THOUGHTS FOR RE-PITCHING
THE TENT
SESSION THREE: THE CHURCH BUILDING
Luke 4:16
When
he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on
the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read.
In New Zealand. post Māori renaissance, we might read
this verse as “When he came to Nazareth, where his whakapapa
was …”. The Greek conveys the sense not only of growing up but of immersion in
a culture, not such chronology but Story.
Luke, who has interests in establishment religion, wants his audience to see
that Jesus is a pious Jew, however rebellious, and that he is from Nazareth –
ko Nahareta tōna iwi. This was presumably because,
despite the inconvenient business of having to be born in Bethlehem in the
interests of prophetic fulfilment and Herodian politics, Jesus was known as a
Nazarene. Some of you will be aware that, in scenes reminiscent of Nazi
Germany, ISIL/ISIS/IS activists are painting the Arabic symbol (ن) nun on the doors of Christians, who they refer to as Nazarenes
after the hometown of our founder.
Luke is keen that Jesus is seen as having a
place of belonging for th4\e sake of civic authentication, but portrays Jesus
also as peripatetic, and therefore as (as James K. Baxter put it of the Spirit)
“blowing like the wind through a thousand paddocks.” Luke walks a fine line between
Spirit of Place and having what the author of Hebrews refers to as “no lasting
city.”
To the Jews of Jesus’ time place was
critical – and the place de la place
was the Temple. But by the time Luke was writing the Temple was gone, and the synagogue
was the only remaining place of meeting. I can think of no similar transition
in pakeha kiwi history. All that was safe and trustworthy and eternal was gone,
and the temporary was all that was left. Personally some will have experienced
a house fire, when all that seems stable is lost, but there are few comparable
experiences otherwise. For the Christians of the Levant that is not true. For refugees
everywhere that is not true. All is transient.
As for Muslims today, Second Temple Judaism
developed a dual-strand sense of liturgical space. The Temple was the centre of
engagement with God. The synagogue, or place of gathering, existed alongside it
around Jewish communities, as a place where ten or more might gather to
pray. This roughly parallels the place, respectively, of Mecca and mosque
today, but only roughly. Christians have no equivalent, though Jerusalem itself (pre
fall), cathedrals and holy shrines sometimes fulfilled the place in medieval
practice. The permanent became symbolic only, and a balance was struck between
apparent permanence and actual transience. At the time Luke was writing the balance
favoured the transient, but as the second coming was pushed back, and as
Christianity was concretized, until WW2, the permanent began to dominate the
narrative.
But in either type of space, temporary or permanent,
the koinōnia, the sunaxis (which is the same
word as synagogue and as synod), the breaking open of the word, anamnesis and the
sending out into God’s world continued.
As
they were going along the road, someone said to him, ‘I will follow you
wherever you go.’ And Jesus said to
him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has
nowhere to lay his head.’
Very
few people actually offer apparently
spontaneously to follow Jesus in Luke’s account – this and the following
exchange are the only occasions. Perhaps it is reading too much into it, but perhaps
the offer is in a sense an attempt to remain tightly in control of the “offerer’s”
life: I will maintain the terms on which I serve God and gospel. At any rate,
both “offerers” appear to strike a stumbling block: priorities. Scholarly insight
suggests that both “offerers” were effectively procrastinating: “I will … when
I am good and ready.” By the time of Constantine’s reign early in the fourth
century the holes and nests had come to take precedence over spontaneity,
freedom and itinerancy, and as roots of temporal permanence (a deliberate
oxymoron, because even then most thought acknowledged impermanence) and mendicant ministries were pushed to the fringes of
experience. Even the monastic life slowly reverted from the eremos to the monastery, and slowly
became magnets for capital and stability.
Huge cathedrals emphasized the dominance
of the structure and the permanence of faith over the life-experience of the individual:
builders and architects and benefactors rarely saw their work to completion, so
they were not necessarily Ozymandiesque monuments to self-importance (“look on
my works ye mighty, and despair"). The Lisbon earthquake of All Saints’ Day
1755, with its subsequent fire and tsunami began to change all that: amongst a
myriad other monumental buildings the quake destroyed the Lisbon Cathedral, the Basilicas
of São Paulo, Santa Catarina, São Vicente de Fora, and the Misericórdia Church,
along with up to 100,000 lives. Permanence – and the protection of God, were irrevocably
called into question.
The cathedral tradition was not destroyed, and the iconic
survival of St Paul’s in London in the blitzkrieg of World War Two became a
symbol of resilience, but the hold of the Big and Presumed-Permanent weakened.
Ironically the not unrelated revolutions of the 1960s, the Beatles revolution ("Six Days that Changed the World") arguably
instigated by the contraceptive pill, and its pious cousins the charismatic
movement and the liturgical renewal movement that emerged from Vatican II, drove
the focus further still from the Big and the Presumed Permanent: for better and for worse the immediate and the
personal came to dominate narratives of faith.
The Son of Man stepped down from the Grand Extremes of the
Universe to become the clown of Godspell.
At the potentially higher end of popular culture Kendrick’s “Shine Jesus Shine”
and Pink Floyd’s nihilistic “Another Brick in the Wall” became anthems of,
respectively, joy-filled faith and faithless anarchy, but each had the
potential to slide rapidly from meaning to vacuity by overuse. At the sugar-pop
end of instant gratification the more empty-headed “Open the eyes of my Heart x
8”,[1]
or the commercial and vacuous “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” became dominant expressions
of nothingness.
Somewhere out on the fringes though there was another voice:
hand in hand with the vacuously sentimental, there grew consciousness of the Divine
in the Everyday, the centrality of the symbol of the agape-meal, the treasuring
of silence, all tempered with the observation that the symbol is not the thing.
Instead of representing the permanence of God by building an edifice removable only
by calamity, we learned that there is greater permanence that has neither hole
nor nest, which neither collapses in an earthquake nor disappears in a
hangover: silence and stillness and reverence for eternity refocused on bread
and wine and water, on minimalist sound and wordage; under Jewish emphasis on
the white space between the words and ironically Buddhist emphasis on the
sounds of silence, the sacredness of simplicity and silence reasserted itself, and
a new understanding of the Son of Man with no-place began to emerge. In philosophical culture
this was most spectacularly represented by Nicholas Cage’s three movement “Four
minutes, thirty-three seconds”; in liturgical culture by the minimalist chant
of Jacques Berthier and even the composition of Arvo Pärt. In ecclesiastical
architecture and interior design it was represented by focus on the simple and
unadorned yet eternal elements of bread
and wine in the midst of a transient, passing people, us.
[1] “Open
the eyes of my heart, Lord/Open the eyes of my heart/I want to see You/I want
to see You/Open the eyes of my heart, Lord/Open the eyes of my heart/I want to
see You/I want to see You/To see You high and lifted up/Shinin’ in the light of
Your glory/Pour out Your power and love/As we sing holy, holy, holy/Open the
eyes of my heart, Lord/Open the eyes of my heart/I want to see You/I want to
see You/Open the eyes of my heart, Lord/Open the eyes of my heart/I want to see
You/I want to see You/To see You high and lifted up/Shinin’ in the light of
Your glory/Pour out Your power and love/As we sing holy, holy, holy! (Repeat
two more times). ” Paul Baloche, 2000.
