"Resurrection Stories"

The Violence of Love

These are selections from the sermons of Archbishop Oscar Romero:

Let us not tire of preaching love;
It is the force that will overcome the world.
Let us not tire of preaching love.

Though we see that waves of violence
Succeed in drowning the fire of Christian love,
Love must win out; it is the only thing that can.

We have never preached violence,
except the violence of love …
the violence that we must each do to ourselves
to overcome our selfishness and such cruel inequalities among us.

The violence we preach
is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood,
the violence that wills
to beat weapons into sickles for work.

 

Sermon:

Consider resurrection: what is it for? What is resurrection in your life? Your flesh-and-blood life, I mean; your life here on earth.

The choir graced us this Easter morning with these lovely words: “My soul magnifies the lord” – words taken from the song of a peasant girl. She was the child of a people living under the oppression of Pax Romana, a peace enforced with violence. These words attributed to Mary in the Gospel of Luke go on to thank a God who keeps the promises God has made; a God who will topple the rulers from their thrones, scatter the proud with a mighty arm, fill up the hungry with good things, and send the rich away empty.

This was the beginning of the Jesus story, written 2,000 years ago by a people longing for deliverance. At the end, this same Mary, according to the gospel of Mark, watches from a hillside as her son Jesus is put to death by the imperial power – his execution ordered by those very rulers God was to have overturned. Two mornings later, another Mary, Mary Magdalene, runs away from the empty tomb, too frightened to tell anyone of the apparition she has seen.

What is resurrection in your life?

What are we to make of these stories, and of the strange teachings of this man Jesus? What to make of the belief that he is risen on this day, Easter; that his life represents a triumph over the forces of death?

We turn to a modern story to help us understand.

It comes to us from El Salvador, a land, like ancient Judea where Jesus lived, with sharp divisions between rich and poor. El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s was ruled by an oligarchical alliance of the military with rich plantation owners, who forced the campesinos, the peasant farmers, to work their coffee plantations.

Oscar Romero was an unlikely sort of hero. Bookish, introverted, conservative, frail. It would appear they picked him to be archbishop of San Salvador because he wouldn’t rock the boat. He seemed a good bet to continue the church hierarchy’s unspoken support for the landed gentry, to look the other way while the church, by its silence, sanctioned the virtual slavery of peasant farmers locked in a feudal system.

Romero had not been all that sympathetic to the new theology that was bubbling up from the village churches, a theology of liberation that sometimes embraced Marxist political thought and always put at the center a Christian mission to respond to the suffering of the poor.

Liberation theology has been in the news this week. White America has had the unusual opportunity to listen in to the theology of liberation as it is expressed in the Black church. Liberation theologies arise when a people have been marginalized and excluded. They are complex and powerful and cannot be understood by a sound bite on Fox News. These theologies always seem threatening to those who hold political and economic power, and it was no different in Romero’s El Salvador.

Romero began to embrace liberation theology after the first of his priests was murdered. Father Rutilio Grande was a friend of Romero’s who had supported the campesinos in organizing agricultural co-ops. Soon after Romero’s appointment as archbishop, Grande was gunned down in his car by para-military death squads. An old man and a young boy also died that day, taking bullets intended not only for Grande but to impose terror on the peasant community and its supporters. These killings were also a warning to the new archbishop: watch your step.

Instead, Romero began to stand up to the military. The people loved him; he became their voice, the voice of the voiceless. His courage gave them hope. His intention was to maintain his good relationships with the owning class; he was after all their pastor as much as he was shepherd to the campesinos. But his faith was leading him toward a rigorous practice that required him to treat everyone the same. Just as Jesus had sat down to eat with tax collectors and the despised of his society, Romero began to require the rich to baptize their children and attend mass alongside the peasants. For this they could not forgive him.

Romero preached in increasingly strong language against a spiritualized Christianity that saw salvation as something that came only after death. He came to believe, passionately, that it was the Christian imperative to save the people in their historical reality – in the here and now, in their bodies on this earth. He preached against a gospel “that doesn’t get involved at all in the world it must save.” He grew bolder. Three years after his appointment as archbishop, he sent a letter to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, asking him to end aid to the government of El Salvador. "Please Mr. President,” he wrote, “do not send weapons, they will be used for more repression against my people."

But it was the sermon that he preached 28 years ago today that sealed his fate. The killings had accelerated. In his Lenten sermon of March 23, 1980, Romero spoke directly to the military – who were also his flock. “Soldiers, do not obey your superiors when they order you to kill,” he told them; “You are killing your brothers and sisters. In the name of God, in the name of these suffering people, … I beg of you, I ask of you, I order you, in the name of God, stop the repression!” He was immediately denounced as a traitor and a Communist.

The very next day – Monday, March 24 – the assassins came. They gunned down Archbishop Romero as he celebrated a funeral mass for the mother of a friend. The repression that followed was even more horrific. By the time peace came 12 years later, more than 75,000 had been killed, in the name of freedom and democracy.

A few days before his death, Romero had said this to a reporter for a Mexican newspaper: “I have often been threatened with death. I must tell you, as a Christian, I do not believe in a death without resurrection. If am killed, I shall arise again in the Salvadoran people.”

To this day the people of El Salvador gather on March 24th to commemorate Romero’s death. But they do not weep. They come together in all their strength and power and courage and hope. They carry placards with the archbishop’s picture, and they chant the word, “Presente!” He is here. He is among us. He lives!

We live in a complicated world, in a country that has just marked the fifth anniversary of the start of a disastrous war. Like the world of Oscar Romero, ours is shaped by systems of domination and marred by their violence. We yearn to believe that we can find a way through, to love. What is resurrection, in a world like this?

On this Easter day, the Christian world commemorates the resurrection of one who taught the way of love; who entered Jerusalem in a procession mocking imperial power; who continued to defy authority that Holy Week with a series of political demonstrations, challenging the temple bosses who collaborated with Rome. The cross on which he died, often taken as a symbol of suffering and sacrifice, was also for the oppressed people of Judea a sign of resistance. You can’t stop us with your state terror tactics! Not even your cross can kill us! He lives!

And isn’t this how resurrection happens, in the lives we are given to live? In every life there are losses, small and large. In the face of the inevitable end of life, in the midst of suffering and terrible grief, there remains hope; there is born joy.

I’d like to tell you about a small resurrection in my own life. I was born into a family of Southern Presbyterians whose religion I began to experience as oppressive from what seems to me now a startlingly early age. My mother, Anne, loved her faith, loved the forms of the Christian year. Especially Easter. Every Easter morning, she would greet my brother and me with these words: “He is risen!” and we were required to say back, “He is risen indeed!” I loved my mother very much, but I found this ritual deeply embarrassing. Noncompliance was not an option, not unless I wanted to summon dark clouds of a bad mood on a day that was supposed to be filled with light and gladness.

My mother died quite young, on Easter Monday, as it happened, of her 60^th year. I was only 26, and did not know how to grieve. I was a sturdy Midwesterner; I figured this was what life was, after all. People you love, die. You cope. Her grandson Galen, my first child, was born a year and a half later.

One Easter morning, when he was about the age I was when I had begun to chafe under my mother’s rituals, I told him about her way to celebrate the holiday. I’m not sure why I did. But I told him that every Easter morning, my mother had said to me, “He is risen!” and I was supposed to say back, “He is risen indeed!” I didn’t tell him my feelings about it, just that we did it.

“Say it, then,” my son said brightly. I was a little embarrassed, but I complied: “He is risen,” I said, and without a trace of discomfort, my sweet Galen said back, “He is risen, indeed!” And my mother Anne, who never got to meet her grandson in the flesh, was there among us.

Why am I telling you this small story, alongside the much larger ones of peoples hungering for hope in an unjust world? When we pay attention to the everyday healing and resurrections in our personal stories, it gives us faith in life itself. This faith in turn gives us the courage that we need to stand with the people who will not let their hopes for justice die. There is a danger here, of course; we need to take care that we do not become those people always lost in their own joys and sorrows, who look to their religious communities for a spiritualized version of rebirth, divorced from the flesh-and-blood realities of poverty and violence in our time.

What is resurrection in your life? Whether resurrection is for you the springtime, whether it is political action in the company of others to end war or to bend the arc of history toward justice, whether it is the sweet consolation of a memory recast by a fresh heart in a new generation, or someone you’ve lost coming to you in a dream, or the joy of contemplating a caterpillar transformation – resurrection is here for the noticing. It is among us, even in the midst of sorrow. It lives.

If Unitarian Universalists have an Easter text, it is the powerful poem, “Manifesto,” by Wendell Berry, which urges us to “practice resurrection.” These are some of its lines:

Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come.

Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Swear allegiance to what is highest in your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it.

Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go.

Practice resurrection.

Today we remember a man – two men -- who died as individuals, and rose again – rise again anew, every day – in the hearts of their people. May you find the courage and the joy to allow for resurrection of the hope that is in your heart. May your soul magnify this resurrection, in your own life and in the lives of others. Remember the caterpillar; watch for the crocus. Presente! They live. Hope is risen; it is risen, indeed.

BENEDICTION

May you go forth into this day, filled with light and gladness. Let the springtime unfold to your senses and renew your faith in life. And when sorrows come, may you find the courage to allow for hope, and wait for a rebirth of joy. It will come. Amen and Happy Easter!

__________

Sermon Sources and Inspirations

Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach about Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem

James R. Brockman, ed., The Violence of Love: The Pastoral Wisdom of Oscar Romero, 1989 film directed by John Duigan for Paulist Pictures

Rev. Cecilia Kingman Miller, whom I heard preach on Oscar Romero at Easter at the Bay Area UU Christian Fellowship in 2002