Luke 16:1-13
Though the word “radicalize” has been around for two centuries, it came into common usage with the rise of the internet, and especially social media in recent decades.
We’ve heard so many reports of terrorists radicalized by online calls for jihad that it is almost an expectation at this point. This past week, it has been misapplied to Tyler Robinson, the young man accused of murdering the hatemonger Charlie Kirk.
Of course, radicalized depends on your definition of radical. Two years ago, we would have described the murder of DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose in an attack on the Centers for Disease Control as the work of a radicalized assailant, Patrick Joseph White. These days, he’s just one extreme on a continuum that includes our Secretary of Health and Human Services, the son of a man assassinated in 1968 by a Palestinian Christian radicalized by U.S. support for Israel.
Historically, the word “radical” has referred to those members of the social and political left who press most aggressively for equality and the common good. That is to say, a radical is someone who challenges the consolidated wealth and power of the few. Which makes me a radical.
Let’s spend a few moments zooming in on a particular case of “radicalization,” one that might offer us a way to interpret today’s messy reading from the gospel.
The Roman communion experienced about a decade and a half of liberalization, from the start of the Second Vatican Council in 1962 to the election of the man who would take the name John Paul II in 1978. During that brief time, a theological movement developed in Latin America that came to be known as “liberation theology.”
Some may remember that South and Central America experienced numerous civil wars and coups d’etat during those decades, often with the most oppressive forces supported by the United States, an interfering hemispheric role we have played since James Monroe first articulated his eponymous doctrine in 1823.
The most active thinkers in liberation theology were members of Catholic religious orders, including the Dominican Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Jesuit Jon Sobrino, and the Franciscan Leonardo Boff, who was repeatedly silenced by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, until Boff eventually left the priesthood.
El Salvador was ideal soil for the message of liberation, with one of the highest poverty rates in the region and control of most arable land by only fourteen families. There had been a political resistance movement for decades, and a series of sham elections keeping the oligarchs in power.
In 1977, the Archbishop of San Salvador, Luis Chávez, reached the mandatory retirement of 75. As his replacement, the Vatican chose the boring and scholarly Bishop of Santiago de María, Óscar Romero. He was a safe pick, a social conservative, and suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder. He was neither charismatic nor likely to cause trouble.
Among Romero’s contemporaries was a Jesuit priest named Rutilio Grande. During his formation process, Grande had been deeply influenced by Vatican II. He also admired the work of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian philosopher of education best known for his work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Grande would eventually be assigned to parish ministry, serving in the village of Aguilares, where he worked to organize the local peasants.
A series of dramatic events took place in a very short period of time in 1977. The Rev. Mario Bernal Londono, a Colombian priest serving in El Salvador, was kidnapped on January 28th, allegedly by guerrillas, and deported by the Salvadoran government soon after his safe release.
On February 3rd, Romero was appointed Archbishop of San Salvador.
Ten days later, Grande delivered a sermon denouncing the expulsion of the Colombian priest. It included these lines:
“I am fully aware that very soon the Bible and the Gospels will not be allowed to cross the border. All that will reach us will be the covers since all the pages are subversive – against sin, it is said. So that if Jesus crosses the border at Chalatenango, they will not allow him to enter.”
Nine days later, Romero was formally installed as Archbishop, with his friend Grande at his side as Master of Ceremonies.
On March 12th, Rutilio Grande, along with 72-year-old Manuel Solórzano and 16-year-old Nelson Lemus, was assassinated by Salvadoran security forces.
Romero traveled to the village to celebrate mass that night. He declared that only one mass would be said in the small nation the following Sunday, a memorial mass at the cathedral. More than 150 priests participated in the mass, with a crowd of over 10,000 in and around the cathedral.
The murder of Rutilio Grande radicalized Oscar Romero. He could no longer ignore the violence and oppression of the nation’s ruling oligarchs. You cannot un-ring a bell, and you cannot un-see what you have already seen.
Two years later, he would say:
“To try to preach without referring to the history one preaches in is not to preach the gospel. Many would like preaching so spiritualized that it leaves sinners unbothered and does not term idolators those who kneel before money and power. A preaching that says nothing about the sinful environment in which the gospel is reflected upon is not the gospel.”
I suppose coming out publicly as gay during the AIDS crisis, when discrimination against LGBTQ folks was legal and gay sex was a crime, was fairly radical, but I think it is most accurate to say I was radicalized in 1998 with the murders of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man, and James Byrd, a black-identified person of color. Shepard was murdered by two young white men, Byrd by three, and both victims suffered brutal torture.
Now, let us turn briefly to the gospel reading. Most pastors who dare to preach on this text will speed past the parable of the bad steward, and with good reason. Neither the story itself nor the interpretation Jesus offers makes a bit of sense from the standpoint of our economic and legal systems.
“Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth” may be the most confusing thing Jesus says in the four gospels. It seems to me that this is a case where there is a real historic teaching, but one that has been mis-remembered or has lost important context in the oral tradition before being recorded.
It is true that Jesus shows a “preferential option for the poor,” a phrase coined by the liberation theologian Jon Sobrino, but his word to the powerful is invitational. He disrupts the commerce in the Temple, but his call to followers is for a spiritual revolution that will lead to social transformation. Think of his image of yeast, a small thing that transforms the whole loaf.
I want to suggest that we can interpret this passage as the manager being radicalized in the way Romero was radicalized when he realized his government was willing to murder priests, in the way I was radicalized by the callousness of so many when Shepard and Byrd were murdered.
The manager was not the master, but he was most certainly in a position above those desperate enough to borrow from his master. Until he wasn’t.
The socio-economic structure of pre-Rabbinic Judaism was small-hold farms. Each family originally had enough land to meet its own needs, theoretically with enough surplus to pay taxes to the Temple and the King.
In this light, the theft of Naboth’s vineyard by Queen Jezebel as reported in the 1st Book of Kings becomes triply troublesome, not only the murder of an innocent man and the theft of the years of labor to cultivate the vineyard, but the theft of the family’s ancestral home.
This small-hold system was collapsing in the New Testament age, with natural disasters like droughts and locusts, backbreaking taxes paid to the Temple and to Rome, and the exploitation of the rich, who snatched up more and more property from those desparate enough to sell.
The master in our story is most certainly among the predatory rich, as the amounts given, one hundred jugs of olive oil and one hundred containers of wheat, are beyond the reach of a single family small-hold.
The manager was probably working for the large landowner because he had lost his own land, possibly to the same man. Like the widows and orphans, all too often thrown on the mercy of relatives, this man had no safety net. He was going from being the powerful intermediary for a rich man to being the poorest of the poor. He was not only in a position of solidarity with those who borrowed, he was at a disadvantage. Radicalized by his own impending poverty, he stole from the master.
Many have heard the old expression “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Maybe we shouldn’t have to have it happen to us, like it did for the manager in the gospel, for us to be in solidarity with the victim. Maybe it shouldn’t have to happen to one of our best friends.
After he was murdered, many of the worst things Charlie Kirk said resurfaced and re-circulated. One of those was this:
“I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage.”
Yet empathy is at the heart of the Torah justice tradition. We are told to welcome the immigrant and treat her with justice because we “were once strangers in a strange land,” a reference to the period of bondage in Egypt, and later to captivity in Babylon.
Jesus most certainly has empathy on the poor and wounded during his ministry, not the more toxic sympathy of one above those who are suffering, for Jesus himself accepts the baptism of John, is nearly stoned and constantly harassed, dies on a cross like an escaped slave or insurrectionist.
In the parable of the sheep and the goats, found in Matthew 25, he tells us God is to be found among the least of us, the poor and the imprisoned.
Oscar Romero earned a doctorate in Rome at a time when less that half of Salvadorans could read. As leader of the Roman church in El Salvador when that faith represented more than 98% of citizens, he had immense privilege. Yet, radicalized, he risked it all in calls for justice, in preaching non-violence to those who retained power through violence.
He did radio broadcasts, cataloging war crimes, delivering homilies heard by nearly three quarters of rural residents and nearly half in urban areas.
It was in one of these radio addresses, delivered on March 23rd, 1980, that he called on Salvadoran soldiers to follow God’s law, not the criminal orders of the government. He invited them to join the resistance.
The following evening, as he celebrated Mass in the chapel of Hospital de la Divina Providencia, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated. The death squad was commanded by a Neo-fascist former officer in the Salvadoran military, one that received substantial support funded by U.S. taxpayers.
Six days later, an estimated quarter million gathered in and around the cathedral for the funeral mass. The peaceful gathering was disrupted when national security forces threw smoke bombs into the crowd and opened fire, killing dozens.
It took many years, and multiple popes, but in 2018, Oscar Romero, a bookish nerd radicalized by the murder of a friend, was recognized as a saint and martyr by the Roman church, something many of us had understood for decades.
Sadly, El Salvador, having known a few brief years of peace and democracy, is once again a brutal authoritarian state, and a partner with our own post-constitutional government.
Forgive debt. Denounce violence. Find God where God is, not just in the beauty of nature, but in the squalor in the streets and the quiet of a hospice, in the undocumented worker sending money home and in the courageous souls who obstruct ICE.
May we be radicalized like the founders of this very congregation, ready to do what it takes in the name of freedom and of love. Amen.