This sermon was delivered at Yale Divinity School in 2021 for the class Radical Lives of Proclamation.
The town of Santiago de Maria sits high up in the mountains of southern El Salvador, approximately one thousand meters, or more than half a mile, above sea level. To get there, Father Oscar Romero would travel on horseback up the narrow trail that wound around the mountain’s slope. What would bring Romero to this inconvenient spot atop the mountain was, in a way, coffee. No, he was not looking for a cup of El Salvador’s finest in some tucked-away coffee shop. He would go there to visit the campesinos, the peasant farmers who labored in the coffee fields that covered the mountains. These were pastoral visits. Romero was the bishop of the Diocese of Santiago de Maria, and the coffee plantations were his parish.
Father Romero did not always feel such a close connection with the campesinos. During his first year as bishop, he never once made the trip up into the mountains. He chose to remain down in the valley, blissfully unaware of the hardships endured by the campesinos, many of whom slept out in the cold on sidewalks during the harvest season. It wasn’t until his second year as bishop that Romero saddled his horse and made the trek up the mountain. Unlike Saint Paul, whose conversion while traveling on the road to Damascus is often visually depicted as him being thrown from his horse, Romero’s conversion to the cause of the poor sees him remaining upright on his horse even as his theology is thrown upside down. (By the way, the story of Paul’s conversion in the book of Acts makes no mention of a horse.)
What happened to Romero atop that mountain? How did he go from rationalizing poverty as part of God’s plan to advocating for the poor to the extent that doing so would become his life’s work…and eventually lead to his death? As the title of this course would suggest, Romero did something radical…he listened. He first saw to the physical needs of the campesinos, opening an unused school to serve as shelter and seeing that they were served hot drinks every night, but then he listened to them. In Scott Wright’s biography of Romero, a witness of these visits is quoted as saying, “While the campesinos were having their drink and getting warmed up, Romero would go around and talk with them. He spent a lot of time listening. That’s how he began to understand that the problems we’d told him about so often were not stories that we’d made up.”
Listening is an under-appreciated skill, not only in ministry but in life. Listening is not often celebrated. There are no famous listeners. There are no blue-checkmark Tweeters or Instagram influencers encouraging us to put down our microphone and listen to the pleas and the demands of the vulnerable among us. And yet the letter of James from the New Testament tells us to “be quick to listen” and “slow to speak” (Jam. 1:19). That is because listening is a divine activity. Listening is what God does before God acts. As the Exodus passage we heard at the outset reminds us, the liberation of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt begins not with a battle cry but with a cry of despair, a cry that is heard by the God who listens. “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt,” the Lord says. “I have heard their cry” (Ex. 3:7).
In much the same way, Father Romero heard the cry of the campesinos up on that mountain. He listened. But more than simply listening to their stories, their struggles, and their sufferings, Romero also saw something up on the mountain…something that would irrevocably change him. Just as Moses went up the mountain and saw the glory of God in a cloud, Father Romero went up the mountain and saw the glory of God in the poor. “The glory of God,” he would say, “is the living poor person” (Wright, loc. 114). “The glory of God is that the poor live” (Wright, loc. 181).
To see the glory of God in the face of the poor seems like foolishness to a world that valorizes material wealth. Such a calculus makes no sense to a world for which dollars and cents are the measure of success. It simply doesn’t add up. But solidarity with the poor is not about adding up; it’s about coming down. It’s about the God who hears the cry of God’s people and comes down to deliver them from the hand of their oppressors. “Indeed, I know their sufferings,” says the God of the Israelites, “and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians” (Ex. 3:7b-8a). God is moved with compassion at the plight of the poor and oppressed and comes down from the heavenly heights to deliver them.
“Compassion”…from the Latin compati, meaning “to suffer with.” Father Romero needed to go up the mountain to go down into the lives of the campesinos…down into the heart of their suffering. In making that journey, in making their suffering his own, Romero was walking in the footsteps of Jesus. He had taken to heart, and had put into motion, the instruction of Saint Paul, who writes in his letter to the Philippians:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
6 who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross (Phil. 2:5-8).
As a Christian, I believe that it is in God’s nature to be filled with compassion, to be so moved by human suffering as to come down from the heavenly throne, to take not only human form but the form of a servant, and to become obedient to the point of death. Father Romero believed this not only of God but of the Church as well. In a sermon he preached just a few weeks after the assassination of his friend and fellow priest, Rutilio Grande, who was murdered by government security forces, Romero said: “True love is what moved Father Grande as he died with the two campesinos at his side. That is how the church loves. She dies with them, and with them she presents herself to heaven’s transcendence, for she loves them” (“The Motivation of Love,” March 14, 1977). In the wake of subsequent murders of still more priests at the hand of the government, Romero noted, “How sad it would be, in a country where such horrible murders are being committed, if there were no priests among the victims! They are the testimony of a church incarnated in the problems of its people” (Wright, 93). Of course, Romero’s words would prove prophetic, as his own murder while leading Mass would become a testimony of his compassion for and commitment to the poor of El Salvador.
Oscar Romero is no doubt a martyr. In fact, in 2018 the Catholic Church declared him a saint, with March 24, the date of his death, serving as his feast day. On one level, the life of Oscar Romero stands out to us as exceptional. He lived…and died…a radical life of proclamation. By comparison, we may think that our own lives are not so radical. Our lives—at least during our time here at YDS—see us consumed with the academic work of reading books and writing papers. As we read about and discuss Oscar Romero and others like him, my concern is that we will feel a distance between their witness and our own. They may become for us objects of reverence rather than sources of inspiration. But I encourage us all to remember that what made Romero’s life so extraordinary was the rather ordinary act of listening…listening to the people he was called to serve. And so it is for us all. Whatever field you plan to enter once you leave YDS—ordained ministry, chaplaincy, teaching, social work, public policy, legal advocacy, the arts—your ministry will involve listening. And in a world in which self-promotion is the norm, those who listen to the cries of the poor and the forgotten are the true radicals. Let anyone with ears to hear listen!
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