Take Responsibility for the Face of the World (Revisited)

Reflections on Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, Lesson Four

Why didn’t those who saw the signs speak up?

They did. They were silenced, banished, and demonized.

And yet, they still speak, not always from stages and pulpits, but from the wilderness places.

This was how I ended my reflection on Lesson Four: Take Responsibility for the Face of the World back in January, now it’s time to pick up where we left off.

The idea behind this lesson is that we have to take responsibility and not allow propaganda to become truth. When we hear the lies, we must speak the truth. When we see corruption, we must call it out. We must not allow the fruits of tyranny to become normalized.

Why are the bullies running the world? Because we allowed their abuse to become normal. We accepted it as the way things are on playgrounds, in families, in board rooms, in churches, and in politics.

We forgot who we are as Americans, that We The People are in charge and will not be ruled by tyrants.

We forgot who we are as Christians, that the way of Jesus is to speak truth to power, even when it costs us everything.

We forgot to take responsibility for the face of the world.

On Wednesday, I listened to Diana Butler Bass’s new take on The Parable of the Talents, which was an excerpt from her book A Beautiful Year and it fits in well with what we’re talking about.

I encourage you to listen to the whole thing because she spins the story upside down, first by inviting us to consider that the “master” in the story is not God, as we have long assumed. That changes everything. 

The “good and faithful” servants were slaves to the corrupt business practices of the day; they played along and were rewarded. The “wicked and lazy” servant boycotted; he called out the exploitation of the system and was thrown out into the darkness with nothing.

This is the way of Jesus, whose “followers would see him betrayed by one of their own group, humiliated and beaten, tried before a corrupt court, and executed in a degrading and excruciating way.” (The Success is in the Sowing, Bob Dean)

But that is not the end of the story. Whether you believe in the resurrection or not, those same followers of Jesus did not let his death be the end. The book of Acts tells the story of how they kept speaking the truth even after they were cast out and persecuted.

We have taken the face of the world for granted. We expect that someone else will do the hard things, someone else will step up. We want a superhero to act as our benevolent bully, because we believe in fairy tales. That our king would never turn against us.

Or we pray that God will intervene because we were taught that Jesus is a superhero who will show up and rescue us. We’re not interested in the Jesus of the Bible, we want VBS Jesus, so we don’t have to risk anything. 

We failed to take responsibility and inadvertently played along with the system; we believed that the “good and faithful” slaves were the righteous ones. 

What does it look like when we refuse to be exploited or to be complicit in the exploitation of others? What does it look like to speak up and say, “I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not scatter”?

Blessed are those who have refused to play along; who have stood up and called out corruption. Blessed are those who have been cast out, lost their livelihoods, their friends, and reputations. Blessed are those who continue to speak from the wilderness places.

This is the way.

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