All Souls
Bethlehem
Church

Last week I shared some stories about the popular movement that has risen up in Honduras following the military coup there a year ago. The experience, as I tried to convey, was rally powerful; especially because we're so gay friendly at this church and two of our three denominations are so Open and Affirming and gay people in Honduras are in real danger. Of course it's not just the LGBT community. Everyone who is speaking out against the repressive regime there is in danger. Actually meeting the leaders who were risking their lives to speak out for justice has left me feeling the need to think more about their situation and our relationship to it.

Just to give you a sense of what it was like, imagine you're in a meeting where someone from an organization is telling you about the kind of work that they do. It's very friendly and supportive and the speaker seems very relaxed. Then after the meeting adjourns you overhear someone say her daughter is being driven out of the country the following morning because of the death threats. It just lends a sense of urgency to it all that I still feel.

Well fortunately when it comes to thinking about these things we don't have to re-create the wheel and feel as if we're starting from scratch. For one thing we have the insights of several decades of theological reflection known as Liberation Theology. More recently Liberation Theology has followed the lead of James Cone, one of my professors at Union, who has applied its methods to the plight of African Americans in the US with powerful and compelling results.

But the movement first took shape in Latin America, when a handful of radical Catholics began to struggle deeply with the systemic nature of economic exploitation that characterizes that region. In short, they started asking questions about the poor, rather than assuming “that's just the way the world is.” Why do a small handful of families own most of the land? Why are big corporations reaping huge profits when the workers themselves are barely making enough to survive? And what does the Bible have to say about all this?

The basic point here is that Liberation Theology is an approach to understanding the Bible and its teachings not in some ivory tower, but out among the poor, the oppressed, among the people who are being crucified by an unjust system much like the system that crucified Jesus. When you think of it that way it makes so much sense: of course our understanding of the crucified one should pertain in some direct way to those being crucified today. But just as in the days of Jesus the powers that be seek to mystify and justify their violence so as to maintain the status quo.

Liberation Theologians are fond of quoting the plight of the Israelites in Egypt. As we read today in our first reading, God tells Moses and Aaron to confront Pharaoh, which they do. And what does Pharaoh do? He makes the working conditions more difficult and accuses Moses and Aaron of lying!

It's a very clear case of economic exploitation, right at the start of one of the greatest stories of liberation of all time. It is a story of a powerful empire oppressing a downtrodden underclass of workers and God enters in on the side of the poor.

Liberation Theologians also point to the prophetic and messianic traditions of the Bible. These two streams of thought stand against injustice, while at the same time longing for a coming time when justice will “roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!”

There's much more to be said concerning this powerful theological movement but for our purposes today I just want to mention one more, which is a notion we're quite familiar with, namely, that all people are part of one human family. While this of course links us to all people everywhere, those connections begin right here within our local community. Over time we form relationships, get to know each other's foibles, and come to care for each other deeply. Just think back to how meaningful it was to create the back garden in memory of June, a beloved leader of our community.

And of course sometimes getting to know each other is funny. Think of Matthew trying to calm us down after passing the peace. Or last week after church, when David was putting away the folding chairs. Somebody pointed out to him that Paula wouldn't like him mixing the red and white chairs so he dutifully kept them color coordinated in deference to Paula who is herself, a beloved member of this community.

So we have brothers and sisters right here in the community. And then through our work in the world we find we are connected to far off places in ways we only rarely appreciate.

I was reminded of this bigger picture when Father Roy came to speak at the the Peace Fair back in May. He gave two talks, one to a large group of teenagers, and the second was the keynote address for the adults later in the afternoon. When he spoke to the kids he told them about growing up in Louisiana and ending up as a soldier in Vietnam, sharing how that experience of war prompted him to question the nature of the system that sends young people off to die.

Then during his afternoon talk attended mostly by adults he continued sharing his story with an emphasis on the School of the Americas, the military training program in Georgia whose graduates have gone on to commit terrible human rights abuses. Father Roy is known around the world for having started a protest of this facility and when he came to Brooklyn he told us how it all started when a death squad in En Salvador murdered seven Jesuit priests, their house keeper and her daughter. This was but the latest event in time of great repression and brutality in El Salvador, but because Father Roy himself is a Jesuit this heinous crime proved to be a deeply personal loss. He felt he had to do something to call attention to the situation.

So he went to Columbus Georgia, where the School of the Americas is located. He and a few other Jesuits went to a military supply store there and bought uniforms of Army Generals. This was of course long before 9/11 in a small military town so the guy helping them in the store simply assumed they were in fact generals. And because Father Roy was a Vietnam Vet he new something of military protocol.

Once they were appropriately attired in their uniforms, they simply walked onto the base, making their way undetected to the dorm which housed the soldiers from El Salvador who were being trained in counter insurgency in support of the dictatorship crushing the people.

They climbed a nearby tree and waited for nightfall at which point they turned on a boom box which blared out one of Arch Bishop Oscar Romero's final sermons. He preached it soon after writing an open letter to Jimmy Carter asking that he stop sending military aid to El Salvador. Carter ignored the letter and approved the aid. Meanwhile soldiers were occupying churches and terrorizing the peasants as part of an ongoing system of oppression.

Here's a portion of what Romero said in his sermon, which Father Roy blasted from the tree tops to Salvadorian troops being trained in Georgia:

“I would like to make an appeal in a special way to the men of the army, to the police, to those in the barracks. Brothers, you are part of our own people. You kill your own campesino brothers and sisters. And before an order to kill that a man may give, the law of God must prevail that says: Thou shalt not kill! No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. No one has to fulfill an immoral law. It is time to recover your consciences and to obey your consciences rather than the orders of sin. The church, defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, the dignity of the person, cannot remain silent before such abomination. We want the government to take seriously that reforms are worth nothing when they come about stained with so much blood. In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuously, I beg you, I ask you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!”

Last week we talked about the notion of a single seed producing a vast harvest or the spiritual journey beginning with the first step. Father Roy's experience is a great example of this. When he first stepped onto that military base he was joined by a very small group of dedicated activists. Over the past twenty years the number of people who attend the SOA protest each year outside the base has swelled into the thousands. Local hotels actually have “WELCOME PROTESTERS” on their marquees.

While the mood is often festive over the course of the weekend, the closing ritual is a very serious and dignified procession of thousands of people, each one bearing a small white cross with the name of someone killed in the repressive violence that has stained Latin America in blood. As they walk the names are read and after each name the people sing in a soft voice, “presente.”

Eduardo Galleano notes that the Spanish word for remember, “recordard,” literally means to run something back through your heart. I think that's what we're doing when the names of the dead are read. We're running the souls of the dead through our hearts and somehow doing so makes us stronger. The pharaohs of the world will constantly seek to trap us in their oppressive schemes. But the spirit of God sustains us in the ongoing struggle for Liberation.

May it be. Amen.