Remarks from the Memorial Service for Rev. Dr. Oscar Cole Arnal at Christ Lutheran Church, Waterloo, Ontario, June 15, 2024
By Dr. Tim Hegedus & Pastor Peter Lisinski
Published September 2024 in GWN
When Mohandas Ghandi arrived in England to begin negotiating India’s independence, a journalist asked him, “What do you think of western civilization?” The esteemed Mahatma replied, “I think it would be a very good idea!”[ Sue Johnson, Love Sense (Little Brown, 2013), p. 285.] In his turn of the millennium book, Napalm and Silly Putty, American comedian George Carlin empathizes: “When I was young I used to read about the decline of western civilization and I decided it was something I would like to make a contribution to.”[ George Carlin, Napalm and Silly Putty (Hyperion, 2001), p. 188.] The revered Indian Hindu prophet and martyr and the irreverent Irish-Catholic comedian find a true kindred spirit in our own revered and irreverent brother in Christ, Reverend Doctor Oscar Cole Arnal.
The title of this sermon, “The Gospel According to Oz,” refers to the “evangel”, Greek for the “good news” of God’s new civilization, the “kingdom of God” envisioned, embodied and established by the radical first century itinerant rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth. And in Oz’s understanding, the inspiration for Jesus’ evangelical mission lies in the prophetic manifesto proclaimed by his pregnant, unwed mother under the fateful shadow of the Jerusalem temple, in the home of one of its priests, who said:
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for … [God] has scattered the proud … brought down the powerful … lifted up the lowly … filled the hungry … and sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:46-55).
Talk about “levelling the playing field”! Pastor Paul Bosch of lately sainted memory, also an insightful and eloquent apologist for the gospel, and one of Oz’s closest friends, commented on these words of Scripture: “What Mary announces [in her Magnificat] is a revolutionary new vision … challenging the conventional values that direct the principalities and powers who now enslave so much of our world, [including] most of us!”[ Paul Bosch, Church Year Guide (Augsburg Fortress, 1987), p. 91-92.] Ouch!
Mother Mary’s “Magnificat Spirit” in turn shaped Jesus’ “Inaugural Address” in their hometown synagogue: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to … proclaim release to the captives and … to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s Jubilee” (Luke 4.18-19). Today this scripture has been fulfilled again in our hearing!
Mary’s “Magnificat Spirit” and Jesus’ “Jubilee Sermon” form the very heart and soul of the personal faith Oz “wore on his sleeve” – or literally on the buttons of his baseball cap and the slogans of his tee-shirts, which his family have brought here today as we gather as a rainbow coalition of Gospel people and promise.
Some of you will know that, growing up, Oz was not very fond of his given name. But in later years he found great pride in sharing his once despised, but now highly prized, baptismal name with El Salvador’s beloved archbishop, prophet and martyr, Saint Oscar Romero, who courageously held high the “two-edged sword” of the spirit of the Magnificat and Jesus’ Jubilee sermon! “The mission of the church”, according to Oz’s Salvadoran namesake, “is to identify itself with the poor, to join with them in their struggle for justice and, in so doing, find its own salvation.”
For Oz, the promise of finding God’s salvation with and among the world’s structurally impoverished and systemically oppressed children of God propelled him beyond the proverbial “ivory tower” of academia, as well as the “bourgeois ways” he lamented in his poetry. Oz’s robust conscience recognized the limited perspective and, therefore, limited credibility – and, therefore, the limited effectiveness – of his deferential status as a pastor and professor in the “comfortable pew” of institutionalized “white privilege”.
To overcome the inevitable inertia of a privatized spirituality – and the glib self-delusion of smug self-righteousness – Oz intentionally stepped out of the introverted comfort zone of the self-described “Luddite” and bookworm we all know and love, to immerse himself in a public “spirituality of the feet” learned among Franciscan comrades, persistently practiced in self-critical accountability, social advocacy, and political activism – even under fire of tear gas or water cannon and, more recently, despite the frustration of declining health and restricted mobility, complicated by the social distancing of the COVID 19 pandemic. With the best balance of humour, “dross and gold” I have ever witnessed, Oz persistently practiced what the poster on his office door during my seminary days preached: “Your life may be the only Gospel other people ever read.”
Like the door to his office, Oz’s life was, and remains, an open book, written with transparent humanity, including honest self-examination and authentic contrition for his confessed “flaws, misdeeds and deep failings.” Notwithstanding the sin that manifests itself in the natural self-centredness that plagues all mere mortals, The Gospel According to Oz – his teaching, preaching and living – testifies to the truth of God’s salvation, made flesh in Jesus, whose full humanity fulfills the divine promise inherent in the name revealed in a dream to his father and mentor, Joseph (Matthew 1:21) – “God saves” – as well as the meaning of Prophet Isaiah’s name: “God is salvation.”
Throughout his life, Oz embraced and exemplified God’s new civilization, envisioned, embodied and established in the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. Today, in his death, Oz’s legacy calls for a truly evangelical globalization of human solidarity, in truth, justice and peace, bequeathing to us the prophetic mantle of the gospel he ever so passionately personified for us and among us.
In today’s Hebrew scripture reading, Prophet Isaiah – whose Jubilee vision Jesus’ Jubilee mission fulfills – promises that God will be with us when we pass through the waters and walk through the fire. Today God walks with Oz, and promises to walk with us, too, until that surely coming day when we all pass through the water and fire of God’s baptismal grace to assemble with Oz and all God’s risen saints; and “free at last” we will go “marchin’ in” to the whole and holy communion of his Gospel’s promised future within God’s eternal life of infinite love.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit is with you now, Amen.
