Sandals at the Gate

I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. Not sure if I could claim the word to my person. Not for lack of love of Jesus the Christ. Or because I doubt the sacraments or the great dogmatic creeds. These I accept and cherish, knowing they preserve the important message and contain the message they keep: Creation is from God, Creation is essentially good, God loves us to the utmost giving very Self to us, God is still working with us, death shall have no dominion for God lives and bids us also.

I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. Not out of some great humility that I fail the term, though I surely do. Humility has oft been a thorn. I don't need more castigation, but building up. If ever I was Christian, it is or was in becoming.

I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. But simply because the title comes too oft on triumph and glory lacking a self-critical spirit, that Protestant principle that even the Protestants and Anglicans have lost, and a commitment to stand wherever we find the crucified, wherever the voices of the crying, the bleeding, the dying, the outcast, the suffering are found. Our news is too often self-congratulatory or self-preserving, too often the reasoning of our own predilictions and temperaments, too often the justification of others' suffering while we line our nest.

I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. I know the worst the Church can dish out to a gay man in the U.S. American context as a former Pentecostal, former Roman Catholic, partner to a Lutheran. Exorcisms at the hands of pastors, when I needed a hug and some understanding. Denial of bread when I was hungry. Conscious attempts to tear away the one I loved in the name of god and church and family. But the Church does far worse and those who claim iconic status, representatives in great hats say so little, they may as well keep silence. Or they say too much, and silence would be a blessing. I am seemingly not counted among those "ordinary Anglicans". And those who justify their own position with moderation, claiming fellow-feeling, to oft their compassion sits suspect, their own status protected, their own person not maligned.

I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. My own nest is too comfortable. I hear of boys, girls, women raped in Sudan. Of brothers and sisters blown up in the streets of Iraq. Of prophets crying on street corners, disheveled, smelly, starving: "Can you spare a little change?" Often, I can't. Or rather, I won't.

I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. I take the pain of the world personally--hunger, violence, death, destruction, theological and psychological warfare, domination, casting out. Each different face, manifest variation, God's glory. But the pain of the world I cannot hold, nor contain, help, nor relieve. And so much of my compassion is my own suffering reaching out to lend a hand, for I do know that pain can shrivel the heart, shrink the soul no matter how oft others tell the suffering it's to our glory--or to God's--that heaven will be better for our bleeding now--the excuses of the comfortable, those who by benefit by accident of birth.

I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. I am far off and too near.

Barbara Taylor Brown notes in her recent work, Leaving Church, she didn't leave finally out of some great anger, but out of tired and a growing sense that there is so much more. That so much of the goodness of our LORD is wasted by the defenders of God.

Am I leaving church? No. And neither does Barbara Taylor Brown. Or maybe somehow "yes". What seems to be unfoling is a revisiting of what is church and with whom and where church can be found. Given the pious, I'll take the prostitutes. Given the authorities, I'll join the crowds. I'm not interested in justifying institutions, of defending my place therein anylonger, nor do I care to belong. Trying to fit in has cost too much poetry and painting and life and love. I find myself small but closer to our auditors "inside" and "out": Blake, Kierkegaard, Weil, Arendt, Stringfellow, Gandhi. Not a prophet's voice really, sounding in the desert or thundering from the city curb. But a pastor's. Or perhaps a friend? No longer interested in preparing the way within the churchyard, or elbowing enough wiggle room to breath air seemingly too clouded by centuries of cultural accretion called "good news". But even criticism gives way to apathy, not out of some great contemplative disinterest. Taylor Brown gets it right, I think, tiredness wins.

On pilgrimage in Wittenberg, we happened upon Judenstrasse across from the Marienkirche (St. Mary's Church), the main city church where Martin Luther oft preached.

Judenstrasse. The street of the Jews. The Jewish section of town in this Saxon town.



1305 anno Domini. Expulsion.

On the Southeast corner of the kirk, Judensau (Jewish pigs) inscribed with an insult to the Name of the Unnamed God as written in the Kabbalah.

This evening, Advent begins for C and I. We'll set up the wreath. Yet to decide on candles. Red or blue? Red is traditional in Germany, being the color of love in that cultural context. Blue is the color of our beloved Mary. Jewish prophetess. Handmaiden of the Unnamed God. Bearer of Love. And I think not of mangers, but of menorae. Of eight candles. Eight days. Of oil enough to renew creation again.

I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. But I love this Jewish man titled Immanuel, God with us, Wonderful Counselor. Has he a word? A wriggling infant in a barn. A crying brother fixed to a tree. A forgiving friend revealing in his Name that the ways of the Unnamed God are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts. In the flesh of the particular, the Infinite. And I gaze the newspaper, the eyes of a Sudanese child, the joy of two men, the hate of a governor, here the Infinite still works and flees, builds up and tears down, sets trees ablaze and lifts up the dead.

Near the incription a monument.



A placard for the monument near the inscription on the Marienkirche reads:



Here are Christians. Ordinary. Wordly. Secular. Town people. Most come to worship here half a dozen times a year, waiting for a baptism, wedding, funeral. Much maligned by the zealous, the regular attenders, the true Christians. But here at the county office, we could register our partnership had we not done so in Hannover. Here virtues of the godly have passed into the everyday. Often unnamed by pastors too concerned with maintaining their place or by Christians in other lands too self-congratulatory in their religiousity.

Here I see a glimmer that we might yet learn that "never again" has many faces, many shapes and we must ever be watchful of our rhetoric, our theologies, our justifications of others' pain. To ignore the suffering and sorrow and terror and pain we justify in God's Name is to repeat the mistake: God hanging from a tree. This way is not God's way, nor these thoughts God's thoughts. The birth of this God signals the judgement of such and the end.

To this God, I offer my thanks. Light a candle in the dark. Come!

I return to household practice, the way of the early ones. Candles on the table. Bread broken on cracked plates. Raising a toast to God. Even venturing to the gathering far away, I remember that we gather to return here again, the Unnamed God lives or dies in the everyday. Here is where my blessing, thanking, priesting matters.

Amen.

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