This past Sunday in my sermon I quoted Oscar Romero and many of you have asked for a copy of it…Here it is:
“The church is obliged by its evangelical mission to demand structural changes that favor the reign of God and a more just and brotherly (sisterly) way of life. Unjust social structures are the roots of all violence and disturbances. … Those who benefit from obsolete structures react selfishly to any kind of change.”
Oscar Romero was a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church in El Salvador during its brutal civil war that began in the late nineteen seventies. Romero spoke out publicly against the oppressive tactics of the ruling military junta knowing that he would pay dire consequences. Sure enough at a Sunday mass, while he was celebrating, assassins with automatic weopons entered the cathedral and gunned him down, drowning the frontal and the reredos with blood.The frontal was burned with his body, but the blood on the rear wall has been preserved for all to see to this day. Last Thursday was the thirty first anniversary of his martyrdom.
Romero was a part of a theological movement which began in Central and South America in the early nineteen fifties called Liberation Theology. This is of course an oversimplification, but it held to two chief tenets: First, that sin the way scripture speaks of sin, is structural, embedded in the status quo protected and guarded by the powerful; much less important are our personal sins; much more important were the unjust structures that demean and oppress societies, not just persons…an insidious corruption that almost silently makes its home among the powers and principalities of our world….and second, that salvation is structural as well….that salvation is first and foremost concerned with the liberation of the human community from the structural sin of the world….”called to freedom” was their mantra. In this awareness we discover that salvation isn’t personal but intimately connected to the world around us….If there are those suffering from indignity in any part of the biosphere we call earth then our own salvation is incomplete, compromised. Salvation then is the life of the Spirit among people of conscience and faith that would call out the sinful structures of our world and seek imaginatively and peaceably to set them right… A lifelong vocation to say the least. Salvation not something to possess, but work to do.
Of course this theological paradigm deeply divided the Roman Catholic Church. Some Liberation Theologians supported Marxist regimes as protest against first world hegemony. Some liberation theologians who were priests were deposed and excommunicated. The only way Liberation Theology kept its voice alive was through the tactful support of Pope John 23rd….who coined the phrase that God’s first preference in the plan of salvation is for the poor….poverty in the myriad ways poverty is manifest.
Perhaps the greatest value of Liberation theology is that it speaks of a God passionately active in our world…a God incarnate with God’s people in practice of an enlightened faith. It stands against the neo-deism of the twentieth century that cloistered, imprisoned God in the heavens leaving humankind to its own devices….a century in which there was unprecedented violence and the accelerating desecration of the planet….We would do well to heed the Liberation Theologians’ call….that we are called to freedom….not just ours, but the freedom of all, because Jesus’ saving work is not complete until all are saved….until all are free at last.
Two words jump out: justice and freedom. I recently read a Wall Street Journal interview with Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703712504576234601480205330.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop. He pointed out that in Arabic, which like Hebrew and Aramaic is a Semitic language, the word for “freedom” means “not a slave.” In other words, the Arabic word for freedom, unlike English, has no political connotation, particularly the way we think of it in the US as meaning “rights.” According to Lewis, the closest approximation in Arabic to the political concept of freedom in the English-speaking world is the word ‘adl, translated “justice” in English. So justice is freedom in Arabic. What about her sister tongues Hebrew and Aramaic, the language of Jesus? Could it be that the liberation theology preached by Romero and others more closely aligns with the ancient Semitic notion that justice is freedom? And if so, then what is the incarnational community to do in a world defined by hyperindividualism, mass consumption, the centralization of political and economic power, media consolidation, religious hucksterism, and moral insouciance? In other words, the world of empire?
Amen, Pete! Well said!