“You Are Either Alive And Proud Or You Are Dead, And When You Are Dead, You Can’t Care Anyway.” - Stephen Biko

“Do not say that those who are killed in God’s cause are dead;
they are alive, though you do not realize it.”
Qur’an 2:154

Deep. 

Still deeper.

In most profound and hidden depths of both our souls is a nourishing awe, admiration, puzzlement, friendship, and appreciation of, for and with true and for-the-love-of-God-and-His-people heroes and martyrs.

By God’s grace, we’ve known some intimately. Others only through the printed word.

Shortly after midnight February 3, 1943, as it made its way across the North Atlantic from Newfoundland to an American base in Greenland, the converted luxury liner USS Dorchester, crowded to capacity, carrying 902 servicemen, merchant seamen and civilian workers, was torpedoed by a German submarine U2 (Unterseeboot).

While the initial blast killed scores of men and seriously wounded many more, many onboard panicked and still others sought desperately to get into lifeboats and escape the developing disaster. 

In the of the chaos that would – by fire, wounds or the freezing cold waters of the North Atlantic - claim 672 lives, four men calmed the frightened, tended to the wounded and guided the disoriented toward safety: Methodist Army Chaplain Lt. George Fox, Lt., Army Chaplain Rabbi Alexander Goode, Dutch Reformed minister Army Chaplain Lt. Clark Poling, Roman Catholic priest Army Chaplain Lt. John Washington.

In the panic, the chaplains reached topside, opened a storage locker and began distributing life jackets. When there were no more, the four simply gave theirs to the next men in line. “It was the finest thing I have seen or hope to see this side of heaven,” a survivor would later say.

“I could hear men crying, pleading, praying
and swearing. I could also hear the chaplains 
preaching courage to the men.
Their voices were probably the only things 
that kept me sane.
There was a deep explosion and a tremor in the water.
A chaplain’s voice was stopped 
in the middle of a sentence.”
USS Dorchester William Bednar

On January 18, 1961, Secretary of the Army Wilbur M. Brucker posthumously awarded the Four Chaplains’ Medal – also known as the Chaplain’s Medal of Honor and the Chaplain’s Medal for Heroism - to the next of kin of the Immortal Chaplains. Only four medals were struck and they will never be awarded again.

The Four Chaplains’ Medal

In 1969, medical student Stephen Biko founded an organization for South Africa’s Black students to combat the white minority government’s racist apartheid policies and promote Black identity. In 1972, a year before the white Afrikaner government banned him from politics, he helped organize the Black People’s Convention. Biko espoused the idea that “Blacks” referred not just to Bantu-speaking Africans but also to “Coloreds” and Indians. Careful to keep his movement independent of white liberals, he opposed anti-white hatred and had white friends. Biko campaigned for an end to apartheid and the transition of South Africa toward universal suffrage, believing that Black people needed to rid themselves of any sense of racial inferiority, an idea he expressed by popularizing the slogan “Black is Beautiful.”

Following the Soweto (Black “township”) uprising of 1976 and with the prospects of a national revolution becoming apparent, on August 18, 1977, the outspoken student and a fellow activist were arrested at a roadblock and held in Port Elzabeth. On September 11, Biko was moved to Pretoria Central Prison, Transvaal (now Gauteng), where he died on September 20. The then Minister of Justice and Police Jimmy Kruger claimed Biko died while on a hunger strike. However, investigations launched by three South African newspapers revealed that he had been assaulted before being transported to Pretoria. (Newspaper investigations revealed that Biko was the twentieth person to have died in South African prisons in the preceding eighteen months.)

Investigators and an autopsy (at which his family was present) revealed that, while in Elizabeth, he was beaten on the left side of his head by apartheid interrogators and sustained a brain hemorrhage. Following the assault and without any medical attention, he was placed in the back of a non-white police van while frothing at his mouth and made to endure a 700-mile-long journey before arriving at a state prison hospital for Blacks. He died on a massive brain hemorrhage on September 12, 1977.

Stephen Biko

“Hear, O Israel: Adonai is our God, Adonai is One!
Blessed is God's name;
His glorious kingdom is for ever and ever!
And you shall love Adonai your God
with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.”
The Shema Prayer

“And you shall love your fellow like yourself.
This is [the] great principle of the Torah.”
Rabbi Akiva

As with any saint, hero or martyr of more than two-thousand years ago, the hagiography (“biographies” that idealize their subjects) of Rabbi Akiva (or Akiba) (50 CE – 135 CE) shouldn’t be considered “history.” Nonetheless, amidst the romance, struggles, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-ism (although he certainly never wore boots), there’s certain unanimity. 

The descendant of converts to Judaism, Akiva was a poor and ignorant (emphasis on “ignorant” because that became the focal point of his story) forty-year-old shepherd tending the flocks of one of the wealthiest men in Jerusalem, when he caught the eye of Rachel, daughter of his employer. Sensing he had the ability to become a great scholar, she agreed to marry him – if he would study Torah. [Here’ just one point where the hagiography becomes fuzzy. Some accounts have him completely illiterate and learning the Hebrew alphabet with his son, often sharing the same writing tablet.] Off when Akiva – for twelve years – to study Torah. Rejected by his bride Manchewhen he returned with 12,000 followers, he resumed his studies – for another twelve years before Rachel accepted him. (On his second return, he is reported to have had 24,000 followers.)

When, in the First Century C.E., the occupying Roman force outlawed teaching Torah, Rabbi Akiva declared in a public lecture that a Jew could not survive without Torah any more than a fish could flourish out of water. An outright rebellion against Rome erupted in 132 C.E. With sieges, starvation, slaughters, and savagery, Emperor Hadrian put an end to the uprising during the summer of 136 C.E., but not before the execution of Akiva. 

The Jerusalem Talmud reports that when Akiva stood before Tineius Rufus, the Roman judge in Jerusalem, it was the time to recite the Shema prayer – another forbidden practice. Akiva recited the Shema with a smile. When Rufus questioned his smile Akiva replied that all his life he had read the verse, “And you shall love your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your possessions,” but was never able to fulfill the obligation to love God with all his soul – his life – until that moment. 

Tradition has it that Rufus ordered Akiva to be flayed alive with iron combs in Caesarea’s Hippodrome, where the Romans publicly executed people.

“He died with the word One” on his lips, the Talmud (Berachos 61b) says.

An artist rendering or Rabbi Akiva

Each year, the Anglican Church of South Africa, other churches in the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church in the United States honor Manche Masemola on February 4. She is one of ten 20th Century martyrs from around the world who are depicted in statues above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey, London. 

Born in a small South African village, she was attracted to the missionary Anglican Community of the Resurrection, despite the fact that her Pedi people, who still practiced a traditional religion, viewed the Christians with distrust. When her parents learned Masemola had begun attending classes in preparation for her baptism, they took her to a Sangoma - African healer, claiming she was bewitched. Because she refused to consume a traditional remedy that was supposed to drive away the evil spirit of her attraction to Christianity, her parents beat her and, ultimately, hid her clothes so she could no longer attend instructional classes at the Community of the Resurrection. “If they cut off my head, I will never leave my faith,” she was reported as saying. 

Scheduled to be baptized on Easter 1928, she predicted “I shall be baptized with my own blood.” On February 4, 1928 – two months before her planned baptism, her parents killed her, burying her beside a granite rock on a remote hillside. When her sister became ill and died sometime later, she was buried nearby. Their father planted some trees near the graves. [Their mother converted to Christianity in 1969.]

Manche Masemola

On June 3, 1886, thirty-two young men – most of them 15- to 30-years old and from the upper classes of Bugandan society, pages in the court of King Mwanga of Buganda, were burned to death on a single massive pyre on the execution grounds of Namugongo. The crime of these twenty-three Anglicans and twenty-two Roman Catholic youths? Insubordination. For refusing the homosexual advances of the king and refusing to greet him when he returned from a May hunting trip.  The next day, the king demanded the Christian youths renounce Christ. When none of them did, he pronounced the death sentences of many and ordered the castration of others. Jointly the Anglicans and Roman Catholics are honored as “proto-Martyrs” and commemorated in the Episcopal calendar on June 3.

A Staten Island native and often referred to as “The Grunts’ Padre” because of his dedication to new Marines, Father Vincent Capodanno was killed on September 4, 1967 during his second tour with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. Following hours of heavy fighting, Father Capodanno, already seriously injured, sighted and ran to the assistance of a wounded corpsman and the Marine he was assisting. Unarmed, Father Capodanno sustained 27 bullet wounds. Posthumously award the Medal of Honor, he is now honored by his Church as a “Servant of God” and his cause for sainthood is under review in Rome. [Nine chaplains, dating back to the Civil War, have been awarded the Medal of Honor.]

If you can show us how or why God deflected a bullet on July 14, 2024 but four US Army Chaplains died courageously and in kindness aboard the USS Dorchester,…

If you can explain why God deflected a bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania but 20 six- and seven-year-old kids and six faculty members were killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School, 49 people were butchered and 53 more were injured in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, and 19 children and two adults were murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas….

If you can help us understand the deaths of Charles Lawanga and his youthful companions on a funeral pyre in Uganda or Stephen Biko in South Africa or Rabbi Avika or Manche Masemola…

If you can help us understand why there are more than 58,000 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall but the Almighty somehow inflicted one man with bone spurs, making him medically ineligible for military service…

If you can show us where God is as state after state tries to find as many ways as possible to execute prisoners….

Then maybe we will believe “God deflected the bullet,” or “God sent His angel” or “God saved him because people were praying for him” or “God chose him.” 

But, until you can provide good explanations – other than deep Faith, absolute and wondrous kindness, and abundant courage – for the deaths of the Immortal Chaplains, Charles Lawanga and his Companions, Father Vincent Capodanno, Rabbi Akiva, Stephen Biko, and Manche Masemola, don’t tell us about God deflecting a bullet on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.

‘Cause we ain’t buyin’ that “God saved him” pious piffle.

“Sweet Nefertiti!” to say “God saved him” is – to continue quoting Colonel Sherman T. Potter [Google him, if your too young to recognize the name.] – “buffalo chips,” “Grade-A, 100% bull cookies,” and “pony pucks.”

As well as really bad theology.