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JUBILEE YEAR for the CENTENNIAL of BLESSED
ROMERO, 2016 — 2017
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| Lord Williams preaching to an array of Cardinal, Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox bishops at Westminster Abbey. Some 1300 attended the service. |
Lord Rowan
Williams, the former leader of the Church of England, delivered the sermon at a
special Evensong commemorating the centenary of the birth of Blessed Oscar
Romero at Westminster Abbey in London on Saturday September 23rd.
Great Britain
has historically maintained a close relationship with Romero. It was members of the British Parliament who
nominated Romero for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. When the installation of Robert Runcie as
Head of the Anglican Communion on March 25, 1980 coincided with Romero’s
assassination, Canterbury Cathedral became the first major church to foster a
devotion and admiration for the Salvadoran martyr. Runcie and John Paul II commemorated Romero
when the Pope visited Canterbury in 1982. The nearby Catholic Church in
Canterbury now houses Romero relics in the form of a stole and an alb. In 1998, Romero’s statue was installed at
Westminster Abbey. In 2013, a Romero
relic was installed in St. George’s (Catholic) Cathedral in Southwark (London). In 2015, a Romero statue was installed in St.
Albans (Anglican) Cathedral. In 2017, a
Romero bust was installed in Liverpool’s (Catholic) Cathedral.
A
true story. Two Welsh countrymen sat in a pub discussing the recent death of one
of their neighbors. ‘How much did he leave?’, asked one of them. The other
lifted an eyebrow and replied, ‘Everything!’
Almost
exactly forty years ago, on the 25 September 1977, Archbishop Oscar Romero in
his weekly mass homily provided an extended and more theological version of
that comment. He reflected in this homily on the biblical notion of property.
Property, he said, in Jewish and Christian Scripture, was something that was
lent to the user. Never absolutely given. Always to be used, rented from God.
And so, he says, the truth is that the rich pay to the poor the rent for the
land whose use they are given for a time. In a just world, that is how we
should conceive property. We are given something through which we are set free
to discharge our debt to the poor. Because if our God is with the poor, then
when we serve the poor, we serve God. When we recognize our indebtedness to the
poor, we pay our rent to God for the land we use. And in that perspective, he
goes on to say, we are all of us beggars together. No one simply owns at
another’s expense. Everyone is caught up in exchange. Those who are wealthy –
in this world’s terms – are those who have been given the privilege of using
the things of the world for the flourishing of their neighbor. Beggars together
we become rich together. And we are delivered from the imprisoning falsehood of
supposing that the world is something we can own, whether as individuals, as
societies, or even as the human race collectively.
What
is given is given to be given.
What
did he leave? Everything. Nothing can be stored against that final reckoning.
And we should get used now to the call of God to serve, to pay our debt to the
needy.
It’s
an unexpected echo of one of the great insights of that father of the English
Reformation, William Tyndale, who spoke in his own reflection on the gospels of
the debt that the wealthy owe to the wretched. We live in a world where it
seems that the wretched are reminded constantly of their debt to those who are
already wealthy. But, as Jesus says in the gospel about the use of power and
resource, it shall not be so among you.
And
the gospel promises liberation from that myth of ownership and control, that
apparently relentless pattern of accumulating resources and not sharing.
Which
is why, later in the same year, when Archbishop Romero preaches about slavery
and freedom, he describes the freedom of those who have heard the gospel in
terms precisely of a freedom from the slavery of seeking possession. We are
possessed, we are enslaved, by the myth that we can possess the world for
ourselves alone. And our true liberation comes when we understand that opening
our hands, sharing what we have, is how liberation manifests itself. Christ
does not want slaves, says Romero. He wants us all, rich and poor, to love one
another as sisters and brothers. He wants liberation to reach everywhere so
that no slavery exists in the world, none at all. No person should be the slave
of another, nor a slave of misery, nor a slave of anything.
This
is the content of revelation, this doctrine, this evangelization.
It’s
easy to see from that quotation why it is that Romero believed that our
liberation immediately projected us into a deeper level of community. Because
once that mythology of possessing and being possessed has disappeared, we are
free for one another in a quite new way. And what happens then is community. A
community in which we are creating freedom for one another, day after day, in
which we, liberated from myth and slavery, from fiction and oppression and
injustice, are set free to feed and nourish each other’s humanity to the full.
And
the responsibility of every baptized person, so Archbishop Romero insists again
and again, is a responsibility to create freedom. We are not only recipients of
liberation, but agents. Not only those who let themselves be fed, by the grace
of God and the grace of their neighbor, but those who have the power and
authority to feed, to nourish, to set free.
In
life and in death, Blessed Oscar Romero paid his debt to the poor. In every
word he spoke, in every encounter in which he was involved, he saw his
responsibility as that of an agent of God’s liberation, challenging day-by-day
and week-by-week, in his letters, his sermons, his public addresses, the
death-dealing fiction which kept his entire society in slavery. Addressing the
gross injustice and inequality of the land-owning system in his country.
Addressing the barbaric violence that supported that system, and eventually
claimed his own life.
He
would have been grieved, but perhaps not surprised, to know that that
inequality and that barbaric violence is still a feature of so many countries
in Central and South America to this very day. And our prayers must today be
with those who continue his work, in costly witness, in speaking the truth. He
himself describes elsewhere the Church itself as above all an agent of truth in
an environment of myth and lies.
But
we should always remember the stress which he laid upon the idea that the poor
were to take their own agency, their own responsibility. Rather than simply
talking about a Church for the poor, Archbishop Romero was one of those who
genuinely understood what it might be for the Church to be a Church of the
poor. A Church where the dispossessed and the wretched found their dignity and
their agency, their capacity to make a difference. Liberation is not something
we receive only, but something of which we become agents. We baptized into
Christ, we become agents of that Christ-like, that Christ-shaped gift of
bringing liberation.
And
that’s why in yet another sermon from this year, from 1977, Archbishop Romero
can speak – as he often speaks very eloquently – of the Eucharist, the mass, as
the place where reparation, restoration, the healing of breaches, the
overcoming of inequality, is all taking place. We offer the Eucharist in Christ
as a means of peace-making. We offer it, recognizing the debt we owe not simply
to God, but to one another. And we celebrate the Eucharist, truly effectively
with integrity, when that is our goal, when the liberated community shows
itself capable of sharing freedom, setting one another free.
In
a particularly moving passage, Archbishop Romero speaks of how this approach to
the Eucharist is a way of restoring what he calls the beauty of the Church. He
speaks of the way in which that essential beauty of unconditional divine love
takes flesh again and again in the Eucharistic body, in the community gathered
at the mass.
Beauty
is a strange word, sometimes, to use of the Church. And beauty is a strange word
to bring to mind for anyone who has ever seen the photographs of Archbishop
Romero’s body, riddled with bullets, and streaming with blood. But to recognize
his life and death as something which itself served that Eucharistic beauty of
the Church is to recognize that without that commitment to liberation, to that
act which frees us from the slavery of myth and fiction, the Church is ugly,
the Church is disfigured, it fails to show what it most truly is. By God’s
grace, in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we glimpse fleetingly what it might
be for the Church to radiate the beauty of God in justice, in reconciliation
and reparation. We, striving to make that real in our own discipleship, are
committed to that vision of the Church’s beauty, painfully, hauntingly aware of
what that might mean in terms of risk for its witnesses.
We
are beggars together, and when we have recognized that, liberation begins to
come alive. When liberation begins to become alive we become people who in
Christ are enabled to set one another free. When we begin to set one another
free, we move into the fullness of community. When we move into the fullness of
community, we show the beauty of God’s act in Christ, and God’s continuing act
in the Church.
In
giving thanks for the life and the martyrdom of Blessed Oscar Romero, we ask
ourselves how far we are still enslaved by the myth of possessing and being
possessed. What is the level of our own willingness to be beggars together? The
level of our own willingness not only to be set free, but to be agents of
freedom?
We
look with thanksgiving to one of Christ’s great servants, who stands with us in
the everlasting communion of saints, who stands with us at the Eucharistic
table of Jesus Christ, who calls us as his blood is shed, to be – with him –
agents of the beauty of God’s people, renewing the face of the earth.
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