Readings for the 3rd Sunday of Easter: ACTS 2, 14, 22-33; PSALM 16:1-11; 1 PETER 1: 17-21; LUKE 24: 13-25
Our celebration of the resurrection myth, and of Life's unlimited powers and possibilities continues for a third week. They invite thoughtful people to scan the list of contemporary events to identify where resurrection might be happening - where death is being defeated by Life's overwhelming force.
With that in mind, today's readings for this Third Sunday of the Resurrection (especially the Gospel account of Yeshua's veiled appearance at Emmaus) suggest that we embrace resurrection as an unexpected new world order arising unperceived before our very eyes.
Could it be that today it is surfacing at the hands of Russia, China., and other BRICS Plus nations?
That emerging order can remind attentive truth seekers that movement towards the entirely new and seemingly "impossible" arrangement that Yeshua referred to as the Kingdom of God is not only possible, but necessary.
It's required to draw our species back from the brink of annihilation habitually fostered by a necrophilic United States with its cult of bombing and sanctions, along with threats of nuclear war and environmental omnicide.
Though it might be hard for patriotic "Americans" to endure, please let me show you what I mean.
U.S. As Enemy of Humankind
To begin with, resurrection calls us to face death. And in the context, I'm suggesting, we must face the fact that the entity most responsible for plunging the world towards complete destruction is our own country.
The Sandinista hymn of the 1980s expressed that clearly when it denounced Yankee imperialism as the "enemy of humankind."
With that shocking phrase, the Sandinistas were only echoing what in 1967 Martin Luther King had said about the U.S. when he identified it (not the Russians or the Chinese) as the world's "greatest purveyor of violence."
Even closer to our own time is Vijay Prashad's description of NATO (of course headed by the United States) as the "machine that destroys humanity."
Careful thought makes it difficult to deny the truth of such denunciations:
- "We" are the most belligerent country in the world maintaining about 750 military bases across the planet - about 3 times as many as all other countries combined.
- "Our" war budget is similarly unprecedented, outlandish, and grossly inflated to more than $2 billion per day.
- "We" are the ones responsible for wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Ukraine, and who know where else?
- Besides all of that and on an unprecedented scale, "we" have intervened militarily and wantonly changed regimes across the planet for more than a century, especially where the regimes in question have tried to improve the lives of ordinary people rather than the bottom lines of American corporations.
- "Our" country is the only one that has ever actually used nuclear weapons and has repeatedly and unilaterally opted out of arms control agreements.
- With just 4.6% of the world's population, the United States aspires to control countries like Russia, China, India, and the whole continent of Africa whose populations (not counting the rest of the Global South) total far more than half the world's inhabitants.
- "America" is historically the world's greatest polluter and is even responsible in large measure for environmental degradation in the Global South (including China), where U.S. corporations have largely relocated for the last forty years.
- In summary, the U.S. has worked hard to ensure that it possesses the same control of the world that Hitler coveted for capitalist Germany.
Accordingly, it is easy to see how victims of such policies might well see the U.S. as the greatest purveyor of violence, as the enemy of humankind, and as heading a belligerent organization well characterized as the machine that destroys humanity.
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