We, like turkeys, die

I have not witnessed martyrdom in the classic sense, but I know that martyrs die at the hand of causes and authorities that do not fear God. They are uninformed executioners. If we read the lives of the saints and study any period in the history of our faith, we get the picture of the unique path of the martyr. They tell us that they fear God, not their accusers. Their fear of God is difficult to explain unless we grasp the full consequences of death.

When we wrestle with demons, and struggle with our weakened moral fibre, we begin to feel the weight of death’s proposal offered to any martyr. Just give in, we are told. We imagine that our wrestling and struggling deals with less than deadly results. Not so. All sin leads to death. The more we give in, the more practiced is our allegiance to fraud. The martyr is presented with the immediate challenge to give into the power of death’s fraudulent owner. We just have a slower path.

Here’s where the turkey comes into the picture. All animals die, as do fruit trees, and greenery of all kinds. If God allows time to go so far, the very earth itself will die. Death is not a friendly concept, but it is unavoidable. The design of paradise did not include death, and the result of sin turned all of humanity into partners in crime against the purpose of creation. We, like turkeys, die.

Avian Deaths and Martyrs


http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/112217.cfm
2 Maccabees 7:1, 20-31
LK 19:11-28

The topic of today’s reading — martyrdom — rarely comes up at Thanksgiving dinner. 

You might imagine I’m going to try to tie in the deaths of a hundred million turkeys into martyrs for the Thanksgiving feast day, ceremonious as that sounds and enticing as it may be. Well, yes I am. Not in the way that you might think. 

It’s hard not to see the irony in praying “God bless America,” and then saying, “Thank God for this bountiful life,” against the sad-sack gobbles under the slaughtering axes reverberating from sea to shining sea. Ironic, yes, but that’s not how I am going to tie martyrdom to turkeys.

Each of the readings on Wednesday are frightening. A mad king martyrs Jews, and a fair king slaughters his enemies. Maccabees reports the heinous martyrdom of Jews under the hand of the unstable Greek king Antiochus due to Jewish refusals to worship Zeus and to profane their religious rituals. Luke reports the tale of a fair-minded, yet demanding king who in like fashion kills off his transgressors. 

Death is the subject at hand here, and their use of power defines the distinction between the two kings. One group of dead represents the friends of God in the face of threat, torture and execution, and therefore become martyrs. The second group are enemies of God in the face of obedience, trust, and accountability, and consequently become foes and rivals of God’s power. 

Martyrdom is an abused death at the hand of a fraud’s mistaken notion of their power. What do turkeys have to do with this? Are they martyrs? Are we abusing our power over them? From a biblical perspective, humans are stewards of creation. We have power over both our own lives, and those of the world where we live. We hold the power of turkey lives, like the king holds the lives of humans. What purpose lies behind the power?

Unlike some who have written about “a good death,” I am a firm believer that all deaths are bad. Every face of death I have seen has been framed in horrified looks from both the dead and the onlookers. On the street at traffic accidents, in hospital rooms, and bedrooms, death’s visage is cruel. In both suicides and unhooked life lines, sullen is our memory. My experiences are limited. I have witnessed and held folks die in only a few of each of these examples. Loss and grief are seared into our souls from death. Without God, there is no relief. 

I have not witnessed martyrdom in the classic sense, but I know that martyrs die at the hand of causes and authorities that do not fear God. They are uninformed executioners. If we read the lives of the saints and study any period in the history of our faith, we get the picture of the unique path of the martyr. They tell us that they fear God, not their accusers. Their fear of God is difficult to explain unless we grasp the full consequences of death.

When we wrestle with demons, and struggle with our weakened moral fibre, we begin to feel the weight of death’s proposal offered to any martyr. Just give in, we are told. We imagine that our wrestling and struggling deals with less than deadly results. Not so. All sin leads to death. The more we give in, the more practiced is our allegiance to fraud. The martyr is presented with the immediate challenge to give into the power of death’s fraudulent owner. We just have a slower path.

Here’s where the turkey comes into the picture. All animals die, as do fruit trees, and greenery of all kinds. If God allows time to go so far, the very earth itself will die. Death is not a friendly concept, but it is unavoidable. The design of paradise did not include death, and the result of sin turned all of humanity into partners in crime against the purpose of creation. We, like turkeys, die.

The power death holds, though, has foreigners to God thinking they can control it, and use it to their advantage. The martyrs tell us that the interlopers are wrong. Their deaths, in fact, lead them back to paradise. Unlike the misled and suicidal death of the terrorist who is manipulated by interlopers of God, the true martyr witnesses to the restorative power of the God who conquers death.

In the review of Maccabees, a book of incredible acts of martyrdom, the middle of the book describes in detail the deaths of a mother’s seven sons, which she is forced to witness. Then, in awful reply, her witness is followed by the her own death. The deaths are gruesome, sordid, torturous, and dragged out. Their awful crime? Each of these sons refuse to eat pork. 

Lamb is the preferred meat of the Jew. Pork is forbidden. People have the power over the lives of sheep and pigs. This is the world of the turkey. We have the power of life and death, nurturing and harvesting, over all of this world. It feeds us. Some might say that we don’t have the power over the life and deaths of humans. That, though, is not evident. 

Parents have the power over the lives of their unborn child. Children are often given the power over the lives of their dying parents. And, certainly, we each have the power over our own lives. Many martyrs, though not all, have the power of their own lives. Quite often, the option to save themselves is a simple thing — eat pork or bow to a false God — but even when the option is severe, the martyrs of have windows of opportunity to delay their deaths. This is the sick leverage the savage holds over the martyr.

Previous to the mother and her faithful sons, Eleazar, a Hebrew scribe, set up the scene for their eight public martyrdoms with his own death. He, as the scriptures report, preferred “a glorious death to a life of defilement,” and thus, “went forward of his own accord to the instrument of torture …” 

His death speech is of importance in explaining what he was about to do in preserving the reverence of the holy. It is a similar speech given by hundreds of accounts throughout history from the stories of martyrs. Not eating pork was the hinge pin for Jew’s door into martyrdom, but it could have been countless other things the savage king could have picked. The faithful Jews, though, would have none of it, primarily due to Eleazar’s speech:

“Even if, for the time being, I avoid human punishment, I shall never, whether alive or dead, escape the hand of the Almighty. Therefore, by bravely giving up life now, I will prove myself worthy of my old age, and I will leave to the young a noble example of how to die willingly and nobly for the revered and holy laws.” (Maccabees 6:24-28)

Let’s look at a key phrase from Eleazar, “Even if, for the time being, I avoid human punishment, I shall never, whether alive or dead, escape the hand of the Almighty.” This notation about the “hand of the Almighty” is not just a passing phrase, but the convincing motivation for all martyrs. The escape from an angry God is not the actual reason for martyrdom, but it describes the proper logic for balancing the power of death which we have over all life, including our own. 

Fear of God is real. God’s hand can rightly be raised against those who defile, abuse and even just ignore him. Eleazar has a deeper motive, though, as should we. The fear of God is the precursor, not the end game. “I am not only enduring terrible pain in my body from this scourging, but also suffering it with joy in my soul because of my devotion to God.”

You see it don’t you? The pain inflicted upon Eleazar, and indeed all martyrs, matches what we envision would be God’s punishment if we were to fail him. The pain from this life is temporary, no matter how torturous. This life’s pain, in fact, is no more than the suffering of our daily trials. Torture is relative. There is the long wait before the dentist’s chair. Imagine, if you have never undergone them, the inflicted cancer treatments suffered by so many, or the daily punctures of the diabetic. Almost everyone knows, or will know, the months of rehab from a wide range of bodily repair surgeries. 

The pain of defying God, however, deals with eternal matters. Even in this temporary life.

The agreed upon attacks to our body for our maintenance, and ultimate restoration preview our ultimate death and resurrection. There will be no full restoration in this life. By suffering as we do, we are simply honoring and sustaining the gift of life, which is the ultimate requirement of these scriptures. Yes, we may have a long life like the noble Eleazar of ninety years. As he says, though, from what do we escape by abusing our power of forgoing martyrdom? Escape is not possible. Only delay. If we don’t die willingly under God’s rule over death, then we may forgo the opportunity to join God. Death is the necessary path to God. 

The mother of the seven sons, “… saw her seven sons perish in a single day, yet bore it courageously because of her hope in the Lord.” While living for a little while longer may motivate some of us to put up with a temporary pain, there is more to the point of accepting suffering. Indeed, martyrs have a full range of answers for why they should follow through on their honor and fealty to the God of the Universe. 

The seven boys knew, “The King of the universe will raise us up to live again forever, because we are dying for his laws.” As one of her son’s added at his death, “It is my choice to die at the hands of mortals with the hope that God will restore me to life.”

It is not hubris, or superiority that made them accept death. They hoped for the real power over death from God. God is not some pretender, or marauder, or thief. They expected the best from him.

So, what do turkeys and pigs have to do with these amazing feats of martyrdom? We are like God in our control over the life and death of the inhabitants and the produce of this world. We either nurture and harvest for the purpose of this world as God expects us, or we twist this power into something else. Though fanatical vegans, as opposed to logical vegans (yes, there are many), consider “meat” as murder, even they must agree that if we did not butcher and eat them, the pigs and turkeys would still die. In fact, a vegan chops up vegetables, and slices into fruits. Their butchery of green things, sweets and tubers — though butchery is not how they would describe it — still takes place. Life and death is a power we are given. Our stewardship, handed to us by God, includes both the nurturing and the harvest of the bounty.

The cycle of life, whether viewed from the gates of a cattle ranch, the pew of the funeral home, or the perch of a garden’s fence, falls into three major categories, all at the same time — bounty on its way to the table, bodies on their way to the grave, or creation on its way to restoration. It is those who twist this cycle into a power grab that twist life’s deadly end for their own purposes. We can disallow eating the cow, but we must still choose to harvest something in order to live.

We humans have power over the turkey, the cow, the fruit, the fish and the vegetables. Jesus joined us in our human stewardship over all of creation, becoming on sin flesh with us. Jesus, in conquering death by rising from the dead, is the promise of restoration that the martyrs have cried out for millennia.

At the end of the Luke reading today, where Jesus tells the tale of the king and the ten servants given money to invest, Jesus explains that the king, an analogy of God himself, said, “Now as for those enemies of mine who did not want me as their king, bring them here and slay them before me." There is that ominous hand of God, wielding a power against those who do not operate within the proper boundaries.

Luke reports that Jesus said no more after that. He simply turned, and proceeded on his journey up to Jerusalem. What was to happen there? Jesus was to be martyred by those who insisted upon their control of life. He was killed though he was innocent, by the evil ones who believed they held death in their hands. God allows death to play out, even when it required his own death.

Jesus, though, conquered death. He rose. Jesus fulfilled the hope of Eleazar, the mother and her sons, and every martyr before them, after them, and up to today, and until the end of time. We choose under whose power we will live. God’s, or his usurpers. 

All will be restored. We eat our turkey and give thanks, because the power over death which we will only need to temporary hold, has a restoration in mind that will turn feasts into the most amazing of life — unending and eternal.

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