influence or power fill its pews, the thin walls that frame the sanctuaries let the sounds of drums and the voices that sing to their rhythms mingle with words preached in other languages a few yards away. Everything that takes shape here has the feel of a rough, ad hoc, beginner’s improvisational performance. People without homes find that they have cooked meals that have somehow made their way to other, hungry people. There are disagreements and tensions over how to take care of trivial matters (like who is to open the church when it rains or who is to lead the music during a worship service) or weightier ones (like a member who in dealing drugs is gambling with prolonged jail time and jeopardizing the welfare of her children). The church barely keeps afloat financially. There are sewage backups many Sunday mornings. Some of the old friends of the church have grown cold or uncooperative or hostile in part because of occasional eruptions of aggression, inflexibility, and meanness of spirit from those closest to the top on the church’s organizational charts and most visible on its raised platforms on Sunday mornings. The Spanish congregation struggles with its leadership; the French congregation is in the midst of a possible split; the new pastor of the Khmer congregation does his job in the wake of his predecessor, who left under a dark cloud of mistrust.
But something beautiful and holy happens, when during prayers one voice after another calls out to a holy Mystery—for the healing of a mother’s diseased body or the cessation of a war in a distant country or a change in city housing policy or the spiritual renewal of a friend or a safe home for the abandoned children cared for by the church or for the undocumented workers who continue to flood into the neighborhood. These are prayers entangled in the actions and passions of these people. “This is our prayer,” they call out; and the priestly reply joins their words, “Lord, hear our prayer!”
118. Mark 2:16: “When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax-collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners?’”
119. On Epiphany Sunday, congregants, adults and children, addled or clear-headed, who have not been baptized are invited to take the journey toward baptism. Those who respond are interviewed by their pastor. On Ash Wednesday a sponsor is assigned to provide the baptizand with support and guidance, meeting with her weekly or more often. Although this is a church that ordinarily invites all, baptized or not, to feast on the body and blood of Christ, she is asked to postpone her celebration of the eucharist on subsequent Sundays until she is baptized. Just after the Ministry of the Word each service from Epiphany through Holy Saturday she is invited to stand at a temporary distance from the rest of the assembly to meditate on the catechetical instruction she has received, attending in particular to Genesis 1–3, the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostles’ Creed. Holy Week services are given to the remembrance of Christ’s bloody baptism on the cross. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday services call the church to meditation on the abasement of Christ as the pattern of its discipleship. The congregation looks on these days to the baptizand as the icon of all the children of God, lost sheep found on Christ’s journey to the cross. Holy Saturday is in particular devoted to explicating the significance of baptism.
120. Cf. Barton, “Dislocating and Relocating Holiness,” 206; also Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 266–68.
121. Cf. Song, Jesus, the Crucified People, 216; and Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 236–37.
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