Martyrs Bear Witness for the Life of the World
The issue of Liturgy entitled “Religion Outside of Religion,” guest-edited by David Farina Turnbloom, raises the question of whether the daily rituals of our lives might be seen as contributing to our religiosity. This is an excerpt from Brandy Daniels’ essay “Practicing Martrydom? From Liturgy as Protest to Protest as Liturgy.” Dr. Daniels served as a “Clergy Witness” with the Portland Interfaith Clergy Resistance (PICR) created in 2017 by Rabbi Ariel Stone of Congregation Shir Tikvah. The PICR brought leaders from a wide variety of faith communities to the streets to accompany the resistance and bear witness to the violence of police against protesters. –– Melinda Quivik
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Protestors. . . are a kind of living martyr, bold truth-tellers who pursue justice. And while this essay has focused on those protesting white supremacy and racism in the contemporary United States, the logic extends and is applicable to those who have stood up to speak and pursue the truths of liberation and justice in various other contexts. One might think here of the courageous protestors in Hong Kong, in Belarus, or in Myanmar, who risk their freedom and their safety in the pursuit of democracy—even to the point where their martyrdom ceased to be a living one. Or, one might look to the protests against the Vietnam war, to the organizing of the Chicago 7 or the prayerful incineration of draft cards by the Catonsville 9. The list could go on. While utilizing various methods and working in pursuit of different aims, these protestors all signpost the truths of justice and liberation, what Boff calls “the true name of God.” In this way, not only are protests a kind of liturgy, but protestors are a kind of sacrament.
. . . The subtitle of [Louis-Marie] Chauvet’s The Sacraments, The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body, is notable, and relevant. The body—both the physical body and that broader body, the symbolic order, that constitutes human existence—mediates God’s presence in the world. Those who are out on the street protesting for justice, putting their actual bodies on the line, are revealing and inviting others into the grace of God—a way of living justice as the Good Samaritan lived justice. These living martyrs celebrate the liturgy of protest so that the world might be sanctified into a life of racial and social justice. Unless our bodies move in solidarity, then, we have rejected the grace that these living martyrs reveal. . .
In a letter written in a style—and, in many ways, context—that mimics [Martin Luther] King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Reverend Osagyefo Sekou, a Black pastor and public intellectual who was active in the protests in Ferguson, chastises his fellow clergy who have questioned the intentions of the protests of the faith leaders supporting it. “The church of the street and the communion of protest have drawn clear lines between the just and the unjust,”
Sekou writes. Continuing to use ecclesial language when speaking of the work of young activists in Ferguson, he notes that these “urban protestants will not be seduced by slanted news stories, a corrupt judicial system, or clergy who seek peace without justice.” These protestants are those who are witnessing to the world and to the church. Clergy, he goes on to assert, must not only “support” protestors, but are called to join, to be protestors—to join in the work of witnessing. “By placing our bodies on the cross of a militarized police, deep infrastructural racial bias and a system that profits from human misery, a new way of being and seeing America and all its promise is being born,” he writes. “A willingness to be bruised, broken or detained for the sake of the gospel is our only option.”
The rest of this essay is available in the full digital and print editions of Liturgy. All of the essays in Liturgy 36, no.4 are available by personal subscription and through many libraries.
Brandy Daniels is assistant professor of theology and gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Portland, Oregon. Her work stands at the intersections of constructive and political theologies, ethics, and gender and sexuality studies.
Brandy Daniels, “Practicing Martrydom? From Liturgy as Protest to Protest as Liturgy,” Liturgy 36, no. 4 (2021): 22–33.