|
|
Removing Walls and Renewing Minds: That's what Church is For
|
|
| 4/28/2008 |
The passage from Acts is found here.
I have a friend, an ordained minister too, who fills his house with religious artifacts from many traditions. Icons of Jesus take one wall, pages of an ancient Hebrew Torah on another. He collects Muslim art, and has a statue of the Buddha on his desk.
“I like to keep all of my bases covered,” he likes to quip.
Paul’s sermon before the Areogapus recorded in Acts 17 begins, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” Athenians like to cover all their religious bases, too. Athens was filled with shrines and temples, and Paul even discovered an altar dedicated “To an Unknown God.” They want to be so sure that no god is offended, they put a shrine to god they don’t even know about.
Paul cleverly states, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you!”
It’s a brilliant sermon, maybe my favorite of Paul’s. He will affirm pluralism, the mystery of knowing God truly, and, at the same time, commend to the Athenians that they stop being “merely curious and seriously committed to nothing ” when it comes to religious practice.
Paul then preaches, “The God who made the world and everything in it, God who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands. . . .”
The architecture of our church may exegete this best. Christ Church has no stained glass windows, duh! Nearby Neighborhood House has a basement full of stained glass, for not so long ago, this church was filled with stained glass. Beginning in the Victorian era, slowly every clear window was filled, so that when you sat inside, the world outside was invisible. And the world outside could not see in. The stained glass was removed in the 1980’s, restoring the original design.
That Christ Church was first built with clear glass embraces what Paul is preaching, that God is not found in a shrine, but in the very world that God has made. In this church, we are meant to look at the world in all its beauty and all its complexity and tragedy.
Gothic church architecture blocks out the world. Think of a Gothic church with its soaring vaults filled with stained glass. In such a church, the walls disappear, and the worshiper has the impression that they are in a space without walls, as if those stones and walls dissolve into air and light, creating a “spiritual,” dematerialized structure. The person inside a church with stained glass believes they are not in a building, but in a space removed from the world. As God is transcendent, in such a space, we transcend out of the world and directly into the presence of God. Truly, a church like that is a sanctuary, a protection from the world.
Isn’t Paul telling the Athenians to try not to capture God on an altar, or in building, but in the reality of the world?
Then Paul preaches something explosive to a modern sensibility of worship, “God is not served by human hands, as though God needed anything, since God gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.”
Paul is saying, not only is God not in any humanly constructed shrine, whatever we do in such a shrine is not in service to God. So if Paul is right, why bother to be here at all? Why say the prayers and continue in the teachings? Why break the bread and share in the fellowship I better come up with an answer to this question fast!
If we believe in God, we must desire to be in relationship with God. So, we gather in this church to equip ourselves to be in relationship with God of God’s love and salvation of us. But, even though I believe, do I believe this is the right way to God?
Paul speaks to the unique nature of the world and all that is in it as having been organized by God: “From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for God and find God.”
The translators chose the word “grope” carefully, for, let’s face it, the word in its usual context can cause tittles in polite company. The King James said “Haply (meaning haphazardly) feeling in the dark for God.”
We come into church to grope for God. Even in a church full of light, we grope in the dark. The church itself doesn’t have answers. The answers are found in the church’s engagement with the world, for God is in the world. I think that’s what Paul is saying.
We come to church, in Paul’s view, to prepare to serve the world rather than stay in the world always and be corrupted by it. We come so that we can go to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves, respecting the dignity of every human being. But how can we love and serve our neighbor if we are not full of the knowledge of the world our neighbor lives in?
On Friday night, I listened to an interview of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Trinity Church in Chicago, who has gotten Senator Barack Obama in such trouble for some of his sermons. Bill Moyers asked him, why was he so controversial? What Rev. Wright said makes Paul’s point: He said that when he started preaching, he didn’t want the church he served to be a place where people went to escape the harsh realities of the world, but to engage those realities. He wanted to bring in the HIV crisis, hunger, poverty, the lack of childcare and medicine. Because he could not tear down the walls of the church or blow out the stained glass that hid the world from those who came to pray, he brought the world right in, including in his preaching.
Our parishioner, James Timberlake, has designed the Cellophane House, and this summer it will be on display, like art, at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. It is a house with no exterior walls, just a high-tech, recycled cellophane wrap that affords a clear view. I don’t know if I’d want to live that exposed to the world, but such a wall-less building certainly should be a church! I like what James and his partner said, “the goal of our firm is nothing short of redefining the wall.” I want our church to redefine the wall by having our walls not keep the world out.
When Paul speaks of different peoples and cultures “groping for God” I hear Paul emphasizing our common humanity, and that God’s providence fuels a pluralistic world seeking God in many different ways and in different religious expressions. Paul sounds almost multicultural here. A diverse world gropes for God, but we are in the dark, and thereby tolerant of each other. Paul is being tolerant of the Athenians and their varied worship, and he wants them to tolerate him. Mostly, he is being careful not to offend, even quoting some of the local Athenian philosophical talent: “In God we live and move and have our being.”
But, fundamentally, in testifying to the unknown God, Paul is maintaining that God is unknowable.. He preaches, “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that God is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.” His impatience with building-based, human-led worship is that it suggests to whomever is faithful to that particular expression that God is definable, and knowable, when God is unknown and unknowable.
Totally, of course not! Paul says in I Corinthians, referring to knowing God, that we all see through a glass dimly. Only in the end, whatever the end is (life? Time?) we will see clearly who God is. Until then we are fueled toward God by faith, hope and love, the greatest and most important of which is love. As we have been loved by God in being given life and all that life is, we love others in return. We don’t love those in church at the expense of loving those in the world. Since we are all God’s offspring, we all have a common basis of love for each other
Of course, Paul is Paul, and while God may ultimately be unknowable, Jesus is monstrously concrete: “While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now God commands all people everywhere to repent, because God has fixed a day on which God will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
Curiously, Jesus is a man appointed rather than God incarnate. If God is unknowable in a complete way, why is Jesus’ reported resurrection so definitive? Huge theological and Christological issues loom, but we don’t want to be here all day. However, is Paul loosing his pluralistic edge?
I think not totally, but there is an edge. For Paul, it is time for the Athenians to stop dabbling in a variety of religious practice, and decide what they each believe is true. Paul regrets the narcissism that results from people having so many different religious practices, they really have none at all. All they have is their spiritually needy self, not the God-self.
I see this quite a bit. Yoga on Monday, Pilates on Tuesday, vegan cooking classes on Wednesday, locovore grass fed beef on Thursday, mystical kabbalah on Friday, IKEA on Saturday and church on Sunday.
I can hear some angry responses now, “What is wrong with Yoga! I get more out of an hour of Yoga than I do out of an hour of church and these old prayers and hymns!”
Paul’s response is, “But does the world get more out of your Yoga than your hour at church?”
For the record, I love Yoga, and love to do it. We are speaking, again, to the danger of living our religious lives “merely curious and seriously committed to nothing.”
What Paul is saying is religiousness as found in the Yoga place, the church, the whatever, is not righteousness. It is not loving service. It is not social justice work.
We are called to serve the world as much as we serve ourselves, and the church lives, I believe to protect us from, to quote Paul again (from another place) of compromising to the world. To avoid that compromise, we must look at the world as we look for God.
“I beg, my family in God,” Paul says in Romans, “to worship God with your righteous bodies doing righteous work in the world. Offer your righteousness to God; don’t just leave a little money on the altar so you can say you did your duty. The offering of righteousness is the only worship God requires.
“But I warn you,” Paul continues (you’ve firgued out that this is my loose translation of Romans 12ff., I hope), “do not be morphed into the culture around you in hopes that its pleasures and successes will make you happy. Be morphed into God’s pleasure and love of you by the renewing of your mind. That will make you complete, and give God joy.”
That’s what the church is for (now quoting Romans accurately), the place that guides us in “not being comforted to this world, but transformed by the renewing of our minds.”
There’s a mission statement for Christ Church: We remove walls; we renew minds.
|
|
|
|