{"id":25012,"date":"2025-04-02T10:08:32","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T14:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=25012"},"modified":"2025-04-02T10:41:24","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T14:41:24","slug":"25012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=25012","title":{"rendered":"Gospel Instructions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"I shall not be moved - Johny Cash HQ\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/NL5FI-HJf2M?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Gospel Instructions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Episcopal priest Adam Bucko offers encouragement for action and contemplation amid circumstances of systemic injustice<\/em>:&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That is the heart of the challenge\u2014what do we believe? What is our ground? What narratives have shaped us and are shaping us? We must have the clarity to name evil for what it is, yet without losing ourselves in othering, understanding that in some way or form, we are part of what we are naming. <strong>We must engage not just with what\u2019s out there but with what\u2019s within us as well<\/strong>. History is filled with revolutions that promised liberation only to replicate the cruelty they overthrew. Justice movements have struggled against the pull of ego. Institutions built to resist oppression have, over time, become oppressive themselves.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus called his disciples to be fishers of people\u2014to be caught up in love and drawn out of the world\u2019s illusions. Have we been caught? Have we been pulled out of a system that thrives on violence, on stepping over others to climb higher? Or are we still trapped in it, confused and disoriented?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If we have been pulled out, then we must see clearly. <strong>We must commit to both inner and outer wor<\/strong>k. We must say no to violence, no to greed, no to power that exploits and destroys. And we must do it even when it costs us\u2014because that is what it means to live in truth. That is what it means to allow ourselves to be caught in the net of love.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Returning to the gospel and tending to our spiritual lives are essential practices in times of crisis and unknowing:&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/em>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It may not be in our power to determine how things will unfold, but <strong>it is in our power to decide how we respond. It is in our power to hold on to the practices that nourish us, inform us, and give us courage. It is in our power to remain in integrity, to choose nonviolence and noncooperation in the face of all the violence we are already seeing.&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus was clear: Love always. Bless those who persecute you. Forgive even the unforgivable. Turn the other cheek, not in surrender but in defiance of violence. Do not repay evil with evil, but overcome evil with good. <strong>This may not change the world, but sometimes it is important to do things simply because they are the right things to do. In the end, all we have is our integrity. <\/strong>So let us stand in it, grounded in the <strong>One who renews us each moment and calls us to a nonviolent witness of love\u2014one that is big enough to hold both our friends and our oppressors, knowing that love endures beyond violence.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/app-link\/post?publication_id=254001&amp;post_id=160151337&amp;utm_source=post-email-title&amp;utm_campaign=email-post-title&amp;isFreemail=true&amp;r=5p0kg&amp;token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo5NTY1MjE2LCJwb3N0X2lkIjoxNjAxNTEzMzcsImlhdCI6MTc0MzMyOTA2OSwiZXhwIjoxNzQ1OTIxMDY5LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjU0MDAxIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.n8vEQcNXVDWFT481Hdg3NqGEydXq3I7PateEqGpEV3A\">Nonviolent Resistance of the Saints<\/a><\/h1>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/@marklonghurst\">MARK LONGHURST<\/a>  MAR 30<\/td><td><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/@marklonghurst\"><\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td>&nbsp;<\/td><\/tr><tr><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>&nbsp;<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>In the Oscar-winning film \u201cI\u2019m Still Here,\u201d we witness the resilience and endurance of Eunice Paiva, the wife of a disappeared politician under Brazil\u2019s military dictatorship. Rubens Paiva was a Congressman when the military overthrew the government in 1964. He returned to his previous career as an engineer but helped smuggle letters to relatives of regime opponents. Members of the Brazilian military descended upon his home in Rio de Janeiro and imprisoned him, along with Eunice Paiva. And, like so many people taken and killed by the military dictatorship\u2014he disappeared. Eunice was released after several days, returning to her shaken family, but Rubens was never heard from again, nor was any official information provided about his whereabouts or fate. Whispers from a journalist friend pointed to the obvious\u2014that the state murdered Rubens. Eunice held her family together, advocated for twenty-five years until after the eventual re-emergence of democracy, until she finally received the official death certificate. It\u2019s a harrowing and simultaneously beautiful movie about the story of one woman\u2019s slow and persistent resistance and one family\u2019s loving endurance amid authoritarian rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Brazilian military initiated a coup d\u2019etat after President Goulart introduced sweeping reforms aimed at helping the poor. Policies like land reform that redistributed unused rural land to peasants were deemed by the Brazilian right-wing as \u201ccommunist-inspired,\u201d and the military took action. The United States was right there, ready to aid the military coup, with a mission that would have lent U.S. Navy and Air Force officers to the cause named \u201cOperation Brother Sam.\u201d The military takeover was not opposed, and the U.S. did not implement its secret operation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019m thinking these days about the United States\u2019s long collusion with dictators in Latin America, from its readiness to participate in the Brazilian coup to the CIA-involved Chilean overthrow, friendly relations with dictator Augusto Pinochet, and many more. The disappearances that happened in Brazil and elsewhere are now starting in my own country. Instead of the scapegoating category of communism and the \u201cred scare,\u201d it is now terrorism, \u201csupport for Hamas,\u201d and an imagined immigrant crime problem.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Palestinian activist Mahmoud Kahlil is a legal resident of the United States with a green card who led nonviolent actions opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza at Columbia University. Now he sits in an ICE detention center in Louisiana. The list is growing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Coverage in&nbsp;<em>Democracy Now<\/em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>The New York Times<\/em>&nbsp;tells me the following. Georgetown professor Badar Khan Suri\u2014who studies and teaches about religion and peace\u2014is not an activist. Still, Homeland Security agents raided his home in Virginia, arrested him without cause, and now he, too, sits in a (different) Louisiana ICE detention center. Momodou Taul is a PhD student at Cornell University and a pro-Palestinian activist facing deportation. This week, Homeland Security agents apprehended Tufts student Rumeysa Oztur. She is a Turkish citizen in the United States on a student visa who was on her way to a dinner to break her Ramadan fast. She signed an op-ed that criticized Tufts for failing to acknowledge the Palestinian genocide. The reason Homeland Security provided for terminating her visa? That she had engaged in activities in support of Hamas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p><em>Here is a call for the&nbsp;<strong>nonviolent resistance<\/strong>&nbsp;of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and hold fast to the faith of Jesus. \u2014<\/em>Revelation 14:12<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>The readers of John\u2019s apocalyptic vision lived under an imperial state: the Roman Empire. They were very familiar with the imperial tactics of disappearances, erosion of civil liberties, persecution, and imprisonment. The South African theologian Allan Boesak considers Revelation a subversive book\u2014the critique of unjust power in the book is so symbolically incisive that it became underground literature:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>Because of their political perception and challenge in such dangerous times, these [apocalyptic] books could not be written in the \u201cnormal\u201d way. Any person who has ever lived under political oppression, where every move is watched and every word carefully weighed and where every other person could be an informer, knows this.\u2026 These books were, in the real sense of the word, underground protest literature.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>John uses a word to encourage his readers-hearers to continue in faithful resilience:&nbsp;<em>hypomone.&nbsp;<\/em>It\u2019s often translated as \u201cpatient endurance.\u201d But a commentator I trust named Brian Blount says that the Greek is much more active and determined than passive waiting. He renders it instead as \u201cnonviolent resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the cascade of visions in Revelation, here\u2019s a quick summary of where we\u2019ve been around chapter 14. In chapter 13, readers witness beastly monsters: a dragon, a sea beast, and a land beast, all symbolizing structures of evil and oppressive imperial power. Rome is writ large in metaphor and archetype.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/redirect\/5ae800c8-901e-4ad5-9f03-797d11431f06?j=eyJ1IjoiNXAwa2cifQ.YAyL4V3QajRZWEa9RRzApx3T63xhnavEPaYBgWo1Y4g\"><\/a><\/td><td><\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The beast&#8217;s followers even have their bodily brand of 666, a tricky linguistic way to refer to the Roman emperor. At the beginning of chapter 14, we see the Christ-Lamb standing on the sacred mountain of Zion. The followers of Christ-Lamb, too, have their own brand, with God\u2019s name written on their foreheads.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><\/td><td><\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Then, John gives us three angels flying and heralding the good news (14:6) of divine love and justice, which is always true, and the terrible news that divine judgment is coming. (Much more on this in future weeks). John lists some of the horrible things that will happen\u2014fire, sulfur, and the like\u2014and then provides his pastoral clarity:<strong>\u00a0<em>Here is a call for the\u00a0endurance\u00a0of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and hold fast to the faith of Jesus.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The endurance John calls Revelation readers to is not passive withdrawal. It is faith-filled nonviolent resistance<\/strong>. When John uses the word\u00a0<em>hypomone,\u00a0<\/em>he links it to faith. The faith he has in mind is inherently political. It is faith that God holds reality with love, justice, and peace, even when we can\u2019t perceive it. It is faith that the realm of Jesus Christ will last and the rule of empires and power-hungry leaders will pass away. But this resistance is fiercely embodied and, to quote Blount quoting another scholar, involves \u201cunbending determination, an iron will, the capacity to endure persecution, torture, and death without yielding one\u2019s faith. It is one of the fundamental attributes of nonviolent resistance.\u201d This resistance is revealed in the tenacious patience and courage of Eunice and Ruebens Paiva, the determined resolve of civil rights organizers like Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, climate organizers like Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement, democracy-defenders in courts and communities across the United States, and those decrying the genocide in Gaza like Mahmoud Kahlil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is the fierce side of \u201cnonviolent resistance,\u201d <strong>but there is also the patient side of enduring<\/strong>. The endurance John of Patmos counsels is not only for activists. It is for those who, in small and large, ordinary and extraordinary actions, <strong>live their lives with the faith that oppression and evil do not have the last word. <\/strong>I often experience my meditation sits as \u201cpatient endurance.\u201d <strong>I\u2019m not solving anything when I sit in silence, nor am I succeeding at anything. Contemplative prayer is an exercise in failure by any measurable standards. But it\u2019s also the place where I bring my powerlessness, my cries, and my personal and political pain to God. Like the cyclist or runner, I\u2019m training. Somehow, the act of prayer day in and day out trains me to remember and participate in a deeper reality. <\/strong>Contemplative practice sustains me in a trust that reality is far more expansive and truth far more piercing than authoritarians would have us believe.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><\/td><td><\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s time to cry out to God, to our legislators and to anyone who will listen. I recommend reading\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/redirect\/d5ffb7e8-18cb-4096-abfd-bdc933f9b5ff?j=eyJ1IjoiNXAwa2cifQ.YAyL4V3QajRZWEa9RRzApx3T63xhnavEPaYBgWo1Y4g\">this thoughtful Substack post<\/a>\u00a0by Cameron Bellm about the necessity of crying out prayerfully at this time. <strong>All of us are asked to do what we can to edge us collectively toward greater love, compassion, liberation, peace, and community. The diversity of our actions will mirror the diversity of who we are<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gospel Instructions Episcopal priest Adam Bucko offers encouragement for action and contemplation amid circumstances of systemic injustice:&nbsp;&nbsp; That is the heart of the challenge\u2014what do we believe? What is our ground? What narratives have shaped us and are shaping us? We must have the clarity to name evil for what it is, yet without losing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25012"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25012"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25018,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25012\/revisions\/25018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}