By Ian McRae
Given March 24, 2007 at St. Andrew’s Christian Church
Some years ago, I had the privilege of hearing Dom Helder Camara, then Archbishop of the diocese of Recife and Olinda in eastern Brazil. A man of the people, Dom Helder Camara always rode public transportation in Recife. He reports the following experience.
One day in Recife, he say down beside an eight year old boy riding the bus and asked him what he was doing. “I’m taking my ant for a ride,” replied the boy. And sure enough, he had a little stick in his hand and an ant was crawling up one side and down the other. So Dom Helder told him about his ants. Every day he would visit with his ants in the garden. He reached an agreement with them that he would put out honey every day if they would leave his flowers alone. Said Dom Helder: “The little boy didn’t think I was putting him on. It seemed like a perfectly normal conversation. So I decided to tell him about Aunt Claudia.
One day, I was talking with my aunts and noticed that Claudia was having trouble getting around. So I went into the house and got the first aid kit. I came out and found Claudia. I picked her up and turned her over. And she saw the sky for the first time! And all of a sudden, she forgot about her sore feet because she had a new vision of what life could be.”
Oscar Romero had an experience that was at once very similar yet totally different. The year was 1977, the place San Salvador. The aged Luis Chavez was completing his term as Archbishop. There was considerable debate about his successor. The wealthy landowners, conservative politicians and most church leaders were deeply bothered by that new understanding of the gospel called liberation theology and that new form of the church called base communities. They wanted a candidate who would discourage the leftward thrust of some rural parish priests and a few parishioners. Oscar Romero was their ideal candidate. While he had watched with interest as the reforms of the Second Vatican Council brought changes to the church, he was highly suspicious of what he saw as a radical endorsement of a non-capitalist economy and the practice of encouraging ordinary church members to interpret the scripture.
But within three weeks, the Archbishop had a new vision of what was going on in his country though it was far from Aunt Claudia’s first look at the sky. Not a view of the heavens but the death of a dear friend, the Jesuit Rutilio Grande, murdered for his justice seeking activities.
Most of you know the story of Oscar Romero. You have read James Brockman’s excellent biography, you have seen the movie. Some of you have visited the simple home where he lived. Some of you may even have known him personally. Within a few months of being appointed archbishop, he became a changed man. He added to his weekly radio broadcast what he called “hechos de la semana,” the news of the week. Those 1 1/2 hour broadcasts reached over 70% of rural Salvadoreans. In 1978, one year after being named Archbishop, he decided to keep a diary. The very first item on March 31, 1978 begins: “The most important meeting today was one we had with lawyers we had brought together to ask them for legal help with so many cases of abuses of human rights.”
How best to remember this man? How best to learn from him? How best to celebrate his life?
One is tempted to use just his own words. He wrote so widely and so well. That diary which covers only the last two years of his life runs to 536 pages – of small print! But to limit ourselves to his personal statements would be to deny a major point that he made. He insisted that he was interpreting the gospel for the El Salvador of his time and that our responsibility was to speak the Word for the situation in which we live. Here are his words. “The church can be the church only as long as it ¬ goes on being the body of Christ. Its mission will be authentic only so long as it is the mission of Jesus in the new situations, the new circumstances of history. . . it is the church’s duty in history to lend its voice to Christ so that he may speak, its feet so that he may walk in today’s world.”
Of the many values incarnate in the life of Oscar Romero, two seem to me to call for particular attention as we seek in our day to be followers of the Way. First, we must find how to stand over against the values of the dominant culture. Henri Nouen, another saint of the church, friend of the poor and of those troubled in body or in mind, states the matter well. “You are Christian only as long as you pose critical questions to the society you live in, as long as you emphasize the need of conversion both for yourself and for the world, as long as you in no way let yourself become established in the situation of the world, as long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is yet to come.”
To confront the dominant culture can be a dangerous and a lonely business. I was told of a minister who returned one summer to the University of Chicago Divinity School as part of his sabbatical. Married with children 10 and 8, it was fortunate that one of the professors was going to be away on leave and needed someone to stay in his Hyde Park house close to the university. Those are great three story homes and the two children slept in a large bedroom on the third floor. One night after the children were in bed, the parents were reading downstairs when one of those ferocious Chicago thunderstorms hit.
After a few moments, the father decided to go upstairs to see how the children were getting along. Just as he opened their bedroom door, a flash of lightning lit up the whole room and the thunder crashed. “Isn’t this wonderful,”, said the father, “can’t you just feel the presence of God up here.” The ten year old looked at him for a moment and then replied: “You can stay up here with God if you want, I’m going downstairs with mother where it’s safe.”
Oscar Romero like the rest of us wanted to play it safe, would have preferred it that way. But that is not an option for those who stand over against their dominant cultures.
Annie Dillard, surely one of the more stimulating writers of our time, graphically describes the condition of too many church members. “Why do people in churches seem like cheerful passengers on a package tour of the Absolute? On the whole I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible to the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? It is madness to wear hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someway and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”
Here are Romero’s words as he paraphrased scripture: “Those who would save their lives – that is those who want to get along, who don’t want commitments, who don’t want to get into problems, who want to stay outside of a situation that demands the involvement of us all – they will lose their lives.
What a terrible thing, to have lived quite comfortably, with no suffering, not getting involved in problems, quite tranquil, quite settled, with good connections politically, economically, socially, lacking nothing, having everything, They will lose their lives.” He broke with the culture in which he lived; we must do the same.
A second theme that shines through the life of Archbishop Romero is his concern for the poor. Here are his words: “A church that does not join the poor in order to speak out from the side of the poor against injustices committed against them is not the true church of Jesus Christ.” That is, for Romero, to stand with the poor becomes an essential criterion of what it means to be the church. What does that imply for us? Where do we start? Where do we stop? Millions in this richest country in human history have to choose between adequate food, a decent place to live, and desperately needed medical care. What do we make of a system that gives millions of dollars in bonuses to the already wealthy while the helping agencies have to stretch their budgets to meet the needs of a growing number of the truly needy. We label the undocumented poor “illegal aliens” and think that building a fence is the solution to the problem. The nations of the world call what is going on in Darfur “genocide” but do nothing about it. Will the list never stop!
The danger is that we move from indifference to concern to frustration that we cannot solve the problems. Here are his words: “We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that this enables us to do something, and to do it very well. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the ‘master’ builder and the worker. We are the ministers not the Messiah. We are the prophets of a future that is not our own.”
The Quaker, Harry Bonaro Overstreet puts the matter even more bluntly. “You say the little efforts that I make will do no good. They never will prevail to tip the scales when justice hangs in the balance. I don’t think I was ever sure that they would. But I am prejudicial beyond debate in favor of my right to choose which side shall feed the stubborn ounces of my weight.”
To paraphrase Hebrews 11, time would fail me to tell of Archbishop Romero’s life of prayer and bible study, his steady commitment to the church even while being rejected by so many of the church leaders, his pastoral care of his flock – his diary is called A Shepherd’s Diary, his skill as a preacher and a teacher.
My wife, Cynthia, was for many years the teacher of a pre-school that met in a church where we were members. One day, I called the home of one of her four year olds wanting to talk to the mother about some church business. The four year old answered the phone and when I said I wanted to speak to his mother, he politely asked “Who is calling?” Later his mother told me that he had turned to her and said “Someone on the phone is using Mrs. McCrae’s name.”
I was being accepted in that home because I came in the name of one who was trusted, who was loved.
We celebrate this night in the name of Oscar Romero. Here are his words: “Easter is itself the cry of victory. No one can quench the life that Christ has resurrected. Neither death nor all the banners of death and hatred raised against him and his church can prevail. He is the victorious one. Lent, thus, is the call to celebrate our redemption in that difficult combination of cross and victory.”
We go forth in the name of Jesus Christ. Here are his words: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has appointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Let it be so for us.
