The
Day After
“...When
people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay
attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to
women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay. Whoever
wrote this stuff believed that people could learn as much about the
ways of God from paying attention to the world as they could from
paying attention to scripture...”
Barbara
Brown Taylor (An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith)
With Christmas over, we
turn our attention back to the world of people. Here are a couple of
stories I heard from folks during sumptuous Christmas meals: One
friend went to midnight mass at a large episcopal church here in
Birmingham, one that is wealthy enough to pay its choir and most of
the Alabama symphony to participate. She was neither spoken to nor
welcomed by anyone in the church, including the usher who handed her
a bulletin—not even by the people around her at the passing of the
peace. The second happened to one of my sons, when he was at the home
of some folks who belong to one of the most conservative Christian
churches in town. Someone asked what his mother was doing that night,
and he said, she's having dinner with some of her friends who are
lesbian. The woman shushed him, “We don't use that word in our
house.” and then proceeded to ask the question, “What do you call
a straight woman who hangs out with lesbians?” My son's answer: “I
guess you call them 'Friend'.” Now here is my question to you:
Which one of these scenarios demonstrates Christianity?
We who call ourselves
Christian must understand that the world is a gift and everything—and
everyone—in it is part of that gift. We are not here to decide
who's in and who's out, who's loved by the creator, and who is not.
We are expected to welcome the stranger and support the outcast, and
when we fail to do that, then we should no longer call ourselves
Christian. Barbara Brown Taylor's altars in the world include the
ones found among people whose names are not spoken in "polite company." They are found among those guys living under the overpass and
pan-handling at the exit ramp. There are altars in our stripped
forests and in our plastic-choked oceans. One of the best gifts I
received for Christmas was a small card that told me a donation had
been made in my name to help save penguins from extinction. I believe
the Son of Man would be pleased with that—I know I was.
In the ancient Hebrew
tradition, when one came across a place in which they experienced
something holy and inexplicable—like Jacob's dream of a ladder to
heaven with angels coming and going—their response was to create a
stone altar there and pour some oil over it to bless it. We might
want to adopt that practice to help us to understand that the sacred is
not only found in churches and temples and mosques. In fact, Barbara
Brown Taylor writes that “many of the people in need of saving
are in churches.” Everywhere we set our feet, and in the faces
of everyone we meet, the same Christ child whose birthday we
celebrated yesterday is looking back at us, and wondering how they
will be received today.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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