Thursday, July 11, 2024
Memorial of Saint Benedict, abbot
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Who you gonna call?
Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.
I remember a Sunday long ago when our pastor disguised himself as a homeless man, badly dressed. He sat quietly during worship and communion, then stood and walked behind the podium, smiled at us all, and began to preach amid gasps from several folks in every corner of the place. Of the church. Of the sanctuary.
Sanctuary is a long-standing, accepted role of the church, a place where someone on the run can go for safety. The idea that a homeless man could go there isn’t surprising, but whether or not he would be readily received is an open question. Are you a member of the LGBTQ community? Are you black? Are you homeless and smelly? Are you an immigrant, afraid to tell anyone you have no documentation? Are you Catholic? Are you Protestant?
What does it take to gain admission, acceptance, and welcome? How and when will you feel like you’re home?
Ron Rolheiser, priest for decades, has experienced our churches as sanctuaries, but also as exclusive clubs.
Whenever we have been at our best, as Christians, we have opened our churches as sanctuaries to the poor and the endangered. We have a long, proud history wherein refugees, homeless persons, immigrants facing deportation, and others who are endangered, take shelter inside our churches.
But not always. And especially not when the refugee isn’t physically in danger but simply seeking a place to sit still and ponder what they believe.
There are millions of persons, today perhaps the majority within our nations, who are looking for a safe harbor in terms of sorting out their faith and their relationship to the church. Sadly, too often our rigid paradigms of orthodoxy, ecclesiology, ecumenism, liturgy, sacramental practice, and canon law, however well-intentioned, have made our churches places where no such sanctuary is offered and where the wide embrace practiced by Jesus is not mirrored.
Instead, our churches are too often harbors only for persons who are already safe, already comforted, already church-observing, already solid ecclesial citizens.
Jesus did not do things this way. In fact, he challenged those who did.
Jesus was a safe sanctuary for everyone, religious and non-religious alike. He reached out especially to those whose moral lives were not in formal harmony with the religious practices of the time. Significantly, he did not ask for repentance from those deemed as sinners before he sat down at table with them. He set no moral or ecclesial pre-conditions. In his person and in his ministry, Jesus did not discriminate. He offered safe sanctuary for everyone.
If Jesus could do this so well, can’t we do at least a little better than we’re doing now? Margaret seeks out strangers and invites conversation after our church service. In doing this, she begins to be like Jesus.
Is our embrace as wide as that of Jesus?
What should the church be saying to the world today? At a conference, small groups of us proposed a number of challenges regarding justice, prayer, sin, church-going, the evil of abortion … all good and important. But none of the groups thought to say: We need to comfort the world!
Which, I have come to believe, is the first task of religion. Challenge may not precede comfort. Why aren’t we being perceived more as “a field hospital” for the wounded, as is the ideal of Pope Francis?
Jesus described just this kind of place. Fling open the doors, open wide the gates and follow Jesus into the comforting business. See this whole church thing differently, see it as “sanctuary for searchers, for the confused, the wounded, the broken, and the non-religious, rather than as a place only for those who are already religiously solid and whose religious search is already completed.”
Let us see your face, Lord, and we shall be saved.
That search is not completed for any of us. Who are we kidding? Not God, hopefully not even each other.
Take care of this vine, and protect what your right hand has planted, the son of man whom you yourself made strong.
(Hosea 11, Psalm 80, Mark 1, Matthew 10)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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