Last Sunday, the Episcopal parish church which I once served as warden held its annual meeting. This was the first annual meeting since the parish was demoted to mission status, thereby conferring on the bishop, not only title to the building (worth millions), but the right to select the congregation's priest-celebrant. The decline from struggling parish to barely-on-life-support mission can be traced to the selection three-and-a-half years ago of a woman who hit the trifecta of disabling characteristics to serve as an Episcopal clergyperson: divorced, former Roman Catholic, former lawyer. Lord knows how many years of penance or seminary training are necessary to overcome those disqualifiers, and predictably, her legalistic outlook on life, ingrained works-based-salvation theology, and anthrophobia infected her dealings with the parish, and parishioners fled the pews. The bishop's canon (read personnel director) could not mediate the dispute, and the parish let her go. The bargain was that the bishop, who has been paying the bills by selling off the assets of defunct parishes, short-circuited any effort to revitalize this congregation, which lies in a diverse and gentrifying section of the city, by, for instance, having an evangelical or orthodox priest serve the altar and pulpit.
The bishop solved one problem by creating another. He placed a partnered homosexual as the weekly celebrant, even giving some funds toward that end. Other parishioners, whose judgment I respect, had lauded his preaching, and to give him a fair hearing, I listened to his sermon. Perhaps because I have been spoiled by two of the great preachers in the Episcopal Church (Tom Bowers and Fleming Rutledge), I found the congratulatory tone of the sermon, pegged to the story of Jesus' changing water into wine at the wedding at Cana, off-putting. Basing his message on Jesus' "it is not my time" rebuke of His mother, he seemed to imply that it was time for the mission to move forward. Was this an implicit injunction to accept homosexual clergy? To push for more aid to Haiti or "social justice"? Whatever the subtext of the sermon, it was not focused on God's grace and mercy, without which we are all lost in a pit of our own making.
This former parish cannot support itself without new members and new money. One ministry that got short-shrift at the annual meeting was a weekly Bible study that once attracted some 12-15 people and and even brought a few newcomers to the Sunday pews. May that mission not forget that the role of the Church, any church, is to preach the good news that in Christ all is made whole, and all truth revealed, not that the popular culture is to be celebrated, even idolized.
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I suppose the new priest's point in citing the famous reply of our Lord to his mother was a simple one: Jesus' time is always at hand - he is always ready to answer a request. In other words, Jesus was playing a verbal game with Mary and didn't mean to put her off - maybe he was just testing her faith by "pulling her leg"?
ReplyDeleteBut for some reason I've never found the tongue-in-cheek interpretation to be warranted by the text. I'll admit I'm not sure why Jesus would have stated a general rule concerning the timing of his ministry, and then proceeded to work a miracle "against his better judgement," so to speak. But I wonder if one of his reasons may have been to illustrate that Jesus (much like his Father, in His famous bargainings with Abraham and Moses) is a God who is open to persuasion, and willing to make exceptions to what seems like a hard-and-fast rule. I think Jesus never said less than what he meant. But I like to think that a large portion of his earthly ministry was spent planting the seeds of his Divine Nature into the willing soil of the hearts of certain of his followers - followers like his own mother, for instance. After all, He came to create sons and daughters who would share in his own Sonship. Mary, shaped for 30 years by the Divine Sonship of her own son, may have reached a point, at Cana, where she was able to understand and draw out of her son not just what he had consciously intended from the outset, as a man, but what he actually wanted to do, as God. In short, she was able to convince him that now, while perhaps not the preconceived "perfect" time, was as good a time as any. And maybe even better.
In the same way, it is easy to become discouraged by the inept theological tinkering of a small-minded bureaucracy - and particularly one that seems more worried about not offending the Spirit of the Age than about offending any spirit one might plausibly describe as holy. But the Incarnation reminds us that, in Christ, we are more than Abrahamic friends of God; we are brothers of the One Son. God may seem to have written off the Episcopal Church, and be content to let it wander its vain, muddleheaded way into oblivion. But His Spirit has been shed abroad in our hearts, so that even now He is (if we let him) recreating in us His own Nature. If Abraham could argue with his Maker from the perspective of God's own heart concerning the future of Sodom, how much more can we plead with Him concerning the future of a church we love? And thankfully we still have a God who, like Abraham's Friend, is humble enough to be open to persuasion.