Diocesan
Life Columns
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Bishop Paul's writes a monthly column for the Diocesan Newspaper, Diocesan
Life, edited by Communication
Minister, Bill Lewellis.
For more features from the life of our diocese, check Diocesanlife....ONLINE; and Bethlehem
News.
A
kind of idolatry
Confusing a church with a building
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Diocesan Life, March 2003
It is said, perhaps naughtily, "Even God cannot change the past. Historians
can, and perhaps that is why God tolerates their existence." My doctoral
work is in a historical field, but events in our life are helping me get over
it.
Tony Campolo once addressed a congregation of wealthy people more or less as
follows: "There are more than a million people in the world who will starve
to death this week and you don't give a [bad word deleted]. In fact, you are
more upset that I said [bad word] in church than you are that people are dying." Nobody
can hear that story and not feel a little ashamed. The bad word he used is a
shocker-and thereby he made his point.
This concern with superficialities was brought home to me on a deeper level on
Lincoln's Birthday. I received in the mail the contract for my sixth book, an
in-depth historical study of the first five years of the Episcopal Church, 400
pages of my sweat and labor over eight years. I also received several pieces
of anonymous mail and one anonymous email, all inspired by a wildly inaccurate
and vicious article in the newsletter of the Berks County Historical Society
regarding the closing, last July, of St. Michael's Church in Birdsboro.
It was hard to know where I was most offended. As your bishop I was vexed to
see the Episcopal Church defamed and vexed even more to see once again the idolatry
that confuses a church with a building.
As a historian I was outraged to see a group that claims the title "historical" issue
an inflammatory article without even once contacting the diocese or consulting
the public documents regarding the closing. In the publishing world the attitude
the newsletter displays is called "reckless disregard for the truth."
As I wrote to you last summer, no bishop wants to close a church: it causes pain
for absolutely everyone concerned. It is very much like a death in the family,
something one does not get over completely, not ever.
In the year 1900 we had nearly twice as many parishes in this diocese as we have
now. The surviving pictures of some of their buildings are stunning, The kind
of workmanship that went into them cannot be duplicated. For all kinds of reasons,
I grieve their loss.
What I really grieve though, is the loss of so many Christian communities, so
many outposts of the good news of the One who reached out in every way to the
outcasts and oppressed. I keep the map of the diocese in the early 20th Century
(it's on a large copper printer's plate) in my office as a reminder of the impermanence
of anything except the good news of Christ. Anybody who thinks s/he is an empire
builder is deluded.
Back to Tony's observation about who gets upset about starvation versus swearing
in church. It is sobering to note that people who have never written or spoken
to me about why we can't do more for the poor or why we can't do some real evangelism,
or why we don't finally do something in this state about its endemic racism and
classism, can get bent out of shape about a pile of bricks.
People who do not complain about the fact that Pennsylvania is cited as being
second in the nation for the prevalence of hate groups are worked up about a
tiny piece of real estate in bad repair. People who do not express outrage that
our state is third from the bottom in its support of education are worried that
their gift to a parish's physical plant today may not tie the congregation's
hands forever. Lawyers call this the desire to "rule from the grave." I
call it the lust for permanence, a very real sin.
Lent begins next week with Ash Wednesday when we are taught to remember that
you are dust and to dust you shall return. Anything we allow to give us the illusion
of immortality poisons our souls.
I collect old things, especially books and manuscripts of historical importance
- but I try not to believe that having them is a kind of immortality. When I
die I don't get to keep them.
Those who have gotten to know me are aware how much I value music, the arts,
and certainly architecture. Notwithstanding my interest in history and things
churchly, I am very deeply troubled that what outrages some of us more than all
the suffering and injustice in the world is a building.
Isaiah 58 provides one of the Old Testament lessons for Ash Wednesday. The prophet's
words cut like a laser through our habitual preoccupation with religiosity rather
than religion.
After condemning the human tendency to mistake dieting for the deep-down purgation
that fasting is meant to signify, Isaiah is very blunt. He says that the heart
of devotion is to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke.
He further asks us to consider whether true repentance implies a radical reordering
of priorities: Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless
poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself
from your own flesh? I believe that more single-minded dedication to those ideals
would in fact fill our churches.
Only time will tell if the decisions made by the bishop and the trustees of this
diocese were correct - nobody claims infallibility.
What is clear from this episode so far, however, is how our species can confuse
secondary with primary goals, what is eternal with what can be destroyed in a
minute's time. Those of us who do have a keen sense of the past are particularly
vulnerable to this sin.
The only immortality we are offered is God's gift in Christ. Lent offers us the
opportunity to forsake utterly our illusions of permanence. We are called to
do whatever it takes to tear those illusions out of our hearts so that, when
Easter comes, we will be able to realize what a gift it is to receive the one
thing that actually does last.
Lent is very hard work, but it can change something more important than the past.
Lent can change the future.
(return to Bishop Paul's Columns
Index)
Please direct any
questions or comments to the webmaster@diobeth.org
|