Today felt important. I believe it was important. There
were quite a few interesting learning experiences. But there were three points
when I felt personally connected in a way that leaves the world changed for me.
Will I be a better person for them? I don’t know. But it feels significant.
The first point was at the Western Wall. Placing my hands
and face against the wall and praying – laying my sins and failures on the
wall, praying for mercy and blessing for myself, for those dearest to me, and
for all those entrusted to my prayers – was like pouring my hope and concern
into a great river of humanity’s prayers, a river flowing through the
centuries. Each day, I pray for the Church, especially the Episcopal Church and
Katharine. I pay for Joseph and Machakos, for Alex and Santiago, and for the
Diocese of Nevada, our parishes and our people, naming those in special need.
My prayers for the Church have changed recently as I’ve gotten more of a sense
of how Jesus called the religious to repentance from their religiosity into an
authentic love for God and God’s creation. At the Western Wall today, my
attempt to pray for the Church immediately ricocheted into a prayer for people
of all faiths that we might repent of our divisions and be united in an
authentic commitment to each other’s well being. I left the Wall feeling
considerably different than I had when I first touched it just a short while
before.
The second point was in the Church that Western Christians
call the Church of the Holy Sepulcher but Easterner Christians call the Church
of the Resurrection. We did not stand in the long line again to pray in the aedicule
over the spot where the Church commemorates the burial and resurrection of
Jesus. I am not persuaded that is the spot. The piety people practice there
confuses me. See JMHH Part 1. Moreover, the tomb that was discovered there in
the 4th Century crumbled away long ago. That space is now a lovely vault
artificially manufactured to evoke religious emotions. But tucked back in a
dark less frequented area of the church, you can scrunch down and virtually
crawl down through a tiny tunnel to two genuine 1st Century tombs.
Some say that one or the other of these tombs may have a better claim to being
the actual burial place of Jesus than the place under the aedicule. Even if
they are not, it was a place like this where his body lay and the miracle
happened.
Two of us led the way, half crawling our way into that
cramped stygian hole. I knelt beside the tombs not out of reverence but
necessity and held the flashlight app of my I-phone on the tombs while each members
of our group came down one by one to see the burial places. These tombs had not
been aesthetically designed to evoke piety. They were just the gloomy place of
despair where hope was buried and reborn. I felt especially privileged to be
shining light into the tombs so that my fellow pilgrims could see them.
A brief educational digression from this spiritual
confession: The burial practice in the first century was to place the body in
such a tomb and enclose it with a rock. Then after the body had been given time
to decompose, about a year, the family would remove the bones, clean them, and
place them in an ossuary.
The third point of reference moment for me today was at
Golgotha. There is something of the Protestant historian about me that frets
over whether a sacred place is where something really happened. If a place is
deemed holy just because we feel it is holy, that works for me. But if we say
it is holy because something happened there, I want to know whether that’s true.
Golgotha is the real deal. This is where it happened.
There are two chapels – one Roman, one Orthodox – located
over the rock of Golgotha. Linda and I went to the Orthodox chapel. As we
approached the altar, we could look down through a glass floor at the rock.
Under the altar was a hole in the floor. Like each person before me, I knelt
under the altar and reached down through the floor to place my hand on the
rock. There I prayed for forgiveness for all my failings and to be changed into
the person God would have me become.
There are many theologies of the atonement; a lot of
explanations of what difference Jesus’ death, descent, resurrection, and ascension
make for us. There are eight such theories on two pages of Romans. They make my
head spin. I loved a sign I saw today at St. Anne’s Basilica: “No explanations
inside the Basilica.” I have some explanations of the atonement I sometimes
think are helpful. But today, I only knew there is one specific atonement
doctrine I don’t believe and another vague one that I do. The specific one is
that God needed someone to pay the price for our forgiveness. That would not be
the God I believe in. The other is that there is something written into the
order of things – karma is a good enough name for it -- so that sin has
consequences. Blood cries out from the earth. A price must be paid – just not
to God – it was a thousand years after Jesus before anyone said the price had
to be paid to God. But I know my failures to love, my selfishness, my
cowardice, my duplicity, my envy, my pride, my greed, my faithless fears, my
many, many sins of omission and commission – and I know they deserve
consequences. To trust that God in Jesus has taken those consequences into
himself for my redemption is my hope for this world and the next. With my palm
against the rock of Golgotha, this was not an abstract idea. It was as palpable
as stone on flesh. All the other atonement doctrines may be interesting and
even helpful on some other day in some other place. But today at Golgotha, I
understood redemption simply in my heart. And I trusted that by the power of
all Jesus did and does, I will not only be forgiven but also transformed.
Those were the big moments spiritually. But there were
other points of real engagement with the Jesus story. One was the Pool of
Bethesda where Jesus healed the paralytic who was not entirely sure he wanted to
be healed. Bethesda captured my attention because, like Golgotha, this place is
the real deal. We know without a doubt this was the Pool of Bethesda that was a
sort of Waters of Lourdes in Jesus’ day. This is where people came to be
healed. What I don’t know much about is the ruins that surround the pool –
except that quite nearby at a higher level is a Shrine to Asclepius, the Roman
God of healing. My one learning from the visit was that it was not easy to get
down to the pool in the first place. I used to think of the paralytic as a
total slacker. I now see him as someone who had almost made it to his
destination, then lost his drive at the very edge of the place he had been
trying to go.
Earlier in the day we visited the Church of St. Anne, which
purports to be the site of the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary. According
to the agreed statement of the Anglican – Roman Catholic International
Consultation, the traditional Roman doctrines about St. Anne (Immaculate
Conception) and the Dormition of Mary point to theological truths we Anglicans
affirm. Belief in those stories is a permissible Anglican piety – they are just
not dogmas for us as they are for Roman Catholics. Personally, I am fine with
Joaquin and Anne. But if the BVM was bodily assumed into Heaven, I need the
story line to be coherent, which for me means she needs to have lifted off from
Ephesus. I have been to her house there. (I don’t know that it was really here
house. But if she was in the care of the Beloved Disciple and he was the leader
of the church in Ephesus, it would have been a perfectly good place for her to
live.) So my mythical Mary spent her final years in Ephesus. She spent precious
little of her life in Jerusalem. I just can’t see her ending her mortal life
here. Jerusalem was not a great place in those days. Ephesus had the sea and
was the only city on earth with streetlights.
We passed by the Armenian Orthodox Church that purports to
have the Upper Room in it. Again, my skeptic kicks in.
We also visited the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Temple Mount –
that is we were outside. We were not allowed inside the Mosque or the Dome of
the Rock. But I did learn something that changed my feeling about that place.
The Temple Mount is a large flat open area atop the mountain where Solomon’s
Temple stood in 1000 and Herod’s Temple stood in the time of Jesus. The Dome of
the Rock is a magnificent Islamic Building that occupies a central portion of
the Mount. It is in an important place because it stands over the rock on which
Abraham may have almost sacrificed Isaac (or Ishmael depending on which holy
book we are reading) and Solomon’s Temple may have extended over this area. But
it does not cover anything alike the total area of Herod’s Temple. It does not
cover the area believed to have been the Holy of Holies.
Herod’s Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E.
Christians regarded that destruction as fulfilling the prophesy of Jesus. Jews
for the most part replaced Temple sacrifice with Torah study and observance
(something the prophets had been advocating for over 800 years). When the
Christians took over Jerusalem the first time during the reign of Constantine,
we had no interest whatsoever in the Temple Mount. We used it as a garbage
dump. When the Muslims displaced us, they scrupulously refrained from
desecrating any of our holy places. But they restored the Temple Mount as a
holy place. When the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem, they sacked the Mosques.
But when the Muslims came back, Saladin refused to disturb the Church of the
Holy Sepulcher. Muslims have preserved the Dome of the Rock – which they hold
to be the place Mohammed ascended into Heaven. We need to remember they didn’t
take it away from us. It was never ours.
A final head-shaking note on the Church of the Holy
Sepulcher: six different Christian denominations laid claim to the building
during the days of Muslim rule; so the Sultan divided the place up and gave
each denomination jurisdiction over a part of it. The border skirmishes are
intense. On an outside ledge, some construction workers left a ladder 160 years
ago. It’s still there. They can’t decide whose job it is to move it.
No comments:
Post a Comment