Churches: What's Dangerous?

Of the many letters, emails, and phone calls I received this one:

"...I was at Duarte Park yesterday and seeing you climb those stairs was incredibly inspiring. I can not quite put in words the feeling of hope and dignity it gave me.

I think so many of us feel that this is not just a crisis of the banking system or the healthcare system or the educational system or the political system--but a far larger crisis of faith in all systems, a spiritual questioning of whether we are willing to live by the words carved above the door.

I suppose I have been mostly an atheist in my life, but seeing you act has renewed my faith."

Invariably at the end of every interview--twice with Thom Hartman, once on TV and then on the radio--this question was always posed, "Why don't the Churches take more of a stand in these times?" I have no answer except to say that many worthy sermons and over coffee at meetings talk about Occupy Wall Street fills the air.

That is not the problem; it is doing something about it. The opposite of action in these days is complicity. There were seven clergy who jumped the Duarte Park fence on Saturday. Seven. But off camera was a whole contingent of clergy you didn't see who were our moral underpinnings. They showed up. Moreover, the prior week I attended an Occupy Faith meeting with 60 clergy who in addition to the Duarte protest devised a plan to confront Albany.

These are days when houses of worship should be quickened--and for my faith group--remembering that Jesus (this cute, docile babe) became a potent occupier of the Temple in his last days. His potency was so penetrating that--as Robert Tracy writes, "the dangerous memory of Jesus Christ" was invoked to convene the faithful.

"Well what should church goers do?" I'm asked. They should ask their pastors to talk fearlessly about injustice from the pulpit and they should commit to some local action where the vulnerable are being pushed aside by the powerful. Considering that there are 99% of the former and 1% of the latter that should be a simple exercise. The hard part is that faith communities must face it: they have often forfeited living opposed to the culture and they are complicit with it. There's a need for a reality check on priorities. How does the faith community spend its time and money? Where is its attention? This message could be a salvific blessing.

During this time of faith crisis nothing is more important. To do less is to consign our current versions of religion to irrelevancy.