The poor are the altar of God.
Such, at least, is what I tell myself and my people who are spiritually stressed that the doors of their churches are closed, their altars forbidden. It is a bitter truth. Bitter because it proves the poverty of my trust and richness of my fear, reminding me how often I don’t believe it. That it is the poor whom God justly loves before me, whom I should love if I say I love him.
Do not mistake the damage done from churches closing. It is a sort of death. Necessary or not, to close churches’ doors is to suffocate them slowly. There is a theology implicit (and a bad theology at that) in forcing churches to go entirely online. The very word church means gathering. Christianity is a bodily, incarnational religion; assembly is its nature. A virtual Christianity that denigrates place or body is simply is not Christianity. It doesn’t matter how one sentimentalizes it.
Such explains our legitimate frustrations. Now I’m not talking about the rantings of fundamentalists, nor the politicos, nor borrowers of sham Christian identity, nor the historically ignorant. I’m not talking about the sideshow arguments about whether churches are “essential.” Rather, I’m talking about those who are spiritually saddened, those who, although recognizing the necessity of closing the churches, see it for the disaster it is. To close churches, mosques and synagogues is a tourniquet destructive of the body politic.
As I said, it’s a sort of death — a death that not all will mourn, and not a few rejoice. The churches, by many, are not loved. Many of us have long forgotten even the barest contribution the churches make to civil society. Even now too many of us deny the tremendous philanthropy of the faithful. But maybe this is how the deaths of churches can in some sense be atoning, how we can begin to imagine the damage done to the churches not as an end, but maybe another beginning. By making us find our God elsewhere for the time being.
John Chrysostom was one of our saints, one of our best preachers. In the fourth century he preached in a time of famine, of starvation and death. I’ve been thinking of him while feeling sad every day locking the doors of my own church against my own people. I remember his words as if they were spoken today. “Do you wish to see this altar?” he asked his congregation once. My people have asked me the same, some calling me a coward, saying I don’t care for their souls for not opening the church. Because they want to see the altar.
But it’s Chrysostom’s answer that haunts me, because it’s precisely the bitter truth we churchgoers must remember, clamoring as we are to unlock the doors. “This altar you can see lying everywhere, in the alleys,” he said, “and you can sacrifice upon it anytime.” He said, “When you see a poor believer, believe that you are looking at an altar.” That’s the church, he insisted, that’s worship. To serve the sick and the poor.
Which is what we Christians should be thinking while our doors are locked. Yes, it’s a sort of death to close churches, sad and devastating. And to be honest, as a pastor of one, I am frightened. But it’s precisely the sort of fear that calls on faith, on what Christianity really means. Like Good Friday, like Holy Saturday, it is possibly a harrowing full of hope, death before resurrection. If we trust.
Which means we should worry less about things like the quality of livestreamed services or returning to whatever we once considered normal. Perhaps we should seek those altars that aren’t locked away and revere those bodies of Christ tabernacled beyond our shut doors. Because that’s where the church is now, in those scattered places. Which raises the only spiritual question that matters in a pandemic. And that’s whether you’ll attend this church too.
This column originally appeared in the Dallas Morning News.
