November 7, 2014
The first time I went to St. Peter’s in Rome, the experience was unsettling. It just seemed like a huge space filled with knickknacks from five centuries. After a few more visits, though, the place grew on me. I mostly enjoyed how people from all over the world – every nation – were interacting with the images, tombs and the massive altar. St. Peter’s seems to work better than another massive church, the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception right down the street from me in Washington, D.C. The semi-modern mosaics and statues don’t grab me the same way. The church that struck me most, however, was San Marco in Venice. Most of us were able to get in without getting splattered by the hundreds of pigeons that fly outside (though I had to help clean my sister off). But when I went inside, the brilliant light from the windows, the mosaics of gold all over the walls, the realization that here, for centuries, the Eastern and Western Churches met – I found myself drying my eyes because of the beauty of this space.
We American Catholics, as a people, are fixated on churches – mainly the buildings. We came as immigrants to a country that took a long time to welcome us. We built churches at enormous sacrifice; they represented us as a struggling-and-arriving people. Many of those churches had the only beauty that immigrant neighborhoods would see. At a time when many church buildings are now being closed, and many parishes are merging, all of this leaves us deeply disappointed.
It’s a bit of a surprise, then, to realize that our readings – special ones as we commemorate the founding Basilica of the city of Rome, St. John Lateran, and therefore our common church building – talk of two tragedies that involved the destruction of the two temples of the Jewish people. Ezekiel speaks of a new temple because the Temple of Solomon, built and adorned by the Jews in Jerusalem over a 350-year period, was leveled to the ground by the Babylonians. It was turned into rubble. And Jesus’ words in the Gospel reference yet another destruction, one which would occur when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD, demolishing Israel’s second temple, the last one it would ever have. Jesus’ purifying the temple is an image of the ongoing need for purification, of our not using our church structures to obscure where our hearts actually are.
These readings are given to us to both underscore the importance of our church buildings, but also to put their importance into perspective. Paul, in the second reading, says it so clearly: “You are God’s building.” Above and beyond any church building, however beautiful or huge it may be, the experience of the people comes first. And we know this is true because we visit Europe where spectacular buildings remain as museums because so many people do not attend any more. And this is becoming true enough even in America. While some dioceses are building churches, mostly in the south and west, many other dioceses are announcing the closing of parishes and churches.
So the question is: Do we want to be Church? Do we want to be the living stones that create the community in which God’s spirit lives? Do we want to be the vibrant people in and through whom the world can discover Jesus Christ? Do we want to accept our call to be disciples and to build churches, not with capital campaigns and marble, but with the fervor of our own faith?
St. Francis of Assisi heard famous words shortly after his conversion: “Build my Church.” He though it referred to the broken-down chapel where he would meditate and pray. He eventually saw that the words meant he was to start a revolution, calling a complacent Church back to burning love for Christ. Given our modern life, and the statistics of church attendance all through the United States, maybe those words are also addressed to us: “Build my Church.” Transform it from a church of learned cultural behaviors to a church of living disciples, drawing people to Christ’s love by the way we live.
It’s not my Mission—it’s our Mission, what God is doing in the our lives. We have to let God call us to renewed discipleship as we renew our experience of conversion, of prayer and worship, of community, and of service to others in the name of Christ. We have to let Christ make us Church once again.
One of the exciting things about Ezekiel’s image in the first reading is the flowing of the water from the temple. The water doesn’t sit stagnant in a pool. It flows, and it grows as it flows. This represents, of course, Baptism. But it also represents the effects of baptism – to create followers of Jesus who bring him to the world, until it is flooded with his love. It’s time to stir the water, to turn on the taps, to swim in the water of the Holy Spirit and to inundate our lives, our world, with the glory of God.
It’s time to be Church in a new way.