THE MR ROGERS POST: WHOSE FAULT IS OUR BAD REP?

Last week, I shared this Rollie Williams link in praise of Fred Rogers on my FB page: http://www.upworthy.com/the-nicest-man-in-history-had-a-shocking-secret-you-never-knew-about?c=ufb1 The basic point was that Fred Rogers was a great guy and his shocking secret was that he was a Christian. The author said Mr. Rogers’ message was the opposite of the  “lack of love and compassion” that characterizes most of Christianity. It praised Rogers for his caring, generous spirit (my words) and for keeping his faith secret (actually, he was not at all secret about his faith. See. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eliot-daley/fred-rogers_b_862976.html While proselytizing was not his ministry – and that could never have happened on publicly funded TV even if he had wanted to – Mr. Rogers’s religion was never a secret. He even concluded his acceptance speech for his Emmy, “May God be with you.”) I take the thrust of Rollie Williams’ post to mean that secularists should not despise all Christians because, although most of us are harsh, judgmental jerks, some Christians are ok – so long as they keep their relationship with Christ a secret.

Feeling my faith damned by faint praise, I shared the Williams link saying I was left perplexed. While Rollie Williams’ view of Christians is wrong on the facts, I still want to know how he came to think this of us. He is clearly a well-intentioned person trying to be magnanimous and affirming the core values we actually hold. His objection isn’t to our message, but to us, the messengers. He reminds me of a seminary classmate who in her younger days rejected Jesus, claiming she believed instead in Aslan – only later to learn that Aslan was C. S. Lewis’s fantasy avatar (so to speak) of Jesus. I want to understand how we look to Rollie Williams and why. I received a number of very good, insightful comments. I was particularly engaged by three comments taking different perspectives:

Fr. Torey understood the Mr. Rogers article as reflecting the narcissistic, solipsistic (my words) culture in which “there is nothing more worship-worthy than one’s opinions.” (He was not talking about the author of the article but the cultural context). I agree wholeheartedly with Torey’s view of our culture and the state of religion in it.

Dave was one of several voices denying that Christianity is generally “lacking in love and compassion.” I focus on Dave because of his broad encounter with Christianity. He has been an Episcopalian, a Presbyterian, a Southern Baptist, and a “contemporary Evangelical.” Yet he has not found the kind of Christianity Williams decries in any of the churches where he has worshiped. I mostly concur with Dave. While I have, on occasion, encountered mean-spirited bigotry in churches of several stripes, I have encountered more of it in secular settings. Like, Dave, I have never personally been in a church where love and compassion were not the overwhelming moral message.

Deacon Scot may, at first, seem to be at odds with Torey and Dave. But I am going to substantially agree with him too. Scott lays the blame for the ill-repute of Christians with the Christians themselves, saying we have portrayed Christ as a fool and God as a “petty tyrant,” and that if we presented a faith people with half a brain or half a heart could accept, the churches would be full. I don’t think Dave is talking about the hate-mongering Westboro Baptist Church or Franklin Graham’s Islamophobic prejudice. He is a Deacon of a progressive Episcopal Diocese. But Dave is saying that we mainline Christians have not presented a true account of our faith, that we have not been outspoken in presenting the God of Love in contrast to the hateful God of the Left Behind Series brand of Christianity. We have ceded the name “Christian” to the crazies. I think Scott is right. We, mainline Christians and moderate Evangelicals, bear our share of responsibility for the low stock of the gospel in society, and the part about our portraying  God as “a petty tyrant” is precisely right.

So after giving credit to these insightful commenters who have sparked my thoughts, here’s my take on why so many people regard Christians as mean-spirited bigots, when on the whole we are not.

I. PERSECUTED FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS SAKE?

Psalm 44: 22; Isaiah 53; 1 Peter 3 & 4; and Matthew 5: 10 all say that righteousness will subject us to persecution. “Righteousness” does not mean stern faced judgmental piety. It means “right relationship” with God, the earth, and each other – right relationship with the past, with the present, with the future, and with eternity. In a culture drunk on subjectivity and pathologically averse to deep or committed relationships, especially those rooted in tradition, faith in transcendent mystery, and inconvenient moral duties, a lot of people are going to find us problematic. The Wisdom of Solomon Ch. 2 is in point. To the extent that we assert that there is such a thing as righteousness (a network of right relationship) and try to adhere to it, we make ourselves unpopular in a culture that finds righteousness objectionable.

But is that what is going on? 1 Peter 4:15 reminds us that just because we are Christians, that does not mean our persecutions are necessarily unjust. Christians can do wrong and be called to account for it by non-Christians. Which of these two scenarios is going on? The answer is: both.

There are Christians who are hate-mongers. Take a look at http://www.godhatesfags.com. There are also Christians who have stood silent while the hate-mongers act in our name. Good people, like Rollie Williams, object. So let’s give our critics that much.

But then there are times when Christians act righteously and are persecuted for it, sometimes by other Christians. Christians were beaten and jailed in the Civil Rights Movement and various peace movements. Those churches, such as the Episcopal Church, that have defended the rights and dignity of LGBT persons have paid a huge price. We have been slow and inadequate in our stand for LGBT persons, but to the extent we have done the right thing, we have paid a price. 

But mostly we are judged, not from the religious right, but from the secularist perspective of the Williams post. What is going on there? Sometimes it may be innocent confusion. But I know Christians whose secular friends know good and well that they are not bigots. Yet the friends are distinctly uncomfortable with their religion. It is an elephant in the room. It is a disfigurement from which even our friends avert their eyes.

If asked their view of Christians, such secularists will say it is our judgmental bigotry, though they know that is not the case. It is our inconvenient insistence on a transcendent reality from which arises a moral order, our claim that there is a network of right relationships in which life flourishes. Some things are true which is inconvenient for those that are false; some things are right and others wrong. We may be wrong about truth and we may behave wrongly, but we still insist that there is Truth, there is Goodness, there is Beauty – which just makes us Platonists – but we go on to insist that all these transcendent values are One and that One is personal, which makes us Theists, and so on until we turn out to claim that God has come to us in Jesus – we are, like it or not – and many do not – Christians.

I believe this is Fr. Torey’s point. Some of our persecution is “blessed” and it is our place in a fragmenting disempowering society of solipsists to be Socratically inconvenient.

II. DISENGAGEMENT FROM THE WORLD

But what about the increasingly large number of people who genuinely, sincerely believe what the Mr. Rogers article says – that “love and compassion” are the opposite of the Christian message presumably of hatred and dismissal? Let me tell you a few very short, super simple stories.

After my mission trip to Kenya, my luggage needed a new zipper. The young man at the luggage repair shop asked me what I’d been doing in Africa. I told him about the Anglican Church’s work to save young women from genital mutilation and forced marriages and our efforts to fund their education. He said, “Where is your church? That’s a church I’d go to.”

When I went to help clean up a community center in Las Vegas on MLK Day, several young people who were there working on behalf of Starbuck’s or their fraternity, discovered I was a bishop and said, “Where is your church? If you’re here, we want to be there.”

I went a community organizing training in Texas this year. All of us trainees who were over 50 were church folks. The ones under 30 were not.

But two of the young adults said, each in their own way, “if I’d known Christians like the ones here I’d still be in the Church. In fact, I’m going to give it another try.”

My point: a lot of people, especially young people, don’t know anything about Christians except the bigots. Whose fault is that?

James Davison Hunter, in his book, To Change The World: The irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_17?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=hunter+to+change+the+world&sprefix=Hunter+to+change+%2Cstripbooks%2C295 traces the story of how mainline Christianity began to systematically withdraw from the wider culture in the mid-19^th Century. We sold the hospitals, gave away the colleges, entrusted social services to the state and to secular non-profit agencies.

Mainline Christianity withdrew from a challenging world in which righteousness makes inconvenient demands on us. We withdrew inside the four walls of our churches and became a spiritual support group to each other. We have progressively made ourselves largely unknown and utterly irrelevant.

Those Christians who still live “in the world,” confront the larger culture in aggressive domineering ways reflective of their belief in an aggressive domineering God. Hunter analyzes the failures of both the Christian right and the Christian left to dominate the culture through power politics. Another example of aggressive domineering confrontation is proselytizing, selling the gospel like a product, using manipulative threats and promises. People rightly reject aggressive domineering confrontation in both cases.

Hunter invites Christians to “faithful participation” in the larger society, working alongside people of other faiths and people of no faith, for the common good. His point is that “faithful participation” is socially and politically effective. My experience is that when we engage the world through “faithful participation,” people learn that we are not bigots and some of them even want to join us. Those who continue to despise us will at least be harder pressed to despise us for the wrong reasons.

In sum, the negative impression so many secular people have of Christians is, as Scott says, a case of our reaping the whirlwind. If we want people to believe we stand for something good, decent, kind, and compassionate, then it is incumbent on us, not just as individuals, but as churches, to act boldly in the larger society.

III. UNPERSUASIVE, BORING, AND BANAL BELIEFS

Scott also argued that our belief system isn’t persuasive to people who have half a mind and half a heart. In my opinion, Scott is right, but I want to take this more expansive format to flesh out the problem more than he could in a FB comment.

A.   The Petty Tyrant Versus The Fellow Sufferer

Many clergy today are more at home with a simplified psychology than they are with a mature theology. The result is that some of us don’t talk about God much and those who do don’t speak of God very well. Even in mainline churches, I hear God talk that betrays a very problematic image of God. In fact, some mainline Christians don’t like to talk about God because the only God they know is the Petty Tyrant.

The Petty Tyrant God is the one who sends all sorts of blessings and curses into our lives to reward, punish, teach, test, or otherwise manipulate us into doing what pleases him. Or he (and it is a “he”) pulls the strings of the universe to accomplish a secret plan in which all will work out – but he doesn’t plan to let us in on it.

No one with half a heart is going to love that kind of God – fear maybe; cow tow before, maybe – but love, no way. So 20^th Century theologians gave us another God – the helpless God who really can’t do anything about this mess the world is in, but this God is infinitely empathetic – the Fellow Sufferer Who Cares.

Misery loves company. The folks with half a heart can like this God well enough, but the folks with half a brain will know such a God is not much help in a crisis. The Fellow Sufferer is an Innocent Bystander – but is that what we mean by God. It’s a far cry from “Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light in accessible hid from our eyes” or “King of Gory, King of Peace.”

Short simple point: We aren’t offering the world a compelling portrait of God. Our better theologians actually are offering a profound, beautiful, intellectually credible, compelling portrait of God. Unfortunately, they don’t speak the language of the people in the pews or even a lot of the people in the pulpits. It isn’t that people aren’t smart enough. People are plenty smart. The problem is that academic theologians are talking to each other in the language of academic theology. That’s what they are supposed to do. But we are not training clergy to translate the deep wisdom of our faith into English – not dumb it down – people are smart – translate deep truths into common language. Take the trouble to explain it.

This is do-able. Commercial break for a moment of shameless self-promotion: My forthcoming book God Of Our Silent Tears may be challenging at times, but it is in English. It does take the God images of Rahner, Hart, Sobrino, Hick, Adams, et al and make them accessible to bright people who want to think about what they believe. I am not alone. Shirley Guthrie’s Christian Theology does a good job of it as well. If clergy make the effort, we can present a God who will be more than acceptable to people with half a brain and half a heart. We can present a God who will enrich people’s lives beyond the reach of imagination.

B.   Triumph of the Therapeutic

Know that I write this as one who has spent more time on the metaphoric couch than most and do not regret it. I respect therapy. Three members of the next generation of my family are therapists. I have been to Esalen, Omega, the Gestalt Institute, etc. etc. etc. I do psychosynthesis work almost daily.

But therapy and religion, while touching each other and sometimes overlapping each other, are not the same thing. Philip Reif wrote 40 years ago about the displacement of religion, which offers a large frame of reference for life, with the therapeutic model focused on the individual self. Eventually we came, as Reif predicted, to a society in which the most influential spiritual leader was a talk show host. http://ncronline.org/blogs/grace-margins/oprah-and-triumph-therapeutic

Since mainline Christianity abandoned the larger society, I am glad someone as beneficent as Oprah stepped in to take our place. But the cultural shift in Western religion has been the replacement of Christianity with a creed that is currently known as Moral Therapeutic Deism. This short article truly is worth a read. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/aprilweb-only/116-11.0.html.

Again in the absence of a healthy robust Christian presence in the world, MTD is not that bad. As a trend of the rock of intellectual culture rolling steadily downhill from Kant to Kierkegaard to Camus to – God help us – John Lennon, it was inevitable. In the absence of authentic witness from Christianity and other world religions, this is what we got. God became the “cosmic butler and on call therapist.” We learned to be nice, get help as needed, and hope to go to heaven when we die. As secularism goes, it could be a lot worse. But the Christianity Today version of MTD[i] is sometimes not so different from what mainline churches, mega-churches, and even contemporary evangelical churches offer as an alternative to the angry judgmental religion that rightly offends moral secularists. Such an innocuous worldview is a far cry from the Christian faith people have gone to the stake to defend.

Another social media discussion I am following has leading Christians saying of MTD, “what’s wrong with it?” Again, I say, “not much” for secularists. For the intentionally “spiritual but not religious,” it’s fine. But for the Church: As practiced by some, it is the brand of religion Marx called the “opiate of the masses” helping people adjust to the world instead of changing it. MTD can easily reinforce the ego; indeed make ego-goals the be all and end all of life, instead of the fundamental problem with life as it has been held to be by the great religious teachers from Buddha to Jesus to Mohammed. For the Church, it is offering a cut rate watered down version of what psychotherapy can do considerably better than we can.

Finally, if Christians are right that Creation and our spiritual journey through it are wonderful and mysterious gifts, we need a word view larger than the version of MTD that Christianity Today describes. If St. Augustine is right that human beings have an innate sense of the vast mystery, that we are wired for God (and there is neurological evidence that we are wired for God), that “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee,” then MTD is ultimately not satisfying.

I offer no defense for aggressive domineering Christianity. I am against it. I offer no defense for the inward looking disengaged from the world support group churchianity of the modern mainline denominations – except that I do deny that they are hate-mongers or bigots. For those who are outside the Church, if MTD offers them some modicum of grace and comfort, then I am glad for it.

But if the Church is to be the Body of Christ, we need meatier stuff. We need faith and spiritual disciplines that equip us to engage in the world-changing Kingdom Mission. We need spiritual resources for an adventure in which we will have to contend against powers and principalities – both spiritual and temporal that repress the children of God and make us less than we were created to be.

If we are not a crucible of transformation in which lives are set on fire for a mission that invests this life with deep meaning and offers hope for joy in eternity, then we are boring. Domineering aggressive Christianity is at least interesting, albeit in a bad way. If we are boring, then we will understandably be either ignored entirely or tarred with the same brush as the bigots.

IV. CONCLUSION

The stock of the gospel in our culture is low. We can blame the culture for that, and we will be partly right. The technological juggernaut of consumerist culture is not as God would want it to be. If this were the Kingdom, if this world were already as God wants it, we would not be praying, “Your Kingdom come.”

But our mission is not to blame the culture. It is not to condemn, harangue, or berate the culture. Our mission is to faithfully participate in the culture. That will not be easy. But as Chesterton said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried.” I hope we try it and see if it changes Rollie Williams’ opinion of us.

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[i] From following social media conversations, I know that some people like to embrace the label of MTD but actually adhere to a larger worldview than the definition that arose from a survey of adolescent beliefs.

Jerusalem, My Happy Home: Epilog

Looking back on our adventures in Israel/ Palestine from the vantage point of Washington Dulles, I can’t see the big picture yet; so this is not a summary. It’s a few loose ends and the current state of my reflections:

HOLY SITES: I have a bias toward historic preservation. I would like for a site to be kept as close as possible to how it was when something important happened there. But we have built churches – or in the case of the Dome of the Rock, a mosque – on such places. I started with an aversion to churches built on sacred places. But in the Hebrew Scriptures, holy sites were marked with holy objects. First, they constructed cromlechs – piles of rock – to say this spot is holy. Then they built altars. Abraham built an altar at Hebron. Jacob built an altar at Bethel. When a place is holy, as opposed to merely historic, we worship there. So I have come to see that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, etc. are right, good, and a joyful thing. Some of them are architecturally brilliant at capturing the feel and the aesthetic of the thing commemorated. Gethsemane does that best. I have come to grudgingly admit that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is a holy place and that it is even quite plausible that Jesus was buried and resurrected in that particular place. But I stand by my original reaction that the Church atop Mt. Tabor is awful. By the way, the church I liked best (Gethsemane) and the Church I liked least (Tabor) were by the same architect, Antonio Barluzzi.

WHY CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG: Israel is not a happy place. I have come to realize how little I understand about the Israeli/ Palestinian Conflict. I am appalled to discover how little I even know about the history of the situation. I can tell it is in part the residue of the disastrous diplomatic resolution of World War I, in which the Arabic Allies of the West were betrayed. But things were less than rosy before that. The Ottoman Empire was not kind to the Arabic peoples, the Armenians, or the Greeks. And the European ancestors of the Israelis were ill served in both Eastern and Western Europe before coming to Israel.

I was looking for the roots of our church conflicts in this primal conflict – Abel vs. Cain, Jacob vs Esau, Joseph vs. his brothers, Saul vs. David, Rheoboam vs Jereboam, Elijah vs. Ahab, Judas Maccabeus vs. Antiochus IV Epiphanes, etc. to Jesus vs. Herod, Paul vs. James, St. John the Divine vs. Domitian, etc.

Of course there is a lot to disagree about, but why do we persistent in disagreeing so disagreeably? I am a long, long way form an answer on that one. But the Martha Nussbaum book I am reading – The New Religious Intolerance – raises some possible areas for exploration. She writes about the “moral imagination.”

On the one hand we have the power of fear, which Irish Murdoch calls “a dimming preoccupation” meaning it constricts our imaginations into perceived threats. It diminishes our ability to experience others as sources of delight or even entertainment. We are too obsessed with saving our lives to live them.

In contrast, what Nussbaum (who is Jewish) calls the Kantian-Christian principle of universalizeablily, the Golden Rule, invites – even compels – us to imagine each situation as it is experienced by someone else. She says: “The empathic imagination moves in a direction the opposite of that of fear. In fear a person’s attention contracts, focusing intently on her own safety, or perhaps that of a small circle of loved ones. In empathy a person’s mind moves outward, occupying many different positions outside itself.” Fear diminishes us. The moral imagination, as we try to engage others compassionately and fairly, makes us larger.

I do not have a solution to the troubles in Israel/ Palestine. But one thing was very clear to me. Fear is in charge.  Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians I met had any insight into the perspective of the other. There is a famine of moral imagination, a famine of empathy. It is also clear to me that Israel/ Palestine is an archetypal site of human fear, but not a unique habitat for it. Islamophobia in the U.S. is another case in point. Fear of Latino immigrants is another.

What I wonder is how this same dynamic plays out in the petty power struggles that, to a regrettable degree, define the life of the Church. I do not mean to denigrate the “big issues” the Church has fought over in recent years – though issues of LGBT inclusion are high on Nussbaum’s list of fear-based aversions. I am wondering instead about the fights over ritual preferences, governance issues, and small issues of office management. I wonder: what is going on here? Why is so much emotion being invested where so little of substance is at stake? After my visit to Israel, I am still wondering that. But maybe I have a few clues to work with.

Nussbaum says fear is natural but it gets culturally focused in irrational ways that prevent us from exercising our moral imaginations. But that is not natural or necessary, “More generally,” she says, “the imagination makes others real for us. A common human failing is to see the whole world from the point of view of one’s own goals, and to see the conduct of others as all about oneself . . . . By imagining other people’s way of life, we don’t necessarily learn to agree with their goals; but we do see the reality of those goals for them. We learn that other worlds of thought and feeling exist.” In order to discover those worlds, she suggests that we deliberately cultivate “participatory imagination” – the ability to imagine our way into someone else’s shoes.

I wonder how congregations might cultivate the ability to see things from another viewpoint, to care about people different from themselves. What kind of exercises or disciplines might open our hearts and minds a bit wider? Could the Church make us better people, larger souls, more creatively imaginative moral agents in the world? If not, then what is the Church for?

PRAYER FOR THE CHURCH: The weeks of reading and study leading up to this trip, and now this time spent in the places where Jesus spoke and acted, lived, died, and rose, have brought me up against something. Jesus was fully engaged with the institutional religion of his day – teaching, healing, and prophesying in synagogue, temple, and domestic ritual settings. Institutions are out of favor these days for good reason. Most of our institutions have operated in mechanical ways that control and use people instead of organically in ways that nurture people and provide a framework of meaning. But institutions per se are networks of committed human relationship. Jesus would not have fallen for the current fad of anti-institutionalism so popular in all the “future church” books.

But Jesus was not a company man. He was at odds with those institutions with which he remained engaged. Jesus called the religious institutions of his day to repent of their agenda. I am convinced he is calling us to repentance as well. I am convinced that neither the liberal nor the conservative voice has got it right. Nor do I think that I’ve got it right. But when I look at the option of a church boringly inward looking and repetitive on the one hand or a church so open that it stands for nothing in particular on the other, when I look at a church whose spirituality is narcissistically focused on feeling good, or a church that excludes people who are “not our sort” or that proselytizes people because we have institutional uses for them – I am not seeing the Kingdom project. I used to pray for the life of the church, for our institutional strength. I now pray for our repentance – though I am not sure what that repentance looks like.

There is an old saying, “God loves us the way we are, but he loves us too much to leave us this way.” The Church, broken and fallible as it is, remains Christ’s Body on earth. We are called to love the Church, but to love the Church too much to leave her as she is.

Jerusalem, My Happy Home: Part 14

MARONITE CHURCH – We spent today in the Old City beginning at the Maronite Church. The Maronites are a little confusing. Their liturgy is Eastern Orthodox and has always been in Syriac; never Latin, but they are part of the Roman Catholic authority structure. Their origins could be said to go all the way back to the Church in Antioch in the Apostolic Era, but their name goes back to Maron, a 4^th Century monk in the Desert Fathers tradition. After he died, his disciples built a monastery and the Maronite Church grew out of it.

The Eastern and Western Church divided during the same general era as the Crusades. There were other theological issues, but when the Western Crusaders sacked Constantinople, that did not help church unity. The Maronites who had been living under Muslim rule, on the other hand, welcomed the Crusaders. So relations between Rome and the Maronites, who are mostly in Lebanon, have always been cordial. Hence, the formal connection to Rome despite the different language and ritual.

The Church was covered with icons. I have been in a lot of Orthodox Churches and am accustomed to lots of icons. But this place didn’t have a bare spot. Sitting in the Church was an experience of being totally immersed in the narrative the icons told.

LUTHERAN CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER – From the image rich Maronite Church, we went to the Lutheran Church with elegant stone arches and bare wall, a study in simplicity. It was a different kind of holiness. But there was one icon and it was unusual. It was the moment of God’s Covenant with Noah, sealed by the rainbow. I had been praying the Loving Kindness Mediation – “May I be filled with Loving Kindness. May I be well. May I be peaceful and at ease. May I be happy” – then praying those prayers as intercessions for others. Somehow having that prayer rolling through my head while looking at the rainbow icon fit perfectly.

ST. HELENA’S CISTERN – Next stop: The Greek Orthodox Church, adjacent to – almost part of -- the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. There is such a network of caves and caverns under Jerusalem, I expect the whole place to sink someday. One such deep place is St. Helena’s Cistern, a pool of water in a deep underground cavern under the Church. We bent double to climb down the narrow twisting stone stairway to the pool of dark water. I kept expecting Golem to pop up form the black surface. This cistern was found in the same excavation that led to the discovery of the tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and was the water supply for the church.

ST. MARK’S SYRIAN CHURCH – We were allowed inside St. Mark's thanks to our guide Bishara’s friendship with the holy old priest. St. Mark’s makes several bold claims: to be the site of the Last Supper, to be the oldest Christian Church, to be the home of Mary Magdalene and John Mark, to be the place the disciples waited and prayed while Peter was in jail.

Let’s start with the Last Supper. The Church building is not that old. It is Crusader era. But it is built over the ruins of older churches. There is stone basement where a meal could have been shared. “But wait,” you are thinking, “wasn’t the Last Supper in the ‘Upper’ Room?” Yes, but that may not mean it was upstairs. It may mean it was in the “upper” part of Jerusalem, which is where the first Christians are believed to have lived.

Tradition holds that Mary Magdalene and her son, John Mark (a protégé of Paul and possibly the author of the Gospel of Mark) lived in a house at this location. Feminist theologian Elizabeth Schuessler-Fiorenza makes a plausible argument that Mary Magdalene would have been one of the first Eucharistic celebrants and this is where she would have done it.

I bought a card of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic written by the white bearded old Syrian priest and received a blessing from him.

ARMENIAN VESPERS – From the Syrian Church we went to the Armenian Church for Vespers sung by the Armenian Seminarians. Armenia became the first Christian nation when St. Gregory the Illuminator converted King Tiridates III in 301 C.E., several years before Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge turned the tide for worldwide Christianity. But tradition holds that Christianity had a rockier start first century Armenia. St. Bartholomew is said to have been skinned alive and crucified upside down for his efforts to share the gospel there. But that’s legend. Gregory and Tiridates are history.

Following yesterday’s visit to the Holocaust Museum, it seemed fitting to be in an Armenian Church today. Beginning in 1915, the Ottoman Empire initiated the first modern genocide against the Armenians. Armenia, situated in modern Turkey, had been part of the Empire for centuries. Armenians as well as Greeks had been treated quite badly by the Turks. As the Ottoman Empire began to crumble with World War I dealing it the final blow, they blamed the Armenians and killed 1.5 million of them. I mention this because yesterday’s blog post told the story of genocide committed against Jews, and expressed concern over anti-Islamic prejudice in Europe and the United States. This is a case of a genocide committed against Christians by Muslims. The slaughter of Muslims by Christians in the Crusades was a study in barbarity. It is important to remember that the potential to be either a victim or a perpetrator is there for us all.

The Armenian Church was dark. Turkish carpets covered the floor. Hundreds of lamps hung from the ceilings. I was told that the lamps represented villages wiped out in the Armenian Holocaust. The priests wore long pointed black hoods. The seminarians wore black cassocks. Some of them were deacons and wore stoles hanging straight (not crossed diagonally) over their left shoulders, Mike Margerum style. (I am sure they got it from him.) As they chanted a skillful thurifer, swinging a thurible with bells, filled the church with smoke. It was all quite holy and mysterious. I kept thinking, "they sure didn’t do it this way back in Bowie County, Texas." I am a long way from home.

Now one more day: The Road to Emmaus, Closing Eucharist, farewell dinner, then rise and shine at 1:30 a.m. to catch a plane to Nevada! It’s been great, but I cannot wait to get home.