Posts Tagged ‘Oscar Romero’

To act or not to act

January 23, 2016

Epiphany 3 -2-16

Luke 4:14-21

Marian Free

In the name of God who challenges us to build a world without poverty, injustice or oppression. Amen.

The Clergy Summer School usually has two guest speakers. This year our guests were a Professor of Physics from the University of Queensland – Ross McKenzie and an American who is passionate about the pastoral uses of social media, Joshua Case. I’ll share more about social media another time, but this morning I wanted to tell you something about the Parish from which Joshua comes – The Church of the Holy Innocents in Atlanta, Georgia.  From what I can gather, the parish is not too different from our own. It is Anglican and is situated in a middle-to-high income suburb. There are at least two differences between ourselves and Holy Innocents. One is that on a Sunday five hundred people regularly attend services.  Another is the social justice focus of that Parish.

As I understand it, Joshua was employed to assist the congregation discover how they could live into their name – Holy Innocents. This exploration led to a realisation that if their church were to honour the children slaughtered by Herod, they would need to identify and to side with the vulnerable in their own time and place. A number of initiatives have emerged from this starting point. For example, every year the church seeks and obtains the names of all children in the state who have been violently killed over the course of the year. The names of the children are recorded and once a year the church holds a twenty-four hour vigil during which the names of all the children are read aloud.

Children are not the only vulnerable members of society.  In Atlanta, as elsewhere, homeless people have created a tent city on vacant land. The local fire department has made it their mission to support the homeless with food and other necessities. Last week (when the temperatures were still between -1 and 10 degrees C) the local authorities moved in and bulldozed a section of the camp.  That same week, the Federal authorities shipped a number of Latinos – some who had arrived through the appropriate channels and some who had not – to a detention centre in another state. Most of the children detained attended the school associated with the Parish.

The Parish’s relationship with the members of the Fire Department and with the children attending the school means that these actions directly affect them and their mission. They must work out how to respond, knowing that taking a stand may well make them unpopular with others in the city, the state and even the nation.

In today’s gospel, Luke depicts Jesus reading from the book of Isaiah. The language is uncompromising: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” From Exodus to Malachi, the Old Testament records God’s preference for the poor and the marginalised and details God’s anger: “against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the alien, and do not fear the LORD of hosts” (Mal 3:5). “Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice” (Deut 27:19).

Even though the Bible is very clear about God’s expectations, many of us find social activists to be uncomfortable people and we tend to want to distance ourselves from those who challenge the status quo. There are a number of possible reasons for our disquiet – the words and actions of social activists can and often do bring them into conflict with the government and the law and we don’t want to be seen as law-breakers. Activists are uncomfortable people because their willingness to act and take risks can lead to our feeling that we are lacking in courage or determination or, worse, that we have no compassion or understanding for the situations in which some people find themselves.

Those who challenge the status quo are often made to pay for daring to name things as they see them, for standing for and with the oppressed. Michael Lapsley a New Zealander and a Franciscan received a letter bomb that robbed him of both hands and an eye because he dared to speak out against apartheid. Oscar Romero, an El Salvadorian bishop was shot at the altar for taking a stand behalf of the poor. Peter Greste an Australian journalist and his colleagues were arrested and jailed in appalling conditions for reporting the truth as they observed it in Egypt.

We should not be surprised at the crowds’ reaction to Jesus. Jesus’ claim that the words of scripture had been fulfilled in himself was not the source of their anger. Rather it was his interpretation of the words of Isaiah (at least this is N.T. Wright’s suggestion).  With the passage of time, these words and other OT texts had lost some of their sting. As a people who had been in exile or under foreign domination for the better part of 500 years the Jews had come to believe that the words of Isaiah spoke to their situation – they saw themselves as the poor, the oppressed and the imprisoned.  They believed that when God’s anointed came, he would to set them free. They had lost sight of their responsibility for the vulnerable among them.

In his words and in his actions, Jesus demonstrated his compassion for the outsider – the poor and the dispossessed. By claiming that the words of Isaiah were fulfilled in himself, Jesus was calling the people to return to their biblical roots, to revive a concern for the widow and the fatherless, the hired worker, the alien and the poor.  This made him an uncomfortable figure, someone whom they didn’t want to have around. In the first century, Jesus is interpreting words that were written some five hundred years previously. In the twenty first century, it is our task to make sense of the words for our own time and place.

What do we make of Jesus’ words? Do they make us anxious, uncomfortable or uncertain?  Are we tempted to push the uncomfortable Jesus away from us (over a convenient cliff)? Or do these words challenge us to consider how we should respond. Do they encourage us to ask: Whose are the voices that are not heard in our day? Who are the people who are longing to be set free?  Where are the marginalised and the oppressed?

What is our role as Christians in the world today? Are we meant to keep our hands clean and our heads down or does God demand that we take an interest in and demonstrate a concern for what is going on around us? Do we leave issues like domestic violence, homelessness and refugees to the secular world, or do we take a stand and, with Jesus, initiate God’s kingdom here on earth?

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Living Dangerously

February 28, 2015

Lent 2 – 2015

Mark 8:31-38

Marian Free

 

In the name of God who invites us to take risks, to live dangerously and to have fun. Amen.

Over the past week or so I have been reading an interesting book entitled: “Why Men Hate Church” by David Murrow. The book addresses the obvious – the fact that in most Christian denominations women outnumber men, often by a considerable number (something which is not entirely accounted for by the reality that, on the whole, men die at a younger age than women). Admittedly I have only had a cursory look at the book[1], but from what I have gleaned it is something of a “Men are from Mars, and Women are from Venus” sort of thesis. Murrow argues that men and women think differently, act differently and want different things. He suggests that even though until recently men dominated the leadership of the church; for the last 1300 – 1400 years, the church has been increasing feminised. Murrow contends that around the year 700 the church lost its edge. At that time, he claims, the church gave up the emphasis on struggle and sacrifice and replaced it with a call to passivity and weakness. The image of Jesus changed from someone who was strong and courageous to someone who was meek and submissive. This in turn, he suggests, has led vast numbers of men and some women to feel at best uncomfortable and at worst unwelcome in many churches.

Assuming Murrow’s thesis to be true, we can of course document exceptions to the rule. As ill-conceived as they were, the crusades provided an opportunity for displays of courage and self-sacrifice, as no doubt did the two world wars. Throughout the ages, Saints such as Joan of Arc, missionaries such as Graham Staines and his sons Phillip and Timothy, clergy such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Bishops such as Oscar Romero have been willing to take greats risks and lay down their lives for the faith.

By and large though, the institutional church has settled down, become a part of the surrounding landscape and played it safe. It could not be argued that we at St Augustine’s live dangerously or that we take risks that might cost us our place in the community, let alone cost us our lives. Murrow suggests that this is one of the reasons why some people do not come to church – they don’t want to be safe. They want to be dangerous. Risk-takers, fun-lovers and builders he claims, do not find enough in our liturgy or our community life that is challenging or that takes them to the edge and so they stay away.

I am not at all sure that I agree with Murrow’s overall argument (among other things he is writing from a North American perspective) but his book does provide some food for thought and leads to a number of questions. Have we created a kind of mono-culture which leaves some people feeling as though there is no place for them in the church? More importantly it forces us to ask – what are we really about? Have we forgotten that the gospel is all about living dangerously, not about building a secure and comfortable place in which we can now (and forever) feel at home? Worshipping in our beautiful churches, using a liturgy with roots that are ancient, gathering with our friends week by week, have we lost sight of the fact that the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head and that the early disciples were called away from all that was familiar and secure to a life in which almost nothing was certain except for uncertainty and risk. In our efforts to be part of the world around us, do we allow injustices to go unchallenged? In other words, are we really living gospel lives?

I suspect that we all suffer from a form of collective amnesia and that for the most part we put our efforts into keeping the institution of the church alive, rather than worrying about the survival of the gospel. That said, that model has served us well for centuries. As long as the community around us was predominantly Christian, the church has served the purpose of building up the community of faith. Through worship and prayer we have supported one another through difficult times and been challenged to grow in faith and faithfulness. Our faith has enabled many of us to take risks of sorts, to trust God when we have had to make difficult decisions or to step out in faith when we had no idea what the future held for us.

Times have changed. We can no longer assume that members of our local community hold the faith or that those who do will join our worshipping community. This being the case, how can we ensure the continuity of the gospel? How, in this changing world can we share with others this amazing gift of faith?

One answer is this – if people don’t come to us, we must go to them. We must ask those who do believe in Jesus Christ why they don’t join us. Is it because our culture and practice make them feel unwelcome? For those who do not believe we must explore new ways of making conversation, new ways of letting them into our secret. If the Christian church is to survive, we must be bold and courageous. We must seek out builders, risk-takers and those who are prepared to live dangerously and we must allow them to make us feel uncomfortable for a change. We must step out of our comfort zones and do things differently for a change.

Whether we like it or not, we must change or die. Or, perhaps as today’s gospel puts it, we must die to all that we are and all that we have known so that God’s purpose can be worked out through us. Jesus didn’t call us to be safe – anything but. His call to follow is an invitation to live on the edge, to let go of the past and to begin each day as if it were our first. We are not invited to be comfortable or complacent, but to be adventurous and daring, open to change and to challenge. We are only here because twenty centuries ago there were those who were brave enough to step out of their comfort zones and leave everything behind in order to answer Jesus’ call. Their courage and willingness to take risks ensured that the gospel message, not only survived but spread throughout the world?

In the twenty-first century, do we have the courage to answer the call? What are we prepared to leave behind to enter the future God is preparing for us?

[1] If you are interested, I suggest you read it for yourselves. Murrow, David. Why Men Hate Going to Church.

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