All she had to live on

A sermon about identifying with and walking with the poor, in the spirit of Jesus and St. Óscar Romero

Yesterday I had bunion surgery. This corrective procedure was much needed: come to find out a genetic predisposition plus years of dancing salsa in heels equals a good deal of discomfort. While my recovering foot is quietly screaming, my heart is feeling steady and grateful that this surgery was available to me and that I am free to convalesce on the couch while my husband and my parents bring me food, help me hobble around a bit, and keep our two-year-old twins busy (so far today they’ve spent time at a farm, played kitchen, and molded play dough animals. All in a preschooler’s day’s work!)

Mindful of my limited capacity for the coming weeks (I won’t be able to walk or drive for a while), last Sunday was my final scheduled guest preacher slot of the year. It was also the Sunday after the elections here in the US, and I was visiting a politically mixed congregation. I decided to lean hard on the shoulder of one of my favorite Saints, Óscar Romero, whose own context was politically fraught and yet who stayed true to his call to stand with the poor. It is a message I hope will be a source of accompaniment to you in these uncertain and turbulent times. While I can’t physically walk right now, know that I’m walking with you in Spirit.

(As always, I veer off manuscript as Spirit moves, including pretty substantively at the end, so here’s the recording if you’d prefer to watch/listen).

Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

Proper 27, Year B, 2024: Mark 12:38-44

As Jesus taught, he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

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“She out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

May the Word of God be spoken, may the word of God be heard, in the name of the loving, liberating and life-sustaining Trinity. Amen.+

In 1977, Oscar Romero was very much of the world of long robes and long prayers Jesus cautions his disciples to avoid in today’s Gospel. 

Consecrated as the Archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador, Romero was on the fast track to power, thanks to his longstanding service as a priest with a deep commitment to pastoral care.

Like many in high positions in the Catholic Church in Latin America, Romero’s focus on the “spiritual character of Christian life,”¹ made him quite popular amongst political elites, who had no reason to believe he would threaten the status quo.

That status quo was one of massive economic disparity between rich and poor, as a small landholding aristocracy controlled the lives of millions of peasants, trampling on their rights and denying them dignity.

This order was maintained by the infamous death squads, which roamed the country murdering people in cold blood.

Romero wasn’t one to criticize the state, for which he exercised many official functions. And he might have stayed popular with the powerful if he had stayed quiet.

But just three weeks after becoming Archbishop, Romero’s good friend and clergy colleague, Rutilio Grande, was murdered by the death squads.

Grande had been serving in peasant farmer communities, empowering them through the Gospel to know their worth and dignity. This made him a threat to the government, which couldn’t risk ordinary people rising up to demand their human rights.

Losing his friend in this way was a kind of second conversion for Romero.

While the government death squads posted flyers reading: “Be a Patriot. Kill a Priest”, Romero caught courage.

His pastoral ministry pivoted. 

He went from a focus on inward cultivation of holiness to following his late friend’s example, visiting peasants in their villages to listen to their experiences of suffering at the hands of government forces.

Romero quickly came to see the plight of the poor in El Salvador as the lens through which to see the entire social-political reality.

In his preaching, he began emphasizing what is known in liberation theology as the “preferential option for the poor.”

“We say of that world of the poor, that it is the key to understanding the Christian faith, to understanding the activity of the Church and the political dimension of her faith… It is the poor who tell us what the world is, and what the Church’s service to the world should be.”²

Instructed by the experiences of the poor, Romero named how the church, by its silence, sanctioned state violence. 

And he began openly criticizing “the regime and those supporting it, denouncing cases of abduction, torture and mass murder.”³

All of this led to Romero being assassinated while celebrating mass.

Moments before being shot, he preached: 

“Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ, will live like the grain of wheat that dies…”

In the last chapter of his life, Romero identified with the poor, and was killed for it.

In 2015, the Church named the beloved bishop a saint, as if to finally say: “This man taught us to look upon the poor with the eyes of Jesus.”

Our Gospel this morning calls us to do the same.

There are three groups present on the scene at the temple treasury: The Poor, the Powerful and the Lookers On.

As the audience, we, like the disciples, are lookers on to the scene, with Jesus serving as our tour guide, orienting us to a particular way of seeing. The way he encourages us to see will subvert everything society tells us about who and what is most important.

Little more than a glance is given the rich as they place their hefty sums in the treasury. Jesus has already instructed his disciples to be wary of such privileged people.

Their money, he warned, has been made through exploitation of the vulnerable – devouring widow’s houses. Their religiosity is performative – they want to be seen as good by others. These folks are not the teachers and leaders they project themselves as being.

Jesus is not impressed by flaunted wealth and shows of power. He is training his disciples to see differently.

Suddenly a poor widow enters the room.

Can’t you feel Jesus’ joy bubbling up?! 

He sees her and names her generosity as exemplary.

Look! He calls his disciples, don’t miss this moment! See the generosity of this widow. She has given more than anyone!

The rich gave out of their abundance, with more to spare for themselves.

But, “She out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

There is an almost worshipful tone to this whole exchange. I imagine Jesus standing in awe of this woman as he invites his disciples to simply go,

WOW.

I’m reminded of Fr. Greg Boyle’s call to “stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it. “

That’s what Jesus is modeling.

Here is an ordinary, humble person, representing all those oppressed and exploited by the powerful – you know, one of those people Jesus just talked about, whose house has been devoured by the ruling class – and here she is, highlighted as the one making a difference in the kingdom of God. 

While everyone else is parading around, flaunting their power gained by trampling on the rights of the poor, she's quietly giving her everything to God in radically trusting faith. 

She is the exemplar of faith, lifted up that we might ask ourselves:

With whom do we identify – with the powerful? or with the marginalized? 

I wonder how the disciples felt in this moment as they realized the depths of faith to which Jesus was calling them.

Because, realize, Jesus was calling them – as we too are called – to shift from a deferential faith of obedience within an established hierarchy with its clearly visible leaders in long robes making long prayers,

to seeing marginalized people like:

poor widows and children, 

people with disabilities and folks with chronic illness, 

foreigners and pagans 

as exemplars of faith, 

and to become like THEM. 

To put it simply, the Gospel call is to become poor outsiders for Jesus’ sake. It is to give everything we have, everything we are, for the sake of love.

While our culture presses us to identify with the powerful, with the rich, with celebrities and politicians and business people and billionaires, Jesus calls us to identify ourselves with the marginalized, those who have nothing of material value to offer, but whose spiritual riches are innumerable.

Those who are society’s scapegoats, but to whom God runs with open arms. Those whose identities are ridiculed, but whom Jesus marvels at as magnificent. 

This was a countercultural call then and it is a countercultural call now.

To intentionally choose this lens of preferential option for the poor is a risky thing.

It is St. Romero facing a moment of decision after Rutilio Grande’s murder – would he return to his familiar church life of long robes and long prayers? Or would he allow himself to be changed by the poor peasants whose lives had utterly transformed the life of his friend, putting his own life on the line to uphold the dignity and rights of theirs?

Romero surely realized that death was a likely outcome if he stood in solidarity with those whose lives were being extinguished en masse. But he knew in his soul that the alternative was worse than death — what Jesus called the “greater condemnation.”

And so, in a sea of lookers on, helpless and afraid, Romero modeled how to take on the eyes of Jesus.

I wonder: who are the people in your life whose example of faith, from the depths of suffering, poverty, or grief, compels you?

How might their example of audacious love, radical generosity, and courageous solidarity change your life and be your guide in these change-filled days?

How might you lovingly stand in awe of them and lift up their stories like Jesus?

And, who in your life needs to hear these stories of faith, that they might see the human beings around them as worthy of dignity, respect, and all the rights God has afforded to human beings?

And if you are feeling like the widow – used and abused by the powerful, unseen and unacknowledged for your faith – I want you to hear that not only does Jesus see you, but Jesus stands in awe of you.

Jesus sees you struggling to make ends meet, the disrespect you face, the way your identify is weaponized by the powerful to gain more power, and weeps over your dehumanization.

Jesus lifts up those who are forgotten and yet remain faithful amidst seemingly insurmountable obstacles to the place of honor.

And it is all of our responsibility to love and lift up all who find themselves in this place. 

I’ll close with a prayer offered at Oscar Romero’s funeral by one of his colleagues. 

Let us pray. 

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view. 

The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is this Sacred work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.

No program accomplishes our mission.

No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

Amen.

1.  https://historiadomus.net/2018/10/13/the-making-of-a-poor-saint-oscar-romero/

2. http://www.romerotrust.org.uk/drupal/sites/default/files/1980-02-02%20Louvain.pdf

3. https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2020-03/oscar-romero-forty-years-assassination-anniversary0.html