Thanks to the extensive CD collections of the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Libraries, I spent most of my driving time last week (it being Holy Week and I spending a lot of time attending meetings or visiting parishioners around the city) listening to several different recordings of Handel's legendary oratorio and musical masterpiece, The Messiah. I heard a gigantic, thundering orchestral version and a minimalist, period instrument version. Each offered unique interpretative insights. While not a musical historian, I also concluded that each recording was "faithful" to Handel's original.
Had you been driving and listening with me, I'm confident that you and I would have noticed different nuances in each recording, and that you and I probably would have chosen different recordings as favorites. Of course, neither you nor I would have been right or wrong - just different! "Different strokes for different folks," it's often said!
I also ran across a wonderful (as in wonderfully truthful) cartoon last week:
While reflecting upon the cartoon, I remembered a landmark national survey released just a few weeks earlier. The folks at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported that nearly half (44%) of all American adults have "either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether." It seems that church hopping (or is it shopping?) is no longer an exceptional or unusual practice – church hopping (or is it shopping?) has become the norm!
As a former Roman-Catholic, I certainly fit the profile. If you look around or ask those seated beside you next Sunday, I think you'll quickly discover that St. Matthew's fits the profile too. As we move forward as a parish, and ask questions about our current as well as our desired future "life together," we need to assume that most, if not all, of those walking in our doors now and in the future will come because they haven't liked the way things were done elsewhere. And we must be honest in admitting that some in the past as well as some in the future will leave us precisely because they don't like the way things are done at St. Matthew's.
While I can't speak for you, I take great comfort in the fact that change (the dreaded "c-word") has been a fundamental fact and a "constant" of Christian life from the beginning. Jew or gentile? Circumcised or uncircumcised? Bishop of Rome or Patriarch of Constantinople? Pope or King of England? Latin or English? "High" church or "low" church? 1928 or 1979 Prayer Book? Men alone or women too? Heterosexuals only or homosexuals too?
Just as we all share Handel's The
Messiah, so do we share a Sacred Text and a living tradition. How we choose to interpret these, as well as the nuances we bring to these interpretations, are at the core of our Christian life –as individuals and as communities of faith. Why should we have it any different than those who have gone before us? Change has been "the constant" in the Church since that first Easter morning. Differing interpretations of what happened, why it happened, and what it means for us have been a "constant" in the Church since that same first Easter morning. I guess church hopping (or is it shopping?) really is nothing new!
With blessings…Mark+
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