Some commenting on today’s catastrophe [the Notre Dame inferno] seem not to understand the hallowing of the material realm that is the purchase of the cross.
Yes...the church is not buildings but it’s also not immaterial.
Where creation—stone, glass, wood, fabric, metal—has for a millennia been ordered in one space toward the resurrection, it is natural for the body of Christ to mourn this loss, to seek to restore this sacred house, to renew its standing as a sign (before its arrival) of the world that’s coming to this world.
Even as the church seeks by the Spirit to preserve our memory—to have the mind that is in Jesus Christ—that we might continue to tell the beautiful story of our God, of the God who makes the world in love, of the God who saves the world by offering all of God for all of the world, we do good to preserve the artifacts—the art, architecture, music and books—that emerge from centuries of shaping nature in the form of the cross.
When we understand with the first Christians that the salvation made possible by the cross extends to the cosmos—not just human souls but human bodies, not just ethnic groups but nations, not just ideals of things but their actualities—that the cross saves human ingenuity and creativity, what we make of the good world that can inherit the new creation—we remember to steward the whole of the natural order, to practice care of the creation, awaiting the transfiguration of this bright blue marble, terra firma, which is the inheritance of those who humbly lay down their lives with God for the life of the world.
Today and for a long time we mourn but not as those without hope, and not as those without an intergenerational task of restoration and redemption in front of us enabled by the Spirit that indwells the church.
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