By all accounts Stan Rother was a normal kid. Growing up in a devoutly Roman Catholic farm family near Okarche, Oklahoma, Stan was destined to be a priest. The big hitch was that he just couldn't master Latin, then the exclusive language of worship in the Roman Communion of the Church. His family helped him search until he could locate a seminary that he could get through without usual Latin credentials. He did, was graduated, and in 1963 Father Stanley Francis Rother was ordained a priest. After several postings around our state, he volunteered to serve in Latin America. He was a highly loving and effective priest to his people in Guatemala. Being a champion of the poor and oppressed, Father Rother quickly became a nemesis of the big capitalist element and their criminal associates. He was warned repeatedly of the dangers of following the Gospel and the logic or moving to a safer place. But he would not abandon the people God had given him to serve. After a respite in the US in 1980, he returned to Guatemala and was gunned down by three assassins in his rectory. Recently, the Roman Communion announced the obvious, that he was a "martyr." I gather that this proclamation will allow him to move through the cumbersome Roman system for the naming of Saints. I am glad that he will be eventually so honoured.
In today's reading we hear of John the Baptiser who, in Matthew's account, appears suddenly on the scene as a severe ascetic, wearing animal skins, keeping a diet of bugs and honey and living in the desert. Any Jew would recognize that this scenario intends to suggests that he was calling people back to original fidelity to basic values, back to Sinai so to speak.
To borrow terminology from the protestant scholar Walter Brueggeman, Jews had gone from a life style of Mosaic values over to Royal values. In the Mosaic times, Jewish practice was eco-friendly, radically compassionate by focussing on taking care of the least, and there was expectation that in reality what we would call the Kingdom of God would come through the work of God's People in partnership with God. This nomadically-based lifestyle had come to be replaced by a new kind of Judaism. The itinerant sanctuary (Ark of the Covenant) was replaced by a fixed Temple, nomadic tribal government replaced by Monarchy, compassionate and cooperative enterprise replaced by a capitalist system which ignored the needy and oppressed, free-wheeling cultic life displaced by a rigid system , and the Kingdom would come by God acting around and despite of, not through, his People. This socially conservative new Judaism led to the rise of the major and minor Prophets' reminding people of the old values, the need for repentance and return. The people didn't listen and ended up in Exile in Iraq before some returned to re-start their lives in the Holy Land.
Father Stan and John the Baptiser both served in troubled times, both took to task the business-as- usual attitude in their cultures and challenged the domination systems of their times. Both were quite effective. Both were executed by representatives of those systems. Their lives and witness stand as a sobering reminder to us that God still calls us to change the world in our own time, for God's sake and our own.
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