(Note: this is a synopsis of a homily delivered for our Sunday observance of "Mary the God-Bearer", "St. Mary the Virgin" on the Episcopal calendar. I've added reflections based on our exploration of outreach ministries at Saints Peter and Paul--kn+)
A colleague of mine, a respected rector of a vital urban parish, once told me that he tries to spend at least twice as much time each week in coffee shops and brewpubs than he does in the church office. "If I am in the office too much" he opined, "I have the wrong conversations."
Well, he is very quotable on this and, I think, very right. These "wrong conversations" may not be "bad conversations" per se. But they are predictable conversations, about bulletins and church calendars and attendance and building maintenance and church programs and a great deal of things that have absolutely no meaning to anyone once one puts a foot over the threshold of the doorway. Frankly, I think those things I listed increasingly have little meaning for many of the folks who come inside the doorway as well!
The other day I was speaking with a parish member, in a coffee shop, about life and values and God and spiritual seeking. A woman I did not know walked past us, saw the book I had brought with me, and said "Richard Rohr! I have to talk with you some time!" Another customer, a young woman in a sleeveless top, walked past with her cup. I saw that she had a beautiful, full-color Our Lady of Guadalupe tattooed on her upper arm. It was August 15, the actual day of Our Lady's feast.
I smiled at seeing the beautiful tattoo and thought, "There she is. She's right where she should be." Like my colleague, Our Lady wants to have the right sort of conversations, and is outside of the walls of church office and sanctuary where her people are.
That is the outrageous character of the Gospel. God has left the building.
Most of us love temples. It is human instinct to build a temple, to provide a beautiful place for meditation and for prayer and for gathering groups of people to perform sacred acts. Temples establish mailing addresses for God, or at least we hope they do. Every major culture builds and has built temples, whether we call them cathedrals or mosques or synagogues or stupas. They are wonderful to visit and often invite prayer and reflection.
But the God of the Bible has left the building!
Remember David, the great king of the Hebrew Scriptures? He too wanted to built a temple, feeling guilty that he had a nice wooden house while the Ark of God was still under the old tent that was carried by the people of Israel while they wandered in the desert. The prophet comes to David after a dream and says, "Thus says God: I did not ask you to build me a temple. I traveled with my people in the wilderness." The God of the Bible is a pilgrim God, and the best and most intimate time with this God was when they traveled with God in the desert. On the road, in exile, homeless, learning in humility how different a God this was and how different they were called to be. The whole business of a temple was a very mixed experience for Israel, and prophets criticized the temple and predicted its destruction as much or more than the temple was praised.
And when the pilgrim God wished to break free of culture and time and ethnic loyalty, what happened?
This pilgrim God chose a young woman, anonymous and unmarried and away from the power and privilege of Jerusalem. On the day that everything changed, the Temple in Jerusalem was conducting business as usual, sacrifices and sung Psalms and incense and offerings and all. The Temple and its priests and singers and those attending were ignorant of the fact that God had left the building. God was up north, in a small town, where a mighty archangel spoke kindly and politely to a young woman and respectfully waited for her answer. For she was free to say yes or no.
The young woman, Miriam, said "Here am I, the servant of the Lord: let it be."
And God took up a new home, in the body of that young woman. Mary became the new Temple, which is why old litanies call her things like "tower of ivory, mystical tabernacle". God took a chosen place on the margins, in frail flesh, with people forgotten and pushed aside and silenced. God had left the building. Years later, when the God-made-flesh died on the cross, the Gospels speak of the curtain in the Temple veiling the Holy of Holies being torn in two. Out, out, no longer in a temple made of stone, but wild and out in the world. Look to where people are in exile and on the edge. Look to the margins, the forgotten places. There the divine wind blows and there the God-made-flesh will be found, making Nowheres into Somewheres and Nobodies into really Somebodies and leaving the powerful and the self-righteous standing silent with wide-open mouths amidst their offerings and their rites.
We all love a temple. We, meaning church-folk, usually love our churches. It is good for the praying community to have a home, a place to gather to celebrate and to pray. It is good to have a roof for our ministries, especially for those that benefit someone other than ourselves. But we must always be on our guard to have the right conversations, and to regard our buildings and other possessions in the right way, the way of the Gospel. The Gospel is a message for those who have not heard it, the divine energy pushing us past our inward-looking preoccupations and self-involvement and into a world where God has chosen to dwell, among people whom God has loved so much that he became one of them and is within them still. The right conversation for church-folk goes something like this: how do we seek and serve the Christ who walks past our doors, whom we encounter in work and errands and in our streets? It is one of the greatest irony of the organized Christian project that a church can be where we hold the least amount of conversations about the Gospel. So often we talk about other things, and at great length.
Last night as I write this, the Senor Warden and I accompanied a young couple, with us for the past year, as they walked the streets of Montavilla with an attitude of curiosity and of prayer. They are helping lead us into exploring anew some basic Gospel questions: Who is our neighbor? Where did we see you, Lord? Our steps took us down Stark Street, where a lone homeless woman welcomed us into her space of sidewalk that she shares with a lone white dove who keeps careful watch on her. Then up north, eventually to Montaville Park, where under trees we found small gatherings of homeless already worried about the ending of summer and the coming of the rains. Out of the church building with its lovely silence and lingering smell of incense and flickering candles, out among those who have not croseed our thesholds but whom Christ loves dear and lives among to this day. It can feel oddly vulnerable to be out and about in the streets and the lots, away from the protection of role and title. But it is one place to have the right conversations, like "Where is God when you are out on the street? How can we approach these people with respect? What is the Good News for them?"
I did not see another colorful tattoo, but I did not need to. The God of the Gospel has left the building and journeys with the people. It is still the Octave of Our Lady's feast and, unseen but powerful, she was already walking among those vulnerable and poor, those among whom the pilgrim God loves to travel.
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