Church That Aided Wall St. Protesters Is Now Their Target – NYTimes.com
I agree with Reverend Sojwal. And I disagree with Rev. James H. Cooper.
“Trinity Church had a fantastic opportunity to be a Christlike presence by openings its doors to the protesters,” said the Rev. Milind Sojwal, the rector of All Angels Church, an Episcopal parish on the Upper West Side. “And I believe Trinity blew it.”
But there are many outstanding questions, questions that Christians should be actively and persistently asking, but questions that we are not.
For example, what would it entail to occupy the Church? Occupy wants to stage protests from Trinity. Here I am reminded of the churches in Rome where Romans sought refuge from the hordes invading from the north in 410 C.E. Saint Augustine was among the first to recognize the two-fold miracle illuminated by these refugees.
First miracle: that non-believers viewed the Church as a place to seek refuge. Second miracle: that the (non-Trinitarian Christian) invading hordes respected the sanctity of the church buildings.
But seeking refuge in the Church is different from occupying the Church. So the question Christians must raise—and I as an Episcopalian must acknowledge—is “Is the Church Preoccupied?” and, if so, by whom or by what?
Occupy should not only view the Church (or churches) as a sanctuary or staging ground, but as an inspiration and ally, a leader in the struggle for justice. Here Rev. Cooper may have more than a leg to stand on. Trinity has not only been welcoming Occupy to use its property to stage actions against Wall Street. Trinity has also been inviting parishioners and protesters to reflect critically upon the broader significance of Occupy, both for New York and for the Church.
But, might not Trinity (and all of our churches) be a worthy target of Occupy? Are we not preoccupied—by wealth, by mediocrity, by security, by capital, and by Kulturprotestantismus, as Karl Barth once sneared? And are we not therefore in need of a new occupation—by the poor, by God’s spirit, by the dispossessed, by insecurity, by laborers, and by a Gospel that speaks (and performs) truth to power? What might the occupation of the Church look like?
Which leads to another question: can Occupy occupy our churches (and our Church)? Here again Rev. Cooper may have a point. Is Occupy sufficiently radical, sufficiently critical, and sufficiently . . . well, sufficiently eschatological and apocalyptic to announce the coming of the reign of God’s Christ on earth?
Here we must be careful how we answer. For, on the one hand, much of what Occupy says falls neatly under the present age and not the age that is coming. It is insufficiently radical.
But, as a Christian and as an Episcopalian Christian, I feel I need genuinely to ask myself whether I am allowing myself to hear the prophetic word that God is articulating and directing to me in Occupy? Am I listening closely enough to allow myself to be occupied? Or might I too not be preoccupied?
And, here, I believe, we need to heed Rev. Sojwal’s call. When we raise a defense of Trinity with appeals to the sanctity of private property and the law, we take our bearings from standards that clearly fall outside of the Gospel and that call into question our own commitment to the radical critique we should be finding on our own lips and not the lips of the invading non-Trinitarian hordes. And, so, as Saint Augustine recognized, many (and almost certainly most) of Rome’s Christians took their stand with pagan Rome against the invading hordes. But not Saint Augustine.
Instead, Saint Augustine allowed this invasion to serve as the occasion for a radical critique not only of Rome and its brutal, imperialist policies and practices throughout the Mediterranean, southwestern Europe, Northern Africa and the near East, but also against a Christianity that had invested heavily in Imperial Rome.
Can we pray and work for the occupation of Trinity? Can we pray and work for the occupation of the Episcopal Church? Can we pray and work for the occupation of the United States, of all our religious communities, and of the world?
I not only believe that we can. I believe that we must.