Εν Τούτῳ Νίκα

Sunday is an important anniversary in the life of the Church.  I suspect it will, for the most part, go unnoticed.  Perhaps that is just as well, except in the sense of George Santayana’s perhaps misunderstood maxim that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  Still, Sunday is the 1,700th of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the day the church made an unholy deal with power and lost its freedom in the Gospel.  It is an important anniversary to mark because the deal with power is unraveling before our eyes, and we have a better opportunity than we have had in centuries to be free once again.  

The official story is that on October 28, 312, the Emperor Constantine fought a decisive battle at a place called the Milvian Bridge that made him the sole ruler of the Roman Empire.  The details of the spiritual side of this event vary, but the basic idea is that Constantine attributed his victory to a vision of the cross, or maybe it was the Chi-Rho, appearing in a blazing light above the sun bearing a message from God, which read, “Εν Τούτῳ Νίκα,” in this sign you will conquer, which was followed by a vision of the risen Christ instructing Constantine to use that sign against his enemies.  As this story goes, so began Constantine’s purported conversion to Christianity.

Now, I have to tell you, that does not sound much like Jesus to me, but it does sound a lot like the Church.  It has had a lot to do with our life ever since. 

Not too many years later, Christianity, which had begun three centuries earlier in witness that power was made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9), became the established religion of the Roman Empire, the epitome of worldly power.  From then until now really, the Church, particularly the clergy, especially the bishops, became identified with power, prestige, and privilege.  Today we are more democratic perhaps about how we distribute power and privilege, but they are power and privilege nonetheless.  Instead of being the voice of truth to power, the Church justified the use of power in the name of God.  Instead of being an instrument of peace, it perpetrated violence and preached the crusades.  Instead of being the advocate of the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized, it became the defender of the established order.  Instead of a posture of self-offering, it assumed a posture of self-protection.  Bishops became princes.  Pastoral cures became administrative units based on those of the Roman Empire, which happened to be called dioceses.  Episcopal ministry took on the trappings of legal jurisdiction to the detriment of diakonia or service.  And the imperial authorities insisted that the church, contrary to its nature up to that point, order itself for the good of civil society even though it had existed quite well without universal councils of any kind and certainly without the Vatican, the Curia, the so-called Instruments of Unity of the Anglican Communion, the Anglican Covenant, and, God forgive me for saying so, the General Convention.  In short, we forgot.  We forgot about God.  Our memory and our perspective became impaired by our own power, privilege, and prestige.

We are finding that power, privilege, and prestige are hard things to give up, but they are crumbling all around us nevertheless.  The fact that they are crumbling appears to be decline, which has resulted in a great deal of anxiety and acting out by those still trying to cling to the Church that once was, but we are no longer the established Church nor the Church of the establishment.  As we are freed from the trappings of privilege, difficult though it may be, we have an unprecedented opportunity to remember about God, to make Christ present, to be who we really are.  I think the world’s salvation may be in that.  I know ours is.

In a letter to the community at Rome long before Constantine became the emperor, St. Paul gave us a truer vision of what it means to conquer.  He asked, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?  Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”  And then he answered, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”  (Rom 8:35, 37)

It turns out Constantine was right, just not in the way he thought.  We are beginning to come to ourselves again, the way Paul saw us and not so much the way we let Constantine use us.  Εν Τούτῳ Νίκα

Peace,

+Stacy