Sunday, November 6, 2022
/Proper 27
Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18; Psalm 149; Ephesians 1:11-23; Luke 6:20-31
The Rev. James M.L. Grace
In the Name of the God of the Living. Amen.
In the year 1864, the Cheyenne chief named Black Kettle, recalled the promise given to his people by the United States Army, which was that if they raised an American flag and a white surrender flag above their encampment, they would not come under attack by the United States. In that same year, Black Kettle and his tribe camped beside a bend in the Sand Creek River, which is in the Colorado plains.
The appearance of the United States flag and the white flag beneath it above the Sand Creek encampment was visible to John Chivington. Chivington was a Colonel in the United States Volunteers, a group that assisted the United States Army during wartime. He was also a Methodist preacher. On November 29, 1864, Colonel Chivington marched toward the Sand Creek encampment with 250 men of the 1st Colorado Cavalry. Ignoring both the American and white flags raised above the encampment, Chivington gave orders to attack.
Witnesses and historians now estimate that about 130 – 150 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho were killed in the attack, nearly all of them women, the elderly, and children. Later called the Sand Creek Massacre, this attack is among the most heinous in American Military History. Chivington was a murderer.
As a result of the westward movement of European American settlers, already established Native American societies experienced horrible convulsions of change, violence, deportation, disease, and desperation. Circumstances like these gave rise to an Indian spiritualism consisting of visions, prophecies, and rituals that allowed Native people to survive and flourish even under the grim circumstances they were facing.
Native American theologian Vine Deloria, of the Standing Rock Sioux, writes “[w]e might therefore expect American Indians to discern out of the chaos of their shattered lives the same kind of message and mission that inspired the Hebrew prophets.” In many cases these native visions imagined an intervention of supernatural forces that would drive away European settlers and restore their old tribal ways of life. Manifest Destiny had a different agenda.
Today we hear from one of the great Hebrew prophets, Daniel, like the great First Nation leaders who would follow him centuries later, Daniel also had powerful visions. During the time of Daniel, the prophet, visions were a powerful form of communication for broken, subordinated people, like the Hebrew people. Daniel’s vision was of four great beasts coming out of the sea, and he is told by an angel that the beasts in his vision represent four kings or worldly powers coming out of the earth. The angel also informs Daniel that the four kingdoms, or beasts, will be conquered by God, and God’s kingdom will be everlasting.
This is the promise of All Saints’ Day. Today we proclaim, boldly, that God has already overcome the world and its brokenness and restored the dead to life. That is the grand vision of Daniel – that all kingdoms and governments fall, save one, the only one that matters: God’s kingdom – where justice, truth, and redemption are all possible, through God’s mercy. The power of All Saints, which we honor today, is that those who deserve heaven, and those who deserve hell, are somehow joined together through God’s mercy and grace. In a mystery understood only to God, not to us, all people become saints, and in God’s kingdom, Black Kettle and Colonel James Chivington are reconciled. AMEN.