Amos 5:6-7, 10-15
We rightly start our services at the Park Church with an acknowledgement of historic injustices committed against the indigenous people of the Americas and the kidnapped and enslaved people of Africa. The actions of the ancestors of so many of us of European descent can only be described under the contemporary category of crimes against humanity. But the first catastrophe to strike Native Americans was unintentional. The Europeans brought with them new diseases that may have killed as much as 90% of native populations. So massive was the reforestation of formerly cultivated fields that the earth experienced a mini-ice age.
This was not the end of the catastrophe, which continues to unfold today. Europeans claimed to have discovered the Americas, describing the native people as few and primitive. Population and societal collapse between first contact in 1492 and the establishment of the first English colony in 1607 left a wasteland that did not represent the historic reality of advanced cultures and thriving cities. The United Church of Christ has officially repudiated this Doctrine of Discovery, which does not really make up for our complicity in the settler colonialism that pushed ever westward, displacing Native Americans from any land that was even marginally valuable.
Most of us know the stories, the Trail of Tears, the cycle of broken treaties and wars, massacres at places like Sand Creek.
It was in this context of ethnic cleansing and genocide that a Northern Paiute religious leader named Wovoka had a vision during the solar eclipse on New Year’s Day, 1889. In the vision, God promised that if the people danced a new five-day dance they would accelerate the day when evil was swept away and the earth was renewed. There was significant Christian content in Wovoka’s vision, including the Second Coming of Jesus and a reunion with the dead.
This new non-violent spiritual movement spread quickly among a people who felt powerless against the forces of white settlers and a white government. They called it “Dance in a Circle,” and it was adapted by other North American tribes. It was the Lakota version, called Spirit Dance, that led to the name sensationalized by the press and the military. White folks called it the Ghost Dance.
It also seems to have been the Lakota that developed the Ghost shirt, which supposedly repelled bullets. This may have been inspired by Mormon temple garments, which are believed to protect the wearer from evil.
“Dance in a Circle” arrived in South Dakota at the same time the United States government was breaking yet another treaty with the Lakota people, taking most of their territory and forcing the tribe onto five small reservations with poor land, where they were expected to farm. The Lakota turned to the Ghost Dance, alarming the white agents representing the occupation forces. Bureau of Indian Affirs agents asked for more troops, which in turn increased the oppression and violence in a cycle that ended first in the murder of Sitting Bull, and eventually to the massacre at Wounded Knee.
The Ghost Dance vision is a perfect example of apocalyptic belief, the idea that the world is so broken and corrupt that only the divine can restore it. Apocalyptic is always dramatic, sometimes violent.
Jewish and Christian scripture contains three significant apocalyptic texts, the last half of the Book of the Prophet Daniel, the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel According to Mark, and the Revelation to John of Patmos. In fact, apocalypse is simply the Greek word for revelation. So weighty has that late work of holy imagination been in Western culture that its content came to redefine the word.
It does not take long, if we are attentive to the historical context, to discern a pattern in the development of apocalyptic thought, similarities between John of Patmos and Wovoka. Apocalyptic prophets, texts, and cults are all driven by despair.
Even something like the Jonestown mass suicide, an event in the living memory of many of us, pivots when the utopian vision fails and the message of the visionary switches from constructive to destructive, from hope to despair.
Helplessness, powerlessness, are realities in some situations, especially from the perspective of individuals lives. We are all finite. The us that is us in these bodies will one day be gone, and if there is an us outside of our current bodies and what that us might be is a matter of faith, not science. But our story is not just these finite bodies. It is the story of evolution and entanglement, is the invention of cooking and the composition of Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem.”
It is true that we are causing global climate catastrophe, but catastrophic events are hard wired into our planet and sometimes play an essential role in the capacity of the planet to sustain life.
It is true that we all too often are agents of barbarity, rising up from the pit of gore and viscera celebrating our barbarity. But we are also capable of incredible compassion and courage and creativity.
Some of us may be prone to despair, because our electro-chemical self is out of balance, because our gut biome is out of whack, because we have been socialized to believe we will always be victims, but for most of us, in most circumstances, hope is a choice, and rather than waiting for divine intervention, we can act.
Hope is a core Christian trait. I am not interested in whether you have or have not found Jesus. Jesus isn’t lost. I am not interested in whether you have walked up the aisle for an altar call and uttered the Sinner’s Prayer. I am interested in whether, like Jesus, you believe in the goodness of God, the God who calls us to radical and restorative justice, to loving kindness, to humility as we walk with Holy Mystery. I am interested in whether or not, like the psalmist, like the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, you see God’s grandeur all around you, the holy in the turning leaves of an oak and the dude who took your shopping cart back to the rack just because.
People have been waiting for God to come re-order the world and fix everything that is broken for a very long time. God is not Superman.
Honestly, I have no idea why so many white American capitalists are among that number, praying for Apocalyptic Riders to arrive, when those same Evangelicals live in immense privilege, though they seem to have missed the Fifth Rider, misinformation, who has already arrived.
Is it good that the Ghost Dance gave hope to the Lakota? I’m not sure. I was tempted to place a red paint handprint across my mouth this morning, a symbol used by activists for the Native American women who are murdered or disappear every year, though I feared that might be cultural appropriation. Poverty and substance abuse disorder are still all too common on “the Rez.”
The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther suggested the apocalyptic texts in Christian scripture needed to go. Ultimately, he decided that was a step too far, and as he had done with his initial theology of communion, he fell back into the old ways. But I think in the end he was right.
God did not create a broken world. God created a beautiful and miraculous world. No fallen angel hissed from a tree and corrupted humans with knowledge of good and evil. We are more than capable of mis-using our gifts without demonic assistance.
We also have all of the tools we need to do good, to align ourselves with holy creativity and holy compassion, with life itself, and scripture tells us to use those tools. Feed the hungry, bind the wounds of the broken, set the captives free…
So many cling with bleeding fists to what is theirs because we are fed a steady diet of fear, but all of their money will not save them when the mountains slide down and the valleys flood.
Apocalyptic thinking has no place in a progressive and practical Christianity. As the late Frederick Buechner said, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
So dance in a circle if you want to dance in a circle. Do it to celebrate your culture, to come together with other dancers, to celebrate these amazing bodies, fragile and finite, and then… then!… leave the sacred circle and go out into the world, where there is indeed much beauty and too much terror. Be part of the beauty, this day and always. Amen.