Every 500 years more or less, the church goes through upheavals. Now is our time for the upheaval. The first period might have been Constantine. Yes it was in the 300s and the Islamic revolution hit in the late 600s. Then there was Charlemagne around 800. And the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s. Here we are in the 21st century following (or perhaps in the middle of) a devastating pandemic.
What will the church be going forward?
My family consisting of my wife and me and two adult daughters, were all vaccinated in February as soon as vaccines were available. We were all excited to get it and we have viewed our vaccine status as a kind of imaginary shield against future disease. We were wrong.
This will be my final installment of “In the Meantime” as a podcast and written blog for Grace Church. Churches and institutions such as cities all go through cycles of growth, decline, and rebirth. My time at Grace over this last eleven years has been one of preparation of the parish for rebirth and growth. It is time to name some of these emerging, positive signs of rebirth and celebrate them.
I was reading Morning Prayer today. The Hebrew Bible lesson is the story of Samson from his birth. Bishop Spong once pointed out that all the miracles in the Christian scriptures (the “New Testament”) have direct counterparts in the Hebrew scriptures (the “Old Testament”), only in the Christian case, the miracles are pushed even further.
Alas, the owner of Amazon will blast into space on his company-built rocket along with his brother and the winner of an online auction. It will be a suborbital, eleven-minute flight like the earliest days of NASA space travel with the Mercury capsules. Other private companies are gearing up for space tourism too. Just imagine the bragging rights at a cocktail party,
This will be my next-to-last entry in these blogs and podcasts. I thank you for your watching and reading. I thank you for your questions and comments. I have tried to keep these writings politically neutral. The challenge is that the ethics taught by Jesus can be the opposite of some political ideas. Changing the words of Jesus, or deliberately misinterpreting Jesus, or ignoring his teachings in order to stay away from certain hot-button topics would abrogate my ordination as a priest.
In the south of modern-day France, in the Roman city of Lugdunum which is now Lyon, around the middle of the second century, a bishop was stoned to death by the people of the city who followed Gnostic teachings. The pope summoned Irenaeus who was serving as a priest in Lugdunum and appointed him to be the second bishop of the region. Rather than set up shop as a bishop with all the pomp and circumstance, Irenaeus considered his work to be more missionary in nature since most of the people in his diocese were not Christian.
The news this week includes the possibility that the Sackler family (owners of Purdue Pharmaceutical which promoted prescriptions of synthetic opioid drugs) will receive immunity from future opioid abuse prosecution in exchange for their donation of about $5 Billion to a fund for victims. Since victims alive today are in the 100,000s range, the “settlement” at most give $10,000 to $50,000 per victim while the Sackler family enjoys the remaining billions they have stashed away in foreign bank accounts. Ill-gotten gains to be sure.
People today are busy and stressed out. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans pioneering the west were likewise too busy to sit down and wrestle with deep issues in the bible. The Roman Catholic Church produced the “Baltimore Catechism” which is a question-and-answer format to understanding the basics of the Roman Catholic faith. Although the Episcopal Book of Common prayer contains a very similar catechism, I have derided such things in the past as “paint by numbers religion.” But the point of the Baltimore Catechism was to provide a basic understanding of the faith for people who were too busy planting crops and managing farms to do much more.
Today (Thursday, 13 May) is Ascension Day commemorating Jesus’ resurrected body ascending into heaven (Acts 1:9). To modern, space-age sensibilities, the idea of a divine figure rising bodily into heaven has morphed from the medieval climax of the mystery of Christ into an embarrassment.