A Worker for God's Church of the Poor

Every year, as we on the Sojourners editorial staff sit around picking our brains, trying to I come up with burning issues on which to editorialize in our December issue, some hapless comedian suggests an editorial on the importance of "putting Christ back into Xmas." And, every year, we all look down our noses and laugh, considering the topic more befitting a church bulletin than our own "serious" journal.

But in fact, it is to that very topic that we devote our entire December issue every year. While so many of those around us mark the holiday thinking only of extravagant spending sprees and Santa Claus, we try to remember that the real reason for celebration is no less than the incarnation of God in human history.

While that incarnation occurred very dramatically and precisely with the birth of a baby in a Bethlehem stable many years ago, we believe incarnation is more than a single, historical event. For if Jesus made the church his body and called Christians to live as though God's Spirit lived within them, surely wherever there are faithful Christians the gift of incarnation is made real.

So, for several years, it has been our tradition to feature in our December issue a particular person or group of people who has given flesh to the way of Christ in this world and whose lives speak to us of the hope and joy of Christmas. In years past we have focused on the life and work of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Clarence Jordan, St. Francis of Assisi, A.J. Muste, Sojourner Truth, William Stringfellow, and others.

This year we have chosen to celebrate the incarnational life of Dom Helder Camara, the retired Catholic archbishop of Recife and Olinda in northeast Brazil. Now almost 79 years old, Dom Helder remains a shining example of Christ's love and a tireless worker for a church and a world that would follow Christ's way of justice, peace, and nonviolence.

One of Dom Helder's most basic beliefs is that not only are we all made in the image and likeness of God, but that we also are made co-creators with God of our world. Therefore, he believes, it is our responsibility to work to create a world that reflects God's values. Dom Helder has taken to that responsibility with a sense of joy, conviction, and sacrifice seen all too seldom in our modern world.

Dom Helder has worked for years to make his powerful church a church of the poor. Many of the theological and social concerns that have revolutionized the 20th-century church--the preferential option for the poor, liberation theology, active nonviolence, and base Christian communities--flourish as they do today largely because of the prophetic witness of this one small man.

Dom Helder has struggled for justice and human rights in the face of tremendous odds and in spite of deep personal suffering. But the seeds he sowed in faith and hardship have reaped a harvest of hope and righteousness. Today there are more than 120,000 base Christian communities in Brazil alone, representing millions of poor, faithful Christians. We also celebrate in this issue the Brazilian base community movement as another sign of the incarnation.

Dom Helder tells us that the world will be changed and God's will shall be done through the faithful, persistent efforts of small groups of people who "hope against all hope." Dom Helder calls each of us to the best in ourselves. He encourages us to let Christ live in us and through us so that we may all know the power and the hope of incarnation.

Vicki Kemper was new editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.