Memorial of Saint Charles Lwanga and Companions, Martyrs

Saint Charles Lwanga

Lectionary: 353

The neighbors mocked me, saying to one another:
"He is still not afraid!
Once before he was hunted down for execution
because of this very thing;
yet now that he has scarcely escaped,
here he is again burying the dead!”

Today we begin a series of readings from the Book of Tobit, one of the apocryphal books not found in Protestant bibles. It is a short novel but well-told and rich with elements sad and comical, frightening and reassuring.

The situation is all too familiar to us today, a Jew lives with his wife and son in Syria and suffers the oppression of state-sponsored terrorism. He is a devout man who has already suffered imprisonment for practicing his faith; he buried the dead despite the government’s undeclared preference that its murdered victims be left in the streets to rot. Many governments, including our own, suspect people who practice works of charity of being unpatriotic.

But Tobit, for all his heroism, has his limits. When he is accidentally blinded on the very day of his most heroic deed, he wonders if God has abandoned him. Embittered, he becomes depressed and suspicious of his faithful, over-burdened wife. And she, like Sarah and Job’s wife, is not one to take a husband’s criticism lying down.

I need not tell you how it ends except to remind you that God finds surprisingly convenient and pleasant ways to make all things well, and all manner of things well.

On this feast of Saint Charles Lwanga and his companion martyrs, we remember that governments are often irrational, unjust and cruel. They represent their people. Here in the United States we hear often of our government’s casual cruelty: the internment of Islamists in Guantanamo; the arrests and confinement of “undocumented aliens” by the INS; the tolerance for rape in the military; and the most fundamental act of barbarism, abortion. A nation that cherishes a culture of death cannot be expected to conduct itself justly.

And yet the Church lives in this country. We pray for our leaders, honor our civic responsibilities and, like Tobit and Saint Charles Lwanga and his companions, we beg God to deliver us from evil.