Church

Today is The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ. We celebrated the feast day twice, once at Espiritu Santo in Santa Rita -- the first church our mission team helped to build many years ago -- and once with the congregation of Santa Maria Virgen -- whose church we are helping to build on this trip.

The morning service at Espiritu Santo was deeply moving for many reasons. We had a baptism -- which is especially appropriate for the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus. Little Alex Mauricio, the son of a young woman who has been helping to serve lunches to our work team on all our mission trips, was welcomed into the church family today. Standing up for him as godparents were Margaret and Oakley Pearson. Their role in the service, and in Alex's life, is a wonderful outward and visible sign of the deep relationships that have been formed over the years of these mission trips. I was invited to participate in the service as well; I had asked if I could anoint Alex with the oil in baptism, so I had the privilege of saying to Alex "You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ's own forever" -- something I find personally meaningful in every baptism I preside at, but even more significant in this cross-cultural, bilingual, all-Episcopal baptism we shared today. Then, to my surprise, Father Mejia, the one priest who serves all those congregations around Copan, invited me to say the Great Thanksgiving at Eucharist, and to administer the bread to the people. I said the prayer in English, and spared them my very very poor pronunciation of Spanish; but the administration I chose to say in their language. They received by intinction, with me dipping the wafers in the wine and placing them on their tongues. a practice we don't do too often at Trinity; so the words I spoke to them as they received were "The Body and Blood of Christ," "El Cuerpo y la Sangre de Cristo." I am quite sure I didn't pronounce it correctly; but somehow the combination of the deep familiarity of Communion with the practice and words that were unfamiliar to me brought home the unfathomable mystery of the sacrament: that the God who is beyond all our understanding and comprehension nevertheless comes to be with us as we are, in terms we can understand, and lifts us out of ourselves to be more than we could ever imagine. Baptism and Communion are the cornerstones of that mysterious reality.

After the service we were invited up the hill -- and it was a very long and steep hill! -- for lunch at Adela and Mauricio's (Alex's parents) house, and they prepared for us a wonderful meal and genuinely heartfelt hospitality. While we were eating, Lee Beam shared with me a thought she later posted on Facebook (some of you may have seen it already), that we say we come to Copan to build churches, but really we build relationships. And our morning at Espiritu Santo bore witness to the truth of that. But it also got me to thinking that really, at the heart of it, the church is relationships: the church is the people, and the love of Christ that binds them together; the building is a manifestation of the community, a physical sign and vehicle of the community's presence, and so the building is pretty important; but really, the church is the relationships. We come to Copan to build churches -- and that starts with the relationships we form on the worksite and in the worship services and at mealtimes and in supporting education -- and even in being godparents -- and the buildings that rise from the trenches we dig and the rebar we tie are the outward and visible signs of those inward and spiritual relationships. Both are part of building the church.

This evening we attended a second church service, the people of Santa Maria Virgen (whose church is now just foundations and rebar and dreams) gathered in the garage of their lay leader, for a service of Evening Prayer and scripture and song. We sang songs that we Americans of course didn't know; but they had easy tunes, and refrains of simple words that were easy to pick up after a time or two -- and we could always clap along. After the service the Junior Warden (more or less) spoke about a fundraising dinner they were planning to pay for more building supplies; he mentioned that those who did not attend the supper would get an envelope for their contribution nonetheless. It reminded me that church stewardship is much the same no matter the language or culture. There again, it became clear that praying together and working together meant building the relationships that are the church, and of which the physical building is the material epiphany.

The original New Testament word for "church" is ekklesia, which literally means "those who are called out." Worshiping today at Espiritu Santo and Santa Maria Virgen made me think of how we are all called out: called out of our comfort zones, called out of our regular routines, called out of our complacencies, called out to reach across borders and boundaries, called out to proclaim by word and deed even when our words aren't the same, called out to be brothers and sisters with people about whom we know no more than that they too love and follow Jesus, called out to come together in water and oil and bread and wine in the most unexpected places.

Building the church, deepening relationships, being ekklesia, come to us today in the form of a dove -- like Luke says in his baptism narrative, like the mural painted on the front wall of Espiritu Santo -- and in a little boy with Honduran parents and Virginian godparents. May God grant us to build this kind of church in all our baptized lives.