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Dear St. Christopher’s Family,
On Wednesday of this week, our study group took a field trip to Fort Worth and the Kimbell Museum for the exhibit of the altar appointments from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. If you’re unfamiliar with this church, it is one of the holiest sites in Christendom: it covers both the Hill of Calvary, where Christ was crucified, and also the believed location of his tomb, where the Easter story started. Because it is at the site of the most important moments of our faith, different groups of Christians have tried to control it over the centuries: Latin (Roman), Orthodox (Greek), Coptic, Ethiopian, Syriac, and Armenian.
Tension between Christians stretches far back before our own time, and the disagreements only get sharper over time. For this reason, the Ottomans, the Turks who controlled Jerusalem in the 18th century, imposed what we call the Status Quo. The emperor put to rest the fighting by declaring that whatever the schedule was and the claims to space were on that particular day in 1757, that would be the unchangeable arrangement going forward, and that each group was entitled in perpetuity to the privileges they had at that time (their own “mansion in my Father’s House).
They say of course that the sign of a good negotiation is that nobody is happy, and that certainly applies here. The Status Quo, as any day on the news has borne out, doesn’t ease tension or make us grow together. Sure, the arrangement stops the fighting a little, but in itself, it does not show the kinds of ‘fruits of the Spirit’ that cause people to see the church as the Bride of Christ she is.
Lots of things constrain how we do church: our service times, the size of our building, our location, our parking, etc. Those things are our Status Quo. But what we can control and even change is our own spirit. When we project being excited to be with each other, when we have something to say about Jesus, when we are glad we can open our doors to whomever walks in, we short-circuit those things that drive us into our nooks and corners as Christians. When we pray for our fellow Christians, when we pray for peace, when we pray for refugees, we’re showing that our mansion sits squarely within our Father’s house.
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