IT IS always moving to make your communion in a different church, in another country. The familiar is made strange; the liturgy comes alive in a new context. You have been asking yourself, “What do I possibly have in common with these people?” And the answer is Christ, Christ entering the Temple, Christ coming to them, as to me, in bread and wine.
So it was thatI came, on Candlemas, to a great temple of sorts, to the National Cathedral, in Washington, DC. It is a central hallowed space, both ecclesial and civil, an American Westminster Abbey, and, just a fortnight before, it had witnessed a prophetic moment when the Bishop of Washington, the Rt Revd Mariann Budde, had addressed the newly inaugurated President directly, asking him, in this most central of all places, to show mercy to vulnerable people on the edges, the very people whom he was, in fact, hoping to push over the edge altogether (News, 24 January). Her call for mercy exposed the Bishop, her denomination, and the great cathedral itself to a storm of controversy, claim and counter-claim, denunciation, and threat — threats to which she has responded with dignity and restraint, a calm centre in the eye of the storm.
On 21 January, this national temple had been presented with a President who is, arguably, the most powerful man in the world; but here we were, on Candlemas, remembering and celebrating an altogether different presentation. In fulfilment of Malachi’s prophecy, God himself was coming to his Temple; not, as Malachi had imagined, in some devastating and intolerable burst of refiner’s fire, but in the weakness and vulnerability of a baby. But perhaps Malachi was right: it is the presence of the weak and vulnerable which truly tries and refines us, and it is how we treat them which reveals who we really are.
Bishop Budde was there herself, presiding at the eucharist that welcomes Christ into each one of us, but also welcoming into the cathedral Dr Sean Rowe, the new Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church. The cathedral was packed, and there was a real sense of expectation when he mounted the pulpit to preach. It was a great sermon, and a clear follow-through from the sermon preached in that pulpit a fortnight before.
He took as his text Simeon’s prophecy that “this child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel.” “Rising, yes,” he said, “but falling first.” He pointed out that St Luke was writing this Gospel after the fall of the very Temple in which this scene is set: that it was written under a tyranny, and when “imperial rule had deepened the oppression and inequality of the time.” St Luke is writing for people who have already experienced the falling of which Simeon spoke, and desperately need the hope embedded in the second half of his saying: after the falling, the rising.
Dr Rowe set out the priorities of imperial rule, then and now: “Priority for the rich, fear and contempt for the weak, the poor, the other. An assumption that the rich shall be first, that somehow compassion is weakness.” And then he showed, with some relish, how the coming of God as a babe into the Temple turns all that upside down: “In God’s Kingdom, the last shall be first, the merciful shall receive mercy, and the captives go free. In God’s Kingdom, immigrants and refugees, transgender people, the poor and the marginalised are not at the edges, fearful and alone. They are at the centre of the Gospel story.”
As he paused for breath, the whole of that packed cathedral applauded. I had the distinct sense of a gauntlet being thrown down, and of the centre and the margins coming together.