Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Is That the Bishop in the Dumpster?
A story, especially for Lutherans, told by an Episcopal bishop
By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
August 2001For many professions, there are some kinds of concentrated work that get done only if you come in early or stay late. Not being a morning person, I usually stay for a couple of hours after the office closes.
One morning I came in early to attack an unusually large pile of letters set aside the night before. They multiply in captivity.
I experienced the desperate nauseated feeling that accompanies seeing a large empty space where something important should be. They say nature hates a vacuum, and I was not fond of this one. I went into panic-search mode, repeatedly looking at all the places where the letters should or might be.
I have since read that psychologists have identified and studied this unproductive behavior of our species. Every time I find myself repeating it, I find little comfort in that fact, and I wonder what evolutionary purpose it would have served.
My older brother Mycroft once told me that when you have eliminated all the possible answers, it is time to work on the impossible ones.
My worst fear, which was impossible, was that somehow my stack of letters had been dumped into the trash, taken to the dumpster, and hauled away. I couldn't remember which day the dumpster was emptied. There was a chance that it wasn't this morning. I went down to take a look.
Are you getting ahead of me? The dumpster, a big one, had been emptied the previous morning. There, on the bottom of the dumpster, was our trash from the night before. Among the bags of trash was the Amazon Books box in which I had stacked my letters.
At the rear of the Cathedral parking lot on a busy street, our dumpster is a very public one. There I was in the somewhat conspicuous purple shirt that bishops in the Episcopal Church wear instead of a purple cassock. It was drive time in Bethlehem. Would I cause a major accident by hoisting my bulky frame into and out of a dumpster? If I waited for help, who knew what might have landed on my letters? Was middle class upbringing right? Are people always watching?
Sometimes we cannot afford the luxury of neurotic paralysis, so I lurched and flopped my Nero Wolfe physique over and down into the dumpster. The letters were all there in the Amazon box.
With them safely in hand, I remembered Jesus describing the woman who turned the house upside down to find some money, and when she found it invited all the neighbors to celebrate. This was what I wanted to avoid.
Rather, clutching the box, I rose deliberately to make my exit quickly. In mid-flop over the dumpster, I noticed three silver-haired parishioners standing by their car watching the apparition of the great plum.
I tell this story because this month our Lutheran brothers and sisters in their national assembly will consider modifying the Lutheran-Episcopal agreement of full communion. There is some concern that is based to some extent on a fear of overbearing bishops.
Perhaps, rather than getting caught up in endless theological arguments (unwinnable wars) and ancestral memories of Norwegian despots, they can just hold the image of the dumpster-diving Bishop of Bethlehem and try to live the relationship as agreed to and see what happens in God's time.
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