(Un)Mute Yourself, Day 15
By: Tuhina Verma Rasche
Tags: Food Justice, Farmers, Advent, Christianity

What if sharing Good News to the Captives began at our tables with the foods we eat?

Some of you are listening to the voices of empire figuring out how to fix this. Folks do not see every slaughterhouse worker, farm worker, and food factory worker as a beloved child of God, created in the Imago Dei as a part of our Body, our family. Folks with no consideration for our animal kin. Folks like Bezos, Gates, Musk, and Biden who value profit over all, even maybe themselves. Folks who are hiding themselves behind the Progressive Green Deal while creating more climate refugees, funding more factory farms, still binding up and breaking hearts, all the while making you lust after what they’ve got. Like, Amazon warehouse workers are wearing diapers so that you can have your packages. Happy Advent, you Brood of Vipers!

We have desecrated the land by displacing native peoples and deforestation as so to grow more beef. Much of the forest and endangered wild species are being burned and razed so American beef can graze. Eating beef contributes to this demand.

We have sacrificed our siblings by demanding they remain essential workers in factory farms and slaughterhouses leading to their Covid outbreaks:

“Slaughterhouse workers around the globe are often members of underserved or marginalized communities. U.S. data indicates that, early in the pandemic, 87% of COVID-19 cases in slaughterhouse workers occurred among racial and ethnic minorities. In Germany, the majority of workers infected in an early outbreak were from Romania and Bulgaria. And after a cluster of cases was traced to one meatpacking plant in Australia, a worker told the Guardian Australia that they felt unable to question management policies or practices because of a language barrier. “I don’t speak English well,” said the employee. “I just stay silent and work…We just come to the factory and go home. Everything they tell us to do, we don’t say no.”

We have welcomed organic produce into our homes that was harvested by slave labor, during a pandemic, amidst wildfires. A local organic peach picked by slave labor isn’t “Sharing the Good News” even if you pray the sins off of it, or whatever. And more, we have asked them to bring us food (so that you can go to whole foods in your gentrified neighborhood or have a BIPOC person deliver food to you safely while you sit at home during this pandemic). No. I am not saying, “Go vegan.” That’s cute. But no. How can your eating practices better reflect the Good News to the Captives?

Photo from One Voice Radio

Take root. Go deep within yourselves. Look around. How are your neighbors really? Whose land have you settled? Take root, beloved. God is planting us in darkness that we might Rise and be crowned with flowers. Take root. We have been chained and have chained and caged the earth and animals and ourselves that we forgot how to take root. We think the weight of rooting down and growing up might be the same as the yoke of the oppressor and the empire. But that is not so.

And so beloved, on the 2020th year of our Lord Jesus we must choose now if we’ll be spreaders of this Good News or oppressors, captors, binders, and heartbreakers; namely superspreaders of more hate and this zoonotic disease.

The people of God are indeed defined, shaped, and transformed by this Good News — we exist for the sake of the oppressed, for the brokenhearted, the imprisoned, and mournful. Not the other way around. We share a call to liberate the whole earth, to eagerly proclaim the Shalom of God, and to love our neighbors well. But this pandemic is a shocking and painful reminder that we havelots of work to do before we can peacefully coexist in a world where all can live abundantly as creatures of God.

In what ways has your life — ministry and personal — aided or diminished the work of liberation for God’s incarcerated peoples, animals, and land?

Are we leading toward a life of abundant flourishing where all bodies have agency? Bodies of flesh and bodies of water and ice and stone and sand? Can we dare to welcome the abundance of life even to these? Are we feeding into the empire who continuously benefits from our sacrifice?

Beauty and sacred darkness are not a bad thing, seeds and Black people are rising. Will we center their leadership?