People Who Need People
I’d like to suggest a spiritual exercise that could get us all ready to respond to this section of the Bible that we have just heard.
Love can be very hard work. Following your instincts usually doesn’t work. It demands the discipline of taking another person’s well-being to heart. Most of us can identify a moment in our lives when we hurt someone else by our actions, attitude, and conversation. I don’t want to suggest that you are evil, or beyond our ability to love you. But, you know...there are moments in our stories when we thought we had it right... but, it wasn’t. So I ask you to take a moment, right now, to survey your life, and identify a moment when you failed to love another. It’s a moment where you now recognize there was a lot of pain, and it happened because you were unable to love. Develop a picture of your loveless happening and we’ll come back to it.
What we just read is a conversation about love, the central dynamic of how God and I relate to each other, and a central dynamic in how the People of God respond to one another, and also a key to how we relate to the wide, wide world. The writer of 1 John says “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” and then goes on to say that same thing about a dozen different ways. It is the heart of the Jesus story. It’s not human nature; it is the foundation of the focused Way of Jesus.
I sometimes find it helpful to hear someone else’s story. I realize: that his or her life is not my life, but the stuff that person faced is going to have some parallel to the stuff I face. Maybe, just maybe, I can learn something.
- Oscar Romero
Let me share with you the story of Oscar Romero. Some will have heard it when it was in the news but it may be time to hear it again. To love is to be changed, even transformed; it isn’t just a matter of believing in God, living by the commandments, and putting into practice all that you learned, long ago. Hear this story, and reflect.
Oscar Romero was raised in the Central American country of El Salvador. There the tradition is Catholic Christianity. He went to Rome to become a priest and then returned to his home country. He believed that the way of Jesus was well aligned with all that the Pope had to say, and with the rule of the Salvadoran government. For him, Jesus was not a revolutionary figure but someone who could be used to defend church and government – the status quo! The status quo is, of course, the way things always have been, and that means inequality. Nearly half the country’s land was owned by just over a dozen families. Church officials and government leaders lived in affluence. The vast majority of peasants struggled to have enough food and a place to live. Some priests sided with the poor but Romero faithfully supported his national government, which was good to the church.
Oscar had a friend, a progressive priest named Rutilio Grande. This fellow supported the poor in his parish and was assassinated for it. By now Romero had been made the Archbishop of El Salvador because he was a supporter of the religious and political power structure. Deeply touched by his friend’s murder, he asked for an investigation but the request was denied. Appeals to stop the killing of peasants and priests went unheeded. It was a crisis for him – how could he advocate for the love of God in a context like this one?
It was by opening himself to the love of God, as he went about loving his people, that Romero found the courage to change, to align himself with love. Poor people, rather than professors would now be his teachers.
He proclaimed the Christian story as he preached Sunday by Sunday, over the radio, condemning the abuses of power and the greed of the country’s leadership. These sermons were the most listened-to radio in the country. He even wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter asking him to stop sending money to right-wing parliamentary groups that were killing the peasants he loved.
Romero’s criticism of the government and the church establishment made him a marked man and he realized his days were numbered. On the 24th of March in 1980, while he was preaching at a funeral mass, a gunman aimed at the open doors of the church and shot him dead.
- Oscar Romero and Our Lives.
It took a piece of his lifetime but Oscar Romero came to see that love does not allow people to escape or to hide from the pain and troubles of this life. To love God is to realize: an abundance of life requires that people learn to give themselves away in service of others. To love is to heal injustice and kindly embrace the world.
I don’t think anybody’s going to shoot you, yet there are ways of turning your eyes from the struggles that the rest of us are facing. It may be time to ask this question of ourselves: Do I believe and do I obey the commandments of God as an obligation? or, Do I believe and live the Christian lifestyle as the route to loving God and loving the lepers of life? Go back now to your recollection of a failure to love. Does this take you anywhere? I hope the Oscar Romero story will help you to lean into the loving God, loving all of us, loving even those who make us uncomfortable, and then being loved by the strangest collection of people.
- We, too, have been changed by being loved.
But now another spiritual exercise. I think we can agree that you did not get to this moment of your life all on your own. If you are like most of us you can name people who have given you a hand in life. Some of you will be able to identify one, or maybe a small group, of people who made possible the person you are today. I ask you to do the reflection, right now, and identify such a person or persons. It will be someone who saw in you what you could not see in yourself. There was a glimmer of calling and possibility that could only be detected by love, giving to you that which you needed to be you. Take a moment. Picture that person and name her or him.
All of this may not sound very spiritual to you. Indeed, even the title of this sermon – "People Who Need People" – is lifted, not from Jesus, but from Barbra Streisand. My excuse is that we understand Jesus to be God incarnate. That means divine but always translated into what is human.
All this makes sense, yet it's something we cannot do by ourselves. It takes a regular working over with the Jesus agenda. That’s why we keep coming here. It also takes this whole community; we need one another. That, too, is why we keep coming here. People who need people...