Start:Stop - You're on Mute!

“You’re on mute!” Can our recent experience communicating online help us fulfil our calling to become what St Oscar Romero described as “true microphones of God”? Listen to this week's Start:Stop reflection at this link.

Hello and welcome to this week’s Start:Stop reflection from St Stephen Walbrook, when we stop for a few moments and start to reflect on a passage from scripture. My name is Phillip Dawson. 

Our experience meeting online during the lockdown has made us more aware of the impediments to speaking and listening brought about through dodgy sound engineering and lax microphone control. Can this experience help us to fulfill what Saint Oscar Romero described as our calling to be “Microphones of God”?

Our Bible reading is that great proclamation of his “Nazareth Manifesto” at the start of the mission of Jesus:

 

Bible Reading - Luke 4.16-21

 

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
   because he has anointed me
     to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
   and recovery of sight to the blind,
     to let the oppressed go free, 
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ 
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’

 

 

Reflection 

 

“You’re on mute!” A phrase we’ve heard with some regularity since the lockdown began, when people start speaking in online video calls without first turning on their microphone!

 

Living in the basement of an old house with thick walls I’ve grown used to having a poor wi-fi signal. But it still seems to come as a surprise when - usually while at my most witty or erudite of course - a message pops up on screen saying “YOU HAVE AN UNSTABLE CONNECTION” - and I realise that only a fraction of what I’ve just said has been heard! 

 

After a few private messages between one or two people, it seems that someone will always pluck up the courage to establish the source of background noise - the radio or television blaring loudly in another room - which is making it impossible to concentrate on what’s being said. By seeing whose microphone is hastily switched off we can all tell who the culprit was, even if they are too ashamed to confess their lapse of microphone etiquette in public!

 

It is somewhat harder however to address the thunderous interference as a star speaker or Company Chairman shuffles their papers over the microphone built in to their laptop; or perhaps most embarrassing of all - the “hot mic” moments - no longer the preserve of unfortunate politicians or celebrities - as speakers unwittingly share their most private thoughts with everyone via their open mics. The result of which is sometimes devastatingly funny but can also be disastrously destructive.

 

Over the past few years we’ve become more aware of the impediments to speaking and listening brought about through dodgy sound engineering and lax microphone control. Can this experience help us become more effective communicators of the Good News of the gospel?

 

Forty years before Zoom or Microsoft Teams had been invented, Oscar Romero said that we are all called to be “microphones of God.”

 

Speaking after the destruction of the Diocesan Radio Station in San Salvador by those who were threatened by the message of liberation and justice it proclaimed, he said:

 

“We might be left without a radio station [but]God’s best microphone is Christ, and Christ’s best microphone is the Church, and the Church is all of you. Let each one of you, in your own job, in your own vocation... live the faith intensely and feel

that in your surroundings you are a true microphone of God our Lord.”

 

Archbishop - now Saint - Oscar Romero was such a microphone.  

 

On the evening of 24th March 1980, he was assassinated in a hospital chapel in San Salvador as he prepared to celebrate mass. 

 

His life was taken because he amplified the voices of protest against rising poverty, social injustice, assassinations and torture, as those in power in El Salvador sacrificed the human rights of their countrymen in pursuit of their own economic success. He was not alone – between 1968 and 1979 it is estimated that 1500 priests, nuns and lay people active in the church were arrested, kidnapped, interrogated, tortured or assassinated for doing the same.

 

Oscar Romero’s last words, prior to preparing the altar to celebrate the mass, encouraged those listening to bring “justice and peace to our people.” At 6.24pm, he was killed by a single gun shot. 

 

He sacrificed his life by acting as a microphone of God.

 

Speaking at the Romero Trust Anniversary Service this week at St Martin in the Fields, Edgardo Colon-Emereis, Dean of Duke Divinity School asked us to use scripture as the soundcheck for our baptismal promises - to see if our microphones are working - whether we are effectively broadcasting God’s Word through our lives. 

 

Perhaps our experience meeting online over the past few years provides a helpful diagnostic tool in this regard. 

 

Using scripture as our soundcheck, we might find we’ve been on permanent mute - either speaking so loudly that we are unaware of those crying in our face that they can’t hear us, or maybe we feel we haven’t found our own voice and have been too afraid to turn on our microphones at all. Are we suffering from a dodgy connection - not properly attuned to those with whom we are speaking, so they hear only every other word of the Good News; or not properly attuned to the Word of God so we fail to hear it in the first place? It may be there is so much going on around us that all anyone can hear is the background noise of our lives; the Word of God present but drowned out. Or perhaps people are put off by our “hot mic” moments; when after proclaiming the gospel outwardly we are overheard in private doing quite the reverse. 

 

Using the bible as our soundcheck and drawing on our experience during the lockdown, may we, who have received the Spirit of the Lord, become more effective microphones of God; proclaiming His Word of justice and peace so that scripture may be fulfilled in the hearing of all the world.    

 

 

Prayers

 

Let us pray. 

 

Almighty God, through the death and resurrection of your Son, you have allowed us to communicate freely with you. 

Help us to be moved by your Word amidst the static of our daily lives. 

May we learn to use scripture as our soundcheck;

not to be mute to the suffering and injustice we see around us,

but seek out and amplify the voices of the marginalised and oppressed. 

Open our lives that we might live and breathe your Word; not say one thing and do another. 

Grant us the courage to find our own voice with which to proclaim your peace, your truth and your love to the world;

that we might all become Microphones of God. 

Amen.

 

 

Thank you for joining us for this week’s Start:Stop reflection. The Romero Trust Anniversary Service can be viewed online on the St Martin in the Fields website. Our Start:Stop reflections will be returning in person during Holy Week. Join us in church on Tuesday 12th, Wednesday 13th and Thursday 14th April any time from 7.45am until 9am. Ten minute reflections will be repeated each quarter hour. More details are on our website www.ststephenwalbrook.net. I hope you have a wonderful week. 

 

Watch the Romero Trust's Anniversary Service at St Martin in the Fields at this link.