Buddha At St. Mary’s?

In an earlier posting, we lent our moral support to the progressive ministry of St. Marys Church, South Brisbane in their dispute with the Roman Catholic Church. The issue that seems to be receiving the most debate (and disagreement) among Progressive Christians is Fr. Peter Kennedy’s placing of a Buddhist statue inside the church.

A few have stated that this is the equivalent of promoting idolatry, something which no Christian can tolerate. First, we should set the record straight and recognize that the statue in question was not of Buddha but a Buddhist monk praying. But even if it were of Buddha, this shouldn’t really matter. Gautama Buddha did not profess to be God but a man, and he is not deified by Buddhists.

If having iconography or statues within a place of worship is equivalent to idol worship, then we Christians are (as they say) guiltier than sin. Statues of Jesus, Mary, and the Saints fill thousands of churches, and cross jewelry adorns the bodies of millions. Yet most Christians are no guiltier of idol worship than most Buddhists.

In our meditation on How We Worship, we mentioned how rituals only point towards divine truths. They are not spiritual canisters that contain power in and of themselves. The same goes for religious iconography like statues: be they statues of Jesus Christ or Gautama Buddha. Religious followers are expected to use them as visual reference points to help them turn inward toward a communion with their own inner divinity.

In other words, when the Buddhist monk kneels down in prayer, he (like the Christian) is seeking God’s Kingdom with reverence and humility. And that is something Progressive Christians should not only support but welcome into our churches–recalling Jesus’s words that those who are not against us are with us (Mark 9:40).

Worship Services & How Progressive Christians Worship

When Progressive Christians talk about How We Worship, the discussion usually centers on the goings-on inside the Church walls. While Sunday worship services have an important role to play, what matters even more is the worship that happens during the course of our every-day lives. This daily interactive worship with our immediate neighbors and our inner divinity (Christ) concerned Jesus more than the performance of rituals.

Washing the feet of others (i.e. humbling ourselves in service to our community) is the kind of worship activity that mattered most to Jesus–much more than public hallelujahs¹ and orthodox practices such as recognizing the Sabbath or submitting oneself to formal baptism, a ritual which he told John that they must “suffer” for religion’s sake² not because God demands it–because, after all, rituals only point toward spiritual truths; they are not truths in and of themselves.

When we Christians focus too much on worship rituals in defining “how we worship” we run the risk of elevating the metaphor to God-ordained law, just as the Pharisees did with the Sabbath. Progressive Christian Reverends should begin using the power of the pulpit on Sunday mornings to begin talking more about the daily bread of worship: worship that includes being better stewards of the Garden; caring better for the bodies God has granted us; listening closer for the sound of the Holy Spirit as it struggles to make itself known within us and others; and attending more generously to the needs of family, friends, co-workers, and community as a whole.

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1. “When you pray, you are not to behave as hypocrites do. They like to pray standing in the synagogues and at the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. There, I tell you, is their reward! – Matthew 6:5 [↩]
2. “Suffer it be so for the present,” Jesus answered, “since it is fitting for us thus to satisfy every claim of religion.” Matthew 3:15 [↩]