RCL - Epiphany 4 C - 31 Jan 2010

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. James Michael Dowd, OHC
RCL Epiphany 4 C - Sunday 31 January 2010

Jeremiah 1:4-10
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30


Our Prophetic Call

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Our Gospel reading this morning is actually the second half of last week's Gospel. Last week, you'll recall Jesus was in the synagogue and chose for his reading a passage from Isaiah which read:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim a year of the Lord's favor.

The continuation of the Gospel this week says that the people in Nazareth's synagogue were quite thrilled to hear this and were very pleased with “Joseph's son.” They probably thought to themselves 'we sure could use a year of favor from the Lord,' and 'it sure would be nice for the blind to see and the captives to be set free.'

But as this week's reading goes on we hear these same people of Nazareth turn on Jesus and become outraged by him when he tells them that he knows they will reject his message due to their lack of faith, for no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown.

But every time I read this passage, I find myself wondering about these towns people, the very ones who are “filled with rage.” What is it about a prophet that so upsets people? Certainly the prophets' message can be difficult to hear, but I have always suspected that there is more to it than that.

Once, many years ago, I found myself in the presence of a Prophet – a man specially called by God to announce the Good News to the poor and to proclaim peace throughout the land. The occasion was a retreat I was participating in that was led by the Jesuit priest, Daniel Berrigan, one of the leaders of the Catonsville Nine. The retreat was back in the early 1980's at the height of the brutal repression by extreme right-wing oligarchs and their paramilitary thugs, aided and abetted in their evil ways by the complicity of, first, Jimmy Carter, and then, Ronald Reagan.

Now I knew a great deal about Berrigan and was very excited about the retreat; I also knew that I agreed with at least 90% of what I had read in Berrigan's writings. Though I did not know him personally, you could say that I was one of the hometown crowd. So, not fifteen minutes into the retreat, I began to wonder to myself why I was feeling so uncomfortable. What he was saying was familiar territory for me and the words themselves were not shocking to me. It was something about Berrigan himself that was unsettling me and I simply could not figure out what that was.

And then, many years later, I read Abraham Heschel's book The Prophets and figured out why I had been so unsettled by Berrigan so many years before. In his book, Heschel writes that:

The prophet is the man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon his soul, and he is bowed and stunned at man's fierce greed. Frightful is the agony of man; no human voice can convey its full terror. Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet's words.

It wasn't that I was uncomfortable with Berrigan or even with what he was saying. In my gut I was uncomfortable because it was God I heard raging in Berrigan's words. This was no ordinary retreat session, the rather soft-spoken and eloquent Berrigan made me so uncomfortable because it was not really him condemning all that was happening in El Salvador and here in the United States, it was God condemning that profoundly sinful behavior. And being so near to the presence of God - raging in a prophet's words - is bound to make any ordinary person uncomfortable.

This brings to mind our first reading which is from the very beginning of the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. At this point, having heard the call from God, Jeremiah is terrified because he was thinking to himself that “he is only a boy.” “But the Lord put out his hand and touched his mouth” and told Jeremiah:

Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.

When we think of a prophet, probably what we are most likely to think about is the verse: “To pluck up and pull down, to destroy and to overthrow.” We can just envision the livid Jeremiah or the seemingly half-crazed John the Baptist railing against the powers that be and demanding their overthrow. But it's that last phrase that intrigues me: “to build and to plant.” Anger and outrage may be enough to pull down and to destroy, but if you are going to build and plant there has to be something more. In fact, there has to be love. For, as St. Paul says in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, “If I have prophetic powers...but do not have love, I am nothing.”

The prophet then, is called to love. In fact, the prophet is called to be a great lover. The modern day prophet I most admire is Archbishop Oscar Romero. Oscar Romero was the Archbishop of San Salvador in the late 1970's, and was martyred on the Eve of the Feast of the Annunciation, March 24, 1980 as he celebrated the Eucharist. The murderers were the very people that Daniel Berrigan would be fuming about a few years later on my retreat.

Romero had been a somewhat ordinary priest that the political and church oligarchs conspired to convince the Vatican to raise up as Archbishop. He was conservative. He believed that the Church should not rock the boat. He was "one of them." But upon his elevation, a number of incidents, which is the polite word for murder and kidnappings, occurred that prompted him to speak out. In a very brief time, he became known as a man who would stop at nothing, no matter how dangerous, to call his people – all of his people – to justice, to peace, and to making that preferential option for the poor a reality.

In a homily at the Cathedral in San Salvador, Archbishop Romero said:

Dear brothers and sisters, especially those of you who hate me, you dear brothers and sisters who think I am preaching violence, who defame me and know it isn't true, you that have hands stained with murder, with torture, with atrocity, with injustice – be converted. I love you deeply. I am sorry for you because you go on the way to ruin.

It's that short little sentence near the end that so moves me: “I love you deeply.” He was talking about men who were attempting to, and who eventually did, murder him. He was talking about men who committed grotesque atrocities. And still he could say “I love you deeply.” This was a man who could build and plant.

What made Oscar Romero different, a man who could build and plant rather than simply tear down and destroy? I think an important clue comes at the beginning of the passage I quoted. He begins by addressing all of these people as my “dear brothers and sisters, especially those who hate me.” And there it is. The radical love that names each of God's children as one's brother or sister is the prophetic dimension that moves beyond pulling down and destroying and begins the process of planting and building. When it is an enemy we see, committing grave sins and profaning God, we want to destroy them. When it is our brother or sister we see, committing grave sins and profaning God, we want to call them to conversion and lead them to a new way, a holy way, a way of planting and building.

For the monastic community, for our Associates, and perhaps others as well, who are called to live our lives according to, or inspired by, the Rule of Benedict, our call is, at least in part, to be a prophetic witness for Christ. Not everyone who is called to be a prophet is meant to be a wild-eyed, grasshopper eating rabble rouser. But as prophets nonetheless, the first piece of the prophetic witness, I believe, is to build and plant community. To see one another and all of God's children as our brothers and sisters. St. Benedict tells us in Chapter 72 of the Rule that monks:

...should each try to be the first to show respect to the other, supporting with the greatest patience one another's weaknesses of body or behavior, and earnestly competing in obedience to one another. No one is to pursue what he judges better for himself, but instead what he judges better for someone else. To their fellow monks they show the pure love of brothers...

That is community. Brotherhood, sisterhood, is “pure love.” It is pure because it is selfless. It is living a life based on what is better for another. And that is completely counter-cultural. Fraternal love is radical love because it places the needs of others ahead of our own. And that is why throughout history, community has always been difficult to form. Those few verses I read are a real challenge to anyone attempting to live a Christian life. Seeing one another as brothers and sisters is the work of conversion, the work of our vows, the work of a lifetime.

But in our particular era, I think that the work of forming community is even more difficult than it has been in the past. We are up against a great deal within our culture that fights very hard against the idea of community, to say nothing of its realization. We are isolated one from another, adrift in a world that is so fast paced we find ourselves short of breath just contemplating it.

Add to this that via the Internet, television, and cell phones we are joined to other people and peoples with little knowledge of how they actually live, what is important to them, what they believe in. But there we are, in constant contact with all of God's children without really being connected to them. Most damaging of all is a political and economic system that glorifies individualism, greed, and a culture of violence and death at all stages of life.

As I think about these things, it seems to me that those of us who have a Benedictine vocation have a special call at this time in Salvation History, and that includes not only the monastic community, but our Associates as well. We must not forget that it was our forebears in this great Benedictine tradition that were the leaders of re-forming community in a desperately broken down Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. For 1,500 years we have been living the Good News in our prayer and in our work by creating community in our prayer and in our work. We are at a point in Salvation History in which it is not only Europe that cries out for our prophetic witness, it is the whole world.

Listen closely my brothers and sisters for the cry of the poor rises up from Newburgh and Port-au-Prince, from Kingston and San Salvador, from Hartford and New York and Toronto and Grahamstown and Manila and Islamabad longing for the love of a brother or sister. The pained voices of those trampled by unending war and violence in Baghdad, Kabul and Darfur are moaning for their brothers and sisters to lay down their arms. Forty-five million Americans are begging their brothers and sisters to end our greed and share the health care that we so often take for granted.

I believe we have a choice before us today. We can, as part of Christ's Body, take on his prophetic call by announcing the Good News to the poor, healing the sick, freeing the oppressed. Or, we can ignore the poor, the sick, the oppressed, pretending that they do not exist, which is tantamount to throwing them off the cliff. We can heed God's call to constant conversion and call our loved ones, fellow community members, fellow Americans, and the Church, to that same conversion. A conversion that allows us to build and plant the Kingdom of God with our brothers and sisters whom we love so deeply.

There is risk in this, of course. As prophets, we will make some people uncomfortable because we are so filled with feeling. Some people will want to throw us off the cliff because they are actually hearing God raging in our words. Some of us may be imprisoned or even killed because we love our brothers and sisters so deeply, even those who hate us.

But throughout Salvation History, our Lord has called people just like you and me to bring Good News to the poor, to proclaim release to all who are held captive, to give sight to the bind, and to free the oppressed by welcoming them all into our community. This is our call. A call to take up our cross and follow Jesus down a road that may not always be comfortable, and might even be dangerous. A call that requires a life dedicated to the two great Benedictine values of prayer and work. May the Lord continue to bless all of us in that prayer and work.

Amen.