January 21, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
It was just a simple act. It was just a simple act of solidarity. It was just a whisper in the wind. Truthfully, we did not have any idea why we were going there – we only thought we knew. Isn’t that so often the way?
Download
Full Text
“The Man in the Black Hat”
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
January 17, 2010 @ 10:30 a.m.
So…
this is a story about something that happened
a week ago, in El Salvador.
But it is not about El Salvador,
it is about you and me…
it is about Jesus.
And while I have yet to be here to preach in 2010,
our theme this January is “Many Faces of Jesus.”
So…
a week ago last Friday,
January 8th I believe,
on the night before the first of two groups
of Trinity-ites were to go home,
we found ourselves…
unexpectedly,
inexplicably,
serendipitously
in the very small, very remote village of
Trinidad – Trinity, El Salvador.
We found it at the end of a three-hour drive,
two of those hours on a deeply rutted,
harshly uneven,
dangerously steep and
poorly engineered mountain road.
We were not in an SUV or truck or jeep
but a Toyota van.
We were not alone.
A steady single-file stream of vehicles
were making their way from every direction
across the small Latin American country
about the size of Massachusetts.
Like ants moving in on a fallen crust of pie,
vehicles of every shape and size
were struggling up that merciless road.
In fact, people
were walking up that road
in gaggles of five, six, eight, ten and more,
having been forced to abandon their vehicle
miles down the mountain.
To Trinity they walked
and drove
and hobbled.
To Trinity those of us from Trinity were going –
unplanned
for it would have been impossible to have planned it.
La Cabanas
is the name of the region where a Canadian multinational
mining company with a US license to trade
is making its last stand against
the earth
and the people of that place.
“Pacific Rim Mining” wants to extract gold
from the mountain,
no matter that each effort to do so
leaves the rivers in the region dry
and the rivers downstream
toxic.
Never mind
that the primary community organizer,
a peasant-farmer from the village of Trinity,
had two of his fingers cut off with a machete in order to
silence him.
Never mind
that he would not be silenced.
Never mind
that he disappeared
only to be found months later,
dead at the bottom of a well…
tortured.
Never mind
that another organizer was shot eight times
and lived.
Never mind
that after his recovery party he promised never to
quit.
Never mind that the next day,
on December 20, 2009,
he was shot again…
and killed.
Never mind
that the pregnant wife of another organizer was
shot
and killed the day after Christmas.
Never mind
that the stockholders must have their dividends.
That is why all those people,
mostly poor,
mostly peasant,
were trickling toward Trinity.
That was why the local leader of our group, Rosie,
wanted us to go there.
It was just a simple act.
It was just a simple act of solidarity.
It was just a whisper in the wind.
Truthfully,
we did not have any idea why
we were going there –
we only thought we knew.
Isn’t that so often the way?
At Trinity,
the one in El Salvador,
on the top of that mountain
up that god-forsaken road,
more truly isolated
than most of us had ever been,
and more isolated than we even knew,
a stage had been erected,
surrounded by huge speakers and a tent.
Live music was blaring
syncopated by raspy-voiced announcements
followed by cheers.
Telemundo was there,
the Spanish language television network.
They were interviewing…
the way media people do,
interviewing anything and any one in sight.
In the midst of the noise and chaos and energy
we stood around
awkward,
naked in our Gringo-ness,
likely the only ones with more money than debt,
more food than hunger,
more plans for the future than concerns for the present.
So…
we had been told we would receive a briefing
from the main organizer of the event,
the leader of a local environmental committee –
in truth, a fellow neighbor of the murdered.
We began to think that the briefing would not happen,
given that the man in the black cowboy hat
that was to speak to us,
had to be everywhere at once.
He was in front of the camera
then behind the stage
then welcoming buses
then conferring with groups of men and women
with hushed voices and grim faces.
Why would he want to talk with us –
hapless church-people from Buffalo, New York?
Why would he take the time?
Why should we take his time?
Then…
word came,
the man in the black hat
would meet with us in the health clinic down the road –
a cinder block rectangular building
smaller than our chapel.
We wandered down the road,
awkwardly balancing single-file along the rutted edge
between parked trucks and vans
and the caravan of buses driving in.
As we opened the barbed-wire gate to enter the clinic yard,
we backed away as a ten year old boy on his horse exited
and entered into the flow of traffic.
It was dusk moving toward dark in a land of little
night-time light.
So…
once inside we could see it was more
than the man in the black hat.
Other men with cowboy hats,
peasant-farmers,
and women in matching yellow tee-shirts
that said something official on them in Spanish.
In addition to our ten
there were another ten or more,
including a handsome young priest
who told me emphatically when we met,
priest-to-priest,
that he was from the “independent Catholic Church.”
He invited me to celebrate Mass with them
but we would be leaving before the late-night Communion.
We all took our seats on the ubiquitous plastic
lawn chairs that serve as furniture everywhere
in the Developing world.
In a large circle around the room
we waited in anticipation of what was to take place.
As a group we only had a vague idea
of what was going on –
no knowledge of the violent drama unfolding
between those who work the land
and those who would rape it.
Finally, all were seated and the man in the black hat
spoke first.
Rosie translated between long phrases,
delivered with a resonate cadence,
and eyes that reached out and echoed his voice.
So…
he told us the story of Trinity,
and the anti-mining campaign
that began with the mystery of their river drying up,
and eighteen other rivers melting away into the sand –
every river a critical tributary in a country that lacks water.
He told us the story beginning in 2004
and we listed as if wrapped in a silent shroud.
Now and again as he spoke,
I watched the faces and eyes of our group,
each one a study in rootedness to the moment.
When he finished speaking he invited his fellow organizers
to speak, and the priest talked first.
He seemed to affirm what black hat had spoken.
He pledge the support of the church.
One by one each of the environmental committee members spoke, and with each voice
the room became more intimate.
Impervious to the music and noise blaring into the night
right outside the open windows and doors,
we were entombed in that room…
in that moment.
Finally…
an old man spoke,
an old man with a cowboy hat
and a face as deeply rutted as the road.
He was the first to cry.
His voice broke.
At the end of his statement he looked at us
with wet eyes and said
he hoped we would be more than tourists.
The Black Hat spoke again,
his voice resonant with leadership
until it suddenly fell silent.
He stuttered and wiped tears from his eyes.
At first a little, then he kept wiping his eyes in silence.
We could see…
we could see,
there in the darkening light, we could see
that we were sitting in the presence of marked
men and women.
We could hear the shadow of death breathing on them.
They were in dangers because they had dared to stand up
for the earth and the rivers,
and those who depend upon it for
food
for water
for survival,
not for shinny gold to gilt jewelry or feather portfolios.
There in the darkened night,
on top of a mountain whose name we did not know,
in a land that suddenly seemed extremely far away,
we could see
who we were with and why,
in the midst of all that was taking place outside,
they would want to talk for an hour-and-a-half to us.
We could see why a bunch of
gringo’s and gringa’s from Buffalo, New York,
that had nothing to do
with anything they were going through,
were important enough to take so much time.
We, our hapless little group from Trinity in Buffalo,
were the outside world to Trinity in El Salvador.
They were sending a message to the outside world
by telling us their story.
We were the bottle with a note in it,
cast in desperation to a world beyond.
So…
when Black Hat tried to speak again
Rosie’s voice failed, choked off with her tears.
I looked around the room again, and
through my own blurred vision
saw tears on stoic faces.
We were there,
Trinity to Trinity,
as a witness.
It was like the White Northerners
registering Black voters in Selma –
we were there to witness to an outside world
that would otherwise go to sleep at night.
We were called,
there in that place we hadn’t expected to be,
to come back and find a way, any way,
to say “the whole world is watching.”
“When it is necessary to drink so
much pain
when a river of anguish
drowns us,
when we have wept many tears
and they flow like rivers
from our sad eyes,
only then does the deep hidden sigh of our neighbor
become our own.” (Julia Esquivel)
“The Faces of Jesus” is our theme for January.
We have seen one of the faces of Jesus
at the end of a horrid mountain road in El Salvador.
He is being crucified again, like before,
like so many times before.
In his tears,
from his sad eyes
the deep hidden sigh of our neighbor – Trinity, El Salvador –
has become our own.
Those of us who invest in the stock market –
please go home and find out if Pacific Rim in your portfolio,
or in the stock fund you own.
If it is, email them and tell them to get out of El Salvador.
Now. We have a right, if we own their stock.
We have a moral obligation if we own their stock.
If you do, please find a way to untangle yourself from
that septic tentacle of wealth.
Your partners in community in this Trinity,
the ones that were on that mountain that night,
will provide you with email and snail mail options
with which to contact Pacific Rim Mining,
our representatives in Congress, and the State Department.
When we do,
please treat it as the life and death situation that it is.
I understand that Haiti,
and even local concerns call for our attention as well,
but I have to believe,
I do believe,
that is was not by accident that Trinity was at Trinity
that night.
“When it is necessary to drink so
much pain
when a river of anguish
drowns us,
when we have wept many tears
and they flow like rivers
from our sad eyes,
only then does the deep hidden sigh of our neighbor
become our own.” (Julia Esquivel)
You see,
Jesus is not a long ago miracle at a wedding in Canaan of Galilee –
and that is what this sermon is all about.
Jesus is not a mythological object of faith
or a supernatural presence in time of need…
Jesus is the face that looks back at us in the mirror,
and the one that looks out at us from under a black hat,
and the one whose voice we hear
in the hidden sigh of our neighbor.
We must lift him up.
We must lift him up from the pages of history.
We must lift him up from the fringe of childhood memory.
We must lift him up from the pictorial boxes of Church.
We must lift him up from the gilded edges of our wishful thinking.
We must lift him up from the scorn of our cynicism.
We must lift him up from the anger of our resentments against religion.
We must lift him up.
We must lift him up with the blood that pumps from
our hearts,
and with the power that comes from
our citizenship,
and with the opportunity that is embedded in
our wealth – whether great or small by US standards.
We must stop.
We must stop wanting Jesus to lift us up
as if the refrain from some religious song of schmaltz.
We must lift him up instead…with our lives.
Get it?
We must lift up Jesus
not the other way around.
We give him life.
We resurrect him with our life.
Where the deep hidden sigh of our neighbor
becomes our own,
we lift him up.
So let us lift Jesus up, Trinity, Buffalo.
Let us lift him up for Trinity, El Salvador
with any and every means at our disposal…
Unbeknownst to us,
unplanned
and unexpectedly,
we were called to be witnesses of a far away event –
not the ten who were there
but all of us here now, in this Trinity.
We are community
and we are called from far away to lift Jesus up.
And when we do,
and I believe we will,
a resurrection will be unleashed upon the world. Amen.
