"The Death of Sapphira," Francis Eduard Picot

I.

I have for a long time been interested in an early American religious movement--born in France and then sprouting up in England to grow alongside Quakerism, they would eventually come to stay in what came to be called the United States. I’m talking about the Shakers. That was their nickname; their full official name was the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. They were preoccupied, in a sense, with the end of time and the visible reappearing of Jesus on the earth to clean up the messes into which humanity has gotten itself.

They were called Shakers because in their sometimes charismatic worship services some of them in a worship room, maybe all present on some occasions, would “shake” all over, a reaction to which they attributed the presence of God’s Spirit having come over them or having overcome them. Theologically speaking, the Shakers came to hold a view that no other group embraced.

One of the early Shaker leaders was Ann Lee. In time, she became THE leader, the one and only leader, in the United States. That alone was impressive from a feminist or womanist perspective, but there was something much more memorable about having a woman head a religious movement before the colonists won independence from Great Britain. When she was the leader of the Movement, those who shared her views called her Mother Ann Lee, and she came to believe that God had given her this position of leadership in a religious movement because she was the feminine side of God. Jesus embodied God’s maleness, and she believed that she embodied the femaleness of God. It was progressive to believe that God had any gender characteristics other than stereotypically male ones, but those were the Shaker claims.

The movement grew dramatically for a while, but eventually the movement would fizzle out, and we know very specifically the reason why. Mother Ann who had been married and divorced came to believe that the only proper behavior for God’s faithful people required embracing celibacy. If a husband and wife joined a Shaker community, they had to give up their marital relationship and become sister and brother to each other. In fact, the women lived in dormitories on one side of the community, and the men in dormitories on the other side of the community. The children who came into the community and who would be the Shaker leaders of the next generation were either the children of married couples who came into a Shaker commune and gave their children to the whole community so that all women were their mothers and all men their fathers or children from orphanages whom they, as whole communities, adopted.

They initially settled in New York, and then some moved to Maine; then they expanded into Kentucky and Ohio during the Great Awakening as religious movements began to move from the east coast across the frontier and onto the west coast. Eventually, they would be found in scattered places. The closest Shaker communities to Silverside were right up the road in what is now called Center City Philadelphia. One of those Shaker communities became the first predominantly African American Shaker community, and it was headed by an African American preaching female, Rebecca Cox Jackson.

The Shakers were a thrifty, hard-working people amazingly organized and exceptionally clean in regard to personal hygiene, their clothing, and their living quarters. Mother Ann said, “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” That wasn’t original with her; originally, an ancient Hebrew poet came up with the saying, but Mother Ann saw that it was applied in every Shaker community. They were good business persons, and unlike the Amish who had a little bit in common with the Shakers, the Shakers enjoyed and took advantage of the latest technologies to help them earn money manufacturing brooms, chairs and other pieces of furniture, along with food items such as fruit preserves.

All Shaker communities required those who joined them to donate all their money and earthly goods to the community as a whole. The little pledge card our Board of Finance sends you each year is nothing in comparison to what the Shakers demanded of those who wanted to join them! Each member of the community, then, had a say in how community funds were expended and invested. Could you share all your goods and live day by day with every member and friend of Silverside Church?

Many of you associate the word “Oneida” with silver, and that is an accurate connection; but early on there was so much more to Oneida than silver. There was an Oneida community that had some practices similar to the Shaker communities, but not so much commonality in the theology department.

The founder of the Oneida Community was John Humphrey Noyes. His father, whose first name also was John, was a congressperson, and the congressman’s wife, the younger John’s mother, Polly, was the religious center of the family. She stressed in what she taught her children about religion that they should “fear the Lord,” as she believed the Bible demands.

Despite his mother’s efforts, John did not grow up with a particular interest in anything religious. In 1826, he became a freshman at Dartmouth and happened to attended some revival services led by a famous evangelist of the day, Charles Finney. Though his mother was thrilled to hear the news, the revival sermons did nothing for John at the time; if anything, they caused his lack of interest in religion to grow into cynicism.

Five years later, a Dartmouth degree under Noyes’s belt, Evangelist Finney came through where he was living, and his mother pled with him to attend as many of the four scheduled services as he could. Just to please his mother, he agreed.

Same ole, same ole. Finney’s preaching, again, did nothing for Noyes though many hearers were driven to deeper religious experiences and decisions about the direction of their lives as a result of the revival. At the end of the fourth night of preaching, all John Noyes had to show for his participation in that revival was a really bad cold. While he was sick in bed, it occurred to him that one of these days he was going to die so he decided he needed to embrace the faith in order to ensure his place in God’s abode for eternity. Many people then and now get involved in a church or a religious movement for that reason and that reason alone.

Surprising himself and delighting his mother, his simple realization that he didn’t want to go to hell in case there was one turned into a genuine fervor for the Christian religion. Noyes headed to New Haven to study at Yale Divinity School. He had committed himself to a ministerial vocation and needed the tools to carry through on that commitment.

Not all seminaries want students to think for themselves; they want cookie-cutter graduates who will go out and spend a lifetime preaching theology the way it was taught at the seminary from which they graduated. As Noyes studied, however, he found himself disagreeing with his theology professors. Noyes believed that when a new believer embraced God and committed self to a lifetime of serving God, at that moment the believer experienced what Noyes called “complete release from sin.” As a result of his theology, he couldn’t find any religious group willing to ordain him so there he was with theological degree in hand and no job in the ministry.

Undaunted, he took up the ministry of writing, and in his first major published article, he denounced marriage. Those who were in favor of an early version of the Defense of Marriage bill, blasted him. Then he gave readers another reason to hate him. He wrote an article declaring himself a kind of prophet, claiming that God had sent him for a particular ministry--namely, to help Christians learn how to live together in Christian communities. He said that in a commune, which in his view was what the New Testament called for as the ideal way for people of faith to live, all men were married to all the women, and visa versa; therefore, any woman could have sex with any man she wanted to have sex with, and any man could have sex with anyone woman he chose. There could be no release, however. I’m glad there’s no sermon talkback today as I don’t wish to discuss that element of his communal plan.

They supported themselves by becoming an agricultural as well as an industrial community, and that is where the manufacture of silver entered the picture. Some historians of the religiosocial group that never did become very large say that the community was at a financial low when they became involved in selling silver, which saved them.

Members of the Oneida community were persecuted for their beliefs. Even so, the community would last for many years before it became strictly a business undertaking.

II.

The story on which we focus today from the book of Acts starts off with the idealistic claim that a number of people have long since challenged. The writer of the book of Acts wanted those who read his account of the development of the early Christian community to believe that those folks trying to hold the struggling Jesus Movement together after Jesus was executed lived under idyllic, joyful circumstances where unity ran high, and problems were rare. The verse, in particular, that really stands out, is Acts chapter 4, verse 32: “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common” (NRSV).

Wow! Now that is something that had not taken place during Jesus’ life. Perhaps, the Romans who ruled over the Jews wouldn’t have permitted it, which is probable; or, perhaps, not enough Jews were up for such communal living. The claim for such unity is also hyperbole; and it reflects wishful thinking. The whole group, every last one of them, was of one heart and one soul. Everyone agreed, at least on the big issues, and there were no conflicts in terms of how to spend the money that had come under communal control. It’s wishful thinking, I’m telling you. Here’s the truth: there was no time in the past and there has been no time throughout history and there does not exist in the modern world unity of all Christians--either in individual Christian communities or in Christendom as a whole.

Christians have been disagreeing with each other and fighting among themselves as long as there have been Christians. Jesus’ closest male followers argued among themselves, and there were only twelve of them! Around the big question, the most important organizational question to be answered after Jesus was no longer with them, “Who is now in charge?”, there were bitter differences. Some said Peter, and they won out, more or less. Some said Mary Magdalene, and she had some faithful followers; but she was not taken in the end by most of the early Christians as more capable than Peter--even though, when Jesus came upon tough times, Peter had deserted Jesus while Mary and stood with him regardless of the potential consequences to her. She was willing to die because she would not deny that Jesus was her rabbi.

From there the church moved on to bitter theological debate after bitter theological debate. There was no uniformity of thought in the church anywhere in the world, not even as a rule in small groups who banded together to become a church committed to the teachings of Jesus as best they would be understood and interpreted. In churches where there is a body of doctrine, often stated in the form of a creed, that everyone is expected to believe, there is usually a handful who don’t believe what they are expressing when they are speaking or singing the creed.

Many people since the time of the first struggles of the Jesus Movement after Jesus’ death at the hands of Rome have looked back to a time when they have been taught that the church was at its best. And why not? It was much closer to Jesus both temporally and geographically. Assuming, therefore, greater understanding of what Jesus said than we today can decipher, they could agree on the essentials and operate in unity. Maybe they could have, but they didn’t; and they/we never have.

Some of this has to do with setting up organizations that are doomed to fail at some point because they are built around the assumption that all adherents are in agreement at least on the pivotal issues. If people have been given or have taken the initiative to think for themselves, this has never worked. It’s impossible for more than two or three people to agree on intangibles, and spiritual truths one and all fall into the category we have to call “intangibles.” Faith is intangible. Belief is intangible. Compassion is intangible. There are no norms for quantification.

The only hope for success in any kind of a spiritually based community is an appreciation of diversity, but these experiments largely have been tossed too because how can you hold yourself together as an organization without some few matters on which all participants must believe? That is the question to which some participants are ultimately driven. It takes a special breed to be able to believe something opposite than what another member of your group believes and still hold her in a position of fullest respect and on the same level with you despite differing beliefs.

No offense at all to those positive thinkers who believe that there is something worthwhile to Christian Unity Sunday and/or Worldwide Communion Sunday. There is no Christian unity in any church I know of so how can there be a Christian Unity Sunday to celebrate what isn’t? Similarly, the widely divergent views held within Christendom on the meaning of communion or Lord’s Supper or eucharist make a Sunday to celebrate it kind of pointless. For example, a person who believes that anyone who wants to be in good with God now and in the future must take communion regularly, at every possible opportunity cannot be completely comfortable with someone who thinks the elements of the Lord’s Supper are symbolic reminders of spiritual truths and that it’s a nice reminder if you get around to it; but nothing is lost if you skip out on communion one or two times or the rest of your life.

We so often in Jesus Movement communities let wishful thinking guide our theological formulations and the way we set up our churches organizationally. Many churches including this one used to have little check lists about what people who wanted to join the church were kinda sorta supposed to believe. This church wised up and tossed those after realizing that plenty of the longstanding members and almost all of the newcomers do not buy into what amounts to a little creed. Therefore, if you want to be a part of Silverside Church, we don’t ask you what you believe about God or the Bible or Glen Beck; we ask you if you are willing to join us on the journey of seeking truth. Of necessity, we’re going to come out at different places, and ideas about what is right will not be uniformly embraced. Diversity is the only way to avoid heated theological conflict.

I respect your view, and I learn from hearing you express it; but I don’t agree with you. I can’t agree with you, but I love that I can be in a church where many of us can truly respect our differences in belief and still fully respect each other unless somebody wants to change some of the words to an old hymn.

You respect my view, and I hope you hear and feel my struggle and my sincerity when I tell you what I’m thinking. But you don’t agree with me; you can’t agree with me. Still, you think it’s grand that I get to think for myself and move to my own theological formulations.

According to Professor Stephen Prothero at Boston University School of Theology,

The new data provided by research funded by the Pew trust provides further evidence for the death of denominationalism in American life and for the enduring power of the ideal of religious tolerance. Once upon a time, Baptists and Lutherans and Disciples of Christ fought bitterly over such matters as when to baptize Christians and just how Jesus was present at the Eucharist. But that stuff is so last century. Today even the distinctions between Jews and Buddhists, or between Hindus and Christians, are starting to blur, not least because most Americans have almost no idea what these traditions stand for....At their best, Judaism and Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism call us to rethink the world and then challenge us to remake it--and to remake ourselves. But the truths of one religion often clash with those of others, or contradict each other outright....Absent a chain of memory that ties us to these religions' ancient truths, these visions are lost, and we are left to our own devices, searching for God with as much confusion as we search, in love, for the next new thing.

President John Adams wrote: “The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole cartloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.”

III.

The book of Acts has long been taken by many, certainly not all, scholars as volume two of the Gospel of Luke and written by the same author. The books of Acts, or Acts of the Apostles, seems to be a fascinating collection of narratives explaining what happened to Jesus’ followers after his execution and how the Apostle Paul came into the picture and what influence he played in the establishment of the Jesus’ Movement into a religion separate from Judaism and, as a matter of act, into the second great expression of monotheism in the history of world religions. A number of scholars saw Acts as having at least a slightly greater interest in passing along a document that was more “historical” than were the Gospels, which are blatantly theological in their outlook and intent. More recent evaluations of Acts suggest that Acts is no more historical than any or all of the Gospels and that the so called history being presented is as much theologically influenced as is any portrayal of Jesus in a Gospel. In other words, the writer or writers of Acts are interested in glamorizing the work of Peter and Paul in particular, even when that means taking a few liberties with facts. If the Jesus Movement began as a rather unified entity after the Romans put Jesus to death, that unity didn’t last long, and by the time Peter and Paul are out there there are conflicts between them and between their respective groups of followers. That certainly wasn’t the only rift going on.

Another interpretive possibility for the book of Acts is seeing Peter as a symbol for the early sect forming around the teachings of Jesus but still clearly a part of Judaism. Paul, then, would be a symbol for the church taking shape in the Greek world. And people who relate to Peter and Paul represent groups of people within the sect or the church trying to figure out how to function in a confusing, yeah a complex, time when the prospects of danger for the faithful was on the increase.

For our purposes today, I’m taking the latter option, and the main reason is that I’ve never read of a scholar who proposed that Acts be read in just this manner so in part my, maybe somewhat unique, reading of the book of Acts can help us find the lessons most readily applicable to to moderns.

In this sermon that closes out my series on lying--and between my sermon series on lying and the daily newspaper accounts of lying politicians, I’m sick of lying and am delighted to be moving on to a new series next week--we have a story where Peter is lied to by two members of the Movement. Remember, now, my interpretive model. This isn’t about the man Peter. By this point in time, at least in the book of Acts, Peter represents the whole Jesus Movement trying to save itself and survive after losing its central figure to execution. The two people who lie to Peter; a husband and a wife, Ananias and Sapphira; aren’t really two historic individuals at least as the story is told. They are symbols for certain kinds of people within the Jesus Movement who are willing to say, yes, they will join the commune and give everything they have to the community for communal management and use; but who hold back something for themselves. We have to assume that this is backup money they are holding onto in case the Movement fails, and there was a greater chance it would fail than succeed. All they had to do was to look at what happened to Jesus as a reminder of what could easily happen to them as well.

The writer of the book of Acts wrote, remember?

The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common. With great power the apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great favor was accorded them all. There was no needy person among them, for those who owned property or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds of the sale, and put them at the feet of the apostles, and they were distributed to each according to need.

Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that wonderful? We’re talking perfection or near perfection. People were so generous and caring about the poor that they sold their homes and brought the profits the commune so that no one would be in need. Jesus had said, “The poor you will always have with you,” and we’ve never known of a time when at least most of the nations of the world lacked a significant number of poor people. Yet, shortly after Jesus’ death, here was one group of Jesus’ followers, and we have to remember that this was only one Christian commune among several, where there were no poor folk, no needy people. In the commune, poverty had been wiped out because everybody who joined the commune gave all their money and their property to the community for care, investment, and distribution.

Oops. Trouble in paradise. When we’re dealing with institutions, there will almost always be trouble in paradise, eventually.

A man named Ananias and his wife Sapphira, not historic figures but representatives of types of people in the communal Jesus Movement, owned a piece of property about which they had not told the community when they joined. Claiming to have given the commune all that had in terms of worldly goods, they kept quiet about a piece of property.

One day that property sold, and how they explained that they still had property undeclared at the time of admission to the commune, we don’t know. They are still aren’t forthcoming, however, because though they have to fess up about the property that they owned after all, they still don’t give all they made on the sale to the Christian community. Ananias holds back some of the profit, and he makes sure that his wife knows what he’s doing.

Now, Peter, the symbol for the communal Jesus Movement, confronts Ananias, who represents anyone who’d withhold money and lie to the commune about it, and things get really ugly. The institution accuses the withholding member of lying not only to the commune but to the Spirit of God Godself. This has long been a technique used by leadership of religious groups; they claim for themselves special status with God to the extent that anyone who wrongs them or the institution is wronging God. The story doesn’t tell you this, my dear friends, but I will. God is not tied to any one religion or all religions bound together. God is more than all that all the great religions can put together or offer, and to have a difference of opinion with an institutional leader is not to offend God.

If Ananias and Sapphira lied, they didn’t lie to God; and God wasn’t offended. If they wanted to be a part of the commune and pledged to support the commune with all they had, then they should have done so; but if they didn’t do what they were expected to the commune could throw them out. The commune didn’t speak for God; nor did God speak for the commune as much as the members might have wanted that or wished for it.

The commune confronts the errant member, and he drops dead on the spot--meaning he became of no use to the commune because people living in community have to tell each other the truth. I can’t tell you how many preachers love to preach on this text when pledges are being collected in their churches; the central message of all those sermons is: you hold out on God, and you die. It’s very effective in many churches too. If someone were to preach that in the Silverside pulpit you congregants would laugh because it would sound to your ears like a joke. You don’t give all you can give to this place so you die. Pause. Laughter among the Silverside members and friends.

To stress the message, same thing happens to Sapphira who, when confronted, has no idea that her husband is dead and already buried. She is accused in the same way by the institution, and she too dies--that is she too is found to be of no use to the commune because she is a liar who can’t be trusted. This is not the story of some human whose life is taken away by divine anger for holding back finances from the Christian community.

Scholar of early Christianity, Daniel Maguerat, has discovered that cell groups with ties that paralleled family ties were common. They were bound together by some ideal, and all members of those cell groups supposedly lived by belief in that ideal. Maguerat says there were four characteristics common to all of these cell groups: 1) loyalty to the group; 2) allegiance to communal convictions over what people outside the group believed; 3) voluntary obligation to provide for the physical needs of each member; and 4) a consciousness of sharing the same destiny. All for one and one for all, you know.

Despite the context of perfection the writer of Acts wants to lean to, the truth is that not everyone who said she or he wanted to give all worldly goods to support a Christian commune, which the person claimed a desire to join. It’s really not about the money; it’s about integrity. If you lie about what you will do to support the community, you both hurt the community and you die in a sense to the community because trust is shattered. The complicated or unpleasant or uneasy truth is much better for the community than lies that shatter trust.

Amen.

Potiphar's Wife's Lies

"Joseph Accused by Potiphar's Wife," Rembrandt

NOTE: THE SECOND SEGMENT OF THE SERMON IS OMITTED FROM BOTH THE WRITTEN AND AUDIO VERSIONS OF THE SERMON. THIS IS BECAUSE A TRUE STORY WAS TOLD IN DETAIL ABOUT A REAL CHURCH AND AND REAL MINISTER WHO FALSELY ACCUSED THE SENIOR MINISTER OF HAVING A SEXUAL AFFAIR WITH ANOTHER MEMBER OF THE CHURCH STAFF. THE DISTINGUISHED MINISTER WAS TERMINATED AND HUMILIATED IN THE PROCESS; THERE WAS NO COMPELLING EVIDENCE THAT HE WAS GUILTY. STILL, FALSE ACCUSATIONS WON THE DAY. HIS SPIRIT WAS BROKEN; HE DIED WITHIN A COUPLE OF YEARS OF HIS TERMINATION. HE WAS ONLY 59 YEARS OLD WHEN HE DIED. THE FALSE ACCUSATIONS SURELY HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH ROBBING HIM OF YEARS HE, OTHERWISE, MIGHT HAVE LIVED TO ENJOY.

I.

One of several compelling arguments against the death penalty is the number of people who have been proven innocent long after they were executed and the number of people who served hard time for a long time on death row and who were exonerated just before being legally put to death. Though our Wednesday evening discussion leader last week, the new president of the Delaware chapter of the ACLU, Kathleen MacRae, dealt with the status of the death penalty in several states in our country, she did not go into the statistics I want to share with you now. Our concern today is with false accusations.

For years, there were numerous cases of people being put to death on the basis of weak evidence and/or poor legal representation. Things changed to some degree with the development of tools to study DNA evidence.

Brothers Thomas and Meeks Griffin, African American farmers in South Carolina, were executed in 1915 for the murder of a man said to have been involved in an interracial affair two years earlier; they were pardoned 94 years after execution. Legal scholars now believe they were arrested and charged because they were not wealthy enough or informed enough to hire competent legal counsel and get an acquittal.

In Florida, Jesse Tafero was convicted as was an accomplice, Sonia Jacobs, of murdering two police officers in 1976. The accusation was that they killed the two officers who were trying to apprehend them while they were on the run because of drug charges. Both Tafero and Jacobs were sentenced to death based partially on the testimony of a third person, Walter Rhodes, a fellow prisoner of Tafero’s who happened to be an accessory to the crime testifying against the other two in exchange for a lighter sentence. Sonia Jacobs’s death sentence was commuted in 1981. In 1982, Rhodes recanted his testimony and claimed full responsibility for the crime. Despite Rhodes’s confession, Tafero was executed in 1990. In 1992 the conviction against Jacobs was ruled worthless, and Florida did not have enough evidence to retry her. She then entered a so called Alfred plea and was sentenced to time served. The same evidence was used against Tafero as against Jacobs, so Tafero would have also been released had he not already been executed.

Some say Wayne Felker was a convicted rapist; others say he was not a rapist at all, but was another innocent victim of execution. Felker was a suspect in the disappearance of a Georgia woman in 1981 and was under police surveillance for two weeks prior to the discovery of her body. An autopsy was conducted by an unqualified technician; how that could have happened I don’t know, but the results were presented in such a way as to show that the woman’s death occurred before the surveillance got underway. After Felker's conviction, his lawyers presented testimony by forensics experts that the body could not have been dead more than three days when found well into the two week surveillance period; a whole stack of evidence was found at that point, which had been intentionally hidden by the prosecution so as not to have been presented in court. Part of the hidden evidence was a DNA report that may very well have exonerated Felker or at least have cast doubt on his conviction. There was also a signed confession by another suspect in the paperwork. Despite all this, DNA and a signed confession notwithstanding, Felker was executed in 1996. Four years later, his case was reopened in an effort to make him the first executed person in the US to have DNA testing used to prove innocence after execution. The attempt failed, but only because the DNA report was ruled inconclusive as a factor in determining innocence or guilt.

Getting closer and closer to the present, Cameron Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004; he was charged with setting a 1991 fire that killed his three little girls. Since then, suspicions have been raised about the reliability of the forensic evidence that strongly supported his conviction.

After-the-fact DNA studies have allowed overturned sentences and the release of more than 15 death row inmates since 1992 in the United States. Unfortunately, DNA evidence has only been available for analysis in a small number of capital cases. The realities of false accusation and wrongful imprisonment have had opponents of the death penalty pushing for reevaluation of case after case. Of course, you don’t have to oppose the death penalty to oppose wrongful execution of innocent citizens. In any case, the stir has led to the release of other prisoners with DNA out of the picture because of very weak cases against them and prosecutorial misconduct; the results have ranged from acquittal at retrial to the formal dropping of charges to purely innocence-based pardons. The Death Penalty Information Center publishes a list of 8 inmates who have been executed though they probably were innocent. There’s another list of 39 executions carried out in the U.S., and all of my figures today are based on U.S. cases exclusively, in the face of serious doubt about guilt. If there is serious doubt about guilt, how can governors and the Supreme Court tell the executioners to get on with the job?

A man by the name of Kirk Bloodsworth was the first American to be freed from death row as a result of exoneration by DNA fingerprinting. Ray Krone is the 100th American to have been sentenced to death and later exonerated because of new evidence or a more thorough study of existing evidence.

While these chilling facts give us pause, our concern today is not with the death penalty per se--though that is something spirituality communities need to ponder with frequency; our focus today, again, is on the life-stealing power of false accusations, the life-stealing power of false accusations. Sometimes “life-stealing” means taking away someone’s ability to enjoy life; sometimes it means executing her or him. We’re supposed to operate in this country on a principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” and that may be accomplished to some degree most of the time or much of the time. We all know, though, that often the accusation alone is functionally a guilty verdict.

In my teen years, the comedy actor, Vickie Lawrence, then associated with the immensely famous Carol Burnett Show, released her one and only hit song. All kids in my age range knew the words and could sing them right along with Vickie any time the song was played. “That’s the Night that the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” Actually, I’m not sure that they’ve ever come back on in some places around that state, but that’s for another sermon. Some great Americans have been born and bred there nonetheless.

Back to Vickie Lawrence’s haunting song that caught the ears and the imaginations of kids who knew what life in a small Southern town was like:

He was on his way home from Candletop,

Been two weeks gone, and he'd thought he'd stop,

At Web's and have him a drink 'fore he went home to her.

Andy Warlord said: "Hello."

He said, "How. What's doin'?"

Wo said: "Sit down, I got some bad news and it's gonna hurt."

He said: "I'm your best friend, and you know that's right,

But your young bride ain't home tonight.

Since you been gone, she's been seeing that Amos boy, Seth."

Now he got mad, and he saw red.

Andy said: "Boy, don't you lose your head,

'Cos to tell you the truth, I've been with her myself."

Well Andy got scared, and left the bar,

Walkin' on home, 'cos he didn't live far.

You see, Andy didn't have many friends,

And he just lost him one.

Brother thought his wife musta left town,

So he went home and finally found,

The only thing Papa had left him and that was a gun.

He went off to Andy's house,

Slippin' through the back woods quiet as a mouse.

Came upon some tracks too small for Andy to make.

He looked through the screen at the back porch door,

And he saw Andy lyin on the floor,

In a puddle of blood, and he started to shake.

Georgia patrol was making their rounds,

So he fired a shot just to flag them down.

A big-bellied sherriff grabbed his gun and said, "Why'd you do it?"

Judge said guilty on a make-believe trial,

Slapped the sherriff on the back with a smile,

And said: "Supper's waitin' at home, and I gotta get to it."

Well, they hung my brother before I could say,

The tracks he saw while on his way,

To Andy's house and back that night were mine.

And his cheatin' wife had never left town,

That's one body that'll never be found.

You see, little sister don't miss when she aims her gun.

That's the night that the lights went out in Georgia.

That's the night that they hung an innocent man.

Well, don't trust your soul to no backwoods, southern lawyer.

'Cos the judge in the town's got blood stains on his hands.

III.

When last we encountered Joseph, his brothers had sold him to some slavetraders, but led his father, Jacob, to believe that wild animals had killed him, ripping him to shreds in the process. The slavetraders did what slavetraders do; they sold Joseph as a slave in Egypt, and he ended up as a servant in the household of one of the higher-up Egyptian political officials named Potiphar. Potiphar had a very important job, as it turned out. He was the captain of the palace guard; in reality the Pharaoh’s life was in his hands. Naturally, the Pharaoh relied heavily on him and trusted Potiphar completely.

Back at home, Joseph was such the model servant; Potiphar promoted him all the way up to head of the household staff, and Potiphar’s instincts had been right on target. Never had his household functioned so well.

To his disadvantage in that context, Joseph was majorly good looking, a young hottie in the house day after day after day with Potiphar’s wife while Potiphar was working long hours over at the palace. Long hours went with the job; he knew it, and so did everyone else.

Potiphar’s wife was a Cougar, and Joseph was her intended prey. She was love starved. Potiphar had little time for her even when he was at home, and the physical part of their relationship had long since been less than ideal. He may well have had other wives and concubines to further complicate the life of his sex-starved wife.

The Hebrew Bible doesn’t give Mrs. Potiphar’s name, but a medieval Torah scholar gives her name as Zuleikha. A Persian poet, Jani, in his poem, “Yusuf and Zulaikha,” obviously knows her name but spells it slightly differently than did the Torah scholar I’ve just mentioned. In Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical about Joseph, Potiphar’s wife isn’t named, but is called Mrs. Potiphar, and some of the singers happen to mention that she was a man eater!

Well, you see and sense the situation we’re in here. We only know bits and pieces of what was obviously a very complex story. For example, was Joseph always 100% professional in his dealings with Zuleikha, or did he enjoy the attention and carry on some flirtation? Did he lead the Cougar on?

I’ve been slow to understand what a Cougar is. I know there is or was a television show that had something to do with Cougars, and I’m not talking about Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom.” Beyond that, I was rather oblivious to the increasing interest in our culture of middle aged and older women with younger men and visa versa. I got it more clearly when Carson, my younger son, and I met for dinner at Kid Shaleen’s. Carson interrupted one part of our conversation and said, “Excuse me for interrupting, Dad, but I forgot to tell you that Thursday nights at Kid’s is unofficially Cougar Night so if you see lots of middle aged and older women and a smattering of young guys, mostly gigolos, you’ll understand what’s going on.” Well, sure enough, by the time we left, I was the only male patron over the age of 30 dining or drinking there, and some of the clients kept looking at me with disdain, as if they were waiting for me to get out of the way so they could try their luck with Carson. Many of you know about his struggles to find employment in this economy and his recent decision to try his luck in Baltimore where he is moving, now, in less than two weeks. Anyway, I told him long ago that the solution to his financial problems was a wealthy middle aged woman. Of course, any of you who know me know that I’m joking; if you don’t realize immediately that I’m joking about that, we need to have coffee right away, but not at Kid Shaleen’s on a Thursday night.

OK, so Joseph had been brought up to follow the rules, and he had delighted his father in doing so. Though we have to leave the door open to some possible flirtation on his part, chances are he didn’t flirt with his boss’s wife though he certainly would have been courteous and attentive to her. Given her emotionally and physically deprived state of being, she may well have taken that to be flirtation.

One day, she tells Joseph outright that it’s time to stop playing games and time to get down to serious business; the time for sweaty sex is long overdue, she said. Several artists paint Zuleikha in various stages of disrobing; many of them have her bare breasted by the time she get real. One Dutch artist who didn’t think as highly of Joseph’s virtue as I do, has sketched Zuleikha bare breasted and Joseph naked but on the run away from her. In other words, according to the perspective of that art piece, Joseph gave her every reason to think he was just as interested as she was.

Joseph tells her he will not be able to participate. She doesn’t take no for an answer; she tries to lure Joseph into a sexual encounter day after day. One day when she really turns up the heat, he runs away from her, and she grabs at him to slow him down; he gets away, but she did have a piece of his clothing in her hand. A woman scorned.

Well, she wasn’t going to take that rejection lying down, no pun intended; she screamed out for help from other members of the household staff. They ran to her side, and she told them what had happened, her false accusation; she held Joseph’s garment or part of his garment in her hand--whatever she’d been able to grab hold of--which gave credence to her tale. The minute her husband came home from a hard day’s work at Pharaoh’s palace, she told him Joseph tried to rape her; she had resisted him, she said, and he had run away. This is just what one would expect from a Hebrew she told Potiphar, more or less laying the blame for the incident on him.

He had Joseph found and immediately cast into the palace prison were the pharaoh’s most serious enemies were kept. One New Testament scholar points out that the prevailing law would have called for the death penalty as the proper punishment for attempted rape. This scholar suspects that Potiphar couldn’t swallow his wife’s tale hook, line, and sinker so he imprisoned the man he had trusted with his life and his wife, but he didn’t have him put to death. He had to allow his wife to save face. Her lies easily could have gotten Joseph killed; that was of no concern to her. Only her wounded pride and her unattended sexual desires mattered to her. What’s the value of a Hebrew slave’s life anyway?

If you’ve read Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” which isn’t funny at all, when the fictional Dante takes his tour of hell he sees Potiphar’s wife. She is given no opportunity to speak by the writer, but another resident of hell tells Dante that with all other perjurers, she has been condemned to suffer a burning fever for all of eternity. Remember, Dante was writing fiction, not a theological treatise. He is not encouraging his readers to believe in a literal hell. He is with symbols slamming all of those in history who have told lies, especially false accusations about innocent others--costing these innocents embarrassment, humiliation, job losses, and, yes, costing many of them their lives. Lies can kill.

Peter's Lies about Jesus

I.

I wonder if any of you have ever had to live any part of your life lying about who you really are or what you really believe, in order to live without condemnation, verbal abuse, or threats to your well-being? I hope you haven’t, but there are and always have been, in places, those who have had to lie about their core, their essence, in order to survive.

The first thing that comes to my mind is the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy that existed many years, now rejected though not yet put fully into practice by the military as a whole, or even many parts of the military. Officially, though, it has been determined to be diminishing not only of the rights, but also of the human dignity, of many who have served and are presently serving our country--protecting us and our treasured rights. Perhaps there were and are plenty of gay and lesbian citizens of our country who are relieved not to have to live among others while having to pretend to be who they aren’t and can’t be. There are those, however, who want to demonstrate their patriotism by serving in the military--not all desiring to fight in wars, but plenty hoping to influence the military from within toward world peace.

Yet, many gays and lesbians--brave, selfless, heroines and heroes--have been tossed because of their sexuality, a fact of their birth, something over which they have no more control than the color of their skin. Those who have put their lives on the line for the rest of us, dishonorably discharged, benefits stripped away. medals reclaimed, humiliated to the best of the military’s ability to bring about. Why? Because of a secret discovered, sexuality in the darkness comes to light. Nothing more.

Now, how the military lasted for so long with “straight” personnel having gay flings I don’t know, but, while frowned upon, that was never taken to be the kind of offense as wrong as owning one’s sexuality, saying out loud for anyone who needed to know, “I am lesbian. I am gay.”

Gays and lesbians who never join the military often have much more painful and complicated battles to fight than their military counterparts. I’m talking about coming out to their families.

Add to my personal knowledge of the problems related to coming out, I watched, and I think our Wednesday even crew watched it too, a documentary titled, “For the Bible Tells Me So.” In this film, we meet five essentially fundamentalist families who have a homosexual child. We see the best and the worst ways religiously conservative families respond to a child’s daring to say, “I’m gay,” or, “I’m a lesbian.” The family of former Congressperson Richard Gephardt get all gold stars on their report card because of how much they love their daughter no matter what; they believe their conservative religion teaches them the predominant lesson of loving others, and if you loved others in general, wouldn’t those in your own home especially benefit from such love? That’s how the Gephardts did it. In contrast, one fundamentalist mother preached to her lesbian daughter, “You must repent in order to be the person God intends for you to be.” There was a rift in their relationship. They saw little of each other, and only exchanged an occasional letter. When the mother wrote, she always or almost always, put in her pitch for heterosexuality as a necessity for anyone who desired to be loved by God. One day, this mother got the news that her daughter had killed herself, at least in part, because she could never say who she was to her mother and have that be acceptable. Much too late, that was a wakeup call for this woman who, by then daughterless, became a great crusader for lesbians and gays trying to cope in theologically conservative churches and families. As you can imagine, she found herself unwelcome in the church where she had invested much of her life as well as many other churches where she tried to be a member with the attitudes she had; she wasn’t welcome in many places.

Today, as you leave, you will have another opportunity, if you haven’t yet and if you so choose, to sign a petition supporting marriage equality for all citizens of Delaware. I think the two issues are connected. In our culture, marriage is one way of saying, “This is who I am in relationship to the person I love, and I am not ashamed that our hearts are united.”

As a pastoral counselor in a church setting for many years, I’ve observed that there are three main reasons someone is inclined to lie about who she or he really is.

1. I’m ashamed of who I am.
2. I fear you will reject me or try to hurt me if I tell you who I am.
3. I am afraid of who I am and owning who I am will make it seem more real and true than if I continue denying it.

1) I’m ashamed of who I am. There are all sorts of reasons that people feel shame, but we’ve learned from mental health professionals in the last few years that shame is one of the most destructive emotions anyone can carry around. Some people are ashamed of their background; they came up dirt poor. There is no moral flaw in being poor, but they dealt with the put downs to themselves and their parents and their siblings and felt hated or objectified just because they were poor. They hated being poor, and many of these folks carry a great deal of shame about that to the degree that they don’t want anyone to know.

One of my parishioners in another congregation came up like this, dirt poor, and he became so well to do that he really was ashamed he ever had been poor so he kept it to himself most of the time and only rarely would dare to discuss it with anyone. He once discussed it with me as he entertained me ironically at one of the most high class and expensive restaurants in the city where we went to church together. I haven’t been in his office in many years, but I’ll bet his huge framed poster is still there--the one that reads, “Poverty Sucks.”

In contrast, I had another parishioner in that same congregation who had also grown up dirt poor and had lived in a housing project with a single mom and, I think, one sibling. He wasn’t ashamed of his background in the least, and he’d tell you how he grew up in a heartbeat. The energy that manifested itself as shame in the life of the first gentleman pushed the second gentleman in an entirely different direction. The second gent knew when he found loans and grants to support him in getting a college education exactly what he’d do with his opportunity; he would learn money management, economics, and urban geography toward the end that he would create environments where there would be fewer poor people; those who were poor would live in better, safer housing. He succeeded tremendously in his efforts, which weren’t hampered by a graduate degree in public administration from an Ivy League school and a spouse who was regarded as one of the most gifted architects on the east coast. The governor of the state in which we lived appointed him as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. I think he served alongside that governor for the governor’s two terms.

Two very different responses from two highly successful people. One, though could never get past the shame he felt from being poor as a child. There are many other reasons some people are ashamed to tell you who they are.

2) I fear you will reject me or try to hurt me if I tell you who I am. This a powerful reason to keep quiet about who we are. Supporting the wrong side in many of the civil wars going on in the world today, can cost you your life if you tell the wrong person who you are, but it doesn’t have to be as extreme as that. The whole bullying phenomenon is based on someone letting the wrong person know who she or he really is and having that confidential information shared around a campus or over the internet. No wonder, a high percentage of otherwise honest people use false identities when they’re communicating online.

3) I am afraid of who I am and owning who I am will make it seem more real and true than if I continue denying it. This is often how an alcoholic or a drug addict think before getting into treatment. Someone’s admitting that she or he is an alcoholic doesn’t make her or him an alcoholic or more of an alcoholic; yet, the person with the illness often see it that way so she or he will deny addiction or alcoholism ‘til the cows come home.

It’s easier to live in the modern world if we can be comfortable telling people we encounter the essentials of who we are. I’m not talking about covering your car with bumper stickers making identity statements for you.

II.

We liberals in the Jesus Movement routinely interpret stories that are told about Jesus that make him more than just a remarkable person as icing with which the early church finished the cake. We say, and I certainly am among those think there is merit in recognizing this as we try to understand the process by which Jesus was remembered, that Jesus was, in effect, glamorized by those who wanted to tell his story as the legitimate foundation on which the Christian Church was built. To be blunt, many of us liberals and progressives believe that more was made of certain teachings and acts of Jesus than history or reason could justify. This is precisely what the brilliant, through much maligned Jesus Scholar, John Dominic Crossan, among many, means when he says that the central figure in the Christian faith whom we encounter in Christian scripture is clearly the Christ of faith and certainly not, or not so much, the Jesus of history. Another way interpreters of Christian scripture put this is by saying that the Jesus we get to know in the New Testament is very much the stained glass Jesus, and not the human being who really struggled, sweated, felt frustration, and who had to work to stay on point with the mission to which he was called.

The Jesus Seminar and first rate scholars from Albert Schweitzer to Elaine Pagels to Bart Ehrman have done and continue to provide us with an invaluable service in their efforts to help us see the Jesus behind his handlers. This way of interpreting Jesus didn’t apply across the board, however. By this I mean that Jesus doesn’t look so good in every story that was passed down about him such as in a few accounts where his own racial prejudice showed up early in his ministry. He would certainly leave this narrow-minded perspective behind him as he matured in his ministry, but it is surely there early on. This, then, leads me to say that the tradition Jesus and his earliest followers inherited by no means felt the need to tell the stories of their heroines and heroes only after those stories had been polished until the persons about whom the stories were told had their subjects polished to perfection. Rahab the prostitute, not Rabab the prophetess, hid some Hebrew spies and thereby saved their lives. We’re not told that Rahab gave up her life of harlotry after being touched by the faith of the Hebrew men who spent some time in her establishment. King David, widely regarded as Israel’s greatest king, was an adulterer and a murderer, and those life-facts are not removed from the stories that were told about him.

I want us to keep this in mind when we ponder today the stories about Peter and his lies about Jesus. Peter became the first head of the most influential expression of Christianity the world has ever known; Roman Catholics call him their first pope. This is the case even though Peter denied that he knew Jesus at all, and he left Jesus alone in Jesus’ darkest hour. Why not one of the other men or women in Jesus’ inner circle about whom no ugly stories could be told?

The story on which we focus today takes place shortly before Jesus’ execution. He would soon be arrested, beaten, and abused while some of the few Jews who hated him, and there were truly very few of them, figured out some charge they could concoct about him that would cause Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor assigned by the Emperor to keep the Jews in check, to send Jesus to his death. Just ahead of all this, there is a pivotal, damning conversation that Jesus had with the man who would get the prime leadership position in the Jesus Movement after Jesus was executed.

When they [that is, Jesus and his closest followers] had sung the hymn [following what we have come to call the Last Supper], they went out to the Mount of Olives. And Jesus said to them, “You will all become deserters; for it is written,

‘I will strike the shepherd,

and the sheep will be scattered.’

But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.” Peter said to him, “Even though all become deserters, I will not.” Jesus said to him, “Truly I tell you, this day, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.” But Peter said vehemently, “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.” And all of them said the same.

“All of them said the same.” Some of them meant it; Peter was one among them who absolutely did not mean it. It sounded nice. It sounded brave. It sounded valiant, even. Maybe on the surface Peter believed that of himself, but when the going got tough it was clear that Peter wasn’t about to suffer anything too dreadful just because he was a follower of Jesus. To save his hide, he would lie. He would lie three times in a matter of a few hours to try to convince accusers and nosy folk that he had no connection to Jesus whatsoever. How he got to be the head guy in the church with this on his record is beyond me, but he did; and it at least proves that the church at its best has never played, “Let’s pretend that the people we want to honor were or are perfect in every way.”

Still, Peter’s denial of Jesus was more than a little slip up. Remember what Jesus had said to all of his closest followers out on the Mount of Olives after the Last Supper: “You will all become deserters. You will all desert me and the cause for which we have worked together.” It must have broken Jesus’ heart to have verbalized what he felt in his heart was absolutely the case.

They all protested, but Peter protested the loudest. “If I have to die showing my love and support for you, Jesus, then I will have lived my life for the greatest of causes, and I will have no regrets. Dying because I’m closely connected to you will be an honor, a gift. These other so called followers of yours may be all talk, but you will see, Jesus, nothing could make me deny or desert you. Nothing in the world.”

Jesus said to Peter, “I love you, but you will not risk sharing my fate with me; you’re strong, but you don’t have that kind of strength. I’ll bet you that before the cock crows twice tonight, you will have denied me three times.” Peter’s heart was ripped apart, but somewhere down deep he knew that Jesus understood human behavior to a tee and would not likely be wrong although Peter wanted to prove him wrong.

So did he or didn’t he? Well, let’s see what the oldest of the four Gospels has to say about this tense situation.

Oh, wait. Before we get back to the biblical account, I need to tell you that middle eastern roosters in Jesus’ day were more vocal than modern American roosters who generally crow only once a day--at day break. According to a very highly respected Christian scripture scholar, Dr. William Lane, the ancient middle eastern roosters crowed about midnight, and then about an hour after midnight, and, finally, at daybreak. I have no idea what this is true. I don’t know what kinds of lighting patterns showed up in the sky, but I know that William Lane with whom many of my friends in Southern Seminary studied beyond their study with our own faculty; and he was a grade A scholar so if he says cocks crowed three times in any evening in the ancient middle east he must have some reliable source.

I have never come across a book in original Greek or translated into English that deals with the habits of barnyard animals in the time of Jesus. No doubt, such a book would be a great asset for us. We might have more knowledge of the animals that were in the barn the night Jesus was born in a barn. We might know something more of the little donkey he rode into Jerusalem for his final Passover celebration. Most importantly, we might find out why ancient middle eastern roosters crowed three times in a typical evening when most American and Canadian and British roosters today generally crow only at day break. Finally, the most pressing question of all, “Do the descendants of those thrice-crowing middle eastern cocks still crow three times in any evening as did their forebears and so dependably that Jesus could use the three expected crowings to provide the time frame within which Peter would show his true colors?”

III.

One of the people Jesus’ small band of enemies tried to get involved in getting Jesus’ death sentence rolling was the high priest. Most of them had to know better than that, but I guess they were determined to pursue every possible avenue to get Rome to call for his crucifixion. While Jesus was taken before the Jewish high priest, Peter waited in a courtyard below where the high priest would have heard concerns in his residence in the wee hours. While he was pacing around down there, a servant girl who worked in the residence of the high priest saw Peter standing near a fire trying to stay warm, and she dared to walk up to him--which women did not routinely do with men. She stared at him for a few minutes, and finally said, “I know where I’ve seen you. You were with Jesus when the Roman guard brought him here to the High Priest’s residence. I saw you. We all know that birds of a feather flock together so whatever he is you are also.”

Peter responded in the hearing of all others gathered there that fateful night, “You stupid girl, your vision must be so good you can see in the dark. Why don’t you shut up your ramblings. I can’t even understand what else you’re babbling on about, but no, I definitely was not with Jesus when the guards brought him to the high priests; otherwise, I’d be on trial too.” As Peter walked away from her and those curiosity seekers her accusations had gathered, he heard a cock crow; it was either midnight or about 1 a.m., and Peter’s stomach went into knots.

This servant girl wasn’t going to be blown off by some big, boisterous fisherman. She saw him again, and he she made the charge again in front of several bystanders, “This man is absolutely one of the followers of Jesus. I saw them together just a few hours ago. Who else would be walking with Jesus as the guards were bringing him to a hearing if not one of his associates. There’s no doubt that this is the man I saw with Jesus.”

Peter denied it. “Look, you little busy body. I already told you that you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m here to see the high priest on personal business in the morning; I’m not going to disturb him at this late hour, but I’ll be one of the first in line to see him in the morning. Again, butt out, and stop talking about matters you know nothing about.”

Evidently, Peter was able to silence the servant girl, but by the time he was able to do that some of the others waiting to see the high priest in the morning said to Peter, “You know, the girl makes sense. Jesus spent some time in Galilee, and your dialect tells us that you are a Galilean. You just happen to be here at the high priest’s residence while Jesus is inside for a hearing. Who are you trying to fool?”

This pushed Peter over the edge. He began cussing like a sailor at those who accused him; oh, he was a sailor. In the midst of the angry curse words, he had those nosy people to know that he was not one of Jesus’ associates and, in fact, didn’t know Jesus at all. He’d heard of him as some of them had, and that was that. Now unless they wanted a little something physical to help them believe his story, they’d better get the hades away from him and shut up.”

Peter had barely finished his diatribe when some cock crowed. It was the second crowing of the evening, so it was an hour after midnight or daybreak.

Peter stomped away from the residence of the high priest, but as he did Jesus’ simple prediction branded itself in his brain, “Before the cock crows twice, you will have denied me thrice.” And burley Peter broke down and cried like a baby. He had the man he loved and admired more than any other. He was petrified of finding himself sentenced to death as Jesus was almost certain to be so he lied about his relationship to Jesus even though he’d sworn to Jesus that he’d rather die than deny him. It didn’t work out that way. He cried because for the rest of his life he’d have to say he denied his true identity at his most crucial opportunity to speak up and say who he truly was. We can’t make up for lost moments like those. Peter didn’t have the opportunity to gather up those who had heard him deny his affiliation with Jesus and see that they understood the truth. “You know, folks, I lied earlier because I was afraid. I have spent nearly every moment with Jesus since he first asked me to join him in his ministry three years ago. His message is the message of life, and I can’t deny that I love him or that my life has been transformed through his take on what our Hebrew ancestors left in writing for us. Therefore, if you want to put me on trial too, it’s only fair.” Peter had lost his only chance to say who he really was in the hearing of most of those people.

King Henry II appointed his pal, Thomas A Beckett, to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, assuming as in nearly all political appointments that the appointee continues to serve at the whim of the appointer. Strange thing happened, though. While doing his job, while performing his ministry, he came to believe that God, not any king, was the head of the church, and he told Henry he could no longer live by the demands of the monarchy. His allegiance would have to be to God and church. Soon thereafter, Henry had Thomas put to death at the altar of the Canterbury Cathedral. Thomas knew what awaited him, but he prayed and waited; he would not run and pretend to be someone he was not.

Joan of Arc, as you well know, was burnt at stake for refusing to recant her calling from God and the presence of God she claimed guided her through what she did for faith and country.

The so called Oxford Protestant Martyrs, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, were burned at the stake in 1555 at Oxford for refusing to embrace Roman Catholic faith of Queen Mary I.

In North Korea, the Communist government takes Christianity to be one of the dominant threats to its authority and has instructed law enforcement personnel to arrest not only the suspected dissident but also the three previous generations of her family to root out the bad influence. Still, many of those in the Jesus’ Movement refuse to deny who they are in terms of their faith commitments, and they and their relatives die as a result of their telling the truth.

Angeles Arrien said: “Something definitely changes when we finally summon the courage to risk telling the truth about who we are and are not.”