Crumbling Temples (Reflections on Pentecost 25 Year B)

I think we have established that I really love churches and church architecture. I have a particular warm spot in my heart for the old Emanuel Lutheran Church down at 4^th and Carpenter in South Philly. That’s where I, as a not-yet-ordained seminary student with an episcopal dispensation, said my first mass about twenty years ago. As you can tell from the photo, this was a gorgeous old monster of a Georgian Revival church, built just after the Civil War and holding about eleven hundred German-speaking Lutherans. When I walked into the massive worship space I tried to imagine those eleven hundred worshipers—proud of their new church, secure in their new country after the defeat of the slave-holding South, and lustily singing “Ein feste burg.”

Of course, by the time I got to Emanuel a lot of the bloom was off the ecclesiastical rose. The decaying behemoth sat in the middle of a blighted housing project, and it had only been saved from the wrecking ball because the city decided that the neighborhood required a large auditorium. The vaunted social ministries of the 1960’s and 1970’s had been defunded. The paint peeled off the ceiling of the huge sanctuary and a musty odor permeated the building. The gorgeous clock in the tower had long since stopped keeping time. A tiny congregation of mostly African Americans still sang their hearts out in the smaller ground floor chapel every Sunday, but the end of Lutheran worship in that great structure was slowly but inevitably approaching. Today the Emanuel congregation has merged with another worshiping body, and their once grand temple now serves a Buddhist community. I doubt those 19^th century Germans could have imagined such a turn of events.

The sad truth is, nothing in this world lasts forever. The grand Protestant congregations of my childhood are fast sinking under the waves. Since I came to Philly over twenty Lutheran churches have closed their doors or merged. The Pew Research Group tells us that the number of Americans with no religious affiliation seems to be growing—especially among younger adults. Will all of our splendid temples stand empty some day or be torn down to make way for shopping malls?

In the Gospel lesson appointed in the RCL for Pentecost 25 (Mark13:1-8) Jesus tells his disciples that the great Jerusalem temple, at which they so marvel, will one day be reduced to a pile of rocks. You can imagine that these boys find this prediction a bit disturbing. Once they get Jesus alone (probably fearing that public talk of the destruction of the temple might be considered terrorism) Peter and James and John and Andrew ask him when this destruction will take place. They’d like a little advance warning before the break-down of civilization as they know it, but Jesus is characteristically vague in his answer. Basically, all Jesus tells them is that things will look pretty grim, and false leaders will talk all kinds of crap when the world looks to be falling apart. But disciples are not to buy into the hysteria. This is just the beginning of something new.

Frankly, I’m not that comfortable with this answer (especially if you read the rest of chapter 13!). I mean, I really like my traditional church and my role as professional Christian. I like wearing my long robes and being greeted with respect in the marketplace (see Mark 12:38). If God is doing a new thing with the church, I really wish he’d wait ‘til after I take retirement! But I don’t get to make that call, and neither does anyone else.

The world and the Christian church are changing, and we have to keep believing that this is actually a good thing whether we want to or not. Maybe it will do us all good to be back on the margins of society again when we really have to make the effort to be church. Maybe we’ll stop thinking of worship as a commodity we buy to make ourselves feel good, and start seeing a daily and weekly gathering for devotion as an expression of who we are in our inmost selves. Perhaps our love of God’s Law will no longer be our standard of respectability, but will become our desire for the healing of the world. Maybe, when we stop serving our buildings, we will recapture Luther’s notion of the priesthood of all believers and focus on serving our brothers and sisters in need.

Change is frightening, but it is God’s tool to tune up our priorities.

Thanks for reading, my friends. Let me know what you think, okay?