Remembering all our stories: A Sermon for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost
CW: Before beginning, I wanted to warn folks that this sermon touches on the genocidal realities of the Indian Residential School system and the death of children.
Introduction
On May 28th Canadians learned that the remains of 215 children had been found on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Social media exploded with orange profile pics and cries of ‘I’m shocked!’ and ‘we had no idea!’ This, despite the fact that in the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, released six years ago in 2015, it very clearly said that thousands died at the Residential Schools and many of those remained in undiscovered graves, unable to be found due to the resistance of the church and government and the intentional destruction of records. After the Kamloops 215, it was announced on June 4th that 104 more graves had been discovered at the Brandon school. On the 25th, Cowessess First Nation near Marieval, Saskatchewan announced that they had uncovered 751 unmarked graves near the Marieval Indian Residential School – the largest number to date. At Marieval, the graves had been intentionally hidden by members of the Church in the 1960s in an attempt at covering up this horror. Finally, on Wednesday, June 30th, another 182 graves were discovered near the site of the former St. Eugene’s Mission school near Cranbrook, British Columbia. Other smaller groups of graves have also been uncovered and in just one month, over 1500 graves have been found, yet this is only half of the 3200 that the TRC estimated, so many more investigations are ongoing, though it is beginning to look like there will be many more graves than initially thought.
Propaganda
How did it
come to this? Canadians have, for the most part, been convinced of their general
goodness. Our country has enjoyed prosperity and is respected around the world
for our good government, multi-culturalism, and human rights record. Yet these
stories that we want to believe about ourselves stand in painful juxtaposition
with the genocidal history of colonialism in this country of which the Indian
Residential Schools were but one tragic part. When I was 17, my aunt took me to
visit South Africa. While we were there, I saw firsthand the effects of
Apartheid, even 15 years after it had officially ended. I learned that the
government of Canada and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had been fierce opponents
of apartheid and had helped lead the international solidarity movement against
it. But as we wandered around the townships, I couldn’t shake the feeling that
I had been here before, as it reminded me so much of the reservations near
where I grew up.
When I got
home from South Africa I kept doing some reading, and wouldn’t you know it, I
discovered that the reason the townships felt so familiar was because the
apartheid system had been based on the system Canada had established here to
deal with Indigenous peoples as the colonial state was imposed. So, I was left
with a contradiction, it was a Canadian PM who had vociferously taken a stand
against South African Apartheid – yet that same PM, along with every PM since Confederation,
oversaw a Canadian system of genocidal Apartheid that had itself been the
blueprint for the South African system.
How did it
come to this? There is a myth in Canadian political philosophy known as ‘the
peaceable kingdom’. According to this myth, Canada is a peaceable nation that does
not make its way in the world through military power, but rather through
negotiation and blue-helmeted ‘peacekeeping’ missions we uphold human rights around
the world, protecting minorities from genocidal regimes in places like Rwanda
and Bosnia. We tell ourselves these stories strategically because they make us
seem strongest in the areas we are actually the most weak. We tell ourselves
stories about ‘being the True North, strong and free’ and about standing up for
human rights and protecting people from tyranny as a mask to distract ourselves
from our own actions. As Emilie Nicolas wrote in the Montreal Gazette this
week: “dispossession of Indigenous peoples is not “a dark chapter” of
our history. It is the main plot. Without stolen land, and all the lies and the
violence and the neglect and the abuse that made the land theft possible, there
is no Canada.”
Pain
How did it
come to this? Part of the answer is that we maintain the stories we want to
believe by practicing a very intentional ignorance and forgetfulness about
those things that unsettle us. Hitler and Mussolini and Pol Pot and Stalin and
Mao and Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, these men were monsters, evil, exceptional
in their wickedness. But were they though? The great Jewish philosopher, Hannah
Arendt attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem – the man who had been
the architect behind the holocaust. Writing about her observations she noted
that there was nothing exceptional about Eichmann. He was actually incredibly
unexceptional; he was boring, vacuous even. Arendt, reflecting on the
completely unremarkable character of one who had committed such heinous acts, found
herself agreeing with St. Augustine. Evil is nothing at all, it is banal, and
it is precisely the banality of evil that was on full display in Eichmann.
There was nothing monstrous or remarkable about him, he was simply an ordinary
man who made the trains run on time.
But we don’t
want to believe this, we want a world wherein there are clear heroes and
villains, and it would be nice if we were the heroes and ‘they’ were the
villains. I’ve heard many people this week curse ‘those damn pedophile priests’
for the crimes of the residential schools. But the reality is, it took
thousands of very ordinary men and women from every part of Canadian society to
build and run those schools. There are no scape-goats in such a mass atrocity.
In keeping with
our desire for a world populated, not with ordinary people, but with heroes and
villains, our OT lesson today presents us with King David. In our lesson we
heard that the elders came to David, made him king, and that he established a stronghold
wherein the text concludes, “And David became greater and greater, for the
Lord, the God of hosts, was with him.”
But what
you might not have caught is that the lesson that the lectionary instructed us
to hear is not, in fact, the story that the Scriptures teach. The lesson skips
from the end of verse five to the start of verse 9, leaving out some
uncomfortable material in between so that the version of King David we get is
of an uncomplicated hero, one who has God on his side and undoubtedly on the right
track. But this is not what the story teaches! Let me read to you
the part that the lectionary committee determined was too uncomfortable to be
heard on a Sunday morning:
The king and his men marched to Jerusalem against the
Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who said to David, “You will not come
in here, even the blind and the lame will turn you back”—thinking, “David
cannot come in here.” Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion,
which is now the city of David. David had said on that day, “Whoever would
strike down the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack the lame
and the blind, those whom David hates.” Therefore it is said, “The blind
and the lame shall not come into the house.” David occupied the
stronghold, and named it the city of David. David built the city all around
from the Millo inward. And David became greater and greater, for the Lord,
the God of hosts, was with him. (2 Samuel 5.6-10)
Well, this is definitely a
different picture of David, isn’t it? This stronghold that David has built for
himself was taken by conquest, and, to make matters worse, the implication here
is that David put to the sword everyone including the lame and the blind to
establish this stronghold. But we weren’t supposed to read that, we were
supposed to look away from that and only tell the part of the story wherein
David becomes greater and greater because God is with him.
The impulse to tidy up our Scriptures
is the same impulse we have to tidy up the stories we have about our history.
If we keep weekly singing about God keeping our land glorious and free, it
might come as a bit of a shock to hear that this land is filled with the graves
of children that the church itself had a hand in killing and who worked to
remove the headstones and burn the records in order to cover up our crimes. If David
grows greater and greater, it is just God’s will, right? It can’t possibly have
anything to do with tactics of conquest and genocide…
Promise
In confronting the colonial legacy of the church we might
ask, “How did it come to this?” But our prayers are not caught by surprise. Every time we pray the daily office
as Anglicans we are confronted with these lines: “We have left undone
those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we
ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.” Before we
get to the proclamation of the word, before we get to the consolation of the
psalms or the succour of the prayers, we are made to confess that there is no
health in us. The Book of Common Prayer has a realist understanding of our
condition. Sin is ubiquitous, but it does not always present itself to us with
the horned face of demons. It can be as simple as a soft-pedaling of the truth
here, a selective remembering of history there, and soon enough we are quite comfortable
with stories about us and King David that are sanitized of the atrocities and
offered up as uncomplicated visions of goodness. We might even be tempted to
edit our confession, to suggest, “it emphasizes sin too much, it’s too
judgmental, shouldn’t we be teaching love and tolerance?” Love and tolerance,
however, receive their reality in their relationship to truth. We have sinned
by commission and omission, and we need to be honest about that otherwise we
become the worst sort of hypocrites crying ‘love and peace’ from the pulpit
that sits upon the unmarked graves of thousands of children.
The weird thing about the story of David is that so often,
the contradictions that run through his life are just presented by the biblical
authors without comment. He is a rapist and a murderer and an overall unpleasant
guy who does what it takes to seize and consolidate power, and the Bible doesn’t
hide that fact. But he also wrote many of the psalms and is remembered as a man
after God’s own heart. Is this a contradiction? Maybe God is in favour of this
kind of behaviour? Maybe, though, there is something more sophisticated going
on here. Maybe the Bible is showing us what the world is really like. The life
of David is shot through with profound contradictions, he does unquestionably
wicked things and undoubtedly good ones. And as much as we may want to follow
the lectionary committee in knocking off the sharp edges, I think it is
important that we look long and hard at the paradoxical life of this King,
because it holds up a mirror to the paradoxical lives we ourselves live.
We’ve been working through the book of Samuel this summer
and you may remember that this section of the bible is known by scholars as ‘the
former prophets.’ When we think of the prophets, we often think of holy men
pronouncing oracles of judgment, yet these prophetic books are quite
conservative in their editorial commenting on the goodness or badness of their
subject matter. They simply tell the story and ask us to do the work of
interpretation given what we know of the whole teaching of scripture. It is
rather alarming, therefore, that the church of our time has made the judgment
that we should not read the entirety of the story that it has assigned for today,
instead offering us only the sanitized version. If the church is going to be
equipped to deal with the contradictions and ambiguities of its own history,
then we must be given the opportunity to practice these skills by dealing with
the contradictions and ambiguities of these biblical stories too.
The Anglican Church has committed itself by synodical proclamation
and canon to the ongoing work of reconciliation. But that work is going to
require a long hard look at a difficult history, and we should resist the
temptation to look away when it gets too difficult, or worse, to just reject
the difficulty in favour of a story that isn’t so difficult. For to reject the
difficulty of history is to ultimately reject the gospel, for God has not
looked away from all of the pain, the woundedness, and the criminality of human
history. No, God in Christ has entered fully into that wounded history and accepted
it into his very body through the marks on his head, his hands, his side, and his
feet.
Jesus of Nazareth has gone down into the grave, even the unmarked
graves of all those murdered children and he has burst open the doors to death.
While we remain in so many ways committed to the pain and death-dealing ways of
human history, God in Christ has determined that the powers of death and
despair do not have the final word in history. And so, we have hope. We have
hope not because the Church is great or powerful or really, much of anything of
which to boast, as St. Paul says, but precisely in our weakness and despite
ourselves, Jesus is there, calling us to speak the painful truths of our
history and accept the grace that we do not deserve and cannot earn.
Conclusion
We have
found so many graves and there are so many more to find. And after all the
bodies have been counted and all the stories told and all the truth made known,
there will be yet other failings that the Church discovers about itself. But
there is yet hope in this way of weakness. For God will not abandon any of his
creatures. While the contradictions of history and the fraught processes of
judgment and justice play out, there is a painful grace yet available when we confess
“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we
have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no
health in us.”
Lord, have mercy.
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