I realized I could pass as a New Yorker, or at least as a Manhattanite, when people started asking me for directions. Sure, I dressed mostly in black and walked confidently from one apparel showroom to the next – I was a buyer for a Grand Rapids, Michigan, department store – but likely what made me fit in was that I looked straight ahead and didn’t gape at the skyscrapers like the country-bumpkin that I was. Of course, I secretly thrilled being amid the midtown peaks and canyons, and riding an elevator merely as high as the fifty-seventh floor of the Empire State Building to visit one vendor. I just didn’t let on to the rest of the city. I passed. I belonged.
A couple of Saturdays ago, Kate I walked the length of Columbus Avenue. We started with Irish Coffees at the Buena Vista Café and finished at the Transamerica Pyramid to check out the re-opened redwood garden and sculpture park on the building’s east side. The cool thing about the pyramid is that you can stand at the base and look up a slanted side all the way to the tippy-top. A San Franciscan for three and a half years, I gaped like a country-bumpkin. I didn’t pass, and I didn’t care.
“Look Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” said one of Jesus’ gaping, country-bumpkin disciples. Jesus’ movement was of the countryside and of the villages, not of the city. Even if it wasn’t that disciple’s first visit to Jerusalem, he likely wasn’t from there and couldn’t pass. It took me many visits to New York not to look up all the time; I imagine the same was true for Jesus’ gawking friend. And then Jesus makes his brash prediction: “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all with be thrown down.”
We like to fancy our structures as permanent, but of course they’re not. New Yorkers saw their two tallest buildings thrown down one September day. San Franciscans are no strangers to shaken stones tumbled to rubble. Earthquakes and landslides, storms and floods all take what’s due them. Warring world powers, greater and lesser, know how to level their enemies’ buildings, sometimes multiple city blocks at a time – buildings with people inside them. We haven’t been to kind to our sacred spaces either. Temples and cathedrals and mosques alike have crumbled at each other’s hands. The temple in Jerusalem that Jesus knew was destroyed by the occupying Roman empire some forty years later. All was thrown down, just as Jesus had said.
Our structures mean more than our buildings. The word structure is also used to describe our institutions, the ways that people gather and organize. All Saints’ Church, for example, is both the building we’re sitting in and the people who are sitting here; we are one dot on the long arc of sacramental tradition, from the Last Supper to that last day, as the old communion hymn sings, “when sacraments shall cease.” The Church-universal has always stressed the latter definition to the former one. The people – past, present, and future – are the Church, whose “one foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord.”
The buildings, however lovely and treasured and useful, are merely the shells where we gather. Bank accounts will empty; doors close; steeples topple; roofs cave in; foundations rot – but the Church goes on until “the great Church victorious,” sings another hymn, “shall be the Church at rest.” I suppose it’s similar to the shells of our own bodies, which, however lovely and treasured and useful, one day will fall to ruin, while our souls go on to eternal rest.
It’s fearful to contemplate, isn’t it, the mortality of our individual bodies, or, for that matter, the closures of dying congregations.
I think the four disciples – Peter, James, John, and Andrew – were afraid, too. Country bumpkins though they were, they were astute political observers. They knew the tumult and turmoil between imperial Rome and occupied Palestine. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?”
“How much time do I have left, doc?” a dying patient might say, “And how bad will it get?”
Jesus doesn’t answer their first question, but he spells out the symptoms of the second. We’ll listen to Saint Luke’s account of this conversation in a couple of weeks. Forty years on, life in Jerusalem will get pretty bad. Jesus won’t sugar-coat and soft-peddle the agonies to come, but he will say to those four disciples and to us: “The one who stands firm to the end will be saved.”
The Prophet Daniel heard the same word of the Lord: “There shall be a time of anguish, such as never has occurred since nations first came into existence” […] but, he continues, “Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the sky.”
The Psalmist pleads the Lord’s protection: “Protect me, O God, for I take refuge in you […] For you will not abandon me to the grave, nor let your holy one see the Pit.”
The letter-writer to the Hebrews preaches the same trust in God: “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.”
In our anxieties and in our fears, we place our faith, our hope, and our trust in Jesus, who endured the cross with all its shame and agony, and who thus endures with us the anxieties and fears we carry in response to these uncertain times and our unpredictable lives.
And because faith and hope and trust in Jesus can at times seem abstract, hard to grab hold of, it is through the Church that Jesus gives us each other – the people of God and the structures that hold us – to make the abstract concrete and the elusive tangible.
“Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds,” the letter-writer continues, “not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”
The Body of Christ, the Church, meets together regularly in this sacred space which we also call the church. We worship God; we hear and reflect on God’s Word proclaimed and broken open; we profess our faith; we pray for our needs and those of others; we confess our sins and receive the assurance that God loves us and forgives us; we share in a sign of the Peace that this brings; we receive the unsurpassing gift – the source and the summit – of God’s great desire for us in the very Body and Blood of God’s Son; we gather for fellowship in the parish hall to provoke and encourage one another to love and to do good deeds; and we go out into the world in the Name of Christ to love and serve the Lord until the next time we meet.
God does all this for us in the Father, and with us in the Son, and through us in the Holy Spirit. The God of love and communion has the last Day all worked out. Creation and salvation are all of a piece. You and I and this building one day will topple, but in the time God gives us now, let us do more than pass as the Church. Let us be the Church! Let us be one vital dot on that holy arc that contains all that God wishes to accomplish.
Fr. Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP
26 Pentecost B, Proper 28 – November 17, 2024
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco
“Let us be the Church!”
Yorumlar