CITY ON THE HILL

CITY ON THE HILL Enter the Chapel at Blenheim Palace birthplace of Winston Churchill located outside of Oxford, England and you get the message. Your eyes immediately focus on its baroque altar that ornately depicts the Churchill family being transported into heaven. And you know in a moment that its not a paradise you are invited into. You feel like an intruder here and you really are because it's a veritable museum now: Sacred space for the elite. We erect our own altars. Connect the dots in our cities and you can trace the abandonment of our inner cities to the mantra, "location ... location." When church gets reduced to real estate isolating ourselves insures that our interactions are with those who "think like us" and "look like us." The “great impostor” who posed as “Clark” Rockefeller wanted to gain entrance into the upper echelons of American society so he skipped the country club and headed right to the church. Not only did he know how to choose the ones that would look good on his resume, charlatan that he was, he knew that churches make for great networking with the "right kinds of people." The insularity of the church is a much more serious issue than those that threaten to divide us and in fact our failure to see one another through the eyes of Christ has put us in this crucible. Our lack of love for one another within our own walls feeds our myopia. Most of our churches are cloistered not unlike the gated communities and secured homes we live in, making it unnecessary for us to encounter poverty, homelessness, and the marginalized. Our churches have developed ministries that pleasure ourselves and insulate us. We the clergy have become in our kept roles , "keepers of the castle." As a sufferer of neuropathy resulting from chemotherapy, I often utilize our transit system and now see this city through different eyes. The route between my home and Mann Memorial echoes the Stations of the Cross : abandonment, indifference, betrayal, compassion, mourning... and down from The "Hill,” a different kind of Calvary. Street after street bears testimony to neglect and poverty. Meanwhile the imposing sanctuaries and ascending steeples of our houses of worship line the way up and down the hill. But are their closed doors and secured gates to let in or to keep out? It would probably be easier to negotiate entrance into The Augusta National than enter therein. John Winthrop in 1630 delivered his famous sermon to remind the early settlers of their covenant with God and with one another: We must delight in each other, make one another’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together ... For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” In this city on a hill what are we standing guard over? Our church signs proclaim we are here but one has to wonder how much "here" is really "here." John Wesley the founder of my own tradition spent little time in the safety of sanctuaries. Insisting that the "world is my parish" he embraced the coal mines and city squares. Scorned by his own church and the religious vanguard, he made the jails and prisons his cathedrals. His “beloved community” was the world. How can we love the world with the love of God when we who are cloistered and separated from that very world abandon one another? Every mainline denomination today seems consumed in its own internal struggles and many of the issues appear to revolve around the church being open to all persons or not. Caucuses have developed and petitions are being circulated and in the mean time the Kmart bus day after day climbs and descends the hill en route along its own Via Dolorosa and Jesus weeps over this Jerusalem we call Augusta.