“He defended the cause of the poor and needy and so all went well. Is that what it means to know me?” declares the LORD. -Jeremiah 22:16
Friends,
As you have read in Phileena's letters this spring, the street children here in Lima, Peru continue to face terrible injustices at the hands of the local police authorities. The routine and random arrests of primarily innocent children, the false accusations and forced confessions of fabricated crimes, and the physical abuse and torture these children are subjected to in the jails must come to an end.
The life these children are forced to live is already painful enough. The rejection, loneliness, loss of families, hunger, and fear these boys and girls suffer has already overwhelmed their hearts and broken their spirits. When the legal system that is in place to protect and serve them fails and becomes an abusive authority figure in their lives, it steals from them the hope for a better future.
Without hope what do these children have?
Last fall Walter Forcatto, the Acting Field Coordinator for Word Made Flesh here in Lima, was arrested for defending a child who was being violently beaten by a police officer. Watler's crime was “interfering with police business.”
Recently there have been reports that children in the jails have been subjected to torture by electric shock. Just this past weekend many of our friends, the street children here, we rounded up and indiscriminately arrested. Many of these children were subjected to violent physical abuse in the jail. One small boy was even kicked the face several times and then had his head rubbed in a puddle of urine.
We can no longer tolerate such blatant injustices.
We have been in correspondence with UNICEF and the International Justice Mission in Washington DC concerning these matters and hope that their influence can bring about change and reform. In the meantime, we need discernment as to how to create a positive kind of intentional conflict. Conflict that will challenge these oppressive structures by causing them to reflect on their sin and the injustice they create.
During an ordination service for two priests, Oscar Romero (the late Archbishop of El Salvador who was martyred because of his stand for justice with the oppressed poor of his country) said,
It is very easy to be servants of the word without disturbing the world: a very spiritualized word, a word without any commitment to history, a word that can sound in any part of the world because it belongs to no part of the world. A word like that creates no problems, starts no conflicts.
What starts conflicts and persecutions, what marks the genuine church, is the word that, burning like the word of the prophets, proclaims and accuses: proclaims to the people God's wonders to be believed and venerated, and accuses of sin those who oppose God's reign, so that they may tear that sin out of their hearts, out of their societies, out of their laws – out of the structures that oppress, that imprison, that violate the rights of God and of humanity.
This is the hard service of the world.
It is too painful to stand by and watch the street children of Lima suffer. If faithfulness to our call is to be prophetic, it must stand up and defend the defenseless, be a voice for the voiceless, and suffer with the suffering.
I write this letter as a call to prayer and I request that you pray specifically for:
1) The street children of Lima. Pray for them by name, Anita, Flaqui, Oscar, Blanca, Papitas, Victor, Shirley, Joel, Alfred, Menudo, and Esperanza are just a few. Pray for their protection and safety. Pray for their tender spirits and their fragile hearts. Pray for hope.
2) The Church. As we, the Church, seek to validate our presence as the broken body of Christ on earth we must bring restoration to the present-reality of the Kingdom of God. We must learn to include and identify with those that are not of the dominant culture or but rather those perceived as the “other”- the racially and ethnically oppressed, the economically depressed, the educationally inferior, and those marginazlied because of age or gender.
Further, we must ask the question of partnership that allows us to be empowered by participating in the process of seeing the poor and oppressed freed from dehumanizing and systematic injustice. As we pray through these issues we will be forced to take responsibility and make reparation for our role in causing and perpetuating an oppressive reality of poverty, and I pray we ourselves will be liberated in the process.
3) The Word Made Flesh community in Lima. Pray for courage to do the right thing and to stand up in the face persecution. Pray for discernment and wisdom in knowing how to handle the reality of injustice here. Pray for a new understanding of community as understood in the words of David Chronic,
We are called to seek Jesus among the poorest of the poor. In heeding this call, we desire to offer ourselves to the poor. Our tendency, however, is to invite the poor into our community. We hope to build an open, honest, healing community into which the poor can be integrated. But the poor do not need to be integrated into our community. God is calling us, rather, to identify with theirs. When we move from integration to identification, we close the gap between having two communities: the helpers and the helped, the workers with the poor and the poor themselves.
And pray that we would become true servants of the Word. The Word that became Flesh and proclaimed good news to the poor, recovery of sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed and declared the year of the Lord's favor.
You have a role and we need you to stand with us and with the children of Lima.
Broken to serve,
Chris Heuertz
“Let us not forget: we are a pilgrim church, subject to misunderstanding, to persecution, but a church that walks serene because it bears the force of love.” – Oscar Romero