The
Joy of Irrelevancy
So,
in the midst of the sermon for his ordination I said, “Michael, never forget,
you are being ordained into an almost irrelevant office in an irrelevant
institution.”
I
said that for two reasons: first, I believe it, and, secondly, it seemed to me
it was important for him to hear. He is an astonishing priest and man whose
true gifts will shine through most clearly if he can ‘hang loose’ about his
role and his relative importance in the scheme of things.
I
learned after the service that the bishop didn’t appreciate my insight into
what Michael needed to hear and didn’t agree with my analysis of the church. He
didn’t appreciate my ‘diminishing’ the church in a sermon to 400 people—most of
whom have a vested interest in the relevancy of the church.
I
must agree that it was perhaps not the most appropriate setting for pointing
out the church’s irrelevancy, but it does need pointed out. The American Heritage Dictionary (2006)
defines ‘relevant’ as “pertinent to the matter at hand.” The Merriam Webster
Dictionary of Law (1996) clears up for all us Law and Order junkies what
is meant when one of the attorneys objects by saying “relevancy, your Honor.”
Something is ‘relevant’, according to that dictionary by “having significant
and demonstrable bearing on facts or issues.”
I
would content, by either of those definitions of ‘relevant’ that the Main Line
Churches are woefully irrelevant these days. Not much about the church is
‘pertinent’ to any of the matters at hand in our lives and culture and doesn’t
have any ‘significant and demonstrable bearing’ on the issues that consume us.
Almost no one I know pauses when considering the matters at hand each day and
asks, “wonder what the Episcopal Church has to say that would be pertinent here?”
It has not always been so. For 17 centuries or so—from the Council of Nicea
until relatively recently—the church was so enmeshed with Western culture that
you couldn’t turn around without bumping into both its pertinence and
relevancy. I’m not scholarly enough to pinpoint when that began to unravel.
Certainly the Renaissance got the ball rolling, but the church wasn’t dislodged
from her role all at once. The horrors of two World Wars and the world-wide
depression in between them certainly greased the skids. But, if you ask me, the
true death knell of Christendom in the US came with the construction of the
Interstate Highway System and the explosion of the mass media.
Before
you think I’m crazy, let me point out that no less a figure than Stanley
Howerwas traces the “end of Christendom” to a particular Sunday evening in his
home town of Greenville, South Carolina, when the movie theatre was open for
the first time during the hours of evening church services. (Resident Aliens,
p.---) The explosion of mass media—movies, TV and now the Internet, for God’s
sake—replaced most of the entertainment value of Main Line Churches. As late as
the early 20th Century, churches were still the center of social life and
leisure time (what little of that there was) activities as well as being the
formative influence on morals and ideas. The rise of mass media gave the lie to
that relevancy. And the Interstates freed people to travel much longer
distances to do things than ever before. There are plenty of people still
living who remember the time when only a few people on the block…or in the
whole town!...had automobiles. (When those people talk about that simpler place
and time, they tend to say ‘automobiles’ rather than ‘cars’.) President
Eisenhower’s vision of a nation connected together by four lane highways
created a booming construction-driven economy, transformed Detroit into the
shining city on a hill, put engineers into a whole new class of workers and
made possible “the Sunday drive” right past the church and out to the lake.
There
were, it seems to me, two models for the church in the height of her
relevancy—the village church and the cathedral. Like Orthodox Jews to this day,
most everyone used to walk to church…which insured the church they attended was
in walking distance. And in a village before radio and, more malignantly, TV,
the church was the center of civic, social and political life. And since the
village church was so central to life, generation upon generation of
heterosexual couples met and married in ‘their’ church. It was a very different
world than the one that came to be after WW II.
The
cathedral model was the village church writ large. Commerce tended to flourish
on the cathedral grounds. All those European cathedrals aren’t in the center of
cities because they bought the land—the cities grew up around them. There are
two equivalents to the cathedral model today—shopping malls and Mega-churches.
You can spend a day in a shopping mall—do your banking in the branch there,
have meals in the many eating establishments, do some shopping, find
interactive experiences for your children, get your hair cut and styled as well
as a pedicure and manicure, visit the day spa, see the cars that are always on
display in the walk areas, get your exercise, see displays by civic groups, get
a drink, go to a movie, visit the health care satellite hospitals have
established, get a tattoo, buy insurance—there is actually no reason to leave a
shopping mall for most any needs. I keep waiting for some evangelical group to
put in chapels.
The
other cathedral clone is the Mega-churches that have sprung up in the suburbs
of most all medium sized and large cities. One way Interstates made most Main
Line Churches irrelevant is if the church was built before the Interstates
were, there is insufficient parking. Mega-churches work “because” of the
highways and are islands of holiness in a sea of asphalt. One of the things the
folks at places like Willow Creek have done is perfected the art of parking.
Sports arenas could learn a lot about how to get cars in and out of a venue
efficiently from the Mega-church people. Mega churches also mimic shopping
malls by having food courts, gyms, child-care, ‘Christian’ schools, video game
rooms and worship that is more like Broadway or Los Vegas than like Canterbury.
Mega-churches and sect-like fundamentalist churches are the only ‘churches’
that have figured out how to remain relevant. Mega-churches do it by making
themselves indispensable and competing successfully with the larger culture.
The Fundamentalists do it by mind control. If I were a betting man I would
wager the latter will collapse into irrelevancy before the former.
Mind
control—control of any kind—is something that is becoming harder and harder in
our culture. Jimmie Carter once said on the PBS show Speaking of Faith
that fundamentalism was the creation of what he called ‘dominant males’. My
wife would call them ‘male mutants”—a term, not of endearment, which includes
all the men (and some women) on the planet. Those dominant males, according to
Jimmie Carter, believe that what they think is what God thinks. “That’s a
difficult position to argue with,” he said, in his soft, sweet accent.
It
seems to me that the church, for most of history—at least from the 4th
century until the Interstates—had that opinion of itself: what they believed is
what God believed. Interestingly enough, the Protestant Reformation took that
little caveat with them when they left the Whore of Babylon behind. Church has
been based on ‘absolute Truth’—something I’ve admitted I don’t believe in—and
used that cudgel to batter people into line for century after century.
There
are people my age, for example, who were told by their Roman Catholic priests
that simply entering a non-Roman church was a mortal sin. I ponder what the
percentage of people born since 1977 who believe that there is a whit of
difference between different denominations would be. One of the costs of
irrelevancy is that the denominations have, for the most part, lost their
‘bite’, their ‘scent’, their particular ‘flavor’. Like politicians and
Episcopal bishops, denominations, scrambling to stay ‘relevant’ gave up what
made them distinct and real. I went to a Methodist wedding some years ago and
watched an altar boy with gloves on, along with a red cassock and snow white
surplice, come out to light the candles on the altar. When he finished, he did
what we Episcopalians call a ‘profound bow’—from the waist, all the way down
until he looked like the number 7. Holy moley! The Methodist Church I knew as an
adolescent would have fallen to the ground if 1. there had been an altar boy;
2. he had been wearing gloves; 3. there had been candles on the altar; or 4,
anyone had reverenced the ‘table’ in front of the pulpit. What has happened to
Methodists? They probably drink now too.
Shortly
after I came to St. John’s, I was in the church on a Saturday morning by
myself. I was fussing and obsessing about something or other for the Sunday
services. Today, I could never find myself alone at St. John’s on a Saturday morning.
The ‘Saturday School’ for the Hispanic congregation would be there, the MEEP
group (an unfortunate acronym for an adult training program the diocese runs)
would be there, Knit One/Purl Two (the Prayer Shawl group) would be there, and
any of a dozen or so periodic Saturday meetings and events would be going on.
But back then, I could have the whole building to myself.
I
had the doors locked but heard the doorbell from the parking lot. When I opened
the door I was confronted with twenty or so Hispanic folks, all dressed up,
with a baby in an ornate gown. Many of them were weeping, but one young man,
who spoke idiomatic English, told me what their story was. They had scheduled
the baby’s baptism at the huge Roman Catholic basilica on the other side of the
Green and shown up on schedule. The parents had been through six weeks of
baptismal training prior to the private baptism. But when the priest arrived,
he asked who the god-parents were. Two women and a man raised their hands.
“Are
you Roman Catholics?” he asked.
Two
were, but one of the god-mothers was a member of an Evangelical
Spanish-speaking church. The priest announced he would not do the baptism and
turned on his heel and disappeared in the direction of the Rectory.
“We
just want somewhere to pray for a while,” the young man told me. “Our hearts
are broken.”
I
ushered them into the sanctuary, turned on some lights and told them to take as
long as they wanted. Then I went back to my fussing and obsessing for a while.
Suddenly, something else occurred to me. I went back and found the young man
who had been the family’s spokesperson. I asked him if they’d like for me to
baptize the baby.
“When?”
he asked.
“Right
now,” I said.
After
a short burst of Spanish among the group, he turned to me and have me the
thumbs up sign. I gathered water and oil, wine and bread, lit the Pascal
Candle, baptized little Maria and shared the Body and Blood with her family.
I
haven’t seen them since, but, to me, that doesn’t matter. That sacrament
mattered and made a difference, just don’t ask me what….
A
decade or so ago, I was sitting in the nave of St. John’s being interviewed by
a local reporter about some issue or another. Her skin was copy paper white,
she had red hair and a smattering of freckles across her nose below her blue
eyes (I have a real weakness for freckles). She was 20 something and when the
interview was over she looked around the church and said to me, “This is
different from Jewish, right?”
So,
two generations ago—maybe even one—Colleen would have been worrying about the
plight of her immortal soul, having spent an hour in a non-Roman church talking
to an Episcopal ‘priest’. But all she wanted to know was whether Episcopalians
were different from Jews.
I
asked her about her family. Her oh-so-Irish father had married at 16 and
divorced at 19. When he married Colleen’s mother it had to be by a justice of
the peace. His family disowned him and his church excommunicated him (part of
the death throes of the church’s relevancy). So, understandably, he was a tad
pissed off about things. So Colleen and her brother, Sean (for goodness sake!)
had never darkened the door of a church—except when she came to interview me.
Obviously,
she’d never been baptized. I asked her if she’d like to be.
“What
would it matter?” she asked. “What would it mean?”
I
told her I truly believed it would both matter and mean something, I just
wasn’t sure what.
After
I showed her the astonishing baptismal font with some terribly interesting
iconography carved into it’s marble (a pelican piercing her breast to feed her
young on her blood and a stag and evergreen tree along with an Agnus Dei and a
descending dove) she was interested in the symbol and myth of it all.
“When
would we do it?” she asked.
“I’d
prefer a Sunday morning,” I told her, “but most any time would work for me—but
we need witnesses….”
She
left really considering the possibility, but when I didn’t hear from her for a
while I called the newspaper and discovered she had taken and job in Arizona
and moved there. Oh those Interstate highways….
Which
brings us, inexorably, to marriages. This subject has gotten horribly
complicated by the longing and demand of gay and lesbian couples to be
‘married’ in the church, just like real people. (That’s the point, isn’t it,
that the church doesn’t take GLBT folks seriously, like they’re ‘real’? The
church tends to extend, for the most part, a modicum of hospitality to the GLBT
community—oh, let’s be honest here, to the GL community—the church no more
knows what to extend to bi-sexual and transgendered folks than the church would
know what to do with a woodchuck who got elected bishop. Though the wood chuck
could chuck wood, what on earth would the BT folks of the GLBT community do?
Horrors!) But I’ll save that conversation for later. What I want to write about
now is heterosexual marriage and how the church has made itself irrelevant to
that particular institution…which isn’t doing so well on the relevancy scale
itself!
When
I was a young priest and feeling relevant, I had a multitude of thoughts about
“Christian marriage”. I felt that “Christian marriage” was reserved for people
who had proved both their “Christian” commitment and their heart-felt desire to
wrap their marriage in Christianity in a way that would guard and protect them
until death did them part. Or something like that was what I thought. Since
then, since admitting that Christianity is irrelevant, at least so far as the
church of Christ is concerned, I’ve moved to a different place about “marrying
people”.
That’s
what they usually say—mostly the bride though the groom seems to make first
contact more often than in the past—they say: “will you ‘marry us’.” And the
first time I meet with a couple I assure them that I will NOT be ‘marrying
them’. So far as I can see, the church doesn’t ‘marry’ people. If the church
did, indeed, ‘marry people’ they wouldn’t need a marriage license from the
courthouse. Additionally, so far as I can see, the state doesn’t ‘marry’ people
either—the state provides a license for marriage that, once signed by a
functionary and processed in the courthouse, provides them with certain
specific legal rights. What actually happens, it seems to me, in a marriage is
that two people ‘marry’ each other. And by the time they’re sitting in the library
of St. John’s talking to me, they’re already, in my mind, ‘married’.
“Nobody,”
I tell those, usually nervous couples—nervous because they think the church is
going to try to batter them in some way—“wakes up one morning and decides to go
see an Episcopal priest about ‘getting’ married.” Long before that happens, I
tell them, they have made some decisions and some promises to each
other—hopefully not right after especially good sex or a round of bar
hopping—that have bonded them together in a way that indicates they fully
intend to spend the rest of their natural lives together. What they come to me
about is exactly what the good old Book of Common Prayer says it is—‘the
Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage’. That implies—and I’m an old English
major and understand the language’s nuances quite well—is that the “Marriage”
has already occurred and what we’re going to gather to do is celebrate that
reality and have me, as the representative of an irrelevant institution,
“bless” it.
Then
I go on to explain what I think a ‘blessing’ is. I tell them that where I come
from, when the family is gathered around the dinner table full of entirely too
much food to possibly be consumed at one sitting, someone will say, “Who’d like
to say the blessing?” And whatever whoever steps into that breach says is
something like this: “Thank you, God, for this food and for those who prepared
it and for those we share it with.” And everyone says “Amen” and digs in.
That
truly is what I think I do in a marriage ceremony: I say a heart-felt “thank
you” to God for the two people, their love, their commitment, their longing,
their promises and vows, their dewy-eyed optimism, their ‘good intentions’,
their hopes and fears and wonderings. And I ask God to guard them like the
apple of his/her eye and hide them under the shadow of her/his wing. Lord
knows, given the way things are these days, they need that protection. And
since that’s what I do, I assume that is what the sacrament of marriage (excuse
me, Episcopal Purists, “sacramental rite”!) is about. That and that only and
that—thanksgiving and blessing and prayers for protection—is sacrament
enough…more than enough. That’s the outward and visible act—the inward and
spiritual grace part is up to God. I’m delighted to divide up the responsibility
in that way.
I’m
also delighted when people come to ‘get married’ at St. John’s. Again, there
are two reasons. I truly believe in the objective reality of sacraments and I
think anyone who wants such a reality from an otherwise irrelevant institution
deserves to receive it. Inclusion is not a ‘privilege’, it’s a birthright
as a child of God. And the folks who come for the sacrament are delighted that
it is freely given and not tied up in a Byzantine complexity of rules and canon
law and inhospitality. Many of the folks whose marriages I bless are Roman
Catholics with a divorce or two in their history. Some of them have gone the
long, lonely road of annulment to no fulfillment. Most of them have been
insulted in one way or another by the priest who may have baptized them and
told they are ‘unworthy’ in some profound way. Then they come to me and I’m
delighted to see them and will bend over backwards to provide sacramental
support to their relationship. It’s one of the things I do to make an irrelevant
institution matter and make a difference in people’s lives.
That’s
the thing that I want to leave you with at this point: being ‘irrelevant’ isn’t
so bad a thing. It doesn’t mean we can’t ‘matter’ profoundly and make
miraculous differences in people’s lives. In fact, being irrelevant might just
make it possible for the church to play those roles. What we don’t get to do is
control and manipulate people in every part of their lives. What we don’t get
to do is to use the Sacraments—which belong, by the way, in my way of thinking,
to God and the People of God—as forms of reward and punishment, keeping
everyone in their place. The church has a remarkable and wondrous opportunity
to ‘get out of the way’ between God and God’s children and contribute to both by
bringing instruments of Grace into the lives of those who God loves.
I
always ask people who come to St. John’s thinking I’ll “marry” them and then
learn what I will truly do—I ask them why they chose to call me. I tell them
there is no wrong answer because I know they expect the church to ask trick
questions and then assault them when they answer incorrectly. A perfectly good
answer is this: “it’s a pretty place”. That answer works for me because St.
John’s is a remarkably pretty place and a place such a holy moment should
happen in. But the answer I like most is that they attended a wedding at St.
John’s in the past and their friends who got married told them that St. John’s
was a place of Grace and Hospitality. That’s the answer this old irrelevancy likes
to hear.
(A
closing shot: one of those crippled couples—beaten up by the Roman Catholic
church and denied the sacrament of marriage—had their celebration and blessing
at St. John’s about 12 years ago. I expect about 1/3 of that kind of couple to
hang around in some way and about 1/3 to come back for the sacrament of baptism
and about 1/3 never to be heard from again. I’ll take those odds. The wife lost
her job at a RC school for being married in an Episcopal Church after a
divorce. God help us! This couple disappeared for several years and then—true
to my accounting—came back to have Wyatt baptized. Then they disappeared again.
But the husband came back—God know why (well, of course, God knows why…)—and
started playing guitar for the 8 a.m. service. He’s served on the vestry and
his wife and son came more and more.
Evangelism
is a long-range enterprise for an irrelevant institution. We must be this:
Inclusive, Open, Hospitable and Patient.
