While the Waters Rise

The Episcopal Church, it seems, has a talent for the ridiculous. Episcopalians form perhaps the easiest group of believers to satirize (and the safest--we just don't get violent). It could be the way our clergy dress up--not only dress up, since Roman Catholics and Christian Orthodox get fancy without being made so much fun of. We Episcopalians make a fetish of our clerical garments--we take them so seriously. A priest I know said, when he was elected bishop, "think of all the great clothes." And he was only half kidding. Another bishop suggested his autobiography might be titled, Men in Skirts. Now, of course, we have women in, um, well, they're already in skirts. Some of this is an ability to mock ourselves and that's a good thing. But we are easily mocked by others, especially perhaps when we try to be serious and important about, for example, the Big Issues Facing the World.

Take this week's issue of The New Yorker, which has a hilarious piece by Rebecca Mead on the latest Trinity Institute conference, "God's Unfinished Future: Why It Matters Now." Apparently the attendees called it "Apocalypse Not" (although the funnier New Yorker typo--did the New Yorker used to have typos?--reads, Apocalpyse Not).

For those who don't follow the Epyscopal Church insider guide, The Trinity Institute programs have for years brought Big Deals in Religion to New York's Trinity Church (downtown Manhattan), the richest church in the world, to talk about Important Subjects. This year's conference was on one of the neglected subjects of Episcopal discourse, the Book of Revelation and the End Times. Evangelicals and Fundamentalists think about the End Times a lot. There is an entire series of books, in fact, The Left Behind Series, that lays out in excruciatingly bad fiction what happens when the End comes and the good are raptured (taken to Heaven) while the Bad are left behind to duke it out with the AntiChrist. At the Very End of Time, when JESUS comes back to judge those left and annihilate the legions of the AntiChrist, it is very bad news indeed. According to the latest installment of the series, Jesus cuts off body parts and blows up infidels. It isn't pretty. And I suspect Episcopalians figure prominently among the dispatched.

Needless to say, when Episcopalians talk about the End, they don't use such graphic, impolite images. As Mead describes it, they get together for canapes and Pinot Noir and say ridiculous things. (I know this to be true.) Mainly, it seems, people concerned with the End are the poor or culturally disadvantaged, of which there were few to none, I'd guess, at Trinity. Peter Gomes noted that we Episcopalians have a greater investment in the present than in the future.

Trinity's investment in the present is huge: it owns much of the real estate in downtown Manhattan. One might think that the church would care about global warming, since the impact on its real estate holdings could be significant, something Mead noted wryly in her article.

What her article suggests to me is that it's not only the world that should be worried about rising waters. For Episcopalians, as the Psalm says, the waters have risen up to our necks. We're drowning as we sip our Pinot Noir and attend, glancing slowly into the mirror, to the creases in our vestments.