San Miguel Mission is in the heart of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s beautiful inside and out. Unlike El Santuario de Chimayó which still holds regular services and is open to pilgrims daily, I’m not sure if San Miguel Mission is more than a museum with a gift shop. In New Orleans Catholic parishes are closing and merging almost monthly due to waning numbers. I can’t speak to why the Catholic Church in America is declining, nor would I care to guess; I just know it is. Protestant denominations are no better. My own Southern Baptist Convention reports at least 80% of its churches are plateaued or declining.
What’s clear is this: the disciples of Christ worldwide must live more like Jesus. We were once called Christians because we acted like little Christs. Today, at least in Europe and America, we act more like spoiled little children who wouldn’t know sacrifice or compassion if it stretched out his arms and died on the cross in front of us. We’re no better than the pharisees who crucified our Christ two thousand years ago.
So let’s read the last passage from NT Wright’s For All God’s Worth, pp. 18-22:
And if the seams are still visible – if the stitching still shows – so what? Those journalists of whom I spoke should leave their comfortable metropolis for a moment and come here; come and worship with us, share our life for a few days; then come round the diocese and see the new green shoots that are growing through the secular concrete; look where the blind are seeing, and the lame are walking, and the dumb singing for joy. … Let them come and see that at the heart of England there is a building whose very stones speak of God’s healing love; that at the heart of that building there is a book whose every page is a work of art celebrating that love; and that around that book there is a community of people committed to the one whom that book speaks, who know themselves called to live not for their own sakes but for his sake who died and rose again. This is our God, the Servant King; he calls us now to follow him.
And if we are to make such an invitation, our immediate task is to consolidate what this community is already good at. No one comes into this cathedral, or into any church, without some pain or fear, without some guilt or grief. But the testimony of many is that when they have come here they have felt welcomed, loved and sustained. That is wonderful, and I thank God for it. People have learned elsewhere today to expect rudeness and even violence as the norm. They are thirsty for gentleness, for kindness, for the sense that they matter. They need to be shown that there is a different way of being human, that the true God embraces them as they are, with the healing power of the cross and the life-giving breath of the Spirit. That welcome is our work, because it is all God’s work, and he invites us to share in it.
San Miguel Mission in Santa Fe, New Mexico | November 2009
We are therefore, in Paul’s words, to be ambassadors for Christ. We don’t have to be perfect in ourselves. On the cross he dealt with our sin so that he could then work through us, so that we in turn might embody the saving faithfulness of God to all those whom we meet, all those who enter here. And the real mystery of that is that we do it not so much in our triumphs as in our tragedies; not in our strength but in our weakness; not in our success but in our failure. In the real world it is the wounded who heal. That is why the chequered history of this cathedral forms such an eloquent statement of the gospel. Celebration and healing; this is to be a place where eyes are opened to truth, where ears long deaf hear their name spoken in love, where those who had forgotten how to sing discover a joy which refuses to remain silent. And when we live by that gospel, then tourists may find themselves becoming pilgrims; photographers may stop clicking for a moment and glimpse true beauty; musicians may hear undreamed of harmonies; and historians may come face to face with the one who is Lord of the dead and the living. And so, as celebration leads to healing, healing leads back to celebration. It is all God’s work; and those who find themselves called it must, quite simply, ‘serve God and be cheerful’.
