SPEAKER_03: Blessed is the Lord who forgives all our sin.
SPEAKER_03: Please join me in saying the litany of penitence.
SPEAKER_03: You ask for my hands that you might use them for your purpose.
SPEAKER_03: I gave them for a moment that withdrew them, for the work was hard.
SPEAKER_03: You asked for my mouth to speak out against injustice, and I gave you a whisper that I might not be accused.
SPEAKER_03: As we acknowledge our successes and our failures in living a preferential option for the poor, what we have done and what we have been unable to do, we turn to God who is unceasing hope and prayer.
SPEAKER_03: Lord, comfort your people and clothe us with your strength.
unknown: God, power and touch.
SPEAKER_03: Calm our anxieties, soothe our anguish, and light the darkness that surrounds us.
SPEAKER_03: Comfort your people, God, our surround us with your love and anoint us with your peace.
SPEAKER_03: Hear our voices and our hearts as we discern our way together this week.
SPEAKER_01: This is what the Lord has used.
SPEAKER_01: Almighty act.
unknown: Almighty God.
SPEAKER_03: Let us pray.
SPEAKER_03: Almighty God, who didst call thy servant Oscar Romero, to be a voice for the voiceless poor, and to give his life as a seat of freedom and a sign of hope.
SPEAKER_03: Grant that inspired by his sacrifice and the example of the martyrs of El Salvador, we may without fear or favor witness to thy word who abideth, thy word who is life.
SPEAKER_03: Even Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee in the Holy Spirit be praise and glory now and forever.
unknown: Amen.
SPEAKER_05: As you're being seated, our children are invited to come forward for the children's sermon if there's so inclined.
SPEAKER_05: Alright, so there's a mismatch today.
SPEAKER_05: There's a color mismatch.
SPEAKER_05: Does anybody see it?
SPEAKER_05: Oh, not my shirt.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, that was on purpose.
SPEAKER_05: That was a good guess, though.
SPEAKER_05: Look, look up there, look up there at the cross, and what color is that on the cross?
SPEAKER_05: It's a really dark purple.
SPEAKER_05: Somebody even thought it was black.
SPEAKER_05: But then look what Father Sean's wearing.
SPEAKER_05: Now, does anybody know why we might be wearing red?
SPEAKER_05: Today we're talking about a saint.
SPEAKER_05: A saint.
SPEAKER_05: So what is a saint, you know?
SPEAKER_05: What kind of people are saints?
SPEAKER_05: It's a tough one to answer, isn't it?
SPEAKER_05: Perfect people, right?
SPEAKER_05: Ones that never make mistakes.
SPEAKER_05: People who have gold halos around their head while they're alive.
SPEAKER_05: Because there's like none of those, right?
SPEAKER_05: Saints are people who point people to God.
SPEAKER_05: They point people to God.
SPEAKER_05: So what kind of people are saints?
SPEAKER_05: It turns out everybody is.
SPEAKER_05: And anytime we celebrate a saint, we wear red.
SPEAKER_05: We wear red.
SPEAKER_05: Any guesses why?
SPEAKER_05: It's not the blood of Christ.
SPEAKER_05: That's a good guess, though.
SPEAKER_05: Usually we say we're showing it because the blood of the saint, and blood in the Bible is just a code word for life.
SPEAKER_05: Your life is in your blood.
SPEAKER_05: This is what the Bible says in Leviticus.
SPEAKER_05: So anytime we wear red, we're trying to say we're going to celebrate the life of a saint who pointed us to God, and we want to, with our life and our blood, and with our breath, and the way we think and the way we pray and the acts we do, we want to point people to God as well.
SPEAKER_05: It turns out everything we do points people to some version of God.
SPEAKER_05: Sometimes we don't point people to a very loving, just, or caring God.
SPEAKER_05: Sometimes we point people to a God who has life worth having.
SPEAKER_05: And today we're going to celebrate parts of the life of a guy named Oscar Romero.
SPEAKER_05: Oscar Romero, who showed a lot of life that the whole church was missing.
SPEAKER_05: So that's why we get red and purple today.
SPEAKER_05: Now, would it surprise you if I said that God loves your life?
SPEAKER_05: God loves your life.
SPEAKER_05: Is that a surprise?
SPEAKER_05: God is delighted that you were born.
SPEAKER_05: God is so pleased that you were here.
SPEAKER_05: And what does God want for you from your life?
SPEAKER_05: Do you know the answer?
SPEAKER_05: What does God want from your life?
SPEAKER_05: God wants something for you very much.
SPEAKER_05: God wants you to enjoy the life you have to give.
SPEAKER_05: And God knows that we'll enjoy our life the most.
SPEAKER_05: God knows this.
SPEAKER_05: So today we're doing St.
SPEAKER_05: Oscar Romero.
SPEAKER_05: But there'll be a St.
SPEAKER_05: Jack Triple Day.
SPEAKER_05: And there'll be a St.
SPEAKER_05: Eleanor Steele Day.
SPEAKER_05: And there'll be a St.
SPEAKER_05: Holt Griffin Day.
SPEAKER_05: Where the people we know will celebrate the ways we appointed each other to God.
SPEAKER_05: And that's what we're invited to do.
SPEAKER_05: And length is a time where we get to say, hey, I am pointing people to God.
SPEAKER_05: Which God do I want to point people to with my very life?
SPEAKER_04: Thanks for that.
SPEAKER_02: You have forsaken your people and the house of Jacob, for they are full of divers from the east, and of suicide is like the Philistines, and they clasp hands with horror.
SPEAKER_02: Their land is filled with silver and gold, and there is no end to their treasures.
SPEAKER_02: Their land is filled with horses, and there is no end to their chariots.
SPEAKER_02: My times are in your hand.
unknown: Let your face shine upon your sermon.
SPEAKER_02: Do not let me be put to shame over my call on you.
SPEAKER_02: Let the lying lips be still.
SPEAKER_02: You hold them under your shelter from protection.
SPEAKER_02: Blessed be the Lord, for you have wondrously shown your steadfast love to me.
SPEAKER_02: I have said in my alarm I am driven from your sight.
SPEAKER_02: But you heard my supplication cry.
SPEAKER_02: Love the Lord, all your saints, and the Lord preserves the face of you.
SPEAKER_02: But above the heroes called you.
SPEAKER_02: Be strong in my heart and creation of all the people who are not a very good idea.
SPEAKER_04: I said to him, Sir, you are the one who knows.
SPEAKER_04: And he said to me, These are they who have come out of the great ordeal.
SPEAKER_04: They have washed their robes and made them white with the blood of the Lamb.
SPEAKER_04: And for this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple.
unknown: And the one who is seated on the throne will show up.
unknown: And they will hunger no more and thirst no more, and the sun will not strike them for any scorching east.
SPEAKER_04: For the lamb of the sinner of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life.
SPEAKER_04: And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
SPEAKER_04: The word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_05: Jesus answered the disciples, The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
SPEAKER_05: Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain.
SPEAKER_05: But if it dies, it bears much fruit.
SPEAKER_05: Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
SPEAKER_05: Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.
SPEAKER_05: Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.
SPEAKER_05: And now my soul is troubled, and what should I say?
SPEAKER_05: Father, save me from this hour?
SPEAKER_05: No.
SPEAKER_05: It is for this reason that I've come to this hour.
SPEAKER_05: Father, glorify your name.
SPEAKER_05: Then a voice came from heaven.
SPEAKER_05: I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.
SPEAKER_05: The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder.
SPEAKER_05: Others said, An angel has spoken to him.
SPEAKER_05: Jesus answered, This voice has come for your sake, not for mine.
SPEAKER_05: Now is the judgment of this world.
SPEAKER_05: Now the ruler of this world will be driven out.
SPEAKER_05: And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.
SPEAKER_05: The gospel of the Lord.
SPEAKER_05: Please be seen.
SPEAKER_05: It didn't seem right to talk about Patrick, of whom we know very little, and skip Oscar Romero, of whom we know much.
SPEAKER_05: Before I do, I do want to highlight something else about this red color.
SPEAKER_05: Anybody who's done laundry is very aware that when you wash clothes in blood, you don't clean them.
SPEAKER_05: So when we hear this story about the saints washing their robes and the blood of the Lamb, you may have this thought that, oh, this is about a sacrifice of cleansing.
SPEAKER_05: Instead of the early church's understanding that it was the life of Jesus, not his death, that makes us clean.
SPEAKER_05: The fact that he was embodied, took on the blood, taught and ministered, those are the ways that we cleanse our own lives.
SPEAKER_05: Not by dying, but by living as God intended us to live.
SPEAKER_05: And so when you hear the story of Oscar Romero, I hope that you will hear that he was washed in the blood of the Lamb three years before he was died.
SPEAKER_05: Before he was, sorry, murdered.
SPEAKER_05: So what do we know about Oscar Romero?
SPEAKER_05: Is anybody familiar with Oscar Romero in the red?
SPEAKER_05: I would recommend to you, it's a B-grade film.
SPEAKER_05: You can rent it on Amazon.
SPEAKER_05: It's called Romero, and it has a special tie to me because having seen the film is what made my partner decide to attend seminary.
SPEAKER_05: Having grown up evangelical, this movie spoke to her.
SPEAKER_05: Oscar Romero was murdered in 1980.
SPEAKER_05: He was the archbishop at that time of El Salvador, and he was murdered while celebrating the Mass.
SPEAKER_05: That is, he was wearing his vestments, and at the moment he raised the chalice, he was shot through the heart by a fellow Catholic, by a fellow El Salvadorian, who thought that they were also doing God's will.
SPEAKER_05: Romero was born in 1917 in a lovely part of the country called San Miguel.
SPEAKER_05: He was not necessarily rich, but it turns out that El Salvador was mostly owned by 14 families, and most of those 14 families had country estates in San Miguel because it was quite lovely.
SPEAKER_05: So Romero grew up away from the capital of San Salvador, and early on he decided to be a priest and he was awarded a scholarship to study in Rome.
SPEAKER_05: It turns out he was rather bright.
SPEAKER_05: He had quite a bit of acumen for the priestly work and the priestly study.
SPEAKER_05: He started a PhD in Rome, but the need in El Salvador was so great for local priests that he was sent back.
SPEAKER_05: And it turns out he was a pretty bookish priest.
SPEAKER_05: He did the pastoral office.
SPEAKER_05: He actually was very convinced as a young man that the church had no role in politics.
SPEAKER_05: This is pre Vatican II, in which the understanding of church was that we were going to be this godly city outside of the world.
SPEAKER_05: And that while we might suffer in this life, what we had to look forward to was heaven when we died.
SPEAKER_05: So if life was unfair, don't worry, there'll be heaven when you die.
SPEAKER_05: Boy, I heard that at church, and I went capital.
SPEAKER_05: That turned around in Vatican II, and uh in 1968, it turned around, particularly when there was a conference of Latin bishops in Medellin, Colombia, which is like famous because of Pablo Escobar, right?
SPEAKER_05: Uh, and anyway, they met, and this is where uh liberation theology was born by a priest named uh Gustavo Gutierrez.
SPEAKER_05: Liberation theology uses this phrase from our opening litany, the preferential option for the poor.
SPEAKER_05: Now, we don't like hearing this as Americans.
SPEAKER_05: Just the proof and the pudding, right, is when somebody says black lives matter, we want to say all lives matter.
SPEAKER_05: Because we don't like the idea that God prefers some people over others.
SPEAKER_05: And strictly speaking, right, that's not what preferential option for the poor means.
SPEAKER_05: Preferential option for the poor means when somebody can't take care of themselves at that moment within a family, you give them the attention.
SPEAKER_05: I had two kids.
SPEAKER_05: One was body trained, the other wasn't.
SPEAKER_05: There were moments when we needed to do the preferential option for the baby.
SPEAKER_05: You understand, right?
SPEAKER_05: This is what the preferential option for the poor sort of said.
SPEAKER_05: Not that God favors poor people, but when people are living in abject poverty, God has to take care of the ones who are sick.
SPEAKER_05: This is what Gustavo Gutierrez came up with in 1968, and Oscar Romero wouldn't touch it.
SPEAKER_05: In fact, in 1972, one of the schools in El Salvador, a Jesuit school, did a political protest against the military-controlled government, and Romero wrote a scathing critique that the church had no place in politics.
SPEAKER_05: He later apologized and repented, by the way.
SPEAKER_05: Romero was such a quiet, bookish priest that with his boss, the archbishop, resigned after 38 years in ministry.
SPEAKER_05: Uh, the 14 families that owned El Salvador picked Romero to be the new archbishop.
SPEAKER_05: Because they thought he would rock the boat.
SPEAKER_05: And he probably didn't intend to.
SPEAKER_05: See, at that time, the way that you had access to the archbishop was to lavish donations to the church, which meant that the church would do private baptisms for your family, so they wouldn't have to be around, well, but the mestizos and the indigenous people of El Salvador.
SPEAKER_05: Right?
SPEAKER_05: These were people of Spanish descent who were of the elite class.
SPEAKER_05: All of this changed because Archbishop Romero, in his own words, met Jesus 17 days after becoming the Archbishop.
SPEAKER_05: His mentor and friend, uh, Father Ronaldo Grande, was murdered by the El Salvadorian military along with a 15-year-old kid and an old man.
SPEAKER_05: They were on their way to perform some more local baptisms when their car was run off the road and littled with bullets.
SPEAKER_05: And what Archbishop Romero decided to do in that moment drew a lot of opposition.
SPEAKER_05: This was probably his defining moment, the course that set him down the road that he later walked.
SPEAKER_05: He canceled all masses in the country.
SPEAKER_05: There would be only one.
SPEAKER_05: And it would be at the cathedral that Sunday.
SPEAKER_05: His fellow bishops opposed him.
SPEAKER_05: They said, You're denying people the sacraments.
SPEAKER_05: He said, No, we're all coming together to look at this horror.
SPEAKER_05: And I'm preaching.
SPEAKER_05: His friend, Father Grande, had worked very hard to raise the conditions for the working poor.
SPEAKER_05: People who did not own their own land, could not pay for their own basic supplies, so they took loans from their landlords, kind of like owing your soul to the company store.
SPEAKER_05: So Romero made this conversion and it unfolded for the next three years until he himself was murdered.
SPEAKER_05: Romero presided over the funeral of at least six priests.
SPEAKER_05: And by 1978, there was a slogan in El Salvador, be a patriot, kill a priest.
SPEAKER_05: Because the church was getting involved with the working poor and therefore muddling into politics.
SPEAKER_05: Archbishop Romero sent a strong message when the new president, who could not be bothered to meet with Bishop Romero to talk about his concerns with priests being murdered.
SPEAKER_05: When he was inaugurated, Archbishop Romero did not go to the inauguration, which broke 200 years of precedent.
SPEAKER_05: His fellow bishops said, How could you do something as political as abstain from going?
SPEAKER_05: He said, How could I do something as political as to go?
SPEAKER_05: Over the next three years, Archbishop Romero did some remarkable things.
SPEAKER_05: He lived in a hospital instead of a palace.
SPEAKER_05: So he chose to live with the sickest people in his own community, not in the bishop's palace.
SPEAKER_05: He created the foundation of people who tracked human rights violations, cataloged them, recorded them, and after his death and the civil war in El Salvador ended in 1992, those documents were the ones that led to the conviction of war crimes.
SPEAKER_05: He did that, not the government.
SPEAKER_05: The government censored media.
SPEAKER_05: And in El Salvador, uh, the primary modicum of communication was radio.
SPEAKER_05: So what Bishop Romero did in his sermons, it used to be 15 minutes, they made it to about an hour and a half every week and were broadcast throughout the country.
SPEAKER_05: People were listening to them so much so, it goes to local lore.
SPEAKER_05: But you could walk down the street, and about the time you stopped hearing this radio, you'd hear another one.
SPEAKER_05: And in that hour and a half, Bishop Romero said what happened that week.
SPEAKER_05: See, it turns out the El Salvadorian government would put guns in the hands of the dead priest to make it look like they'd actively resisted, and Bishop Romero would preach about the electrical burns on their genitals and the cigarette works on their necks.
SPEAKER_05: These were people who were being tortured.
SPEAKER_05: Their bodies were just put in landfills and discovered by indigenous people who believed on the landfills to survive.
SPEAKER_05: The day before he was murdered, Archbishop Romero put out in a homily sort of his boldest order, which is that when the government gives you an order that is contrary to God, not only do you not have to obey it, you should actively disobey it.
SPEAKER_05: And so he called upon the soldiers of the El Salvadorian military to stop killing their brothers.
SPEAKER_05: He didn't just appeal to them, he ordered them in the name of God not to do this.
SPEAKER_05: And so the next day, Bishop Romero was murdered at the Mass.
SPEAKER_05: His funeral, seven days later, had at least a hundred thousand people in attendance and was bombed, and 40 people were murdered.
SPEAKER_05: He's been recognized, it turns out, outside of Westminster Abbey, there's a statue of Oscar Romero.
SPEAKER_05: Because of his embodiment, that God actually cares about people that are invisible to us.
SPEAKER_05: What Romero said actually is that God is embodied in the poor, and that when we consider the wounds of Jesus Christ, the poor people of El Salvador were an active, hemorrhaging wound in the body of Christ that deserved our attention and our love, and not just our thoughts and prayers, but our solidarity and our action.
SPEAKER_05: And he was murdered for that.
SPEAKER_05: Now, we call him, he was beatified in 2015.
SPEAKER_05: We call Archbishop Romero not only a saint, we call him a martyr.
SPEAKER_05: Anybody know what martyr means?
SPEAKER_05: So, somebody who died for Jesus.
SPEAKER_05: Actually, if you're a martyr in the Catholic Church, that is one of the criterion, you had to know you were going to possibly lose your life to be declared a martyr.
SPEAKER_05: But as Jim said, I don't know if you've heard this, the Greek word martyr means to bear witness.
SPEAKER_05: What did Asta Romero bear witness to?
SPEAKER_05: That God loved invisible people.
SPEAKER_05: That Jesus Christ had something to do with not just the working poor, but with structures of violence and hegemony and oligarchy with unequal rights.
SPEAKER_05: Now this may surprise you, because I don't want to just unfurl you as a lint and discipline, but I'm going to tell you the purpose of discipleship, or quite honestly, the call of discipleship, is that you are called to martyrdom.
SPEAKER_05: You are called to bear witness to the living God rather than the dead one.
SPEAKER_05: The odds are it's not going to cost you your life.
SPEAKER_05: Not in this country.
SPEAKER_05: See, we have this Christian fiction that Christians are persecuted in the United States, and that is just incredible garbage rent.
SPEAKER_05: In the past week, I've been to two different places of worship.
SPEAKER_05: Let me tell you how they're different from ours.
SPEAKER_05: The synagogue, right when you walk in the door, has a large TV that displays footage from eight cameras simultaneously.
SPEAKER_05: Eight.
SPEAKER_05: And the great odds are that person will be Christian.
SPEAKER_05: They have a buzzer to let anybody in, and on high holy days, they have a security guard and a metal detector.
SPEAKER_05: That's here in Clear Lake, Texas, that our Jewish brothers and sisters are scared that Christians will bear witness to a God that wants them dead.
SPEAKER_05: It's Christians that do this, friends.
SPEAKER_05: When I went to celebrate the Iftar, remember that's when Muslims break the fast at the end of the day by eating over at the Clear Lake Islamic Center.
SPEAKER_05: I didn't see all the cameras, but what I did see was the 300-pound armed bouncer at the door.
SPEAKER_05: Because Muslims are afraid of how we'll bear witness.
SPEAKER_05: Things we don't have at St.
SPEAKER_05: Thomas are bouncers on Easter and security cameras right when you walk at the door to make sure you weren't followed in by somebody who wants to kill you as an act of worship to their God.
SPEAKER_05: See, the truth is, we're all martyrs.
SPEAKER_05: We all bear witness to some God.
SPEAKER_05: The question is, which one?
SPEAKER_05: Which God do we bear witness to?
SPEAKER_05: The one that says, yeah, you're suffering, you probably deserved it, but there'll be heaven when you die.
SPEAKER_05: Or the one that says God cares about suffering.
SPEAKER_05: Turns out that there are things in the world that have a preferential option for the poor other than God.
SPEAKER_05: Those things are public health and disease.
SPEAKER_05: Those things are environmental pollution.
SPEAKER_05: The poorest people live by the landfills.
SPEAKER_05: No surprise.
SPEAKER_05: In Atlanta, and I suspect it's true in Houston, there was a major study of where the highways go.
SPEAKER_05: You know, it's hotter on the highways and right next to them.
SPEAKER_05: That's where the poor people live.
SPEAKER_05: Because there's a preferential option for degrading people who are already poor.
SPEAKER_05: Oscar Romero bore witness to that, and he was murdered for it.
SPEAKER_05: Now we think about sexuary.
SPEAKER_05: And probably a month ago, there was all this chatter on like Facebook pages and at like Christian conferences.
SPEAKER_05: Like, what are you gonna do if ICE agents come into your church?
SPEAKER_05: You know, to do a raid on people.
SPEAKER_05: Ice agents are coming into our church.
SPEAKER_05: Do you know why?
SPEAKER_05: Because the people who ICE would come raid do not perceive this to be a sanctuary.
SPEAKER_05: Consider that Bishop Romero was murdered at the altar in his vestments during communion in a sanctuary.
SPEAKER_05: And we take our safety for granted here because we can.
SPEAKER_04: Because we can.
SPEAKER_05: Which God do we bear witness to?
SPEAKER_05: Which the way we talk, with the way we wrote, and with the way we handle our garbage over done with it, which God do we bear witness to?
SPEAKER_05: And I think the whole reason we take on this momentum discipline, the idea of returning to the land and doing this earnestly is because we recognize that we sometimes just dip our deep in the life of Christ, in the blood of the Lamb, the life of Jesus.
SPEAKER_05: And Lynn bids us dip a little deeper, go a little further, love a little wider.
SPEAKER_05: So, in his own words, this is from Bishop Romero.
SPEAKER_05: For the church, the many abuses of human life, liberty and dignity are a heartfelt suffering.
SPEAKER_05: The church, entrusted with the earth's glory, believes that in each person is the Creator's image, and that everyone who tramples it offends God.
SPEAKER_05: As holy defender of God's rights and of God's images, the church must cry out.
SPEAKER_05: It takes as fiddle in its face, as lashes on its back, as the cross in its passion, all that human beings suffer, even though they be unbelievers, they suffer as God's image.
SPEAKER_05: There is no dichotomy between man and God's image, between woman and God's image.
SPEAKER_05: Whoever tortures a human being, whoever abuses a human being, whoever outrages a human being, abuses God's image.
SPEAKER_05: And the church takes that as its own, that cross, that martyrdom.