SERMON FOR AUGUST 18, 2019, TENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST       TEXT: HEBREWS 11:29-12:2
     Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, did not start out as a leftist reformer. Born in 1917, he entered a Roman Catholic seminary in El Salvador when he was 13 and was eventually ordained in Rome, at the age of 24. The people in his parishes experienced him as a down-to-earth pastor; his fellow priests saw him as an organization man. He pushed a lot of paper as a bureaucrat in the offices of the archdiocese. He emphasized personal improvement, decrying drug use, promiscuity and alcoholism, rather than urging action for social justice. Romero even defended the government’s occupation of the University of El Salvador on the grounds that the school was a hotbed of Marxism. However, he was conservative, not reactionary; committed but not doctrinaire.
      In 1968 the conference of Latin American bishops met in Medellin, Colombia and took extraordinary action to sharpen the Church’s commitment to social justice. This caused increasing conflict with the oligarchy of landowning families, who ruled El Salvador and had long counted on the church not to interfere with their interests. But the Medellinistas, who embraced liberation theology and praxis, demanded that the church’s historic preferential option for the powerful give way to a preferential option for the poor. Over the next decade Oscar Romero sought to find some middle ground in the conflict, and the Vatican rewarded his moderation by making him archbishop, with the approval of the Salvadoran oligarchy. One historian describes his working conditions this way: “Romero’s appointment, in February, 1977, coincided with troubled times: The country faced the growing concentration of power in the military; torture and threats of torture against campesinos who sought concessions from landowners; and a government-backed campaign against activist clergy. In a country named for Jesus —El Salvador means “The Savior” — fliers were passed out urging, ‘Be a patriot. Kill a priest.’” 
     Three weeks after Romero’s consecration, a Jesuit priest named Rutilio Grande and two companions were murdered in the village where they had been organizing sugarcane workers.  Rutilio Grande was Romero’s friend and seminary classmate. The archbishop returned from viewing his bullet-ridden body a changed man. Now when threatened campesinos occupied churches to protect themselves, he supported them. When the president of El Salvador failed to stop the murders of priests and laity, Romero excommunicated him. When the U.S. Congress moved to renew support for the Salvadoran military, he wrote President Carter, imploring him to end the funding. He used his Sunday homilies to report on people murdered or kidnapped, identifying them by name, and he made the archdiocese’s radio station an alternative to state-controlled media.  He boldly accused the ruling class of “paying to kill the voice that speaks out.” On March 24, 1980, the day after Romero’s hour-long homily begging the regime to “stop the repression,” was broadcast across Central America, Romero was assassinated. As the archbishop raised the consecrated bread and wine during the evening mass, a military gunman shot him through the heart.
   Oscar Romero was canonized as a saint on October 14, 2018, more than 38 years after his death. Some within the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church did not regard him as a true martyr, claiming that he was killed for political rather than religious reasons. Traditionalists were suspicious of his association with liberation theology and its Marxist influence. Two popes kept the process on a very slow track, hoping that the fire of Romero’s call for justice, his denunciation of the sins of the privileged and powerful, would be dimmed by the passage of time and the vagaries of historical memory. Not so their successor Francis, who as archbishop of Buenos Aires experienced the so-called Dirty War in Argentina, in which as many as 30,000 civilians were killed or “disappeared” by a repressive government. The Archbishop of San Salvador became an inspiration for him. He knew a saint when he saw one. Three weeks after Francis was elected pope, he authorized Oscar Romero for canonization. 
     Once an organization man, Romero was “reluctant to go through the door of history God was opening up for him,” as one of his fellow priests recalled. But he followed where his faith led. Romero joined the ever-growing throng of disciples, whose witness has set the course for us, whose courage and steadfastness have set the pace. Some, as the author of Hebrews writes, have “won strength out of weakness,” becoming mighty in conflict and putting their enemies to flight. Others “were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented — of whom the world was not worthy.” And before them all is Jesus, the one worthy of such loyalty because of his own faithfulness. “For the sake of the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame . . . .”  The author of Hebrews does not question why hardship is part of life, no less for Christians than for anyone else. This is simply a given, but it is matched by the author’s certainty of Jesus’ joy.  The cross of Christ, the mark of suffering and shame, is the starting block. The cross, the sign of forgiveness and new life, stands at the finish line. And we are called to run with perseverance the race that is set before us, laying aside every weight and clinging sin, so that we too may go through the door of history that God is opening. As Oscar Romero and Pope Francis learned, faith cannot avoid political action; it must inform it. Few of us will be called to shed our life’s blood at Christ’s altar for the least of these His little ones, but in the face of injustice and violence committed against them, each of us must ask, ”When does silence become complicity? What will it take for us all to say, with one voice, that we have had enough?”
     Hold fast to that plural, to the “we,” because you run your race as part of a vast track team. Those who have completed the course cheer on those still running. They wait for us and watch over us, because the promise of God will not be fulfilled util it embraces us all. “Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith did not receive what was promised since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.” When you grow weary along the way of discipleship, and we all do; when you doubt your ability to hold on and hold out, look to that great cloud of witnesses who have gone before you, the many ordinary people like Oscar Romero, who by faith did extraordinary things. Look to the head of that company, to Jesus, the “pioneer and perfecter of our faith,” the one who leads that great cloud of witnesses across the finish line. Amen.