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Old Friendship Baptist Church,
Atlanta
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It is not the end—by any means—of Friendship
Baptist. The Congregation received a
handsome price for the sale of their historic building that is enabling them to
build a new sanctuary only a few blocks away.
But what should draw our attention is the culture-shift this
represents. The Church gives way to the
Sports Field. So many of our
churches—Catholic and Protestant—are seeing a dwindling attendance on Sundays,
but have you tried to by a ticket to a baseball game lately? The guy who throws
five dollars in the Sunday basket can get a seat for about $15 but you will
spend 50, 60, 200 dollars for a good seat.
And even more if you are ready to shell out the bucks. And,
of course, you have to park the car—not going to be cheap. You want a beer? You want that traditional hot dog? You are going to spend some money at the ball
park, let me assure you. And if your
think Baseball is expensive, just try to get a ticket for the Redskins or the
Giants or the Bears—or, I suppose the Falcons.
And you know, people do it.
I am not much of a football fan, but I do love to go
to a baseball game. I really don’t care
about the game; I only understand it in
the most simplistic faction. But it
makes me feel good. It is a
liturgy. You stand for the national
anthem. You yell when your team comes on
the field. You have your sacramental
brew and a dog. You sing “Take Me Out To
The Ball Game” at the seventh-inning stretch.
It is all prescribed by tradition and we all follow the ritual and we
are all the better for it. Of course,
while I will drop $100 at the Park without a thought (I usually take communion,
always in both kinds, at least twice) that kind of money sees the collection
basket once or twice a year at most. And
I wouldn’t dream of spending three hours at Mass. Nor would I come forty minutes early nor sit
around with yet another sacramental beer and hotdog afterwards, talking to my
neighbors while the parking lot clears out.
You have to have your priorities.
“The Kingdom of God is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; when he
finds one of exquisite value, he goes and sells all that he has and buys
it.” Right. Let’s face it: the Kingdom of God is not the
priority for Joe (or Josie) Average American.
We have found our new religion.
And it ain’t about Jesus.
I don’t think it was wrong of Friendship Baptist to
sell their historic building, though I always hate to see historic artifacts
destroyed—even for a more noble cause than a football stadium. (I would feel just as bad if it were a
baseball stadium.) The revenues permit
them a new and more expansive campus. It
gives them funds to use in mission—and as Church we need to be about mission,
not museums. But both Friendship and the
rest of us had better consider what we need to do to bring Jesus and his Gospel
about the Kingdom of God back to center in peoples’ lives.
Lately I have been writing a bit about “Evangelical
Catholicism.” I like the way George
Weigel interprets this term.
Evangelical Catholicism is thus a reality of Word and
Sacrament, in several senses. The Gospel word preached is also the Word
of God, the Lord Jesus, the Sacrament who is present to the Church through the
seven sacraments which are never celebrated without reference to the
Scriptures. Growth in faith, hope, and love—growth in friendship with
Christ—is nurtured through a regular and frequent reception of the sacraments,
and that growth in turn breaks open aspects of the Word of God in the Old and
New Testaments that may have been previously obscure, unclear, or entirely
hidden. It is all one package, one evangelical Catholic reality.
Word and Sacrament are no more separable than Gospel and Church, Scripture and
apostolic tradition, mission and service.
Unfortunately I think Weigel then extrapolates this into
a vision for the Catholic Church that is inconsistent with his own defined
canons of “evangelical Catholicism.” Of course none of us is consistent with
our ideals, so I will cut him slack on that account. But his basic vision is brilliant. But would that we did have a full sacramental
life in our worship. Would that we could
recognize not only that Christ is truly present under the form of bread in the
Eucharist but that it was indeed bread, real bread, life-nourishing bread, that
conceals his presence. And would that we
weren’t somehow afraid of the wine and would take a nourishing and refreshing
gulp, not just the tiniest of sips, of the wine that has become his precious
blood. And would that baptisms were real
baptisms: plunged into the pool of death and raised again to newness of life in
Christ. (Once you have seen adult
baptisms done by immersion you weep in despair when you see a few drops
trickled on a forehead bent over a font.)
And you know chrism has the most marvelous scent which is part of its Sacramental
value in conveying the Holy Spirit—but you won’t find that with a smudge. Oil, whether chrism or the oil of the
catechumens or the oil of the sick needs to be poured. We are such sacramental minimalists. I am not a big fan of incense, but if you are
going to use it, let’s get some smoke.
And don’t sprinkle me with that funny thing that looks like a ball on a
stick—get some branches that what you shake them send streams of water flying
over God’s People. Geese, what good is
it to be a Sacramental Church when you treat all these things like you were in
a Ebola ward? Why isn’t Sunday morning
worth my effort? You go to church and
there is no welcome at the door. The
people around you sit and look straightforward at the altar as if they were at a
funeral staring at the coffin. The music
is mediocre both in choice and performance.
The readers can’t be heard. The
homily was obviously prepared on the way down the aisle. The priest seems as attentive to what he is
doing at the altar as a bored housewife working through a basket of
ironing. We have some dissolvable
plastic disk pretending to be bread so that it can be consecrated and become
the Eucharist. Eucharistic ministers
come up in flip-flops and cut-offs to distribute the Eucharist. Enough wine is consecrated for the first 40
of the 300 present. Do we take this
seriously? Do we take Jesus seriously?
And don’t tell me that the “old Mass” was better
because I am old enough to have been an altar boy and I remember the burn-holes
in the altar clothes, and those same clothes littered with specks of wax and
charred wick and dead flies. And Father
scratching his backside as he climbed the altar steps, still mostly asleep at
6:30 Mass. And the grease stains around
the collars of the stoles and chasubles.
It wasn’t better and it isn’t better in those places that celebrate the
“Old Mass” today. Father, decked out
like the Infant of Prague, stands at the altar doing “his thing” while the
people in the pews with assortments of novena books and rosaries and missals do
theirs. And the music—if there is
music—is relegated to a choir just as limited in talent but far more ambitious
in what they think they can do than any Novus Ordo “folk group.” And people sitting smugly in their pews with
no awareness that Christ is sitting among them in his Body, the Church.
We have the pearl of Great Price. And I don’t mean the Eucharist—as central to
our faith as it is; I mean that we have been entrusted with the mysteries of
the Kingdom of God if only we open our eyes to see and our ears to hear. “Bloom Frozen Christian! Springtime is at hand! When will you ever bloom if not here and
now?” (Angelus Silesius)
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