Heretics & Heroes

Way back in history, those precious people would think some of the most unthinkable thoughts and do the most outlandish things to earn that combo category of heretic and hero. My early heretical heroes were Job, Jesus and Joan.

Job was considered outside the pale of faith by his three pietistic friends who tried to convince and convict him that his past sins had lead him to the god-awful predicaments of what was left of his miserable life. They were in effect trying to tell Job to “get right with God” or “come to Jesus”, except there was no Jesus yet.

When Jesus finally arrived, even in such a miraculous fashion, it didn’t take too long for the religiously right people to label him and his heretical ways so off the chart to eventually lead to his death as a punishment by the state for his outlandish thoughts and deeds; like healing the sick people… on the Sabbath…for God’s sake!

In the fifteenth century Joan of Arc pushed the envelope in her victorious quest to lead a French army to rescue Orleans from the English during the Hundreds Year War. She was caught and turned over to the English forces who convicted her of witchcraft, relapsed heresy [a capital offense],and cross-dressing, which was also considered a form of heresy. She was burned at the stake in 1431, and according to holy rumors, St. Peter greeted her at the pearly gates with the exclamation “well done!” She was posthumously acquitted, and the Roman Catholic Church made her a saint in 1920.

Galileo Galilei came along about a century after the bonfire of Saint Joan.  You know the story…the moons of Jupiter led him to ultimately surmise that the earth was not the center of anything in particular.  The Church of the Almighty Answers, of course could not abide such a thing.  During Galileo’s trial, Cardinal Bellarmine put it like this:  “To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not borne of a virgin.”  Galileo remained under house arrest until his death. Three hundred and fifty years later, in 1992, the Pope acknowledged that the Church had erred in condemning Galileo for asserting that the Earth revolves around the Sun. 

The late congressman John Lewis was one hell of a hero in my book. I was enthralled by his honest courage to fight against the odds to make this nation live up to its founding credo. He got into a lot of “good trouble” in his day and came near death several times. He and his cohorts were taunted targets of every sort of hate and called by every name under the sun, like “anarchists”, “agitators” and “godless communists”. For all practical purposes, they were heretics.

Yet Lewis and his kind came as close to living out the Gospel Truth than many of the Christians who were casting all sorts of aspersions on black lives and trying to keep them from mattering. Trying to prevent them from voting or attending white folks’ worship. On that road out of Selma, they were marching to Zion as much as they were heading toward Montgomery. While considered persona non grata in his earlier days, John Lewis put his flesh and blood — his heart and soul — on the line, again and again, to bring the sacred words of “America the Beautiful” to full fruition: “O beautiful for heroes proved/ In liberating strife,/ Who more than self their country love/ And mercy more than life.“