Today’s Life-Line is:

I spurn with loathing your pilgrim feasts. I take no pleasure in your sacred ceremonies. When you bring me your whole offerings and your grass offerings I shall not accept them. Nor pay heed to your shared offerings of straw-fed beasts. Please spare me the sound of your songs. I shall not listen to the strumming of your lutes. Instead, let justice flow on like a river and righteousness like a never-failing torrent.

~ Amos 5:21 – 24

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This weekend I heard an interview of the Star Trek actor turned author turned activist, George Takei. He spoke about being taken from his home along with his family and brought to an Internment Camp during WWII. Like his parents who were born in California, Takei was born as a US citizen. Nevertheless, he was forced to live in the camp from age five to eight. He emphasized that they were not Japanese Internment Camps, as they are typically called, but American Internment Camps created by the American government, formalized in Order 9066, in the name of all American citizens. Curious word that word “all.”

Takei recounted how everyday he and the others who were interned would stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance ending with the too familiar words ” . . . with liberty and justice for all.” I wonder if over the years their inflection or conviction changed at the words “for all.” Like all those interned, when the Takei family were released after the war, they lost everything. That is, nothing that was their life before they were interned was ever given back to them. Imagine that, your own government seizing all your property, home, and possessions because you had the audacity to be Japanese. I think there’s a law against that. It’s called theft (and even a commandment forbidding it. It’s called stealing). It’s called shameful. It’s called injustice. The Japanese Americans were given $20 and put on a bus to wherever in the United States they wanted to go. I wonder if eight-year old George knew what the word generosity meant. Or irony or hypocrisy or righteousness.

Imagining that boy-child saying those words — liberty and justice for all — and then leaning them up against the reality of his daily life for three years is a hard thought to hold.

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Professional football began this weekend, America’s functional religion. And Takei’s story came to mind — the shameful biting irony of he and so many others saying those words as they were forced to live in camps bordered by barbed wire fences protected by armed guards in sentry towers in the US of A. Easy how “with liberty and justice for all” just rolls off the tongue for so many of us, for me. Maybe for you, too. But I’m guessing that today those words immediately take Takei back to when he was five or six or seven or eight and in that camp in Arkansas dutifully making the pledge with his hand over his heart as he stared out the window to the barbed fence that circled his people like a pressed down crown of thorns. I imagine they get caught in his throat if he’s ever in an arena or a stadium or at some civic ceremony where they sacramentalize the event with the Pledge of Allegiance and the ubiquitous honor guard or the proverbial flyover.

I wonder what the prophet Amos would have to say about these sacred ceremonies of ours, these holy days of obligation, and whether our God would accept the offerings of people standing with their hand over their heart — many of whom curse and accuse and some who make death threats when Colin Kaepernick and others have the audacity (the gall, the nerve, the irreverence or is it a heightened sense of irony or an acute awareness of injustice) to kneel as the flag is raised like the holy bread and chalice. Words either matter or they are just words. I think I can hear other words echoing: “Please spare me the sound of your songs. Let justice flow.”

I hear some people saying what is ironic is that Kaepernick, who makes millions of dollars, could be so ungrateful and disrespectful as to take a knee — as if a million dollar athlete can’t be grateful and deeply sympathetic toward the most vulnerable and violated in our country at the same time; as if an affluent athlete who has worked hard to achieve their success forfeits his or her right and responsibility to see, feel, and name injustice in a land where so few of us choke on the words “with liberty and justice for all.” I suspect Amos would be taking a knee, too. And taking abuse from those Kaepernick haters as he took abuse from the status quo of his time for his seeming irreverence, audacity, and stepping out of bounds.

So, friends, people of faith, I ask wouldn’t we be a better commonwealth if more American citizens were as offended by the injustice that Kaepernick and others were trying to draw people’s attention to as they were offended by players taking a knee during the Star Spangled Banner? I mean, what’s worse: taking a knee or taking lives. The misplaced righteous anger, reminds me of something Tony Campolo, the speaker, author, sociologist, pastor, social activist and passionate follower of Jesus, once said while giving a talk:

I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.

We can tell a lot about the prophet’s God who is offended by pro forma gestures and songs and calling it worship while all around them people suffer gross and daily injustices. So too, we can tell a lot about someone by what offends him or her and what doesn’t, by the words that get caught in our throat instead of rolling off our tongue.