defile and debase God’s creation in the same way the the moneychangers defiled and debased the holiness of the Temple.  Jesus says we can worship either God or money; moneychangers and those who fund and build pipelines choose the latter.

Waking up to see the truth that is coming into the world is the major theme of the season of Advent, which is nearly upon us.  Most of us are sleepwalking through life, thoroughly drugged into conformity with normalcy.  Our whole post-industrial economy is kept going at a feverish pace because it is constantly mainlining oil.  If we do not wake up to the destructive and catastrophic consequences of this addiction, we are at least as doomed as were people intoxicated by the stunning glory of the Temple.

When Jesus goes to Jerusalem, he is going to the place where two worlds collide.  He goes to the Temple because it is where God’s holy Presence is assaulted by a gaudy and oppressive human tourist attraction.  

When Susan and I went to Iona a few weeks ago, we heard Philip Newell talk about how Celtic spirituality often seeks and moves “into the turbulence.”  Those disturbed, roiling, and conflicted places, in the world and in our inner lives, are often where something new and true is trying to be born.  Jesus isn’t born in the safety of a palace; he comes to life in a stable in Bethlehem, a town which languished under oppressive conquerors back then even as today.  Jesus doesn’t die in his sleep surrounded by a loving family; but on a cross, abandoned.  He is all about moving into the turbulence.  

We find God breaking into the world in the places where the sacred and secular crash together, where the corrupt and failing world of greed and extraction meets a new world trying to be born.  Standing Rock is one of those places right now.

III.

It was on Thursday morning that all these ministers and priests gathered around the unassuming campfire that serves as the Sacred Fire at the center of the Standing Rock camp.  And the first thing we did was to publicly burn a copy of the Doctrine of Discovery.

Now, the Doctrine of Discovery was a pronouncement in 1493 from Pope Alexander VI in response to Columbus’ accidentally finding a continent.  Alexander was arguably the worst Pope in history; his corrupt reign set the stage for Martin Luther’s rebellion in 1517.  

The Doctrine of Discovery basically says that Spain had the right to do whatever it wants with the lands and bodies of the “heathen” peoples they run across in America.  It was later adapted and adopted by the other European powers, and became the legal and moral justification for colonialism.  The doctrine was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1823, and was basically the legal reason why the government did not feel itself bound to keep any of the treaties it made with native tribes.  The Doctrine of Discovery was invoked in American courts as recently as 2005.  It is why people think they can just drive a pipeline across land belonging to native people, and attack and arrest them if they get in the way.

The Presbyterian Church renounced the Doctrine of Discovery at the last General Assembly in Portland.  Many other denominations are doing this as well.

We had a copy, in Latin, of the doctrine with us, and at that opening worship at the Sacred Fire at Standing Rock, the over 500 gathered multi-denominational mostly Christian clergy formally renounced it.  Representatives of each denomination read statements from their churches affirming the rights of indigenous people, and rejecting the Doctrine of Discovery.  We then offered this piece of paper to the elders of the Sioux tribe to dispose of as they wished.  They had a little meeting and decided that to burn it in the Sacred Fire would defile the fire.  So they each took a page and burned them separately holding the flaming paper up in the air.

We had more prayers and then we began our planned march to the pipeline construction site.  Now, in Native American worship, they have no concept of getting a service done in an hour.  So over 500 clergy departed from the Sacred Fire circle in single file, individually blessed with sage incense, to walk about half-a-mile up the road.  On the way, on the hill overlooking the road, an old Native man sat continually blessing us as we walked by.  

The police would not allow us to get anywhere near the actual pipeline.  They set up a barricade in the middle of highway 1806, and we gathered there for songs, prayers, and speeches.  After which we formed a very large and sprawling circle.  And there we passed the peace together.  First, clockwise around the circle; then the circle turned in on itself as each person greeted with peace everyone else in the line.  This took a long time.  But every clergy person there got to personally greet with God’s peace every other person.

IV.

Nearly every Sunday I remind you all of the words of Psalm 24: “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof; the world and all those who dwell therein.”  The creation belongs exclusively to the Creator, and our only example of how to express our consciousness of this is Jesus Christ, who walks lightly upon the Earth, and sees creation as an expression of God’s blessing.  Jesus nowhere comes close to saying that the creation exists for people to bleed, destroy, degrade, exploit, exhaust, and reduce to ruin in order to make money for a few.  In fact, he has a few pointed parables revealing the consequences to tenants who abuse a vineyard placed in their care.  

I went to Standing Rock because we were invited, and I felt a need to move into the turbulence and see what God is doing.  I was honored and humbled that they would have me.  There are people alive today who were taken from their homes as children and sent to Presbyterian boarding schools where they were beaten if they spoke their own language.  They called this evangelism.  All due to Pope Alexander’s godless Doctrine of Discovery.

In standing however briefly with the people there, and witnessing their struggle, I truly felt the Lord Jesus’ transforming, renewing Presence among us.  To stand together with poor, non-violent, and spiritual people who stand against the encroachment of what they call “the black snake,” is to stand with the Jesus who demonstrated in the Temple on behalf of all creation.   

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