It may seem like so very long ago, but it was really only the Year One B.C. (that is, before Covid) when the great Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris burned. I remember the tears in the eyes of one congregant in the church I was serving at the time when she thought about all that was lost, art and architecture, and I suspect, as we recently experienced with the death of Queen Elizabeth, a sense of continuity, a sense of the world as it had been for all of her life. In fact, the congregant grieving the loss of the great cathedral was a native of England, so I can only imagine her sense of discontinuity these days with a new king and the Prime Minister of the month.
The Notre Dame fire was made worse by the fact that the fire brigade was not called until more than thirty minutes after the first alarm went off. First they sent a guard to see if the alarm was right. They were not ready to accept that there was a fire. Except they sent the guard to the wrong place, the wrong attic. By the time they looked in the right place and believed the fire was real, it was way too late.
After the fire, there was immediate discussion of what comes next, of rebuilding the cathedral. The French President, Emmanuel Macron, suggested an openness to a “contemporary architectural gesture.” As you might expect, heads exploded. Humans are nothing if not reactionary.
In the end, the French National Assembly passed a law requiring that the structure be rebuilt in a way to “preserve the historic, artistic and architectural interest of the monument.”
Let’s bracket our American expectations about whether a national government should be controlling the reconstruction of a building it plans to give back to the Roman Catholic church, and for a moment, let’s even bracket the backwardness that insists that only the past is worthy of our attention.
Let’s instead admit one simple fact: no matter what they do after the fire, it will not be the same as it was before the fire, and what was there before the fire itself had evolved and changed since it was originally completed in the 13th century, so which “before” should the reconstructionists even choose?
They are spending a fortune remediating the lead contamination both at the site itself and in surrounding communities. Should fidelity mean stupidity, the use of this original dangerous and heavy substance when there are safer, lighter, and stronger alternatives?
Should the 1844 restoration be the target, when France had temporarily recovered from the atheistic spasms of the Revolution? What about the new glass with modern designs that was installed a century after that restoration, when the cathedral was damaged in the battle to liberate Paris from the Nazis and their French collaborators? Is it okay to restore the computerized controls on the magnificent pipe organ? Or must they return to some medieval configuration?
Bottom line: the Cathedral of Notre Dame of Paris that was there on 14 April 2019 is gone forever. It is impossible to restore it, and even if it was possible, it would be stupid to do so. What emerges from that pile of rubble will be safer and more functional, for Notre Dame is not just a museum and a symbol, it is also a working church.
And here’s the thing: human civilization is on fire right now. Some don’t trust the alarms that are going off. Some are looking in the wrong place. We’re late in responding and we’ve got some serious firefighting to do, and there is going to need to be some remediation, for there are toxins everywhere.
But I want to think about after the fire. I want to think about our legacy.
Let’s start with our nation. I was recently asked why I hate the U.S. Constitution because I had the audacity to ask if an amendment that authorized people to carry single shot muskets was really meant to apply to automatic assault weapons.
Never mind that this was gaslighting of the first degree. I don’t hate the Constitution, and swore an oath to it when I enlisted in the Army. Like the lead in the roof at Notre Dame, it was the best thing going hundreds of years ago.
But it was designed to give disproportionate power to white male racists, and it continues to do so to this day. The U.S. Senate is designed to prevent democracy. Our closed partisan primary system is designed to insure power for political parties, not citizens.
Our federal system didn’t break because of the Gingrich revolution and the poison fruit it produced, as awful as all of that is. The system never worked for all Americans to begin with, and was never a democracy. “The land of the free and the home of the brave” was always only for the select few. We have been an apartheid state since day one.
What might we build after the fire. Again, should we just put that poisonous lead roof back on? I hear politicians talk about restoring the traditions of the Senate, a sense of dignity and decorum. Why? Why would we want to restore something that was specifically designed to preserve the institution of slavery?
There are better forms of democracy out there, developed in the last two centuries, and I don’t mean the dictatorship of the majority that happens in “first past the post” systems. Proportional representation is messy, but it insures all voices are heard.
Why talk about this in church? Because if we’re not willing to talk about these things, we leave them to others to decide for us. Because the gospel demands that we look out for those at the margins. Because Hebrew scripture demands that we do justice. Because our own religious tradition, Reform, Congregational, and United Church of Christ, is democratic, and holds that we make the best decisions when we make them together. Democracy is one of our core values. Equality is one of our core values.
Of course, we can pretend there is no fire. Poke around in the wrong attic. Plan to use the latest in 18th century technology. Or we can leave something decent for our children.
And can we just take a moment to talk about our economy. And I’m not even going to try to catalog all of the ways in which it is broken.
It is worth noting that this moment of soaring inflation and soaring corporate profit is accelerating the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The poor don’t own stock, and won’t benefit when the market corrects, but they still need to buy food and put gas in the tank despite the corporate price gouging. For those of us who have money in retirement portfolios this moment is likely to be a wash, for whatever small gains we make in our investments will be lost to inflation. The super wealthy, however, will reap huge profits, while hoping we are distracted by Putin’s war or Elon Musk’s latest chaos grenade.
I believe in free markets and the need for capital, but I also know that democracy is incompatible with extreme wealth, and agree with the Seven Social Sins popularized by Mahatma Gandhi, which defines wealth without work as a sin. I believe in work, in rewarding hard work and talent, but that isn’t exactly how our system functions. As we heard in our first reading, past inequalities have a snowball effect. For every anecdote of someone who worked hard and got rich there are billions who worked hard and stayed poor and we don’t tell those stories.
And again, the question: Is it worth trying to rebuild some system from the past? Which moment would that be? The rapacious colonialism that allowed Europe to strip other continents of their assets and enslave their people? Or maybe the feudal system where a small number of men controlled lives and land?
Sure you want to pass inherited wealth to your children, but you need to think about this precisely because we have an economic system not based on merit and compassion, but based instead on greed and fear, on Social Darwinism and sociopathy. Just because we have turned the toxic gospel of Ayn Rand into a religion doesn’t mean it is right, or the best we can do. Inherited wealth is insurance against an arbitrary and evil economic system. So maybe lets not have an arbitrary and evil economic system.
Those men sleeping in the gazebo outside? Healthcare, mental healthcare, and addiction services driven by Wall Street con men don’t work, are absolutely cruel. If the only motivation we can find for human affairs is fear and greed, then I despair for our species. But I happen to believe we can do better, because sometimes we do.
And, closer to home, there is the church. Those of us in the Reform tradition threw off the autocratic church five centuries ago. Our Congregational ancestors believed that faith was a way of life, not a building or a hierarchy. They believed that the decision you made in the marketplace on Tuesday was as important as what you did on Sunday morning, so they equipped people of faith to think for themselves. We claim the priesthood of all believers, which is why my title is not priest, but is pastor and teacher, someone who provides spiritual care and gives you the tools to live into and change the world.
In the 19th century, church played an important role in caring for the poor. Churches were social services, medical clinics, community centers, childcare, schools, especially urban churches. Government took up those tasks, eventually stripping church of its role in the civic space. Today government has abandoned many of these responsibilities, trying to hand them back to the very churches it weakened when it took them away in the first place, and the needs are far beyond our competency and capacity. We do no one a favor when we try to operate beyond our competency and capacity.
After the Second World War, the church became a “third good place,” a sphere that was neither home nor work where women could have some limited agency without threatening the patriarchy. Church as third good place and social space is about as real today as church as social services. While we have moved closer to gender equality, income inequality has meant women getting crushed from both sides, and few folks in the workforce have any energy left for anything. We’re in our homes watching Netflix and ordering from DoorDash.
So what is the role of church today? Are we simply to reflect the changing tides of culture, as we have at our worst? Or should we be counter-cultural and revolutionary, like Jesus, like we have always been at our best?
That isn’t for me to decide. It is for you to decide. What sort of church are we reconstructing? What will be our legacy? Should we reinstall the lead roof, roofs being an issue in these parts? Should we obsess over some arbitrary moment in the past when everything was perfect, seeking to turn back the clock to some moment B.C.? What does that say to those of us who were not welcome at that past table? Or should we be asking what God is calling us to today?
My job is not to give you answers, and it is not to simply make you uncomfortable, though I no doubt do that some Sundays. My goal is to call you into deep engagement with the world, the world that is God’s gift to us, to challenge you to live boldly in ways that embody our vision of a just world for all, every day, every single day you have, going out in the end like Thelma and Louise with your foot on the gas pedal. If not you, then who?
You are already making the world, through your action, and through your inaction. Let us be intentional, faithful, and filled with holy imagination, love, and courage, this day and always.