Steadfast Endurance

STEADFAST ENDURANCE

What do Oscar Romerp, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King have in common?

The answer is that they are three 20th century martyrs, who together with seven others, are honoured at Westminster Abbey by having their effigies placed in the former vacant niches above its West door.

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Oscar Romero was born in El Salvador in 1917, the son of a telegraph worker. He left school at the age of 12 to work as a carpenter. However, his local parish priest encouraged him to consider ordination. After studying in Rome, he was ordained priest in 1942 and returned home and was eventually appointed Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977.

San Salvador is the capital city of the smallest of the Central American republics, El Salvador. It is a country of about five million people where, since 1932, one dictatorship has followed another and power resides in an oligarchy of about fourteen families.

Oscar Romero became Archbishop at a time of mounting political unrest. Over one third of the good arable land was owned by a mere 2½ thousand people. This meant that the vast majority of the population was forced to live in poverty, scratching a livelihood from the barren hillsides.

It was also a time when the priests of the Roman Catholic Church were beginning to seek for social justice on the part of those who were being exploited by the minority. Whilst the government initially welcomed the appointment of Oscar as being "a safe pair of hands", they quickly turned against him when he refused to become their puppet and gave support to his clergy. The government quickly became nervous and slogans began to appear which read "Be patriotic: kill a priest”.

Whilst Oscar Romero was celebrating the Eucharist on 24th March 1980, he was killed at the altar of the Chapel of Divine Providence, in a cancer hospital run by Carmelite nuns, in order to silence him.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany in 1906. He became a Lutheran pastor and lectured at Berlin University.

He belonged to a section of the German Lutheran Church which frequently attacked the specific policies of Hitler's government, and especially its anti-Jewish laws. He believed that his country's involvement in the war was unjust and, although he was working in America when the war broke out, he returned to Germany so that he might be totally identified with his nation's sufferings.

In 1942, he was appointed spokesman for the Confession Church and of the German resistance and tried, unsuccessfully, to win the cooperation of the British War Cabinet to overthrow the Hitler Government. To this end, he met with George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester in Stockholm.

Eventually he was arrested on suspicion of being involved in a conspiracy against Hitler and the central government of the Third Reich. He almost survived the war, but after the semblance of a trial he was hanged at Flossenburg on 9th April, 1945.

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Martin Luther King was born in Atlanta in the southern American state of Georgia in 1929. Initially he wanted to be a lawyer but changed his mind and became an assistant minister to his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta. After studying at Boston, he returned to the highly respectable Baptist Church of able negro professionals in Montgomery, Alabama.

Ever since the confederacy, the state laws of Alabama had sought to keep black and white people separate, with the whites having all the advantages. Fifteen months after his arrival, almost by accident, Martin, a descendant of slavery himself, found himself a leader of the negro citizens of Montgomery.

On 1st December 1955, Mrs. Rosa Park was asked to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. She refused, was arrested and charged with an offence under the state's segregation laws. Within a week, Martin organised the boycott of the buses by all negroes, which lasted for a year, before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the segregation of buses was against the American Constitution.

Soon Martin found himself leading a non-violent protest against segregation laws throughout America. On Wednesday 28th August, 1963, a quarter of a million people, over 75,000 of whom were white, converged on the Lincoln monument in Washington in a non-violent demonstration.

Martin shared his dream with all those present "that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table in brotherhood. I have a dream that one day the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice".

In 1964, Congress signed the Civil Rights Bill. However, four years later, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, at the age of only 39 years.

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If I could have a "one to one" conversation with Oscar Romero, the Spanish Roman Catholic Archbishop, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran Pastor and Martin Luther King, the American Baptist Minister, I would ask them how did they keep going in their various protests and against poverty, nazism and racial segregation, when it involved so much voluntary suffering?

Oscar Romero would probably reply, to quote from a Mexican journal in which he wrote two weeks before he died: "I am bound as a Pastor, by a divine command, to give my life for those whom I love, and that is all Salvadoreans, even those who are going to kill me. If they manage to carry out their threats, from this moment I offer my blood for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador.

“Martyrdom is a grace of God which I do not deserve. But if God accepts the sacrifice of my life, then may my blood be the seed of liberty, and a sign that hope will soon become a reality”.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer would reply, to use his own words: "Jesus asked in Gethsemene, ‘Could you not watch with me for one hour?’ That is the reversal of what the religious man expects from God. Man is summoned to share God's suffering at the hands of a godless world”.

Elsewhere he writes: "When a mad man is tearing through the streets in a car, I can, as a pastor who happens to be on the scene, do more than merely console or bury those who have been run over. I must jump in front of the car and stop it”.

And Martin Luther King would reply: “We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out across the centuries ‘love your enemies’. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love”.

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A willingness to take up, if necessary, one’s cross and suffer like Christ on behalf of others is part of the Christian way of life. However, what really matters and what really makes it effective is the way one suffers.

St Paul says: ‘We try to recommend ourselves by our steadfast endurance: in distress, hardship, and dire straits, flogged, imprisoned, mobbed, overworked, sleepless and starving’.

It is through “steadfast endurance” no matter what may befall one that one is able to rise above suffering. And that “steadfast endurance” comes through faith in God whereby the weakness of one’s human predicament can become a source of strength. Hence, St Paul is able to conclude this “blizzard of troubles”, to use the words of St Chrysostom, with the words “dying we still live on; disciplined by suffering we are not done to death”.

It is this which the world finds uneasy and unnerving. It is this that made the government of El Salvador so afraid of Oscar Romero. It is this which made the German government afraid of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is this which made the American white population so afraid of Martin Luther King. The power of God being made known through weakness, as it was at Bethlehem 2000 years ago via a helpless child.

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May you too know of the power of God in your lives in times of suffering so that you too may rise victorious and be an example of steadfast endurance to those around you.

There may not be a vacant niche for your effigy above the West door of Westminster Abbey, but there is always a vacant niche in the heart of God for each one of us who is prepared to take up our cross in this life and suffer if necessary on behalf of others.