A Sinister Inspiration

Today’s post is from a dear friend, Stan Dotson. As you’ll see, it is in the form of a sermon. I’m not huge on publishing written versions of sermons. They are spoken forms of communication that are meant for interactive, live communities in particular times and places. But occasionally, one breaks containment, and this one hit me with fresh fire. I especially loved the brief anecdote below from Raul Suarez.

Stan is the author of several books. They include Where Are They Going?: Stories and Backstories of Five Cubans, Cuba: A Day in the Life, and the novel Poor Memory.

Sermon: “Revive Us Again”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedStan Dotson April 27, 2025 Circle Of Mercy, Asheville, NC

As our country totters on the brink of fascism, it's important that we ground ourselves, get some direction, and where better than from holy writ? After all, the Bible describes for us the history of a faith community whose world was beyond the brink; the powers governing them had hurtled headlong into full blown fascism. So hear now the Word of God written for those people of God, from Acts 5, starting with verse 27:

Some time ago when Missy [one of the co-pastors of Circle of Mercy] was looking ahead at the lectionary texts for this week, she came up with the idea for an "anti-authoritarianism revival" based on this passage from Acts, and when she found out we were going to be in town, she wrote and asked if one of us could preach the kick-off sermon. Yes! I thought, Let's do it! The old gospel hymn that signaled the start of every revival I ever attended started ringing in my ears:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedRevive us again, fill each heart with thy love; may each soul be re-kindled with fire from above. Hallelujah! Thine the glory! Hallelujah! Amen. Hallelujah! Thine the glory! Revive us again.

Last Monday I was visiting with Raúl Suárez, Pastor Emeritus of our church, founder of the Martin Luther King Center in Marianao and long-time delegate to Cuba's National Assembly. It's both a high honor and a daunting task to be pastor to such an iconic figure in Cuba. During our conversation he grinned great big and said, "I'm so thankful you decided to be part of our community; your being here is really making a difference." Instantly I felt my heart and my head expanding, until he finished his thought: "We're having quite an impact on you. Your theology, your approach to the Bible, you're really coming along!"

I hope he's right! You see, Raúl knows that I spent most of my life reading the sacred texts from within a context of superpower, having inherited the imperial lens that comes with citizenship. And Raúl knows that reading the gospel through such a filter can turn Jesus of Nazareth into a contortionist; for the savior to squeeze himself into our context, it takes some phenomenal dexterity. By the way, do you know what that word dexterity means in Spanish? Right-handed. That makes sense; it's hard for us to escape reading the text from a privileged, right-handed point of view. The world is designed for people like us.

But I've found that it's quite a different exercise to read this same story through the filter of folks who regularly visit us at the King Center. Imagine going to the dining room every day and having lunch with indigenous Bolivian activists, or Brazilian practitioners of African diasporic religions, or peasant leaders of Colombian base communities.

Engaging in conversations with these movers and shakers who are far to the left of anything I've ever encountered on home soil can be downright unsettling. Maybe that's why the word for leftist in Spanish is siniestra, sinister. Forgive me if what I'm preaching starts to come across as somewhat siniestra. I'll chalk it up to the effects of having lots of left-handed lunch conversations in the King Center's comedor. Revival—re-enlivening—presumes that there are some deadening agents at work in our world, numbing us to all sorts of horrors. Authoritarianism is one of those agents.

That's a big word. Start whittling it down to size, and you get authority. Keep whittling and you get author, which is to say, at its root authoritarianism is all about who really is authoring our lives. It's about the scripts we live by; for people of faith it's about scripture.

Or better said, scriptures, plural, because the Bible presents us with a diverse set of authors who offer us different scripts to follow, complete with divergent strategies on how to respond to authoritarianism whenever it rears its ugly head. The early Christians claimed Jesus as their script-writer. Just a couple of chapters before the passage we read in Acts 5, Peter responds to his critics, declaring: "You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead." And that post-resurrection Jesus is still authoring their lives.

One thing I have been learning around the lunch table is some scriptural context: left- handed folks look at the big picture and see the drama unfolding on the stage of a small, crescent-shaped slice of mediterranean land whose location made it a highly coveted terrain, subject to control by empires in every direction. My table-talking companions know that story, having lived in similar lands that have long been coveted and conquered and controlled by empires in every direction.

They find sinister inspiration and hope in that big-picture story, in knowing that at some point in ancient history, an anti-authoritarian resistance movement emerged, a revival led by nomadic shepherds. That movement grew out of the fantastic notion that these marginalized folks were divinely chosen to cast light on the shadowy empires of the world, to awaken an ancient way of living based on the old nomadic values of sharing equally, of welcoming the stranger, of caring for the vulnerable, all based on trust, challenging the imperial values of consumption, conquest, and control, all based on fear.

As the movement took hold, the empires dug in their heels; they were not interested in having their core values transformed. So, the scriptures document the way this little slip of land and its siniestra resistance movement forever found itself subject to one expanionist empire after another, first Egypt, then Assyria, then Babylon and Persia and Greece, and by the time Jesus landed on the scene, it was Rome. My leftist friends whose lands have been under the thumb of expansionist empires like Spain and England and Portugal and Russia and the United States understand this story very well.

Throughout biblical history, the movement found itself not only in constant conflict with brutal authoritarian regimes from without; there was internal conflict as well, intense infighting over how to respond to authoritarianism. My lunchtime friends can easily identify the contrasting scripts that offer different dramatic direction: There's the assimilation script, a strategy the elites employ to protect their privileged status within the empire. You can see this narrative throughout scripture; its core story is that of Joseph rising to power—where? In the Egyptian empire, where he took command of the grain distribution during a time of famine. By the first century, the Herodians were the heralds of this strategy, scheming of ways to benefit from their bowing down to Rome.

Then there's the imitation script. That's another strategy employed by the elites, some of whom said early on, "Why don't we just form our own militarized monarchy, and fight their fire with our own fire?" Theirs is the fantasy of conquering the conquerors. You see this narrative throughout scripture, too; its core story is that of the Exodus from Egypt, with a guerilla-warrior God casting Pharaoh and his army into the sea. By the first century, groups as diverse as the Pharisees and the Zealots shared this common dream, anticipating a time when the coming Messiah would throw Caesar and his centurions into the deep blue sea.

Assimilation and imitation are the two dominant scripts battling it out throughout the Bible. At their core, these two scripts share a fundamental premise: that the paradigm of expansionist empire is not necessarily bad. Superpowers can be made good, can be humanized, can be tweaked and reformed, can even be made holy, if only the right people, our people, are at the helm.

But there is a third strategy, the anti-authoritarian revival narrative authored by the sinister script-writers of scriptures, the prophets. Theirs is the narrative of non-violent action that first begins to emerge in holy writ with a core story of inclusion and compassion care and love that transforms enemies into family: the book of Ruth.

"Revive us again" is always ringing in the prophets' ears, as they constantly seek to resurrect the ancient values that the empire is constantly crucifying: sharing over hording, welcome over exclusion, care over control, trust over fear. Hallelujah! Thine the glory! Revive those ideals again!

Now let's get to Jesus. What have my left-handed lunch companions been teaching me about the gospel story? They read that story and find lots of connections to their context. First of all, it's a story worth waiting on—when they hear that the prophetic voice had been silent, or silenced, for five hundred years when Jesus came on the scene, a lightbulb flashes: Five hundred years! That's the same amount of time the Brazilians and Bolivians and Colombians and Cubans have been suffering under imperial domination. The time is ripe for revival!

Then they picture Jesus, born into that kairos moment of history, having spent his whole life in preparation for the Great Awakening he would engender. Even before he was born, Jesus had heard his mother's voice, belting out the old anti-authoritarian anthem—My soul magnifies the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, who casts down the authorities from their thrones and empties the elites of all their privileges.

Hallelujah! Thine the glory!

The siniestras also resonate with Jesus' core mission as spelled out in Isaiah—he was anointed by the winds of change to bring good news to the poor, good news defined by particular non-violent direct actions—making the lame to walk, giving sight to the blind, setting prisoners free.

People at the King Center sometimes sneer at the way a lot of European-based theologies stumble around trying to interpret supernatural miracles such as these. My lunch friends just laugh and say it's because colonizers simply don't know how colonized people talk; conquerors don't how people in conquered lands describe their condition. Those folks know what it's like to be lame: to be immobilized by systems of oppression and paralyzed by the threat of violence. "Healing the lame" is just another way of saying "mobilizing the immobilized," bringing movement to the paralyzed.

People in colonized lands also know what it's like to have blinders of imperial ideology imposed on them, blinders of supremacy and exceptionalism that impair any vision of dignity and leave people seeing nothing but inferiority when they look at themselves.

Giving sight to the blind—yes! The Jesus movement is all about removing the thick cultural blinders, peeling off those filters of inferiority one layer at a time. And, people in colonized and conquered lands know all about what it feels like to be made captive. My lunch friends lament the reality that there has been nothing in history quite so captivating as the current culture of capitalist consumerism. And the technology that drives it is a virtual concentration camp.

In Luke's history of the early church, the fledgling Jesus movement, in his name, under his authorship, were encountering people paralyzed by police violence, and they were mobilizing them to march on the Way. They were giving a vision of dignity to people whose eyes were clouded over with ideologies of supremacy. And they were liberating people from the prison of predatory economics.1

If those mighty acts of the disciples had only been a matter of physical healing and supernatural miracles, there would have been no threat to empire. The powers could have easily co-opted that, making it a circus side-show and charging admission. But if you see the wonders for what they really are—mobilizing the immobile, helping people see their own worth and potential, releasing them from the grips of an imperial economy, now that's a threat. That's what cannot be tolerated.

The authorities call the sinister revivalists in on the carpet and say "no more." The Spirit wastes no time in prompting Peter's response: "You're not the author of my life; Jesus is. He's given us a different script, and we're following it. We're not saluting your flag any more. We're not pledging allegiance to your system. We're singing a different anthem, with new lyrics: O say can't you see, we must obey God...

It's not necessary to be an indigenous Bolivian or a base community Colombian or a Yoruba-practicing Brazilian to revive the radical nature of the Jesus movement; there have been all sorts of siniestras from within superpower contexts who have also subscribed to the Jesus script. A little over a hundred years ago, it happened to a young Dorothy Day. She didn't have to have lunch at the King Center in Marianao to have her eyes opened; it happened when she started reading Luke and Acts, and the Jesus she found there began authoring her life in a radical way.

I suspect Dorothy Day would give those of us who identify as anti-authoritarian revivalists today a stern warning: "Be careful about what it is you are hoping to revive." Her reading of the Acts 5 passage would underscore the word "any"—we must obey God rather than any human authority. As an avowed Christian anarchist, Day was consistently critical of and suspicious of every form of human authority, no matter what system of government was in place or what political party was in control.

After all, it was during the heyday of our democracy's "Progressive Era"—with people like us, leaders like Woodrow Wilson dreaming of world peace— that we invaded Haiti and the Dominican Republic and continued clamping down on Cuba, all in the name of democracy and economic stability, our script. It was during this same idealistic era that we criminalized anti-war efforts with the Espionage Act, and we enacted the Sedition Act to criminalize any speech critical of the U.S. flag or its armed forces.

Breaking these laws is what landed Dorothy Day in prison seven times, for her work in advocating for peace and justice. A fascinating part of her story is that her first imprisonment came when she protested at the Wilson White House for women's suffrage. But once that battle was won, she never voted, because she didn't believe in an imperial system that kept poor people's movements and revolutions in check, at bay, both home and abroad.

In the same vein, I think my lunch table conversation partners would warn us not to be satisfied with an anti-authoritarian revival that only resists those hideous tyrannical types who are bent on using brute force to bring about fascist rule. Don't get me wrong, organizing people to rise up and thwart such blatant bullying is a worthy and valiant endeavor. But there's more to the story.

My siniestra friends warn me that there is an even more insidious authoritarian power, stronger and more enduring than brute force fascism; it is the seductive, soft-power variety whose imprisoning power over the mind is greater than any prison cell.

Whenever they hear folks waxing nostalgic about the good old days of Obama, they are quick to note that it was the soft power of Obama that convinced Cuban leaders to privatize their economy, including the food sector, something that has destroyed the Revolution's valued ideals of solidarity and community and created a clear divide of haves and have-nots. What sixty years of brute force blockade couldn't do, this caving in to the pressures of soft power did in a few short years.

Their warning reminds me of the old English fable of Beowulf, where a monstrous figure, Grendel, comes up out of the lake to menace and maim the town's people. A hero emerges, Beowulf, and after a long battle, defeats the monster. The townspeople celebrate and throw a feast, and all is well until another figure emerges, rising from the depths of the lake: Grendel's mother. "It's not the thing you fear," David Whyte says of this story, "it's the mother of the thing you fear."

If we are re-living that legend today, if a Grendel-like monster has indeed arisen to menace us, then by all means, put on your anti-authoritarian armor and go to battle. I have no doubts that though the struggle will be difficult and costly, the heroic efforts that we are already seeing in the streets and in popular uprisings will prevail, and the monstrous movement will eventually crash and burn. But don't celebrate too long when it does, because, as the movie version of the fable showed, the monster's mother will soon appear on the scene, in a much more seductive and hypnotic guise.

If none of what I have said so far seems all that sinister, hear this plainly: Church, we are not being authored by Jesus to revive and restore the authority of a deified democracy. This democracy of ours, and the constitution that defines its powers, has been the screenplay for a drama of conquest and control around the world, authoring oppression and exploitation throughout all our history. To repeat the civil religion profession of faith, the creed of constitutional democracy, is a way of avoiding confessing the true identity of our nation: our script is that of an expansionist empire. We are Egypt. We are Babylon. We are Rome. And the empire wants to author our lives.

But as followers of the Jesus movement, we are called to embody another story, the story of a nomadic Nazarene who inaugurated a movement not based on any kingdom of this world, a movement of the beloved without borders—a community that is already experiencing revival. So, this is not a kick-off sermon; the revival is already happening in the Bolivian mountains, the Brazilians favelas, the rural base communities of Colombia and the lunch tables of Cuban. This sermon is just an invitation to join in the protracted revival that is already in progress, to allow yourselves to be re-enlivened by sinister sisters and brothers in small slivers of land on the margins of empire.

Be ready, though, Jesus gave us fair warning: when we join that revival, we're liable to find ourselves posing a real threat to the predatory economic powers, as soon as they see us pooling our resources and holding all things in common. ICE will label us a security threat when they see us fully welcoming strangers from across the great divides. We're likely to be hunted down and haunted by the military forces where they see us engaging in non-violent direct actions. But not to worry, when they haul us in before the tribunals, the Spirit will be there to give us the response, to give us the script.

We have a story to tell to the nations!

At every revival I ever attended, the sermon concluded with a song and an invitation:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedJust as I am, Thy love unknownhas broken every barrier down; now to be thine and thine alone,O Lamb of God I come...

Just as I am, just as you are, just as we are, let this be a "come to Jesus" moment in our history. Let's immerse ourselves in the Jesus story, allow Jesus to author our lives, to author our resistance movement, to write on our hearts every word.

Hallelujah, Amen.

Upcoming Speaking: I’ll be preaching at Common Table RVA in Richmond, VA on Sunday, Aug 10 at 10AM.

I have a couple of cool things brewing for the fall, but my speaking calendar has some holes. Contact me if your congregation, book group, or YMCA basketball team is interested.

One Last Note: I don’t normally post my own saxophone playing anywhere. I find it underwhelming. My own worst critic or whatever.

But, I managed to find this old video from when I went to Cuba with Stan Dotson. I made quick friends with the guys of a brass quintet, and we altered their arrangements of some Great American Songbook tunes to fit my saxophone. Here’s “Misty.”