Sporks and carbon footprints

Somehow when the most prominent world religious leader and shepherd of the largest Christian church is in New York, the Presiding Bishop just had to be in Utah. That's because there the unbaptized diocesan bishop was celebrating the building of an obscenely expensive bureaucratic center. And of course property, especially of the expensive variety, is what is most important to the Presiding Bishop--certainly more important than hearing anything a boundary-crossing pope would have to say. (In fairness, given how fast the Diocese of Utah is atrophying, perhaps it's good they have some sort of cenotaph at which future generations can learn that there was once a religious cult in Utah other than the Mormons.)

But when there's God's Business to be done in New York, my how fast the Presiding Bishop hurries home. As Chris Johnson reports, the Presiding Bishop made it back to deliver this sermon on the highest of her High Holy Days--Earth Day. Every Episcopalian should watch this, and then compare it with any of the sermons given days earlier by Pope Benedict. That the Episcopal News Service thought it so good to post the video says a great deal about what passes for "preaching" in our church, and what passes for "Gospel."

Chris has made fun of the Presiding Bishop's heralding a spork as a "green" implement. It's actually much worse in the video, where she suggests one should carry a spork around so to avoid using disposable cutlery. One can simply lick it off, she suggests, and save it for future use, and so presumably save the planet. Remind me never to sup with the Presiding Bishop. And perhaps she should hold her tongue a bit when denigrating Majority World bishops for their backwardness. I do believe they all use clean and washed cutlery when eating the many chicken dinners that have proven such powerful bribes to ensure their orthodoxy.

That said, the spork is a useful metaphor for her view of the Christian religion, and if American elites had proper armorial bearings, her arms would no doubt sport the spork as heraldic device. A spork, after all, is a syncretistic implement that attempts to combine the best attributes of fork and spoon, but ends up failing to do anything well at all. The tines are too short to properly spear food with, and the bowl is, owing to the tines, unable to hold anything for which a spoon is necessary. The spork has its fans, but one senses mainly because the nomenclature is catchy and the implement rarely encountered. So people talk about the virtues of sporks, but they don't actually use them. Syncretistic religion of the sort that appeals to the Presiding Bishop is the same: it sounds oh-so-tony and sophisticated, but it offers nothing worthwhile, and so ultimately has no use or lasting appeal. Because it has no tines, it cannot capture the truth; because it has no integrity it cannot hold or preserve it either.

What was most offensive about this so-called sermon, though, was what the Presiding Bishop suggested as a way to reduce our carbon footprint:

How can we participate in reducing the carbon output of the buildings in which you and I worship on Sundays, or elsewhere? That's a major challenge. It's a prophetic act. And as I've pointed out to people, we could do it almost instantaneously if we shared a building with another congregation. You know most buildings, unlike this one, that are used for church purposes sit empty most of the time. How can we use that blessing that we've been given for the benefit of the larger community the other six days and 12 hours--18 hours--on Sunday? A challenge, but I think a very, very important one.

Uh, one way, Kate, that you can meet this "very, very important" challenge "almost instantaneously" is to stop creating those empty church buildings. You can do your part to reduce the carbon footprint by not spending millions of parishioner dollars to sue fellow Christians just for the express purpose of making those buildings carbon-wasting empty. Goodness knows, you could even reconsider your preference for turning those buildings into pubs, and actually agree to share them with Anglicans who want only to have a place to worship God--since you say we should share them. But of course you don't really care about carbon footprints, any more than you really eat with a dirty spork. And you don't want congregations to share those buildings, either, save when "merging" Episcopal parishes that are sailing toward extinction into a single lifeboat so they may die together. So your words are simply not true. Because if they were, you would not be creating the wasted spaces you so decry. You would be eager to share those spaces, if not for Christian purposes, at least to "save the planet."

But now we at least all know that your environmentalism is as authentic as your Christianity.