Doubting Thomas, Second Sunday of Easter, Year A, 2014, The Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith

“What would happen if they found the body?” 
In these Easter days, it’s a question by outside observers of Christianity and by many Christians themselves. People respond in different ways.
There are the literalists, like Thomas in today’s gospel. “Unless I can put my finger in the wounds, I will not believe.” For many Christians, if the resurrection of Jesus is not literally a physical event, it’s a deal-breaker. If they found the body, they’d be outta here.
This is true for many modern-day Westerners: If you can’t verify something as a physical fact in a lab, or with the kind of evidence that would satisfy a court of law, then, for all practical purposes, it doesn’t exist, it didn’t happen. This is sense knowledge, and it’s what many Westerners use to determine what they count as real.
There are others who see the resurrection as a spiritual event, Christ becoming not physically present as he was before his death, but present in a whole new way, even more powerfully present than when he walked the roads of Palestine. This approach uses spiritual knowledge, the kind of knowledge that many here in the West regard as too subtle and evasive.
The fact is, we’ll never know exactly what happened in the tomb of Jesus. Whatever happened inside that tomb is between Jesus and God. Only they know what happened.
No living human being saw what happened inside that tomb, there was no video camera inside the tomb.
All we have are the stories of our spiritual ancestors who came to the tomb after-the-fact. Two of them saw neatly folded clothes. One of them saw angels. 
Most of the disciples saw nothing at all because they were still in bed that morning, but as it turned out that did not matter because the empty tomb was not the point. 
As Barbara Brown Taylor writes:

[Jesus] could have stayed put, I guess, sitting there all pink and healthy between the two piles of clothes so that everyone could come in and see him, but that is not what he did.  He had outgrown his tomb, which was too small a focus for the resurrection. The risen one had people to see and things to do.

There were
Frightened and disillusioned disciples locked behind closed doors to see and forgive and strengthen

• A grieving Mary Magdalene to commission as the apostle to the apostles
• Weary travelers to Emmaus who needed to hear as though for the first time the ancient stories and to break bread with him
• A doubting Thomas who needed a little reassurance

The story of Christ’s resurrection is about more than the miraculous resuscitation of a corpse. It’s about a deeper miracle within the first disciples.
Every time he came to his friends they became stronger, wiser, kinder, more daring. Every time he came to them, they became more like him. This is the miracle that clinches the resurrection.
The proof we have for the resurrection has nothing to do with what happened in the empty tomb but rather in the stories our spiritual ancestors gave us about what happened to them when they ran into him. What happened in the tomb was entirely between Jesus and God. For the rest of us, Easter began the moment the gardener said, "Mary!", called her by her name, and she knew who he was. That is where the miracle happened and goes on happening -- not in the tomb but in the encounter with the living Lord.
It’s through the stories our spiritual ancestors gave us that we encounter the risen Lord. In fact, John says this is the entire reason he wrote his gospel, handed on the stories, so that through them we, too, could meet the risen Lord, come to faith, have life.
Elie Wiesel speaks of the old rabbi who, when he saw misfortune threatening the Jews... 

it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted. Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer." And again the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: "I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient." It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished.

Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient.

"God made man," Wiesel concludes, "because he loves stories."
For us followers of Jesus, it’s through the stories our ancestors gave us that we, like them, experience the true miracle of resurrection, an encounter with the risen Jesus.
But not just their stories. We have our own stories as well.

• Of going through cancer and managing to take the next step knowing that Someone has gone before you, has fully shared your fear and pain, and will not leave you to face your pain alone
• Of struggling with an addiction, and finding Jesus at your side giving you the healing and forgiveness and hope to take the next step toward recovery
• Immigrant families standing up to injustice and racial hatred because they believe that Jesus is with them each step of the way, giving them courage to speak out

It is in our stories that we draw close to the risen Lord--stories about how we ourselves have met and been transformed by this resurrected Jesus, made more alive, stronger, kinder.
In the next few weeks, as we did last year, we’ll have the chance to gather in small groups to hear each others’ stories and to share our own.
This year our focus will be different. We’ll be reflecting on our baptisms.
Baptism is the moment that our stories were joined with those of Jesus and of the millions of his followers down through the centuries. We’ll have a chance to reflect on 
what our baptismal vows mean for each of us at this moment in our lives, 
the challenges we have faced in deciding to make and renew those vows and to live them out.
These small-group sessions will be a chance to mine your own life experiences, comb through your stories to see and savor where that risen Lord has made his appearance in your own life.
Because whether you recognized him or not, the risen Jesus has appeared in your life. It’s a fact. Guaranteed. These story-sharings will be a chance to recognize and savor how he has shown up for each of us.
In the end, our stories--those of our spiritual ancestors and our own--are the evidence we can offer those who ask us how we can possibly believe. We believe because we have found, to our surprise, that we are not alone. Because we never know where the risen Jesus will turn up next. 
It was true for the women who came to the tomb, for the disciples locked behind closed doors in fear, for Thomas, and for you and me.

Easter Vigil 2014, Matthew 28:1-10, The Rev'd Dr. Richard Smith

Do you like the special effects in this gospel story? As the two women arrive at the tomb looking for Jesus, an angel appears out nowhere. He’s like a bolt of lightning. As this messenger descends, the earth shudders beneath their feet. Single-handedly he rolls back the huge stone, then sits on it as though it were his throne. The men standing guard at the tomb take one look at him and pass out.

And then, the angel turns his gaze on the women and says "Don't be afraid".

Say what? You might call this kind of advice counterintuitive. Everything about this messenger is meant to overwhelm, and we humans are after all programmed to feel at risk from what is overwhelming.

But in this case, things are different. Because what overwhelms is grace, a love that is stronger than death. This messenger is at their service in their quest to find Jesus.

“Do not be afraid”, he says, as he sends them off in a new direction, away from the tomb, this place of death--”He is not here”--to Galilee. "There you will find him."

Galilee is the place where Jesus first called them to follow him, where he touched untouchable lepers, dined with whores and tax collectors, railed against the pharisees, shared bread with hungry crowds, and played with the kids. Galilee. Jesus knew well its dusty roads and fragrant fields.

And in this moment, after all that has just happened to him in Jerusalem--after his trial and condemnation, the abandonment by his friends, his torture and crucifixion, his death and burial--now after all of that, in this moment of resurrection, Jesus is going back. Back to Galilee.

The story begins again, but now with a new clarity about where it all leads. His mission continues, but now with a new conviction
that life is stronger than death
that loving with all your heart, with all its joy and struggles, really is worth it.

If you want to draw close to this risen Jesus, the angel tells the women, go to where his mission is and join him there--where people are fed, and violence is overcome with love, and outcasts are welcomed, and tears are wiped away. That is where you will find him.

The women move from sadness and fear to joy and a swashbuckling sense of purpose. They move
from Jerusalem where they buried him
to Galilee where they now join him in his great work.

Thais great work continues to this day right here in our own Galilee--in this little parish, in this neighborhood with all its terrible beauty, in our handing out fresh veggies and bread in our food pantry, in our nightwalks to end the violence in our neighborhood, our vigils to end the war, our working for a dignified future for our elders, and efforts to stop the unjust deportations that tear apart immigrant families…

...and in a trillion other ways great and small that we each do as individuals among our friends and acquaintances, in our homes and workplaces.

Here, in all of this, the risen Christ moves among us, inviting us to join him more and more closely in his great work.

In a moment, we will approach the font to renew our baptismal vows. Like the women in this evening’s gospel, we vow to join in the mission of Jesus right here in our own Galilee. This is how we draw close to him, living out our baptismal vows by joining him in this great work, becoming his heart and hands and feet right here.

The beat poet, James Broughton, has a wonderful way of describing this kind of adventure. He calls it "honeymooning with Big Joy," Let me close with his poem that he appropriately names “Easter Exsultet”.

Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!

Yes! On this great day, everything transforms. From this night forward, we honeymoon with Big Joy.

Good Friday Sermon, Dr. Rebecca Gordon

It’s often said that every preacher really has only one sermon in her; she just finds different ways of giving that one sermon over and over. I think that’s probably true of me. (In fact, I’ll even admit to a little actual recycling in this one.) My one sermon is about the sacrament – the thing that has been made holy— which we enact in the Eucharist, and about the pain and death at the center of that sacrament, and about how we recognize the Body of Christ there.

The Eucharist is the center of my week, like the narrow neck of an hourglass. In the best times, my daily life leads up to and flows out of the Eucharist. I think this is probably true for many people at Saint John’s, and indeed for many Christians engaged in sacramental forms of worship. If the Eucharist is the center of our worship and our week, then the cross lies at the center of the Eucharist. Everything we do in our worship flows into and out of the cross. Tonight I invite you to consider the idea that it could be the same with everything we do as Christians in the world.

We often speak of the cross on which Jesus was executed as “holy.” In Spanish, it’s called “Santa Cruz,” like Santa Cruz, the name of our neighboring city about 60 miles south of here. Episcopalians even observe a Feast of the Holy Cross. The very name of this feast day raises a question: How can we call the cross — the instrument on which Jesus was tortured and murdered — holy? It’s like calling a CIA interrogation site holy; like calling the torture cells at Guantánamo Bay holy; like calling a gallows, a guillotine, a gas chamber holy. How can we do that? To answer this question is to enter into a place that is beyond words, to enter into a mystery. Words can only lead us to the threshold; we each have to choose to step across it. So tonight, this Good Friday, I will try to use my poor words to invite you into a wordless mystery.

What kind of mystery is this? To begin with, it is the mystery of a living God who is willing always and eternally to know what it is “to live and die as one of us.” It is the mystery of a Creator who knows what it is to be a creature – to wake on a soft spring morning and smell the new plants pushing through the earth; to feel the pleasure of clean clothes on a clean body, to take that first sip of coffee, that first bite of toast, and feel the sweet and salty mix of jam and butter run down your chin, to look across the table and see other creatures whom you love, perhaps to remember last night’s sweaty crush of desire and satisfaction in the arms of some other creature. It is the mystery of a God who knows what it is to stand at night in stunned awe beneath an endless expanse of stars, galaxy upon galaxy, universe upon universe. It is the mystery of a God who falls in love with ordinary life – and who, like any living creature – wants desperately to hold onto it.

The God who cries out, “Abba, Father, let this cup pass from me…” But there is more to creaturehood than pleasure and ecstatic joy. Tonight we have chanted the whole of that great psalm, number 22, whose first line we are told in the gospel of Mathew Jesus himself cried out from the cross, “Eli, eli, lama sabachthani? – My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The mystery of the holy cross is also the mystery of the God who knows what suffering is, who knows what it is to be abandoned, to be left alone with the torturer, the God who has cried out with the psalmist: “I am poured out like water; all my bones are out of joint; my heart within my breast is melting

Good Friday is one part of the mystery of incarnation. Each year during Holy Week, we celebrate two parts of that mystery, Christ’s crucifixion and Christ’s resurrection, Good Friday and Easter. I’ll come to Easter in a moment. For now though, let us stay in Good Friday. In the practice of many poor Christian communities around the world, Good Friday, not Easter, is the most important day of Holy Week. Folks in these communities recognize the Body of Christ in the One who accompanies them in their struggles. In San Antonio, Texas, for example, the Latino community re-enacts Jesus’ passion, with far more truth than any Mel Gibson movie.

Who are these Good Friday people? They are the immigrant men who gather on street corners hoping for work. They are the nannies who must leave their own children to take care of the children of other people. They are the women, men, and children who came together yesterday at St. John’s to demand an end to deportations. They are the mothers in this and other countries from whom the Great Recession has taken their jobs, who must face their children who will not stop crying from hunger. We are all Good Friday people, those of us who lie awake in that awful time between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., when physical pain or gnawing fear are often at their worst, and sleep just won’t come. When will it stop hurting? Will it ever stop? Will I lose my job? My home? My lover? My children? My mother? My life?

To enter into the mystery of the cross is to know somehow that God asks these questions with us, that God also knows what it is to be tortured, what it is to find oneself in that place where all of time and space shrink down to the an eternal now of speechless pain and separation. Many of you know that I have spent some years now working on the problem of literal torture, particularly institutionalized state torture. One thing I have learned is that torture has almost nothing to do with gathering what its proponents like to call “actionable intelligence.” Torture is about destroying social bodies by attacking the minds and bodies of the people who make up those bodies. This is what the Roman state and its upper class collaborators tried to do to Jesus and the people with him. This is what our own state continues to do to this day, in secret places around the world, and in our own prisons. When we celebrate Good Friday, we remember the God who is there in every prison cell.

Good Friday commemorates that time – 2000 years ago and yet always now -- when the God who loved life as much as we do experienced – and continues to experience – what it is for a creature to suffer and die. Good Friday is that eternal time when we recognize the God who shares our pain. Recognizing the Christ in our own pain does not take the pain away. The mystery is that sometimes this recognition transforms our experience of that pain, so that somehow we are not alone with it.

In a few minutes, we will have the opportunity to venerate – to honor – a model of Jesus’s cross, to testify to its holy nature. I want to be very clear here: what is holy about the cross is not fear, pain, and torture. There is nothing good or holy about human beings tormenting one another, or about a state that makes such torment an institution, an organized practice. What is holy is the body of Christ that suffers. What is holy is our ability to recognize that body in our own suffering and the suffering of others. When you touch that wood, I invite you to recognize the body of Christ – which is us.

In a sense, every Sunday liturgy has a little “Good Friday” inside it, and a little Easter. Our Anglican liturgical form helps us to experience the central reality of the cross with our minds, hearts and bodies, as each Sunday we retell our story. “On the night before he was handed over to suffering and death…” runs the prayer of consecration.

There at the center of the story stands the holy cross, the sign of the One who died in pain and loneliness – tortured to death for choosing the side of the poor and the unwanted, the crazy ones, the drunks and the drug addicts. It is God’s choosing God’s self-offering, that takes the cross, an instrument of torture, and makes it something holy – makes it the symbol with which we Christians are marked, as we were marked almost 40 days ago, on Ash Wednesday.

Then, in the midst of the prayer of consecration, we “confess the mystery of faith: Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.” Which brings us finally to Easter. Tonight, through the Eucharist we participate in death, but we also participate in resurrection and in the promise of the reign of God, which is both with us now and still to come. When we recognize ourselves as the Body of Christ we create solidarity with each other, with all humanity, with all creation, which is the only context in which death and suffering can have any meaning, can be redeemed.

We participate in a physical way—eating and drinking with our own bodies—in the Body of Christ, both crucified and resurrected. But we truly become the resurrected body only when we make the Eucharist real beyond the altar table, in the world. That is why one of our Eucharistic prayers says, “Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.” A truly great preacher, St. Augustine, said it this way: “You are the Body of Christ: that is to say, in you and through you the method and work of the incarnation must go forward. You are to be taken, you are to be consecrated, broken and distributed, that you may become the means of grace and vehicles of eternal love.”

And that is why on most days our liturgy ends with a dismissal. It is the shortest part of the service, but in some ways the most important. For here we ask God “send us out to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.”

Tonight, we are not dismissed; until Easter, we remain caught between death and resurrection. But we leave tonight secure in the knowledge that Easter does come; that, in the words of another psalm, “weeping endures for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”

So tonight, as you leave this place, remember that you leave it as a faithful witness to the mystery in which we ourselves become the body of Christ, “consecrated, broken, and distributed,” that we ourselves are called to become “the means of grace and vehicles of eternal love.”

Amen

Palm Sunday, Year A, 2014, The Rev'd Robert Cromey

We contemplate Jesus’ death. We think of our own death.

We march toward Good Friday. All the Biblical readings move us to think about the death of Jesus and own death and the death of those whom we love.

Few of us can dwell very long on death. Our minds drift to other things very soon.

The Christian Church is one of the few communities that regularly teach about death Palm Sunday and Good Friday come around every single year, like it or not.

In the first parish I served in 1956 as a curate. Gail came to the rector, Fr. Barrett and said, “Could you please play down all that pain, sorrow and death during Holy Week and Good Friday this year. I don’t think it is good for the children to hear and read about all that stuff.”

The Rector was polite, but said things had to go on as usual and it did.

A few years later Gail committed suicide.

We walk through the valley of the shadow of death in this life of ours. The valley of the shadow of death is:

• Immigrants who fear deportation.
• LGBT people who fear decisions by the Supreme Court perhaps nullifying same-sex marriages.
• Elders who fear running out of money and housing.
• Each of us as we age and grow more sick and infirm. 

“Yeah, though I walk through the valley of death, I fear no evil for thou art with me.”

 The Christian Church is a witness to death, its fact, meaning and mourning and healing.

 We also stood witness to Jesus as we marched around the streets. We witnessed to Jesus who teaches us infinite love, compassion, forgiveness.

 We followers of Jesus stand witness to the hungry, homeless and those who need healing.

 It seems silly and useless to walk the streets, stand vigil for peace or end violence in our neighborhood. We are not likely to change things very much.

 A man asked me when I was at the Vigil for Peace recently, “Do you really think you will abolish all wars?” I said, “Probably not, but I am here to say I am opposed to war.”

So we Christians stand witness to the reality of death, to love, to forgive and to our inspiration, JESUS, the revolutionary.

Raising Lazarus, Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year A, 2014, The Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith

We are now a couple of weeks away from the Easter Vigil when we’ll again stir the waters of baptism, so it’s time to practice resurrection. Today we do this by taking up the story of Lazarus and turning it over in our hearts, noticing its curves and angles and edges, its shades and textures, its emotions, sounds, and smells.

If we can pay attention to what happens in this story, and find our own place in it, we might get a glimpse of how resurrection works both in our own lives and in the world around us.

A man falls sick, then dies, then lies in a tomb. Those who love him wonder how this can be happening. They weep. They lose hope. Up to this point in the story, death, tears, and sadness are in control.

Then Jesus enters. What follows is a collaboration, a dance if you will, between Jesus and Lazarus and the community.

Notice: Jesus does not stand aloof. Before he says or does anything, he draws near to the ones who are grieving. He weeps with them. Jesus, who came to share our lot, does not wipe our grief away without fully entering it himself.

Then, through his own tears, Jesus cries out three commands.

The first is to the community. “Take away the stone.”

Sometimes the stone that entombs a person is so great, so seemingly unmovable, that the person can’t budge it by themselves. If they are to ever escape their tomb, they need other people working shoulder-to-shoulder in a community to roll away the stone.

Moms and dads mourning the loss of their kids to gang violence, little kids losing their parents to deportation, elders living in isolation and fear of eviction, victims of an unjust war. People become trapped in tombs like these. They can’t escape these tombs by themselves. It takes a community to roll back the stones.

Communities have done this, have rolled back huge stones. Think of the village in southern France, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, an entire town that at great risk sheltered 5,000 Jews during the Holocaust. Or the wonderfully diverse community that surrounded Dr. King at Selma, or Cesar Chavez in his pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento. Communities of people working shoulder-to-shoulder to remove the heavy stones from the tombs of their brothers and sisters.

“Take away the stone,” Jesus says to the community gathered at Lazarus’ tomb.

Then Jesus gives a second command, and this one is to Lazarus. “Lazarus, come out!” Now it is Lazarus who must act.

Jesus calls him by name, calls to his friend in all his uniqueness, knowing what makes him laugh, what makes him cry, his favorite recipes, and songs, and hiding places. Loving all these things about him, he calls his friend by name--to come out of the death and darkness that surrounds him; out of the despair, the lack of joy, the loss of purpose.

There is a choice Lazarus must make here, a determination and a faith he must muster despite all evidence to the contrary. He must pry himself loose from the darkness of the tomb, his old ways of thinking, his old ruts, and imagine new possibilities, gently turning a new way, toward life.

Lazarus must choose to live.

The poet Mary Oliver captures what this turning from death to life can feel like in her poem “The Journey”.

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

It’s true, as philosophers say, that one of the fears that can cripple us is our fear of death. But there is another fear that can cripple us even more: the fear of life. The fear of fully entering into life with all its risks and rewards, its great pleasures and great pains, its loves and losses. The fear of life. It’s this fear of life that Lazarus must now come to terms with as he hears Jesus cry out to him, “Lazarus, come out!”

Slowly, courageously, Lazarus takes his first steps out of the tomb. And as he moves into the sunlight, Jesus utters one final command. Like the first command, this one is to the community: “Unbind him, and let him go.”

It’s as though the community is needed not only to begin but also to complete the action of resurrection. Jesus has called forth new life: “Lazarus, come out!" But Lazarus still has burial clothes on. His hands and nose and eyes and mouth and ears are bound. His feet are bound, too, so he can’t walk easily.

Now that he is back among them, the community must unbind him, so he can return to his rightful place among them.

Pastors in the Bayview tell me that when a young man is released from prison, his future, especially right at first, is often in the hands of his family and his community. Will they welcome him home, equip him with skills to find a job, give him back his citizenship, his place in society, his dignity? If his community is not there for him, does not unbind him from his past mistakes and from all the ways the world has conspired against him, then his chances of making it in the world are slim and he is likely to return to the tomb of prison.

The work of resurrecting Lazarus is not complete until his community unbinds him.

So where are you in this story?

Maybe you identify yourself with Lazarus. Is there a tomb you find yourself in at this time in your life? What is it like to hear Jesus call you by your own name, call you out of that tomb? What would it mean for you to respond to that call? Would it require anything of you?

Maybe you see yourself as a member of the community that surrounds Lazarus. Is there someone or some group of people you know who are slowly emerging from their tombs? How do you, in your own way, as a member of this community, do your part in taking away the stones, how do you help to unbind them?

Maybe you, as a follower of Jesus, feel called to do as Jesus does in this story: weeping with those who mourn, calling out to those in the tombs and to those that love them with words that give life. What are the words you must speak to them?

Let’s spend a few moments turning this story over in our hearts.

Third Sunday of Lent Year A/Feast of Oscar Romero by Mr. Timothy Dobbins

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, oh Lord.

He was born in a dusty backwater town of no importance to an older father and younger mother.  At the time of his birth, his country was under occupation by a strong military force, which had no problem killing anyone who dared criticize or challenge them.   His father was a carpenter.  He learned that craft well, but was a child who was smart and craved a formal education, so he found a way to study with the religious teachers.  He was very observant in his religious practices, even at an early age.  When he grew up, he talked to everyone who would listen about the plight of the poor and marginalized.  He preached in the countryside about how God was on the side of those who had little, and that one day, God’s Kingdom of love and equality would push out the brutally cold military rulers.  He came to the attention of the political forces in charge and was warned to toe the line or else.  He decided God’s word was more important than the threats from these empty, angry men, and so continued speaking out for the oppressed.  He saw many others killed for doing less, but accepted a possible death as the cost of spreading the message of hope.  In the end, he spoke once too often against the bullies in charge, and so, was executed as a trouble-maker and threat to the established order.

You think I’m talking about Jesus don’t you?  Well, all this is true about him, yes, but this is also true about Archbishop Oscar Romero, whose martyrdom we remember today.

Oscar Romero was ordained on 4 April 1942 in Rome.  Two years later, he returned to El Salvador to begin his ministry as a parish priest.  He grew his remote parishes, started  AA groups, helped plan a cathedral building project, and was rewarded by an appointment to the inter-diocese seminary in San Salvador.  He was considered quite conservative when he ran the archdiocese newspaper, defending both the work the Opus Dei and the traditional Roman Church.

In 1970 he became an auxiliary bishop in San Salvador, and in 1974 became bishop in his own right in a poor and rural diocese.  On 23 February 1977, he was appointed Archbishop of El Salvador.  There were groans and dismay from those who hoped to be led by a bishop who believed in the new liberation theology.  The ultra right government welcomed what they thought would be an easy pawn.

Not even a month later, Rutilio Grande, a progressive Jesuit and good friend of Romero’s was assassinated.  He had been organizing the campesinos into self-reliance groups.  This was Romero’s ‘Road to Damascus’ moment.  He said, “When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead I thought, ‘If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path.’  Romero suspended masses in the cathedral and demanded the government and the press investigate this assassination.   Both remained mute and nothing was done, and both knew they had a new adversary!

Remember, it was traditional for the church in El Salvador to go along 100% with the repressive government and oligarchy, and to never question the abuses that the few powerful landowners used to keep the poor majority in line.

Last weekend I went on a hike with a man from Hong Kong.  I asked him what faith he claimed?  He said “I believe in myself.  If there is goodness in me, and I do the right things, then I am fine.”  I told him I was Episcopalian.  He said, “I do not much like Christians.  They say they love Jesus, but they do not want to do the hard things he said to do.”

Oscar Romero decided it was now time for him to do the hard things!  Over 40% of the country was owned by only 13 families who worked the illiterate campesinos brutally.  Romero began to criticize the forced poverty, social injustices, and mass torture and assassinations.  He used his homilies and a weekly radio broadcast to chastise the powerful and let them know their sins did not go unnoticed.  He began to gather more enemies!

In 1979, a revolutionary junta came to power in El Salvador, and the human rights abuses escalated as the right and left fought each other, slaughtering many innocent and poor people who were caught in the crosshairs.  Archbishop Romero wrote to President Carter in 1980 to warn that increased military aid from the USA would “undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and the political repression inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has often been for their most basic human rights.” 

President Carter was concerned that El Salvador would become another Nicaragua (meaning a too close Communist threat), and so he ignored Romero’s plea.   In one of Carter’s most serious missteps, the USA continued to supply arms and death squad training, abetting a civil war that in the end claimed over 76,000 lives.

Romero was now noticed internationally for his human rights efforts, and on a visit with Pope Paul II in Italy, he told the Pope that it was no longer possible for him to even marginally support the Salvadoran government because it legitimized terror and assassinations. 

Upon return, Romero denounced the persecution of the members of the church who were working with the poor.  Just since Romero became bishop, more than 50 priests had been attacked or threatened.  Six were martyred.  Others were tortured and expelled from El Salvador.  Nuns suffered the same fate if they dared to speak out.  The Catholic radio station Romero used to broadcast his messages of hope was bombed.  The diocesan newspaper office was ransacked.  Parishes and churches were raided and threatened not to interfere with the government.

At a speech accepting an honorary degree from the Catholic University at Louvain, Belgium, Archbishop Romero said,

“But it is important to note why [the Church] has been persecuted.  Not any and every priest has been persecuted, not any and every institution has been attacked.  That part of the church that has been attacked and persecuted put itself on the side of the people and went to the people’s defense.  Here again we find the same key to understanding the persecution of the church: the poor.”


Indeed, the poor were eager to hear what Archbishop Romero had to say.  They packed the cathedral on Sundays, and those in the countryside listened to him speak by radio on Mondays.  He began to list the disappearances, tortures and murders that happened weekly.  The deaths and actions the government would not acknowledge.  The diocesan newspaper carried the same lists of atrocities.  The people felt someone in authority was finally on their side!  With the newspapers and media heavily censored, the Monday broadcast was the main source of news about what was really happening in El Salvador. 

In his last sermon, 24 March 1980, Archbishop Romero called on the Salvadoran soldiers as Christians, to obey God’s higher order and to stop carrying out the government’s repression and violation of basic human rights; to stop killing their fellow citizens.  Moments later, as he was at the altar in the small chapel at the cancer hospital where he lived, he was shot by at least one gunman as he elevated the chalice during the Eucharist.

At his funeral in the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador on 30 March 1980, thousands of mourners came to pay their respects to a man who spoke out against the abuses of those in power, both economically and militarily. The civil war was still raging, and as canisters of tear gas and smoke bombs were lobbed into the crowd, snipers began firing from the rooftops.  The crowd stampeded and somewhere between 30-50 people died in the melee.  Yet the people returned to file by Romero’s coffin to pay their respects day and night.

The words in the Psalm today say: “Blessed be the Lord!  for he has shown me the wonders of his love in a besieged city.  Be strong and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord.”  How difficult that was for those in attendance, when their hope had been assassinated and when the snipers started to shoot.  How hard it is indeed to do the things Jesus asks of us.  And how harsh that some even have to die from following those commandments!

Just nine months later, following Jesus would result in the same sacrifice for four Maryknoll Sisters who were working in El Salvador feeding the hungry, burying the dead left behind by the death squads, and providing shelter for the refugees in the midst of the civil war. They were all fans of what Archbishop Romero was saying about the church needing to speak out and uphold the least among them, and they went to the cathedral to hear him preach several times.   On the night of 2 December 1980, Sisters Jean Donovan , Dorothy Kazel , Maura Clark and Ita Ford were ambushed in their car,  shot to death by plain clothes militia, and then buried in the woods.  But, someone leaked to the US ambassador what had happened, and the investigation of this slaughter finally tipped the scales against our formal involvement in arming Salvadoran soldiers.

Officially, the El Salvador Civil War is over, yet the killings there still continue on a horrific scale.  Newly elected President Sanchez Ceren has to deal with one of the highest murder rates in the world. A 2012 gang truce seemed to cut the country's daily average of 14 dead by half, but the drop appears to have been short-lived. Police statistics show 501 murders the first two months of this year, an increase of more than 25 percent over the same period of 2013.  It is a legacy of brutality carried over from decades of slaughter for power. 

In his book, The Violence of Love, Oscar Romero said, “When we struggle for human rights, for freedom, for dignity, when we feel that it is a ministry of the church to concern itself for those who are hungry, for those who have no schools, for those who are deprived, we are not departing from God’s promise.  He comes to free us from sin, and the church knows that sin’s consequences are all such injustices and abuses.  The church knows it is saving the world when it undertakes to speak also of such things.”  

Who will speak of such things now, and who will do the hard work to wage peace on the streets of El Salvador now?  Who will do the same hard work against violence on the streets of San Francisco?  Who will give, that the poorest in Nicaragua have the water and sanitation we take for granted?  Who will speak out against the rending of families by unjust immigration laws?   Who will work to keep seniors in decent housing with the social services they need?  Who will monitor the violence against GLBT people and work for justice and equality for them?   Who will speak out against the endless wars waged by our government?

If Archbishop Oscar Romero were with us, would he ask us to show up on the Night Walks against violence, to show plainly and publicly where the church stands?  Would he ask us to give to El Porvenir?  Would he ask us to support SFOP?  Would he ask us to stand in front of the Federal Building every Thursday in solidarity with those demanding peace?  And if Oscar Romero and Jesus ask this of us, would you come do this hard work?

AMEN

Born Again (Second Sunday in Lent, Year A) The Rev'd Dr. Richard Smith

It’s the Second Sunday of Lent and the pace is picking up. We’re heading toward the Easter Vigil when we’ll once again stir the waters of the baptismal font and renew our vows as followers of Jesus.

And something else is going on as well. As Leah Forbes reminded me the other day, March is a big  birthday month in our community. Some of us are turning 26 for the second, even the third time. She and Cecil brought a special cake.

And it just so happens that in the midst of this journey to the baptismal font, and these birthday celebrations, we listen in on Jesus talking to Nicodemus about being born again, being born from above. Good time to reflect on this, this Second Sunday of Lent, whether you’re 26 for the first, second, or third time.

Because no matter how old you are, life can throw many things at you. Your life can be filled with zest and passion and purpose. It can also wear you down--the constant daily efforts to make a living, do the chores, struggle with relationships, look for a job, recover from disappointments, and heal from our wounds--these things can, if you’re not careful, make you half-dead, steal your joy.

How do we stay alive, increase the joy? Or to put it negatively, how do we not lose our souls, our spirits, our passion and zest and purpose? Or to put it still another way, how, in Jesus' words, can we be born again? How do we do this?

It’s not what Nicodemus thought. Being born again is not something to be taken literally--an absurd image Nicodemus had of a grown man trying to re-enter his mother's belly. Being born again is obviously not that.

Rather it’s a spiritual awakening that somehow changes us and the way we see ourselves and the world and people around us.

Nor is being born again like simply hitting the reset button on your cell phone, an act that completely wipes out all memory and data--all our mistakes, all the bad things we may have done or that others may have done to us--suddenly erased, gone, as though they never happened. Being born again is not like that.

Rather it means that we come to see those sad and painful things in a whole new way. They take on a new meaning for us. We come to see God at work in them, wiping away the tears from our eyes and bringing us--through those very mistakes and failures and disappointments--from pain and sadness to a more abundant life. It’s what we Jesus freaks call “resurrection”.)

The other day I ran across a poem by David Ray in which he tells of a conversation in which the great American poet Robert Frost was asked about hope. This poem tells us something about being born again.

Thanks, Robert Frost

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

A good poem whether you are 26 the first, second, or third time--whether you’re old enough to have more past than future or future than past. It’s about being born again. Not erasing our past mistakes and failures and disappointments, but seeing them in a whole new way. Hope for the past.

This is what we believe: That God is always working for us, transforming our past mistakes and failures and sins into gateways to a richer and more abundant life.

I once went through the loss of a relationship. At the time it felt like the end of the world. But after a while, I was able to see how that loss helped free me for a richer and fuller life. With all its grief and sadness, the loss of that relationship was a blessing, not a curse, both for me and for him.

I've also made many mistakes and often failed to live up to my aspirations, but, as the writer Parker Palmer notes, rather than looking back with regret, it’s possible to see all of our mess-ups as humus or compost for the growing we needed to do.

He notes that “humus”, the Latin word for compost, is the root of our English word humility, a big word for us in these days of Lent. 

The good I do today may well have its roots in something not-so-good I did in the past. Knowing that takes me beyond both the sinkhole of regret and the hot-air balloon of pride.

Regret shuts life down. Humility opens it up.

This is also true in how we think of forgiving others, of being born again after we have been wounded by others. Here again, it's not a matter of simply hitting a reset button and erasing all memory of being hurt. Forgiving does not mean forgetting.

Rather, when we forgive someone, the memory of the wound might stay with us for a long time, even throughout our lives. Sometimes we carry the memory in our bodies as physical scars.

But forgiveness and being born again change the way we remember those moments and those wounds, they change a curse into a blessing.

When we forgive our parents for their mistakes, our spouses for their lack of attention, our friends for their unfaithfulness in a crisis, our co-workers for their betrayals, we cease to be victims of events we had no control over. We claim our own power and refuse to let those events destroy us. In being born again we enable these wounds to deepen the wisdom of our hearts; make us more compassionate, joyful, loving; and lead us to a fuller life.

We Christians say that every movement from death and pain and sadness to more abundant life is the work of God, the one who is continually at our side, leading us from death to life, inviting us to be born again. With the passing of the years, and on this Second Sunday of Lent, this is the basis of our hope--not only for the future but also for the past.

A couple of questions for you:

•     Do you have in your own life, wounds either self-inflicted or inflicted by others?
•     As Christians, we believe God is working in and through those wounds, to lead you to life. So what are the ways God has been part of your story even in those moments, leading you from sadness and pain and disappointment to more love, more joy, more life? How do you see God at work in your life?