The King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.   ~2 Maccabees 7.9b

“What I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco—is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.” ~ James Baldwin  A Report From Occupied Territory)

Today, on the liturgical caldendar of the Anglican Church, is the commemoration of the Martyrs of Lyons - St. Blandina and her companions. It is not a particularly well-recognized commemoration, perhaps, in part, because the Church does not boast the blood of her saints quite as fervently as she sometimes has. Then, too, boasting the blood of saints during the time in which the church was the glove that covered the imperial fist of the state was a sordid affair. Too often, we have forgotten that the blood of the saints is precious in the sight of the Lord. We have become, as a church and as a society, squeamish about blood, and like Cain we try to bury it where we can't see it. If I don't know about it - if I can feign innocence - then maybe I can carry on with my simple, ignorant faith. It is no accident that Cain's name means "to acquire" and his drive to acquire God's blessings ended with him cruelly snuffing out his brother's dreams of life. 

Their blood cries out from the ground; and it is time for the church to remember that the blood of the saints is precious. It is time because that perfect storm that, as James Baldwin said, is a surefire formula for cruelty, is upon us. Lawlessness has been, and is being, enshrined into the legal judicial systems of our world; and a powerful empire breathes out violence and threats against its people. We may have much to learn from a second-century enslaved woman before the day is over. We may learn, at least, the fortitude of moral leadership; a quality lacking in many of our political leaders today. 

Blandina was a young woman in the town of Lyons in the summer of 177. She was a slave, and she was a Christian. Christians of the Gallic towns of Lyons and Vienne were the targets of xenophobic prejudice, as many of them were immigrants from Asia Minor. (https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/martyrdom.html) In the summer of 177 this prejudice exploded into a violent rampage against the Christians. The rampage was given the official stamp of approval when Pothinus, the bishop of that region, was arrested and brutalized. Others were arrested and beheaded, while still others faced wild beasts and torture in the arena. Blandiwas the last to die, and those who survived the slaughter commended her saying, "The blessed Blandina was last of all, and like a noble mother encouraging her children, she sent them before her in triumph to the King." (For All the Saints, 184) 

The arenas of ancient Rome were theatres of horror; more than the wild beasts they fed an appetite for destruction among their spectators. Their intent, of course, was to impress and cow people into submission through the cruel display of imperially sanctioned violence. The emperors were aware, at least since the days of Spartacus, that arming gladiators was a dangerous game, as the gladiators could potentially revolt. It was a risk they were willing to accept, they had, after all, defeated Spartacus. What the Roman authorities could not envision, though, was the great subversive power of the Christian martyrs. Suffering was interpreted, by these martyrs, as a participation in the suffering of Christ, and therefore a badge of honour. The humiliation that would normally attend these spectacles of death was rendered ineffective by the way these martyrs gloried in their own death. They died in the promise of resurrection to new life, and in the knowledge of having kept faith. In the eyes of the state they were a criminal, subhuman element. They refused to accept this title, knowing that they were the servants of the true authority; the noble army of witnesses (martyrs.) 

Today, in Canada, in the United States, and around the world, we need an army of witnesses, and we have them. George Floyd is dead, and his death was unspeakably cruel, and have seen it. It was an act of monstrous, unspeakable cruelty and it was in no way new, in no way unprecedented, in no way uncommon. It was precisely of this occurrence, of an occurrence like this, of which Truman Nelson wrote in his 1964 account of the case of the Harlem Six The Torture of Mothers. "How can I make you believe this? This is what is blocking the long outcry in my throat, impacting the anger and frustration until I too become dumb and sick with the gorge and glut of my own indigestible fury. Even keeping my voice down, even speaking to you in a whisper, my voice halts under the weight of this monstrous wrong." (Truman Nelson, The Torture of Mothers, 1) 

Dr. Cornel West, in a recent interview with Anderson Cooper, says that we are "witnessing America as a failed social experiment ... The history of black people in America has been, looking at America's failure." We are living, today, at a moment when there is a neo-fascist thug inhabiting the white house. There is a crisis of the legitimacy of authority in the most powerful, most weaponized nation in the world. Since the publication Seymour Hersh's 2004 article and photographs the Torture at Abu Ghraib, and the failure of that publication to unseat the architects of the torture, we have witnessed an increasing normalization of torture in American politics and media. The trajectory from the Bush administration through Obama led to the erosion of laws protecting human decency to the point where, as Jeffrey St. Clair writes, "With nothing to restrain him, Trump was free to turn torture and murder into political spectacle. (Jeffrey St. Clair, "A Few Good Sadists." St. Clair refers, among other things, to Trump's decision to pardon Edward Gallagher. 

We are at a dangerous point in history, but we have been here before. What we need are people who are willing to tell the truth, to bear witness to what is really going on in the world, and to refuse the spin of imperially driven power games. As a church, we need to recall the fearlessness and love of our youth. St.Blandina stands in our history, as a mother to our passion to follow in the footsteps of Christ; to love the downtrodden people that he loved, to challenge the powers and principalities of death and ignorance in all their forms knowing, without a shadow of a doubt, that to stand against hatred, and racism, and brutality - to stand against cruelty is to stand on the side of the eternal law and life of the King of the Universe.