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“Faith consists in accepting God without asking him to account for things according to our standard. Faith consists in reacting before God as Mary did: I don’t understand it, Lord, but let it be done in me according to your word.”
- Bishop Oscar Romero
Dear Folks:
May the Hope, Peace, Joy and Love promised by this season be yours!
The Council of Conference Ministers (CCM) met last week for retreat and continuing
education. As we were on retreat, we heard the story of Mary receiving the news of her pregnancy given her by the angel Gabriel (Luke 1: 26-37), and then we wrestled with and revealed to each other the times when we’ve received good news from the Holy One and times when we’ve given others the Holy One’s news. Among us, there is a sense that we may be giving the Holy One’s news in the voice of prophets as we pray and preach in such a time as this (Esther 4:14).
We are facing, in a mere few weeks, the deportation of millions of our neighbors, friends, and family. How then shall we pray?
Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1: 46-55) is a profound praise of how God’s justice shows up -- scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry while sending the rich away empty. The young girl who sings this song knew only poverty, hunger, and the power of the Roman Empire that tried its hardest to do
the opposite of God’s justice. Jesus’ ministry, learned from his mother, was to preach and practice God’s justice against Rome.
We are facing a time when white nationalistic christianity is becoming the established religion in our public, secular, government-funded schools. How then shall we preach?
The CCM met in a Franciscan Retreat Center with a large fresco of the Virgin of Guadalupe in one of the many outdoor gathering spaces just before the Virgin of Guadalupe’s feast day (Dec 12). I had with me as my advent devotional the writings of Bishop Oscar Romero, who preached against the El Salvadoran Civil War and was killed while offering mass in 1980. This is what he preached on the Virgin of Guadalupe feast day in 1977. “Mary appears in the Bible as the expression of poverty, of humility, of one who needs everything from God. When she comes to America, her intimate, motherly converse is with an Indian [Juan Diego], an outcast, a poor man.”
Today, we are bound to a government that seems bound to do the opposite of God’s justice. How then shall we act?
Romero’s answer: “When Christ appeared…curing the sick, raising the dead, preaching to the poor, bringing hope to the peoples, something began on earth like when a stone is cast into a quiet lake and starts ripples that finally reach the farthest shores. Christ appeared…with signs of liberation: shaking off oppressive yokes, bringing joy to hearts, sowing hope. And this is what God is doing in history.” How then shall we love?
In Christ’s Peace,
Pastor Tony
The Violence of Love, Oscar Romero, compiled and translated by James R. Brockman, S.J. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), pp. 23, 22,
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