There was a seismic event in the music world this week when the Pulitzer Prize for music composition went to the rap artist Kendrick Lamar for his album DAMN. The music Pulitzer is traditionally awarded to some obscure, rarified work, almost always classical, rarely jazz, not ever something that regular people might actually hear, that might sell. I really do listen to Lamar’s complex and charged hip-hop, as do millions of others.
The music Pulitzer can feel like an after-thought, always the last category listed. The other twenty awards are given for journalism, including photojournalism, and writing, both fiction and non-fiction. The focus on journalism and writing makes sense, as Joseph Pulitzer established the prizes through provisions in his will, and he made his fortune in publishing, though he never would have received his own prize, since Pulitzer was probably the foremost practitioner of fake news in his time, is regarded as the father of yellow journalism.
Along with William Randolph Hearst, Pulitzer beat the drums of war until the U.S.S. Maine exploded in Havana harbor in 1898 and his wishes came true, the trigger for the Spanish-American War. At least Pulitzer and Hearst could claim to be on the side of liberty, as the U.S. was supporting Cuban independence. The result of our victory would be the opposite of liberty, decades of military intervention in areas originally colonized by the Spanish, from Cuba to the Philippines. For over three decades, the Marine Corps was ready to invade at a moment’s notice to protect US business interests throughout the Caribbean and Central America. Today, we refer to these interventions as the Banana Wars. The term “banana republic†was coined to describe these tin-pot dictatorships. Those years of interference still haunt us, as instability, inequality, and grinding poverty continue to create failed narco-states like Honduras, where the Marines landed seven times in less than thirty years.
The Banana Wars finally came to an end not because common sense took hold, but thanks to the Great Depression, when we simply couldn’t afford overseas deployments anymore. One of the last interventions came in Nicaragua, where Augusto Sandino, like Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam decades later, fought with only one original goal, an independent nation not under the thumb of a foreign power. In February of 1934, Sandino was leaving peace talks with the pro-U.S. Nicaraguan administration when he was pulled from his car and executed by the National Guard, a Nicaraguan paramilitary we created. Two years later, the commander of that paramilitary, Anastasio Somoza GarcÃa, would lead his first coup d’etat, beginning decades of on-again, off-again rule by the Samoza family that would not come to an end until 1979.
The final Samoza dictator was Somoza GarcÃa’s second son, also named Anastasio. His was a corrupt regime, one of greed and brutality. Asked about educating the workforce, he replied “I don’t want an educated population; I want oxen.†The opposition, those seeking education, justice, and opportunity, took Sandino’s name, becoming the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional. Tensions built and nothing moved. Still, the Sandanistas were just a group of student activists and political agitators until December 23, 1972, when an earthquake struck.
The earthquake was devastating, a 6.2, though most Americans only remember it because of its connection with baseball. Pittsburgh Pirates great Roberto Clemente sent three aid flights to Managua, but had learned that the corrupt Samoza regime had plundered those shipments. Hoping that his presence would help, he boarded the fourth flight departing from Puerto Rico. It crashed shortly after take-off, killing all on board.
Much of the other international aid that was sent was completely inappropriate, winter clothing and frozen TV dinners sent to a tropical city where a third of a million were suddenly homeless, without freezers or ovens, but it wouldn’t matter, really, as most of the aid continued to flow directly into the accounts and warehouses of Samoza and his cronies. The political opposition became an active and armed revolution.
When the Sandanistas finally won in 1979, their first task was to increase literacy in order to create a democracy. In just a few years, literacy went from 20% to 80%, but the U.S. had already once again intervened, funding right-wing militias called the Contras and declaring that the election which returned the liberators and educators to power was illegitimate.
The Managua earthquake was the precipitating event, when the pressure became too much, in the nation and in the earth’s crust. Nicaragua, like San Francisco, Alaska, Japan, and New Zealand, sits on the Ring of Fire, also called the circum-Pacific belt. The shifting tectonic plates in this zone account for 90% of the world’s earthquakes, and 75% of the world’s volcanoes.
Of course, destructive earthquakes can happen far from the Ring of Fire, though none are quite as precise as the earthquake that struck Philippi and freed Paul and Silas. I mean, that is some targeted earthquake, that can force open prison doors, can loosen shackles, but somehow not collapse the building killing those inside.
The story has all sorts of problems. From our perspective, a family is exploiting a mentally ill slave, though in that time she was understood to be possessed by a spirit. Paul does not do anything to heal her or to expel the spirit at first, as she follows he and Silas around town, though he is increasingly annoyed.
But let’s think about what she is doing. She is announcing two true things: that Paul and Silas follow God, and that they offer salvation. We see this sort of thing during the ministry of Jesus too, spirits that know his true identity. This is a good thing though, right, helping people find their way to the good news and offering otherworldly confirmation of the divine?
But Paul get’s annoyed, tension has been building for days, and he expels the spirit. The slave owners, the ones exploiting the girl, whip up a mob. Paul and Silas are badly beaten, and then arrested for disturbing the peace. But they were the victims, not the one’s that incited mob violence. Funny how the targets of other’s hatred always become the one’s arrested for creating a disturbance, then and now. Paul and Silas might as well have dared to sit in a Starbucks or work out in an LA Fitness while being black.
After the earthquake, the jailer is prepared to take his own life, for he fears the consequences of a jailbreak. He is relieved to find that the prisoners have chosen not to escape. Now, Paul and Silas may well believe in earthquake voodoo, but Paul’s statement, “We are all here,†rather than “We are both here,†suggests other prisoners who also didn’t take the opportunity to flee. Why not? Then this jailer, who was ready to kill himself because the prisoners had escaped, takes two of them back to his house and converts to the Way of Jesus.
Of course, the story isn’t about logic. It isn’t about whether Paul and Silas deserved what they got, whether Paul was right or wrong in casting out the demon. The story is about God’s support of Paul’s proclamation, of Paul’s gospel, and about the possibility of finding something good in a bad situation.
But in honor of Earth Day, I feel I must point out that earthquakes don’t normally work this way. So let’s think a bit about how they actually do work.
Most earthquakes are tectonic, like the 1972 Managua earthquake. You see, the surface of the earth, the lithosphere or upper mantle, is constantly changing. There are seven large pieces to this mantle, called tectonic plates, and many smaller plates. These plates have been colliding or drifting apart or simply rubbing up against one another for three billion years.
The movement of tectonic plates does not result in an earthquake, is aseismic, where there is no resistance. But where there is frictional resistance, thing do not change smoothly. Things get stuck, and pressure builds and builds, until the sum of the pressure is greater than the sum of the resistance, massive amounts of energy are released, and usually, there is immense destruction. Resistance in the norm, so fits of destruction are the norm.
But as Star Trek’s Borg would say, “Resistance is futile.†You can’t stop tectonic plates from moving. You can’t stop the surface of the earth from being elastic. And chains and mobs can’t stop the good news of Jesus from spreading throughout the Roman empire, or at least that is what Luke would have us believe.
So let’s review. Things shift and move and change. That is how God created the world. The entire Hebrew and Christian religious trajectory is one of shifting and moving and changing. Iraq to Palestine to Egypt to Palestine to Iraq to Palestine, and that’s even before we get to Jesus and the rest of the world. Harsh egotistical God that is just one of many gods to just God that saves to God as loving parent. Worship tied to an object, the Ark of the Covenant, then to a building, then not to a building but everywhere. Tectonic plates slipping and sliding and animals migrating. But when things get stuck, when there is resistance, pressure builds, there is an explosion, destruction, things die. And not the sort of destruction that picks the lock on shackles… the kind that levels the jail, the jailer’s house, the whole town.
And as much as we’d like to, you can’t always reconstruct what has been lost. The Giotto frescos in the vault of the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi were lost forever in the 1997 earthquake.
We celebrate those who seek to unstick what is stuck, to relieve the pressure and create free movement, people like Moses, like Martin Luther, like the Rev. Dr. King, like Harvey Milk. Funny that these agents of social change should so often get labeled the resistance, when what they dream is a new and better world than the one they currently know. The Rev. King’s dream was not to turn back the clock to some better earlier time, for there was no ideal earlier time for those brought to the nation in chains nor for their descendants. The world King imagined had never existed, and still doesn’t. Kendrick Lamar would be singing a very different song, no doubt just as amazing and complex, but so very different, if the nation King envisioned had come to be.
Earthquakes don’t just happen when tectonic plates get stuck, don’t just happen when social systems get stuck. They happen in our own lives too, as tension builds, as nothing gives, nothing shifts, and the pressure grows more and more intense.
Of course, not all change is inevitable and irresistible. Wouldn’t it be great if it was easy to know which was which! All too often, we get caught up in a spiritual duplicity, like those Creationists who gladly accept the latest scientific advances in medicine, but don’t want us to teach science in our schools. Where do they think we’re going to get the next generation of doctors and researchers? We can get caught up in a romanticized past, forgetting that the past was as complex and difficult as the present.
And the world changes, and the tension builds.
Where, in your life, are you stuck? For surely you are stuck somewhere… we all are. We dig in and clench our fists until the nails draw blood from our palms because that is being human. Can we find those stuck spots and clear the obstacles, loosen our grip, and let things change in the way they are inevitably going to change? Can we sit through an earthquake, like Paul and Silas, and open our hearts and minds like the jailer?
And may we all be just deranged enough to see God working in our community just like a slave girl in Philippi. For God is working in our community, changing hearts, changing lives. May it always be so.