To Speak Out Against Kings ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 29, 2026
By 1980, El Salvador was overrun with paramilitary groups: death squads, who roamed the country assassinating people in the name of “traditional values”, and “law and order”, and “anti-communism.” In the El Salvador of the 1970’s and 1980’s, only 2% of the citizens owned 57% of the farmable land. Malnutrition was rampant, infant mortality was very high, and basic medical care was largely non-existent.
Archbishop Oscar Romero, confronting this profound lack of justice, began asking how people claiming to be Christians could do this to one another, and began to ask how the church could help. He began to preach the message of Liberation Theology, that God prefers the poor and stands with the poor. His was a dangerous and lonely life: he knew he was called to speak to the injustices he witnessed, and as a result was the target of constant death threats. As a result, he isolated himself from colleagues and friends to try to keep them safe.
On March 23, 1980, Archbishop Romero preached his last sermon. He addressed members of the military, saying, “I want to make a special appeal to soldiers, national guardsmen, and policemen: each of you is one of us. The peasants you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear a man telling you to kill, remember God’s words, ‘thou shalt not kill.’ No soldier is obliged to obey a law contrary to the law of God. In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people, I beseech you, I implore you; in the name of God I command you to stop the repression.” (https://kellogg.nd.edu/archbishop-oscar-romero)
Speaking in that way, he said, was his duty.
The next day, March 24, 1980, Archbishop Romero was standing behind the altar during Mass in a hospital chapel in El Salvador when he was approached by two mercenaries, who fired a single shot, and killed him. He is now a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. He had long been a prophet.
We think of prophets as voices from a long distant past, from Biblical times. We picture them as old men with long white beards, wearing robes that are perhaps dirty and torn. They are probably barefoot. We picture them this way because we think of them as being completely set apart, utterly unlike ourselves. They are from another time and another place, sometimes seen almost as comic figures.
This sense of otherness emerges in their accounts of their call to the ministry, their visions, which sometimes approach the hallucinogenic. Here is the Prophet Ezekiel’s narrative of his call from God:
“As I looked, a stormy wind came out of the north; a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually, and in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber. In the middle of it was something like four living creatures. This was their appearance: they were of human form. Each had four faces, and each of them had four wings….” (Ezekiel 1:4-6)
It goes on for pages, but you get the picture. Out of this vision emerged what Ezekiel described as “the glory of the Lord, and a voice which then said to him, “Mortal, I am sending you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me…” (Ez. 2:3)
Given accounts such as this, mystical and utterly other-worldly, it is no wonder that we think of prophets as something belonging to a mythic past. Modern life is far too logical and rational, too easily explained by science, to make room for creatures with four faces and four wings riding in chariots.
Let me take a moment now to reassure you that my own call to the ministry was nothing like Ezekiel’s.
Today is Palm Sunday, when we remember the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. He was first and foremost a prophet. The claims of him being a messiah, or perhaps The messiah, came following his death and obscured much of his work. But Jesus had a public ministry in which he spoke truth to power. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” he proclaimed. We have learned the story of Jesus turning over tables in the Temple in Jerusalem, throwing out the moneychangers who were profaning what should have been sacred space. Jesus accused those in power of worrying over small rules and not paying enough attention to justice, mercy, and faith. (Mt. 23:23-4).
When we tell the story of Jesus’ birth, we tell it from the perspective of the margins, of a poor young couple far from home, forced to give birth in a stable. And this story sets the tone for the rest of Jesus’s life and ministry, told as a life of healing the poor and sick, giving access to outcasts, to people with no power. In his first sermon, quoting from a passage in the Book of Isaiah, he said that he had been “anointed to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free.” (Lk. 4:18, quoting Isaiah 61:1-2).
To bring good news to the poor and let the oppressed go free. Today we call that Liberation Theology, the theological orientation toward the marginalized that developed in Central and South America in the 20th century. It was derided as Communist, and the Catholic Church tried to suppress it.
There is a common thread through all of our stories today: the story of the Hebrew prophets, of Passover and Moses, of Jesus, and of yesterday’s No Kings protests – these are all stories of the human quest for liberation. “Tell old pharaoh, to let my people go.” Liberation from oppression, liberation from the time of slavery in Egypt, liberation from the crushing control of the Roman Empire over the people of Israel, liberation from the would-be tyrants trying to take away the rights of United States’ citizens and residents. We tell these stories today, on Palm Sunday, because Palm Sunday commemorates the day when a prophet born in poverty, a truth-teller, rode into Jerusalem as people bowed before him shouting “Hosanna!” The story of Palm Sunday reminds us of the power of prophets to inspire, to teach, to bring us out into the streets to demand our rights.
As one sign stated yesterday, “You can’t have my rights – I’m still using them.”
Prophets are always among us. They appear throughout history, never confined to the pages of the Hebrew Bible, or to the stories of Jesus of Nazareth. As I planned this sermon, I thought about all the examples of prophetic voices that I would enjoy talking about. It quickly became very clear to me that the sermon would consist entirely of a list.
I asked, Who spoke truth to power? Who tried to change society and make it more just and more compassionate? Who were martyred for their efforts? How far back shall we go?
I thought of Thomas a Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury in the 12th century, who fought with King Henry II over the rights of the church. It is said that the king demanded in frustration: “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” A group of knights proceeded to do just that, murdering Thomas on the altar. Thomas had not long before announced that he was prepared to die to defend the rights of the church.
I would mention Frederick Douglass for his courageous writing and public speaking about the treatment of African Americans in the United States. In 1857 he wrote, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” I think especially of his essay, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” where he openly took on the American church, writing “But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines, who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.
For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines!”
A century later Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged. Of his many writings, nothing is more powerful than his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Dr. King famously called out those who he named ‘the white moderate’ for their lukewarm support, and also wrote, “One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
Then, of course, there is Saint Oscar Romero, whose story we have told.
Just last year a new prophetic voice emerged. During a prayer service at the Washington DC cathedral following the inauguration of President Trump, the Episcopal bishop, Mariann Edgar Budde, addressed the new president directly in her sermon, saying, “I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here,” Budde said. “Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.” (https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2025/01/22/as-trump-demands-apology-washington-bishop-explains-her-call-for-mercy-toward-those-living-in-fear/)
Now, it’s doubtful that any of these prophetic voices ever had visions anything like Ezekiel’s. But they do share some characteristics of the ancient prophets, according to Father Richard Rohr. Father Richard points out that true prophets have messages for society as a whole. Their emphasis is not on individuals who sin, who break the purity laws, but rather on the bigger picture of how to create a society that is more just and more compassionate. Often, in their early careers, prophets emerge as wildly angry. And they appear during times when society is seen as beginning to veer off course, forgetting their laws, forgetting their moral foundations. Angry prophets can then step forward to call people to account, to create holy disorder, or good trouble, to try to move society back to a place of caring for those who are most vulnerable, those who are poor, or sick, or abused, who have no voice.
And over time, Father Rohr points out, prophets mellow. And they begin to speak more of matters of the heart. They become more loving, more compassionate, and ask us to be too. “Blessed are those who weep,” said Jesus. Perhaps he meant that those who can weep for the pain of others are truly blessed.
My friends, this week and every day let us continue to walk the road toward human liberation. And as we do, may we continue to listen for the voices of prophets, speaking truth to power, urging us to become more just and more loving. May our hearts open, and may we be able to weep.
