August 26, 2007

By Harry T. Cook
Luke 13: 22-30
A person who once held a position of significant responsibility in a certain community had reluctantly opposed the election of a superbly qualified person for public office on the grounds that the candidate “hadn’t even been saved.” He said so in a public setting. And I have to confess that I did not understand at first the person who made the comment meant the candidate had not accepted Christ as his personal savior and, therefore, was not saved. Saved, I guess, from eternal damnation.

Aside from the fact that in America there exists no such criterion for election to public office – the good old First Amendment separation clause still being in effect – no professed agnostic, much less atheist, has a chance to be elected dogcatcher in any venue I know. Counter-intuitively, there are actually churches and synagogues in which agnostics and even atheists predominate – raising the question of just what is the price of admission to the fellowship of a church or congregation, say, in the broader terms introduced by the “narrow gate” image in today’s reading from Luke.

The truth of the matter is that most local congregations are so overjoyed to have any prospective member wander in that there is no mention whatsoever of expectations. The usual counsel is to welcome such visitors, more or less beg them to come back and wait for them to ask if there is anything they can or should be doing. Except in the rigidly fundamentalist or evangelical congregations, no one is required or even asked to tithe or subscribe to a set of beliefs. The “gate,” to use Luke’s image, is actually wider than the space to which is it supposed to be the means of ingress.

The clear implication of Luke’s text is that the gate should be narrow and the prospect of getting through it in time not a particularly good bet. So the suggestion is to strive.

Imagine a gated church, entry into which required the swipe of a computerized card encoded with information guaranteeing that the bearer was up to date on the payment of his tithe, that he had not missed too many Sundays and that he had filed the monthly affidavit vouchsafing his continued orthodoxy. Imagine if one or another of those criteria had not been met and that the gate bar did not lift to permit him to enter.

When I arrived as a freshman on the campus of Albion College 50 years ago this September, I set my sights on being accepted into one or another of the top, exclusive social fraternities. Anybody could live in the dormitory, but only a few were elected to membership in the desirable fraternities. Many called, few chosen.

Which raises the question about why people seek inclusion and membership in increasingly irrelevant mainline churches – the ecclesiastical version of the college dormitory. People come, some of them, because they have heard about the preacher and want to hear him or her. They come, some of them, because they know people in a certain church and are hungry for community. They come, many of them, because they know the price is right and the admission criteria virtually non-existent. They come, some of them, because they know it is entirely voluntary. Some come out of abject loneliness.

Some Episcopal churches – many of them in more or less affluent areas of the South and far West – maintain respected parochial schools and thereby have an angle. They do not permit children whose parents aren’t paying, participating members to enroll in the schools. That introduces competition, narrows the gate, making it a competitive matter to get through. And a gate into one of these places also serves as a gate out of it – if criteria are not satisfied.

Anyone can apply, but only those who agree to abide by the rules are admitted. Many called, few chosen.

Recently the pope of the Roman Catholic Church announced to the world that only his church was the real, true one, and that the rest of us belonged to “defective” (was his word) associations that did not possess the “means of salvation” unique, he said, to his own church. He was saying, in effect, that you would have to convert to Catholicism and accept his primacy and everything else in that package in order to attain salvation.

But, hey, no problem. What I want to be saved from is that kind of unwarranted exclusiveness. Who wants it? Who needs it? What I learned in my exclusion from those top-notch fraternities is that wide gates or no gates are preferable to narrow ones. Narrow gates diminish intellectual and social freedom.

So: no gated community, this. All called, all chosen. Inclusive ‘R Us. Our only requirements are an open mind, open hands, open arms and a generous spirit.

 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.