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Justice
Delivered by
Bruce Arnold, September 16, 2007
At the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, New Bern, NC
Scripture:
Gr. Isaiah 10: 1-2
Pu. Isaiah 28: 16-17
Pi. Ezekiel 22: 27-29
Ye. Zechariah 7: 8-10
Bl. Micah 6: 8
In West Virginia, there is a tradition dating back to the 1920’s of community centers known as settlement houses. The settlement house movement was not confined to West Virginia. Perhaps the most famous settlement house was Hall House in Chicago, founded by the Quaker social worker Jane Addams. In the cities, the settlement houses were generally intended for new immigrants and refugees, and the working poor of the sweatshops. They were not places where people lived, but centers within neighborhoods where people could join together to solve their common problems of health, sanitation, housing, food, clothing education, and work.
I mention the settlement houses in West Virginia for two reasons. First, the tradition has stayed alive there. While not as widespread as at onetime, they still exist. Second, because I worked in one for about six months, in 1982. Scott’s Run Settlement House was run by the Presbyterian Church. We had a gymnasium, classrooms for both adult and child education, workshops, and a chapel. Other settlement houses in the vicinity were run by Methodists, Baptists, and Episcopalians.
Something I love about the settlement houses is that they were not government programs. They were places where people could be empowered to solve their own problems. For instance, some of the unemployed coal miners in Scott’s Run came to the settlement house to use the woodworking shop. They formed a collective to make and worked traditional Appalachian crafts. My job was in the area of health and wellness. We worked with medical professionals to increase access to health care, but also to promote healthier lifestyles in order to decrease the need for health care.
We see in these settlement houses a feature of Christian commitment: the search fro justice. In seeking to address not just poverty, but also the economic, social, and spiritual roots of poverty. These good Christian people gave real life to Jesus’ injunction that “whatsoever ye do for the least of these, my children”—the poor, the stranger, the sick, the prisioner—“ye have done it unto me.”
In the 1950’s and 1960’s there was a Catholic priest, Don Helder Camara, who served among the poor in the ghettos of Brazil. Eventually he became well-known for his tireless efforts on their behalf. He was one of the precursors of a movement in Latin America that came to be known as Liberation Theology. One of his most famous sayings was, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a Communist.” While not avowedly aligned with the liberation theologians, his work was certainly a major influence on the birth of the movement.
There were other influences as well. All over the world, in Europe (Hungary, 1955), Africa (Nigeria, Tangeria), Asia (India), North America (The Civil Rights Movement), and Latin American (Cuba), movement for freedom, equality, and prosperity were in evidence. It would not be put of place to cite Gandhi and the independence struggle in Judia as a major influence on liberation theology, as well as Dr. King, Vernon Jordan, James Farmes, Whitney Young, Fannie Jou Hamer, and others of the Afro-Americans Civil Rights Movement. (Bonheofffer-D. Day)
But the primary influences were to be found in Latin America. In education, there were people like Pablo Freire, the Brazilian educator, who wrote the classic “Pedagogy of eh Oppressed” on his work with the poor, using their own living conditions as their classroom material. In medicine, the Austrian-born Mexico-based Ioan Illich warned in his book “Medical Nemesis” that the professionalization of health care was crippling people’s ablility to care for each other. And in politics, Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevaro unashamedly wrote, in a letter to the editor for a newsweekly in Martevideo, Uruguay, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great
feelings of love.”
At the conference of Latin American bishops in 1965, many of these factors started to coalesce. At the conference in Medelhn, Colombia, in 1968, the features of liberation theology had largely taken form. And in the publication, in 1971, of Father Gustavo Gutierrez “A Theology of Liberation,” the movement showed a clarity, direction, and maturity, which would sustain it for many years, in many places.
While primarily emerging within the Catholic Church, there were Protestant leaders as well. Ruben Alves, a Presbyterian minister, was the author of “Towards a Theology of Liberation.” And Jose Migrez Bonino, a Methodist minister, wrote “Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation,” after Gutierrez’ book, my favorite. In American, Episcopalian priest Robert McAfee Brown wrote “Theology in a New Key,” perhaps the most accessible introduction for Anglos.
But liberation theology was not primarily a scholarly event. It was fortunate that the movement was underpinned by such deliberate and thoughtful study, but the study rose out of experience, not vice versa. The hundreds of thousands of poor and disenfranchised across Latin America, who found in eh Bible a radical call to justice and freedom were the dynamo of the movement. While Gutierrez and the rest wrote the words, it was the life of the people that developed the principle of liberation theology. In brief they are:
- Liberation must be political, social, and economic as well as spiritual. Poverty and oppression must be addressed at their roots. The removal of these cruses must be from the bottom up, not the top down.
- Emancipation means freedom from all that limits our capacity for growth and dignity.
- Liberation includes freedom from selfishness and sin, reconciling ourselves with God and with each other. No human, rational agency is sufficient to affect such a radical change. It must be a spiritual endeavor.
The people formed themselves into what have been called “Christian base communities”. Christian, because they sprang out of the Christian churches. Base, because they were people at the base or bottom of society. Community, because of shared love and compassion.
One of the essential principles of liberation theology is the “preferential option for the poor.” In His ministry, Jesus clearly favored the poor, the sick, and the outcast. Only when they were willing to be humble did he have any shrift for the rich. In liberation theology, Jesus is not important because he was, in essence, something different from us: the only begotten Son of God. It is his relational significance that stands out. He shows us how to live in a wholly authentic way with each other and with God, even sacrificially when this is call for.
Liberation theology replaces orthodoxy with orthopraxis. It is not “right teaching”—saying the right words—that will usher in the Kingdom of God. It is orthopraxis—right acton—to echo St. James, faith without works is dead. God is found on the cross along with all those who suffer injustice, not on a cold looking down at them. Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within.” But He also said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is among you.” That is, between us, how we teat each other.
In the early 80’s, when I was returning to faith after a season of philosophical atheism, it was the discover of liberation theology that enabled me to re-enter the Christian fold with integrity. I could not return to the well-meaning, but bland liberal theology of my childhood: be nice to everyone as wish they would be nice unto you.
My life had been radically transformed by the civil rights struggle and Black Power movement; the Vietnam War; the nuclear arms race; the feminist and gay liberation struggles; and my own immersion in the world of wage labor and union organizing, having learned from the Preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World that the ruling class and the working class have nothing in common, and that an injury to one is an injury to all. Early on, unknowingly, I exercised the “preferential option for the poor.” Liberation theology helped me understand and strengthen that choice, and nourishes me in a way that social or political philosophy cannot. I know that this kind of emancipation is not to be focused in governments, in programs, in famous personalities no matter how great.
“Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.” It is the people themselves, sustained by their common struggle and inspired by a compassion that has never had any lasting significance without a spiritual basis, who will free themselves. This underlies my choice of vocation. It underlies my practice of it. It underlies my choice to live in a small apartment in a lower working class neighborhood and to subsist on a net income of less than $15,000 a year. It underlies my lack of health insurance, my well-noun clothing, my unassuming vehicle. Above all, it drives my choice to relinquish, as best I can, the claim to power, status, or prestige, inherent in having been born an educated upper-class white male. None of this is due to low self-esteem or a self-loathing rejection of my own heritage. That would be a theology of despair. It is based on the certainty of love, on faith in God, and in a prophetic hope in a future that we are called to unfold. For “he that would save his life will lose it, but he that will lose his life, for my sake, shall save it.”
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