Satan's throne in a Church?

The Anglican Communion's civil war has flared up again, with more headlines about sex, sin and schism.

Colorado was the front lines last week, when archbishops from Southeast Asia and Rwanda invaded Episcopal Church territory to lead rites consecrating four additional missionary bishops for America. Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey asked if they were aware "that action of this kind takes you perilously close to creating a new group of churches at odds with the See of Canterbury and the rest of the Communion?"

The African, Asian and American bishops behind the Anglican Mission in America think they know what they are doing. The crucial question is: "Why are they doing it?"

To answer that, it may help to flash back nearly a decade to words spoken at a Colorado altar by another Asian bishop. During a 1992 visit, Archbishop Moses Tay of Singapore offered a radical view of the doctrinal divisions within Anglicanism. Tay is a symbolic figure, because he later hosted the January 2000 rites to consecrate the Anglican Mission in America's first two bishops.

Tay is soft-spoken, but not timid. Speaking at Denver's Christ Church, he turned to Revelation, chapter 2, an ominous passage in a mysterious book. In this vision, Jesus is seen reigning in heaven. Christ tells the angel of the Church of Pergamum, ``I know where you are living, where Satan's throne is.''

Is it possible, asked Tay, that Satan had a throne in that church? "Would we be shocked if that is true, that Satan has his throne in some of our churches?''

The Revelation text offered two warning signs of this condition, said Tay. The first was "corrupt teachers" who brought other gods into the church through syncretistic worship. The second was compromise on issues of sexual immorality.

The archbishop didn't have to say much about sex. Clashes over sex outside of marriage – especially homosexual acts – had already shaken Episcopalians and other oldline Protestants for a decade. But this sermon came four years before an Episcopal court ruled that the church has no "core doctrine" on sex and marriage. It came eight years before the House of Bishops acknowledged that many believers live in "life-long committed relationships" outside of Holy Matrimony and pledged "prayerful support" and even "pastoral care" for those living in such relationships.

Sex was old news. So Tay spent more time warning that church members would have to worry about their leaders – literally – praying to other gods. As shepherd of a small flock in Singapore, he stressed that he knows what it's like to work in a culture packed with competing gods. He wondered aloud if Americans take this issue seriously.

"We have this pressure (to compromise) in our own place, in Singapore, in the Far East," Tay said. "I believe this is ... very prevalent within some quarters of the Anglican Communion. I say this with some shame and sadness, because this is the very thing that the Bible forbids.''

A year later, I witnessed what Tay was describing during a news event in New York City – the annual "Missa Gaia (Earth Mass)" at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Before the bread and wine were brought to the altar, musicians offered a rhythmic chant that soared into the cathedral vault: "Oba ye Oba yo Yemanja. ... Oby ye Oba yo O Ausar. Oba ye Oba yo O Ra Ausar." This was printed in the bulletin.

As New York Bishop Richard Grein waited at the altar, the musicians sang praises to some of the gods of Africa and Egypt.

Is this kind of syncretistic worship common? Of course not. Is it encouraged by a few academic leaders and trendy liturgists? Apparently so. Have some bishops quietly tolerated the worship of other gods – by name – at Episcopal altars? Yes.

Are some Third World Anglicans concerned about this? Yes.

It's tempting just to argue about sex, said Tay. But after his Denver sermon, he asked this tough question: What is the meaning of unity in a communion in which some believers and even bishops may not worship the same God?

This is an explosive question. Sooner or later, the See of Canterbury will need to provide an answer.

Bono's crusade comes to DC

As lunch ended in the ornate U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee conference room, Sen. Jesse Helms struggled to stand and bid farewell to the guest of honor.

Bono stayed at the conservative patriarch's right hand, doing what he could to help. For the photographers, it would have been hard to imagine a stranger image than this delicate dance between the aging senator and the rock superstar.

"You know, I love you," Helms said softly.

The singer gave the 79-year-old Helms a hug. This private session with a circle of senators during U2's recent Washington stop wasn't the first time Bono and Helms have discussed poverty, plagues, charity and faith. Nor will it be the last. Blest be the ties that bind.

"What can I say? It's good to be loved – especially by Jesse Helms," Bono said two days later, as his campaign for Third World debt relief continued on Capitol Hill.

The key to this scene is that Bono can quote the Book of Leviticus as well as the works of John Lennon. While his star power opens doors, it is his sincere, if often unconventional, Christian faith that creates bonds with cultural conservatives – in the Vatican and inside the Beltway. Bono has shared prayers and his sunglasses with Pope John Paul II. Don't be surprised if he trades boots and Bible verses with President George W. Bush.

The hot issues right now are red ink and AIDS in Africa. An entire continent is "in flames," said Bono, and millions of lives are at stake. God is watching.

The bottom line is that the Bible contains 2,000 verses about justice and compassion. While it's crucial to answer political and economic questions linked to forgiving $200 billion in Third World debts, Bono said this also must be seen as a crisis of faith. The road into the heart of America runs through its sanctuaries.

"What will really wake people up," he said, "is when Sunday schools start making flags and getting out in the streets. ... Forget about the judgment of history. For those of you who are religious people, you have to think about the judgment of God."

Bono knows that this bleak, even melodramatic, message sounds bizarre coming from a rock 'n' roll fat cat. In a recent Harvard University commencement address, he said the only thing worse than an egotistical rock star is a rock star "with a conscience – a placard-waving, knee-jerking, fellow-traveling activist with a Lexus and a swimming pool shaped like his own head."

This is old news to Bono, who has had a love-hate relationship with stardom for two decades. In U2's early days, other Christians said the band should break up or flee into "Christian rock," arguing that fame always corrupts. Bono and his band mates decided otherwise, but the singer soon began speaking out about his faith and his doubts, his joys and his failures.

"I don't believe in preaching at people," he told me, back in 1982. A constant theme in his music, he added, is the soul-spinning confusion that results when spirituality, sensuality, ego and sin form a potion that is both intoxicating and toxic. "The truth is that we are all sinners. I always include myself in the 'we.' ... I'm not telling everybody that I have the answers. I'm trying to get across the difficulty that I have being what I am."

Eventually, Bono acted out this internal debate on stage. In the 1990s he celebrated and attacked fame through a sleazy, macho, leather-bound alter ego called The Fly. After that came Mister MacPhisto, a devilishly theatrical take on mass-media temptation. The motto for the decade was, "Mock Satan and he will flee thee."

Today, U2 has all but dropped its ironic posturing and the soaring music of this tour covers sin and redemption, heaven and hell, mercy and grace. Bono is quoting from the Psalms and the first Washington concert ended with him shouting: "Praise! Unto the Almighty!"

It wasn't subtle and it wasn't perfect. Crusades rarely are.

"I do believe that the Kingdom of Heaven is taken by force," said Bono, paraphrasing the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 11. "God doesn't mind if we bang on the door to heaven sometimes, asking him to listen to what we have to say. ... At least, that's the kind of religion I believe in."

Father Scalia's vocation

As the boy grew to become a man, he explored the marble chambers that pump power into American politics.

He worked as an intern. He rode the private subway that whisks legislators to the Capitol. He took his share of power lunches. Finally, he decided that his vocation was in a higher court.

"One day it hit me," said Father Paul Scalia. "To save things, it is going to take more than a really good Supreme Court decision. Good thing, too, because we're not going to have one anytime soon. I am very, very pessimistic about the ability of government policies ... to change things."

The 30-year-old priest in the Diocese of Arlington (Va.) has not sought the media spotlight to deliver sobering opinions of this kind. This would have been easy because of his last name. Father Paul is one of the nine children of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, whose outspoken views on moral issues have made him a hero on the religious right and the bane of the lifestyle left. According to media reports, Father Paul also worked behind the scenes to help Justice Clarence Thomas return to the Roman Catholic faith.

Politics are important, said Scalia. But this is an age in which the moral decisions that shape private and public life are as likely to be affected by MTV and movies, as by high courts and legislatures.

Politics may "may slow down our cultural decay," he said. "I am not very optimistic about its ability to stop it."

Priests who observe the lives of their people know this, said Scalia, at a meeting to support gays and lesbians who strive to follow Catholic teachings. The 10th annual "Healing for the Homosexual Conference" was sponsored by Parents and Friends, a network of clergy, counselors and parents based in Washington, D.C. But Scalia's address included few references to homosexuality. Instead he covered a wider range of issues – from families wrecked by adultery to the pressures that drive girls to hate their own bodies, from Catholics who shack up before marriage to teens hooked on cyber-pornography.

All of these issues are symptoms of a larger problem, he said. Millions of Americans yearn for sexual pleasure and for spirituality. However, many have forgotten that what they do with their bodies profoundly affects the health of their souls. Male and female bodies are not mere machines, like automobiles, that can be used for pleasure and then taken in for tune-ups at gyms and clinics.

"If the body is just something that I own, then when I am sexually involved, or when my body is sexually involved, I am not," Scalia said. "So what does it matter? What does it matter ... if I have sex before marriage? Or if I have sex with someone who is not my spouse, or if I have sex with someone of the same sex? And so on. If the body is just a tool, just an instrument, then what does it matter?"

Every human being, stressed Scalia, is not a "soul encased in a body, but a soul living through a body. ... The body is always to be treated with reverence, because the body is the expression of the image of God. The body is the way that the soul communicates."

This is a complex message and one that many hear as a radical limitation on personal freedom. This is especially true, he said, in an age in which the Supreme Court – in its 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision – has linked liberty to "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

With a sarcastic shrug, the priest noted that this decision was based on the "defining the universe section of the constitution." He said this has led to "a deadly understanding of freedom" and what Pope John Paul II calls a "culture of death" in which the weak – the sick, the poor, the elderly and the unborn – can be crushed by the freedoms of the strong.

Freedom "does not mean doing whatever we want," argued Father Scalia. "Freedom means the ability to do what we ought to do."

Charlie Ward, sinner

Every Sunday, countless Christians around the world recite an ancient prayer that begins: "I believe, O Lord, and I confess that You are truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, Who did come into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief."

Anyone who can say that last phrase without a mental pause isn't paying attention. The tendency is to do a few quick mental calculations in which one's sins are contrasted with those of, let's say, Timothy McVeigh or Robert Downey, Jr. But it was St. Paul who first confessed that he was the "chief of sinners" and that means that these words have clout. Christianity teaches that this phrase applies to each and every sinner.

I thought about this prayer during the NBA-playoffs controversy about New York Knicks guard Charlie Ward. While leading a Bible study that was visited by New York Times reporter, Ward said: "Jews are stubborn .... Why did they persecute Jesus unless he knew something they didn't want to accept?"

The reporter said, "What?"

Ward replied, "They had his blood on their hands." He opened his Bible and read from the Gospel of Matthew: "Then they spit in Jesus' face and hit him with their fists." Ward added, "There are Christians getting persecuted by Jews every day. ... People who are raised Jewish and find Christ, and then their parents stop talking to them."

The media storm was spectacular, to say the least. Two comments by Washington Post scribes will suffice.

Sports writer Michael Wilbon said Ward is "someone who tries to push his religious beliefs on other people, a proselytizing, self-righteous and self-absorbed character who thinks that he and a few others have tapped into the truth and that anyone who doesn't believe exactly what he believes is going straight to hell."

While strongly defending Ward's right to free speech, political columnist Richard Cohen noted: "To insult Jews while playing for a New York team and to use the New York Times and a Jewish writer as your medium either shows breathtaking gall or a touching belief that nothing untoward was being said. It was the latter, undeniably."

Both of these writers represented large segments of the American public that were appalled by Ward's words. I am convinced, however, that several other comments need to be made about this latest fight over salvation and the public square.

First, no one can deny that what Ward said was highly offensive, in large part because he spoke out in an age in which any public defense of absolute truth is sure to offend millions. This is a serious issue for anyone – pope or politician, evangelist or entertainer – who attempts to defend traditional Christian teachings on heaven and hell.

However, as offensive as Ward's comments were, it didn't help that many journalists edited them to resemble the views of conspiracy crackpots who preach that a cabal of Jews exists for the sole purpose of oppressing gentiles, especially Christians.

What Ward said was offensive, but not as offensive as what many journalists reported that he said – that Jews persecute Christians, period. The sad truth is that Ward was right when he said that many Jews are disowned or attacked by their families after they convert to Christianity. It's true that conversions cause division and pain, as well as joy.

But it's almost beside the point to mention these other issues, in light of one huge mistake that looms over Ward's comments.

What he said was highly offensive. But in the eternal scheme of things, Ward's words were not nearly offensive enough. Jesus was crucified after a complex and ugly drama in which legions of people – Roman officials, competing elites inside a splintered Jewish hierarchy, a street mob representing all of humanity – ended up with bloody hands and stained souls.

The faith of the ages teaches that all are guilty. Sin is sin. Sinners are sinners. Ward forgot to judge himself, along with everybody else.

So what should Ward have told journalists? According to centuries of Christian tradition, he should have said that Jesus came into the world to save sinners, "of whom I am chief."