Homily for July 26-27, 2008

Father Tom’s Homily
17th Sunday
July 27, 2008

Dreams play a significant role in the stories of the Bible. For example, today’s first reading tells about King Solomon’s dream.
But does God dream? I say “yes, definitely.”
God has a dream for creation. It is called the Kingdom of God.

For the past two Sundays and again today, our gospel readings have been taken from the 13th chapter of Matthew. In this chapter Jesus used seven parables to teach us about the “Kingdom of Heaven.” In today’s gospel Jesus compares it to a treasure hidden in a field, a pearl of great price and a net cast into the sea to catch fish.
Jesus, you can see, spoke often about the Kingdom of God. It was a central theme of his preaching. Shaping us in His image and likeness, God shares with us the divine gift of dreams. In all these kingdom parables Jesus is sharing his dream with us. He wants us to dream his dream.

Earlier in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt, chap 6), Jesus gave us the most powerful image of the Kingdom of God. It was the Our Father.
He instructs us to pray “Our Father…” God is not an exclusive My Father, but an inclusive Our Father. So we can imagine a chorus of the peoples of the earth praying Our Father.
This presents the human family looking to God as the loving father and all of us as brothers and sister in that family. This is the finest image of the Kingdom of God.

This is God’s dream for his beloved creation. All of us in one large embrace with God and everyone else. Kingdom building begins with this inclusive embrace.
Also in this prayer Jesus teaches us to say “thy kingdom come…” The Our Father sends us forth to build the Kingdom of God. We have a hand in shaping the world.

The Our Father and its kingdom confronts another so-called father and its own kind of kingdom. It is the kingdom of darkness.
During the bloody persecution of the early Christians by the Roman empire, the Our Father was officially forbidden. It was a dangerous prayer to say, because the emperor considered himself to be the father of his people. He was to be addressed as “our father.” No one else should dare to compete with the emperor/father.
Jesus’ prayer says deliberately Our Father who art in heaven – in contrast to the emperor/father who was in Rome.

The emperor’s official title was Caesar Augustus. The “august one” meant the “holy one,” at least in the minds of the Roman authorities.
The emperor/father, however, was not the holy one. Instead, the Father in heaven was the all holy One. That is why the Lord’s Prayer says very deliberately “hallowed/holy be thy name.”
The father/emperor was a religious figure and the empire itself was a holy enterprise that received its religious aura from the many official gods of Rome.

Loyalty to the emperor/father and the empire/father land was called patriotism (taken from the Latin word pater which means father).
Patriotism is devotion to the father/fatherland. Patriotism can become a problem when it becomes a kind of religious duty. This happens when the Father in heaven is overlooked in favor of the father and the fatherland.
The will of the Father in heaven can become secondary to the security and prosperity of the fatherland. According to this national religion, the true patriot must never criticize the fatherland and its father figure.

When selling products brought back from the women’s cooperatives in El Salvador at the Farmer’s Market and in our own Salvadoran Craft Shop at St. Mary, we hand out information sheets with a brief history of El Salvador and why we are involved there. These sheets give a short summary of the 12-year war and of the post war efforts by the people to rebuild their lives so shattered by the official violence there.
Several weeks ago, I gave one of these sheets to a woman who had purchased a puppet. She expressed admiration for what we have been doing with the people of Calavera. About ten minutes later she came back to me waving the sheet toward me. She objected to the information sheet because it speaks of “the long 12-year war waged against the people by the U.S-backed Salvadoran military forces.”
She strongly opposed the very mention of the U.S. involvement in the violent oppression of the Salvadoran people by its military forces. “We don’t do things like that,” she told me.

I said that the U.S. gave the Salvadoran government $5 billion during the 1980s to carry out its war against so-called “subversive forces” in that country. The $5 billion comes out to be an average of $1,370,000 each day for ten years. Was the U.S. involved in that horrendous war. Definitely yes. And there were U.S. military advisors on the ground with the Salvadoran troops.
The “subversive forces” were courageous individuals from a variety of organizations: teachers, doctors, union organizers, priests and various pastoral leaders (including the archbishop) who were asking for changed in the unjust system that empowered the elite few and impoverished the majority.

I told the woman at the Farmer’s Market that one can go to a city park in San Salvador to see the Wall of the Martyrs, a 60-70-yard-long granite wall on which are inscribed 75,000 names of the victims of the war.
She turned in disgust and walked away. She returned in about ten minutes to say that she was sorry that we had a disagreement and that we should forget about what was said and be at peace with each other. I said that I was unwilling to forget the 75,000 whose names are on that Wall of the Martyrs.
She turned away disappointed at my answer. I was relieved that she did not throw the puppet at me and demand a refund.
The Our Father asks for our loyalty to God the Father. The Father of us all is above any father/empire that represents another kind of vision.

Tomorrow is the 27th anniversary of the death of Father Stan Rother, a U.S. priest who was pastor in Guatemala. He was murdered by a death squad on July 28, 1981 because he was in solidarity with the Mayan people in his parish of Santiago Atitilan. He openly opposed the oppression of the people by government forces and the U.S. support of that government.
He was declared to be “Blessed Stan Rother” a few years ago by the Church. He deserves to be remembered as a pastor who stood with his people during their darkest hour. In doing so, he was loyal to God the Father of us all, instead of to any political “father.” He dared to share God’s dream.

About ten years ago, the archdiocesan human rights commission of Guatemala published a well-documented report with the names of the 200,000 victims of almost half a century of violence in Guatemala.
It said that over 95% of the 200,000 were victims of government forces.
Any remembrance of Father Stan should include information about the evil climate of terror that plunged the country into a terrible darkness. The archdiocesan report spoke of “the maniacal windstorm that blew in from the north.”
Belief in God the Father demands such truth.

Many years ago Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dramatically announced, “I have a dream.” It was a dream of harmony among the various peoples of the earth. And like Father Stan, it cost him his life.
It was the dream of the Our Father. It was God’s dream.
Dare we to be dreamers like God.