Resisting the Powers That Threaten
July 5, 2015 | Anita Retzlaff and Geraldine Balzer
Anita
You wouldn't know it by the order of books of the Bible but the Book of Daniel tells the final narrative from Old Testament times. In its 12 chapters Daniel tells 6 stories and describes 4 dreams and visions. Since it is the last book to be written in the Old Testament it is kind of a bridge to New Testament times. Written in the midst of terrible trial, about 165 B.C. (just 170 years before the birth of Jesus) Daniel tells stories of faithfulness looking to a time when all the present political and religious trouble will come to an end. The “end times” or the end of time is a theme in these dreams. Through visions of animals and horns and fire, similar to that in the New Testament book of Revelation, the threat of Godless empires is exposed and the small community of faithful Jews is encouraged to hang in.
The first 17 verses of Daniel which Allan read with us just now provides the setting for the stories of faith that are about to follow. Daniel is the hero without a doubt; Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego are his trusty sidekicks and together they show what it means to be loyal to God when their faith is tested. Though the historical data given in verse 1 places the story way back in the exile 400 years earlier the reality is that Daniel's heroic deeds are a response to the full scale slaughter of Jews carried out by King Antiochus IV Epiphanes who ruled vast lands 200 years before Christ. And so the tiny remnant of what was once Israel, 400 years after their exile to Babylon, is again threatened with extinction. Antiochus is brutal and murderous. He and his policies become evil personified to the Jewish faithful. This is the threat that must be resisted: these are the stories of courage and the wild visions of hope-filled victory that describe a very dangerous time.
In that light we hear the stories of Daniel and his three friends refusing to eat the King's sumptuous food. That refusal becomes a symbol of resistance to the ungodly ways of foreign power and domination. God is given all the credit for the outcome of this encounter. The faithful followers of God need eat only vegetables and drink water to remain healthier and more robust than those eating of the king's provision. God is at work guarding their lives. Thus they are able to remain faithful and hold out against the powerful manipulation of their conquerors. The bulletin cover illustrates the confidence that God’s people have in God’s provision.
Daniel becomes invaluable to the King because he is able to interpret dreams; another gift of God given so that faith may be shown and known. The continuing threat of Israel’s oppressors is played out in the story of Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego, thrown into a fire-filled furnace when they refuse to bow down to a golden statue set up by the king. God saves them to live another day. Daniel in the lion's den: another testimony to the power of God over against the power of a tyrant king.
The point of these stories is not only to remind readers of God’s power to guard and to save but also to create in the heart of us listeners the strength to resist the violent ways of selfish and cruel power brokers. When the powerless and dispossessed suffer at the hands of self-centred tyrants the people of God must resist. God’s people trust in the way that God works NOT in the ways of repression and domination and not by ways of violence.
That resistance remains our calling today. We have some difficulty in recognizing where we are expected to raise our voices in resistance and defiance to the way things are. As God’s people today, in North America, we hold a position of privilege and do not have worry about being murdered in the streets because of our faith. But that is not the case in other places in the world. Geraldine has heard stories of murder and intimidation as she has worked in Guatemala in the past decade and from friends that she has made there. For many people in South and Central America there is much suffering at the hands of those who take power and keep it by means of inhumane actions, unspeakable cruelty and oppressive policies.
Geraldine
When Anita asked me if I knew of a modern day Daniel among my Guatemalan acquaintances, someone who endured the tyranny of an oppressive government and resisted that tyranny, one person immediately came to mind. I first met Juan Pablo Morales in 2010 and have had the good fortune to meet with him several times in the ensuing years. Juan Pablo is a resident of the municipality of Sibinal in the district of San Marcos, an area that borders the Chiapas in Mexico. These communities are home to a group of Mayans known as the Mam. Sometimes described as the Switzerland of Guatemala, the area is lush, forested, and covered with streams. Most of the communities are at altitudes of 3000 metres or higher. Juan Pablo comes from the community of Yalu, and, like many communities in this area, Yalu is accessible only by foot or horse. Yalu is several kilometers from the unpatrolled Mexican border and Mexicans and Guatemalans cross quite freely. Today, Guatemalans market their flowers and produce in the neighbouring Mexican communities because the Mexican markets are more lucrative than those in Guatemala. However during the years of the armed conflict, 1960-1996, these mountains provided refuge for guerrillas and a route out of Guatemala for those seeking escape from the violence. Juan Pablo was born in the mid-sixties in the midst of this violence.
Today Juan Pablo is a leader of his people and is currently running for political office as mayor of the municipality. This is, in many ways, a miracle. Juan Pablo is a man of ideas, ready to work, ready to tell a story, ready to sing a song. I don’t think I have ever seen him without a smile on his face. Juan Pablo is reluctant to tell his own story, rather focusing on the dreams of his people, but his leadership came at great personal cost. When Juan Pablo was a young teenager, the Guatemalan army arrived in his village because they had heard that the community was sheltering guerrillas. They gathered all the community members together and called out the leaders. Juan Pablo’s older brother, a young man of 30 was one of those leaders – not a leader associated with a political party or the guerrillas, perhaps connected to the Catholic youth movement, perhaps someone who advocated for an agricultural cooperative. In front of the assembled community members, the military assassinated all the identified leaders. Because Juan Pablo’s brother was in the group, Juan Pablo was also called forward. The soldier then cut off his left ring finger at the first knuckle as a reminder that being a leader was dangerous. But Juan Pablo is a contemporary Daniel, not dissuaded by fiery furnaces, lion’s dens, or military bullies. And here, with thanks to my friend Nate and the wonders of internet, is how Juan Pablo told his story to MCC:
Juan Pablo's Story
"When I was young, my parents raised sheep and planted corn. They also spent time migrating to Mexico. During harvest season, they'd go cut coffee and during the year they'd go clean the fields.
I remember walking with my father through the mountains when I was a boy. He would be carrying 70, 80 pounds of corn, and I would carry my own bit of cargo. He was carrying this weight on his back, without shoes and on rough paths. In these moments, I saw his suffering and that he accepted his way of life as it was.
Moments like this have accumulated over the years to become a fire within me. I got to a place where I just got tired of it – not like getting tired of riding in a car or eating hamburgers.
I got tired of poverty. Everybody here lived like we did. Most people said it's just the way things are. We have to live like this. There were others, and I was one of them, that said no and questioned the situation.
It was something I felt when I was a little boy, 6 years old, and it's something that's grown.
My father died when I was 11. I finished fifth grade, but when I was 12, I had to migrate myself to provide for my mother. I continued migrating and working in the coffee farms, even during the civil war, while trying to grow what I could in Guatemala.
When I was 15 years old I was a victim of the armed conflict here. I saw the military abuse, kill, torture. That marks one. I saw it with my own eyes.
I saw too when they signed the peace agreements, when the two powers, the military and the guerrillas, they laid down their arms – the two powers the people found themselves between and suffered because of.
And the main results of this war was decomposition, social decomposition, family decomposition, this ripping apart of the social fabric. What was sewn into that was vengeance and hate. Some of the worst violence was perpetrated by people policing their own community. A lot of times they were forced to name people as part of the guerrilla. In a lot of ways it was like a witch hunt. But the result was division. I experienced all this with my own flesh. I saw this with my own eyes.
And what left me marked more than anything was the murder of my brother that occurred right before my eyes. In some ways it’s healed over but it’s still a deep wound that’s marked me.
But God doesn’t forget, and he’s always not far from our side.
And there have been some moments of calm when life returns and social peace returns.
The years of war, for us, were like living in the apocalypse. People found themselves between the two powers, the military and guerrillas, and they suffered.
From an early age, I was involved in the community and advocating always for the community in different spaces. It was something that was kind of like a destiny. God has created us to do more than just eat and sleep. There’s something inside of you that’s almost like a dream that you want to go beyond just yourself. It was something like a destiny that God had called me to, to become someone. By the time I turned 16, I had started to focus my life on three areas – looking out for how I could contribute to the community, forming myself spiritually and caring for my family.
It was an awareness that there's more to life than you, than just your own interests. God has created us to do more than just eat and sleep. There's something inside of you that you want to go beyond just yourself.
I grew up in the Catholic Church. My father was very committed to the church, and that was something instilled in me from when I was a young boy.
I married when I was 18. From then until I was 30, I continued to migrate to Mexico to work. Working in the coffee farms, you often get treated poorly. It's not dignified work. You're not free.
I got tired of it. I got tired of the fact that I would migrate and come back and eventually the money I earned ran out, and I would be in the same situation. I was pushed by my faith that there was an alternative, an alternative that allowed me to be with my wife, my family.
Then, with the signing of the peace accords in 1996, it was like the great demon had been thrown into the lake of fire. Instantly, when they signed the peace accords, we had more freedom, more liberty. We could walk without fear.
And I experienced this. I felt this. Then I really started to focus on my own land, to feed my family, to subsidize my family. I worked hard to cultivate tomatoes, potatoes, vegetables and just to take care of my land.
My life was the life of the campesino, and that’s how I supported my family.
This made a huge difference with me spending time with our family. We would farm and we would sell together. There was much more harmony, and we worked together to survive as a family.
Then in 2003, when the Diocese of San Marcos began a new agriculture program, I was chosen to work with it. I focused on gaining the confidence of the people and encouraging them and doing the best I could.
During this time, I studied one year of theology through the Bishop Romero Center of Universidad Centroamericano, a university in El Salvador. They send out teachers and priests to different locations, and they came to this region.
What that year did, it helped remove the blinders that I had. We talked about things like eradicating poverty, including getting involved in politics. It was like I got to see what was behind the curtain of religion that hides so much and sometimes used by the rich to maintain their power.
Before, I had this idea of this angry God that punished, God I had to fear. But I realized it’s something the political and economic forces manipulated to keep the poor poor.
This year of theology helped me see that we’re free, that we live in the kingdom of God, right here, right now. It led me to question what kind of religion is this that we’ve been given.
This was theology of liberation.
I began to think more about the questions and feelings I’ve had since I was a child. I realize now the suffering I’d seen in my father, as he carried his loads, it was the suffering of God as well, because my father was made in God’s image. And as I look at my country, I ask, why do some people have everything and others have nothing?
This land we're on right now is not the land of milk and honey. The land of milk and honey is the land our ancestors, the Mam people, had before the Spanish came and took their land. Now, there are ranchers and farmers with huge tracts of fields, while we live on the ridges of the mountains. One cow has nearly 20 acres of land to graze, where whole families have less than an acre of land that is not fertile to grow their food.
With so many resources in Guatemala, it's a shame there are so many people living in poverty.
In 2005, when MCC first came to the community and worked through the diocese to respond to Tropical Storm Stan, I was part of that work. After that year, we continued with food security and other projects. The Mennonite church, they’ve put their foot to the ground here. They’re committed to the communities, to the places in the world that are left behind, that are suffering from war, that are suffering from natural disaster.
Our MCC project is kind of like an explosion of my personal experience. A number of people don’t migrate. They work their flowers, their trout. It’s not something that happens from night to day. It takes time for things to grow.
What happens a lot here, farmers work without really thinking. They do what they’ve always done and see what happens.
What we’re doing is about creating awareness, about changing hearts and encouraging people. It’s injecting that we can and need to think for ourselves.
It starts with us being models, getting our hands dirty, building greenhouses, trout ponds. We give hope first by saying OK, we’re going to work and we’re going to work together.
It’s about fermenting hope and love – love for our work – and helping people see that money isn’t what’s going to solve our problems. It’s about our hearts.
Money is a medium. It’s not the end. We become consumers, it has to do with the system that’s now present here. It’s for that reason that people migrate – because they’re thinking about the need for money. But that’s not necessarily true. It’s about changing the mentality. People can grow their own crops, trade for what they need. But it’s long-term and that’s why we need to create models and we need people like us that are preaching this.
We do that because it builds trust and solidarity. God is first, before all things. God is the center of each one of our lives and the center of our organization. Without God, we can do, but it’s not going to happen – especially for an organization because we’re talking about putting the organization over the interests of each one of us.
God manifests in each one of us. God is using us as a way to encourage and model to others. The Gospel is the spinal column, and we’re the voice.
God left us a paradise, a paradise that was healthy, that was peaceful, where there wasn’t family disintegration and there wasn’t selfishness. But man has broken that. The paradise that God gave us, we’ve corrupted and made dirty.
What we’re doing is trying to create that awareness with people and rescue that paradise. It’s on our shoulders as individuals and people who work the land to do thing that honor that paradise, honor all God has given us.
It’s very much about changing the way people think about the present and our role in the present. Fifty years from now, wars are going to be fought over water. If we don’t take care of our mountains, our trees, our water will dry up. If the mine comes and brings disgrace on us and the land and uses our water … If for ambitions and greed, they corrupt this paradise, nature will die. And when nature dies, humanity will die. And when humanity dies, God dies. So the whole world is obligated to conserve what God has given us.
MCC and the diocese have been wonderful schools for me. Now, through the diocese, I’m in this program on self-development with all these engineers and professional people. They tell me that I have not only a spring of life that flows up, but it’s like a river and it affects people.
For me, it’s reinforcing who I am in God’s eyes. I continue to realize I have the same value they do. It’s been a process of seeing and learning that because so many people here don’t value themselves."
Geraldine
I see Juan Pablo as a modern day Daniel, a man who has not let the tyranny of governments and mining companies prevent him from speaking the truth and adhering to his faith. Like Daniel and the Israelites, the Mam live in exile, removed from the fertile lowlands by the conquerors. Like Daniel and the Israelites, the Mam have been marginalized and suffer discrimination at the hands of the Spanish colonizers. And like Daniel, Juan Pablo’s faith in God enables him to see a future that is more just and where poor campesinos live in dignity; for Juan Pablo, the kingdom of God is an upside down kingdom. It is the only answer to his question, why do some people have everything and others have nothing? And I’m left with the another question: Why does humanity’s quest for power continue to trample the least powerful?
Anita
There is deathly oppression around us - right here - that demands our resistance and our trust in the way that God works. By now we have all heard much about the horrible realities and the lingering destructive forces of the Residential School experience. This happened right under our noses and we, for the most part, were not aware of what went on. But now we know and now we must respond. Taking the “Indian out of the child” was a deathly and oppressive policy. In the name of God the leaders of the Residential School movement did not trust in the way God works. They distorted the grace and mercy of God and became persecutors in the name of God. We must resist that kind of biblical interpretation and we must work to make things right.
But we must be aware of a couple of things: the extremes of deadening traditionalism on one hand and violence on the other. Daniel is a model for what might constitute faithful response to trouble and oppression. Throughout these stories in difficult times Daniel and his friends do not respond with violence nor do they revert to the old ways of solving problems; they come up with new ideas. They give God the credit for helping them out of tough spots by rather unconventional means. Daniel is given the gift of interpreting dreams; that gift keeps them all alive! He becomes the authority among diviners, astrologers, magicians and fortune-tellers. Daniel becomes the “Super Seer”. That would hardly be considered a morally upright means of helping others in our culture today. Yet this was an innovative and appropriate way to show God’s power and save the day. There are always new and creative ways to make God’s point! I am thankful that we have not institutionalized dream interpretation as a pastoral qualification for ministry. I would not do so well.
That is a little flippant, I know, but there is always a danger of harkening back to specific actions of a by-gone time that are quite inappropriate for today’s context. Yes, you will find all kinds of things in the Bible but are these faithful responses in our world right now? The Old Testament is filled with violence and genocide, some of which is wrought against God’s people as in the Daniel stories we have read today and some of this violence is attributed to God’s will. We must be very careful about how we take these stories and use or misuse God’s activity for our own purposes.
As I have already suggested, the book of Daniel is positioned between times, between the spiritual/historical tales of the Old Testament and the life and work of Jesus in the New. It was a time of upheaval and change. Out of the Daniel context came a group of people who sought to be faithful to God’s ways. They eventually became known as the Pharisees. Another group of the faithful became known as Zealots. In time and through the stories that we hear in the New Testament one group, the Pharisees, become institutionalized and fossilized – stuck in their ways; the other group, the Zealots, become violent and take on “holy war” as their faithful response. You see the danger!
We can get carried away when it comes to talk of end times and the final destruction. I don’t believe that the purpose of Daniel was to scare people into conformity so that they would be found faultless on the last day. Rather, I imagine these dreams and visions to be brilliant but cloaked descriptors of the evil of those who dominate and destroy. They express a passionate longing for a time when evil will end, once and for all. Above all, the writings in our biblical corpus offer hope and encouragement. The stories in Daniel are gifts of creative options: nonviolent resistance and protest in the face of overwhelming corruption and terror.
Daniel Smith-Christopher in his commentary on the Book of Daniel says this of dreams and visions; “[These] were a powerful medium of communication that encouraged the people by drawing on a reservoir of possibilities beyond current realities. It is the nature of faith to look beyond the powers of this world to ask not only about the meaning of these powers, but also about their ultimate reality. Dreams are the beginning of the release from oppression. Dreams are images of what could be, what may be, and most dramatically, what will be!” (Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, Vol.7, p. 106)
To conclude I refer to the work of Eugene Peterson offered in our current context, “…let the strange symbolic figures give witness to the large historical truth that eclipses the daily accumulation of historical facts reported by our new media, namely, that God is sovereign. In the course of all the noise and shuffling, strutting and posing, of arrogant rulers and nations that we call history, with the consequent troubles to us all, God is serenely sovereign; we can trust him to bring all things and people under his rule.
There are always some of us who want to concentrate on the soul, and others of us who want to deal with the big issues of history. Daniel is one of our primary documents for keeping it all together—the personal and the political, the present and the future, the soul and society.” (Eugene Peterson, The Message, pp. 1199-1200)
