Loading...Sermon November 13, 2016
The Rev. Rebecca S. Myers, LSW
The Church of the Nativity and St. Stephen, Newport, PA
Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 28, Track 2 Year C
Observance of Native American Heritage Month
See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. Malachi 4:1-2ª
Please be seated.
It’s a lot of work to buy a house, isn’t it? It’s a lot of paperwork. Seems like there’s more all of the time. I was talking to a colleague earlier this week who is trying to close on a house and property soon. He was lamenting all of the paperwork required and said he was never going to buy another house again. He is a fairly young man, so I marveled at how many years he’d live on this property. It’s property that has been in his wife’s family for five generations and the hope is to continue to preserve its use as a farm and that maybe someone from the next generation will also live on that land.
Because of my father’s teaching and my experience working as a legal secretary in his office, I knew when you bought a home, having a good title search and good title insurance was important. I made sure I had great title protection when I bought my home recently.
Property law and laws… having clear title to the land. Seems reasonable and logical. However, I felt extremely confused for quite awhile when I first heard Native peoples, American Indians, question how you could own the land. Didn’t creating laws about owning land make sense? It took me some time to understand that maybe individual land ownership is not the only way to live together and to use land wisely.
And how did we come to “own” this land for this church, or for our homes? The land upon which we all reside was not vacant of inhabitants. William Penn did make treaties and pay for the land; however, his heirs and successors violated and ignored those treaties. There was a lot of arrogance and evil, often supported through the Christian church that allowed the land to be taken away from the people who had lived upon it for many generations.
The Popes in the Roman Catholic Church of the 15th century, issued Papal Bulls providing support for taking the land in other places where the people living there were not Christian. This became known as “The Doctrine of Discovery.” In our church line, this doctrine originated with Henry VII in 1496 and “held that Christian sovereigns and their representative explorers could assert dominion and title over non-Christian lands with the full blessing and sanction of the Church.”
These rulings by Christian leaders of their time, further provided that the peoples living on those lands taken would be enslaved or killed.
The Doctrine was subsequently enforced in a United States Supreme Court decision of 1823. The understanding was that:
The tribes which occupied the land were, at the moment of discovery [by European Christian Nations], no longer completely sovereign and had no property rights but rather merely held a right of occupancy. Further, only the discovering nation or its successor could take possession of the land from the natives by conquest or purchase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_doctrine
This doctrine continues to be a bedrock of our policy towards those native peoples today. This is how the 2009 Episcopal Church General Convention resolution to Repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery states it:
[The Doctrine of Discovery] continues to be invoked, in only slightly modified form, in court cases and in the many destructive policies of governments and other institutions of the modern nation-state that lead to the colonizing dispossession of the lands of indigenous peoples and the disruption of their way of life;” Resolution D035, 2009 General Convention Repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery. //www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/acts/acts_resolution-complete.pl?resolution=2009-D035
It was only in reading and researching more about the Doctrine of Discovery that I realized, my owning a home today and having a deed today may be a direct result of The Doctrine of Discovery! This church in this place and the “right” to have it on this land may be a direct result of The Doctrine of Discovery!
Owning land the way we do is a direct result of the arrogance of The Doctrine of Discovery that anyone who was not Christian could have their land taken from them, and be enslaved or killed. It was an arrogance of “we know best” or “we are better” or “God only loves us and wants all others to be destroyed.” It was an arrogance of denying that all are created in the image of God.
Then Presiding-Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori wrote in her Pastoral letter on May 16, 2012:
“The ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples is the result of legal systems throughout the “developed” world that continue to base land ownership on these religious warrants for colonial occupation from half a millennium ago. These legal bases collectively known as the Doctrine of Discovery underlie U.S. decisions about who owns these lands[6]. The dispossession of First Peoples continues to wreak havoc on basic human dignity. These principles give the lie to biblical understandings that all human beings reflect the image of God, for those who have been thrown out of their homeland, had their cultures largely erased, and sent into exile, are still grieving their loss of identity, lifeways, and territory. All humanity should be grieving, for our sisters and brothers are suffering the injustice of generations. The sins of our forebears are being visited on the children of indigenous peoples, even to the seventh generation.”
I confess for all of my reading and work to understand and to undo oppression, I knew and still know very little about The Doctrine of Discovery. However, a post from a colleague who went to the Standing Rock Sioux protest over the Dakota Access Pipeline or DAPL, prompted me to want to know more.
As you know the Sioux nation of the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota has been protesting the route of The Dakota Access Pipeline. The pipeline would carry crude oil and would pass close to their lands, including the Missouri River. A spill could damage the nation’s water supply. In addition, the route passes through burial grounds and sacred cultural sites.
Members from more than 200 American Indian Nations have gathered to protest the route of the pipeline. Presiding-Bishop Michael Curry visited the site to show support. The Rev. John Floberg, Episcopal Church Executive Council member and Supervising Priest of the Episcopal Churches in North Dakota, issued a call in late October for religious leaders to join the protests on November 3. He was hoping for 100 religious leaders to heed his call and 500 religious leaders from 20 faiths showed up on fairly short notice.
On November 3, I saw a Facebook post from The Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers (who wrote Radical Welcome). Canon Spellers is currently The Canon to the Presiding Bishop for Evangelism and Reconciliation. Her post said:
Elders from the major Christian bodies in America have just read a statement repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery - the 500 year old church doctrine that declared any lands discovered by Europeans could be taken in the name of God. These elders handed a copy of the doctrine to the Native elders, and invited them to burn it. The Native elders did just that, and as they held the burning paper up high, we began to sing "Amen."
Amen means "Let it be so."
The repudiation of the Doctrine by the General Convention in 2009 was an important act of repentance and reconciliation for our arrogance and evildoing. This ceremony on November 3, burning the Doctrine, was an important act of repentance and reconciliation for our arrogance and evildoing.
Malachi prophesied that those who were arrogant and evildoers would burn to stubble. I believe this burning to stubble represents the refiner’s fire that Malachi speaks about in the third Chapter, verses 2-3:
For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.
As we take these actions of repentance and reconciliation, we go through the refiner’s fire…burn to stubble… and become purified into gold and silver. We go from the arrogant and evildoers to those who revere God and for whom the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. We become healers. We become what Isaiah prophesied in Chapter 58:12: you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.
The night before the November 3 gathering of clergy leaders at Standing Rock, there was an information meeting. Canon Spellers reported this:
“We have just been blessed beyond imagination. An elder woman just walked to the center of the gym where we're gathered. Long braid trailing down her back, she looked around and said, ‘We've known one day you would come. One day people in this nation would ask questions, they would want to know what happened to us. We have been prisoners here for 150 years, but now God has brought you. Now we the people of the earth are together: red, yellow, black, white. Where we belong.’”
Amen
//www.episcopalchurch.org/library/video/episcopal-church-exposes-doctrine-discovery
//www.episcopalchurch.org/blog/IndigenousMinistries
//www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/11/03/us/ap-us-oil-pipeline-protest.html
//xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/PENN/pnind.html
