This year, again, my parish will participate in “Ashes to
go,” a newish practice in the church in which we go to wherever the people are
to share prayers (and dust) for Ash Wednesday. I and a smallish team will be at the
Waltham Massachusetts Commuter Rail Station, a few blocks from the parish. Last year we were on our own—about seven
people participated throughout the morning—but this year, we’re partnering with
Chaplains on the Way, a mostly-homeless ministry. I appreciate this especialy because,
in a way, the street is their church. I wonder about how many people, who, for
whatever reason, don’t feel comfortable coming into a church, and how powerful a witness it is to leave our
comfort zone of having people come to us. Will someone have a more “deep” experience in
coming to church? As a priest I’d probably hope so, but I also shouldn’t make
assumptions about what happens between an individual and God, no matter where
they’re standing. I heard a quote about meditation once that said that you
could open the window, but you couldn’t make the breeze come in. That probably
applies here—when fewer and fewer people having traditional church backgrounds,
we need to throw open as many windows as we can.
It’s not an easy question, though—how far can you go from
tradition before you’ve lost the center of what you’re committed to in the
first place? What are we inviting people toward
if we compromise too far? How much
do we ask of people who come to have a child baptized? Do they have to come for
a few weeks, months, a year? Do they have to officially join the parish by
making a financial pledge? What about receiving communion? It’s the practice in
our diocese in many places, including Christ Church, to offer communion to
everyone, whether or not they’re baptized. The prayer book and church canons
say baptism should come first. Here, again, we are trying to open the windows.
Adherence to tradition is one of those places where we
strive for faithfulness, not necessarily the 100% always-and-everywhere-iron-clad
rule. Faithfulness, it seems to me, is
deciding which side you’re going to err on.
Will we be devoted to orthodoxy or openness? What’s at stake on both
sides? There are a lot of times when I
defer to tradition—the Nicene Creed, for example—but here, I think there is
actually something to say for asking what Jesus would do. His first goal, most often, was to get people
to the table. Once you’re there, you can
talk more, debate, pick sides. As the
parable in Luke 14 tells it, when the nice, qualified guests
wouldn’t come for the feast, the host told his servant quite unequivocally: “Go
out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the
poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.”
When he does that and there’s still
space, he goes out to make everybody else come in. Would it have been a better party if the
well-educated and polite people had come? It’s completely possible. Would they
have appreciated the expensive wine more? Maybe. But that’s not what God’s table
is about. (see my post from last year
in which I had just been the parent helper in my kid’s Godly Play class in
which we did the lesson on the Great Banquet when we were going out for ashes).
I do appreciate, though, that it’s a discussion to be had.
It’s not an uncontroversial stance, it’s not necessarily an “of course!”
moment. And once—if—this gets settled, there
will be something else to struggle with. As we grow into the church we’re called
to be, we are trying to follow a Jesus who’s always just a little ahead, taking
us a little further than we thought we could go.
