SYMBOLS OVERTURNED: CHURCH, CRISIS, AND THE POWER OF SACRAMENT
The cross of Notre Dame cathedral standing amidst the rubble following a catastrophic fire in April 2019. Photo courtesy of the AP.
Thus saith the Lord God; Remove the diadem, and take off the crown: this shall not be the same: exalt him that is low, and abase him that is high.
I will overturn, overturn, overturn it: and it shall be no more, until he come whose right it is; and I will give it him. (Ezekiel 21:26-27)
What is a certainty, now? What has ever been certain? There is a persistent tension in our faith tradition between trusting in that which is eternal and contending with that which is subject to demise. Too often we mistake the latter—the work of our own hands, the proud and brittle imagination of our hearts—for the former, only for God to abruptly remind us of the transience of even our most cherished constructs. In his proclamation, the prophet Ezekiel offers just such a reminder: the overturning of the Lord undercuts the vacuous claim of invulnerability to which the king of Israel clings, warning him that even God’s chosen people are subject to ruin.
Wise and fearsome words for us now as they were then, for we in the West are in a new season of overturnings, both within the church and beyond it. Old certainties about power and privilege are being reexamined. Institutional structures feel precarious. Long-held images, stories, and uses of language suddenly feel insufficient, even suspect. We are witnessing not just a series of unsettling events in our news feed, but a concurrent overturning of assumptions and practices, especially for those who have long inhabited the centers of cultural influence. We are experiencing a symbolic crisis.
I do not mean a crisis that is symbolic, but a crisis undergone by a culture’s symbols themselves—civic and religious symbols that no longer function broadly or well, whose signification is degraded or lost in the swirl of historical and cultural change. For we must remember that symbols consist of “two realities set in relationship: the symbol itself and the deeper and richer reality it evokes.” (1) Symbols communicate something beyond themselves; but when the external reality no longer corresponds to its symbolic vessel, a crisis results. For example, in the above passage from Ezekiel, the crown is a symbol of both the autonomous power of Israel and the Davidic covenant between God and the nation’s kings. Israel, however, has betrayed its covenantal responsibilities and will soon be subjugated by the Babylonians. Thus the crown, once a symbol of divine favor and flourishing, is “overturned” into a symbol that corresponds with the present reality: Israel’s judgment and destruction.
Watching the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January, we saw the overturning of another crown. The storming of that civic space was not just an isolated instance of political violence, but an inflection point in the continued fragmentation of the American symbolic landscape—a landscape, we often claim, that was shaped by Enlightenment principles of rationality and equality, memorialized in solid, symmetrical white marble. But this symbol, it seems, no longer fully coheres with the realities of the society it claims to represent, and we begin to wonder whether it ever truly did. Part of my own grief in watching those events unfold on January 6th, in addition to the loss of human life and the interruption of a democratic process, was the sense that we were crossing further into uncharted territory for which we had no solid reference point, into a realm where, as the poet W.B. Yeats once wrote, “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (2)—a realm where our usual symbols and stories could not sustain us.
Not that such a crisis is always and only bad. Sometimes, the interrogation and deconstruction of longstanding symbolism is urgently needed. It can be the overturning, truth-telling work of God’s righteousness. The widespread racial justice movement that erupted after the death of George Floyd last year, for example, is a direct and necessary challenge not only to certain policies and laws, but also to the tacit symbolic structures of white hegemony that endure in the national mythology of the United States. In such instances, the overturning—which is to say, the accountability visited upon a corrupted symbolic framework—cannot come soon enough.
In such instances, when symbols have become instruments of exploitation, decadence and moral drift, it is holy work to overturn them. Even in the symbolic center par excellence, the Temple in Jerusalem, Jesus overturned the tables of the money-changers, challenging the prevailing assumptions of an equitable and just system for honoring God in that time and place. And thus it seems clear: if a symbol of goodness has been corrupted and wielded for harm, it ought to be questioned, reclaimed, or laid to rest.
And yet the vulnerability of our symbols—their propensity to be undermined or reshaped, even necessarily so—can be costly, because in their overturning we lose our ability to take part in a shared understanding of what is real and enduring, at least until a new system of symbols takes its place. In the absence of the common narrative or identity that such symbols provide, there is much uncertainty or even, as we saw during the Capitol insurrection, an existential threat to the fundamental principles and processes upon which we rely. As Jesus observed and Lincoln paraphrased, “no city or house divided against itself will stand” (Matt. 12:25).
The decline of participation in traditional worshipping communities is indicative of this. For while it may be true that God is doing a new thing in our churches, it also seems to be true that the old thing—the institution which we have inherited—has some qualities that we should not be too quick to discard. The diminishment and closure of parishes, for example, signifies the loss of one of the few remaining spaces in our society where people can come together to make some sense out of their existence, to lean on the durability of symbols and stories, and to be reminded that life is more than an echo-chamber of individualistic fears and assertions. Solely digital conversation spaces, a steadily advancing social media influencer culture, and the privatization of spirituality cannot meet these needs on their own.
But here is some good news: the church is equipped to contend with such a moment as this. In fact, we are perhaps better equipped than any other institution or community, not because we are adept at navigating the power of symbolism, but because we have something greater than symbols—something deeper—to guide us. We have something very particular which will both assist us in these necessary moments of symbolic deconstruction and which will console us in the face of total symbolic disintegration, even that of our own church institutions. It is something that will withstand any pandemic, any election outcome, any crumbling certainty, any other vagary of history.
We have Jesus, united to us in the bonds of Baptism and broken and outpoured for us in the Eucharist. Not symbolically or representationally, but truly present. We have sacrament.
Sacraments, unlike symbols, effect the very reality that they evoke. The water of baptism and the bread and wine of the Eucharist are conduits of God’s grace, not just reminders of it. Unlike the evolving and subjective function of symbols, a Christian sacrament has no disjuncture between object, significance, and effect. It is, instead, all of these things at once, independent of our comprehension or approbation. As the vehicle of God’s ongoing and direct encounter with creation, as God’s own initiative, sacrament invites our participation in its dynamically unfolding, Christic patterns of being—patterns that are given to us, not constructed by us.
What a consolation this is, especially now, when our symbolic constructions seem to be falling apart all around us. Because in the sacramental reality of the church we are reminded that although there is always change—although symbols may degrade and the world may seem to be splintering—even then, the truth of God does not change. God’s Sacraments cannot be disfigured by our malice or apathy or fear. They can’t be despoiled of grace by anything we might have done or left undone (and God knows, in our brokenness, we’ve tried). As Augustine argued in the Donatist controversy, (3) Sacraments do not rely upon our holiness or our moral purity in order to be true and efficacious. They simply are, for they are simply of God. And God, blessedly, is not a symbol. God is, and in the Sacraments, the is-ness of God is ours to partake of and to share with one another directly.
So even when God does “overturn, overturn, overturn” our certainties, when the symbols of better, surer times lie in tatters, the church persists, with determination, sustained not by its signs and symbols alone but by its sacramental life, until the inbreaking of the enduring Divine purpose—the arrival of the One who wears the true, immovable crown of righteousness.
This realization gives us a new lens through which to view the uncertainties of the moment. Although we might indeed have a role to play in either advocating for (or cautioning against) the disposal of certain cultural symbols, the sacramental church has a more fundamental vocation than this. We must consistently and unsentimentally ask ourselves how our use of symbolic language (whether it be God’s love, or justice, or the Lordship of Christ) is undergirded by sacramentally-shaped actions. Have those Eucharistic patterns of life, death, and resurrection formed the character of our days and the life of our communities? If we possess privilege, have we put our bodies and our reputations on the line for the sake of marginalized communities? Have we actually spent time breaking bread—not just dispensing charity—with those that our society would like to ignore or forget? Have we made ourselves poorer so that others might have enough to survive?
In other words, have we embodied the Prayer Book’s Baptismal covenant in our relationships and in our daily, unremarkable choices, or do we just preach and sing about it on Sundays? For “not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Matt. 7:21). God’s reality belongs not to the one with the biggest, shiniest symbol—the crown that will eventually slip—but to the one who has given themself over to a sacramentally-shaped life—a life that is more than mere words and suggestions.
None of us will do this perfectly (that’s why we have the sacramental grace of Confession), but without a wholehearted attentiveness to living out God’s embodied Word, without a capitulation to the quiet demands of sacrament rather than the thrill of achieving influence or prestige, the church risks simply being one more voice in the culture wars rather than the instrument of God’s pathway out of them.
This demands everything we have and everything we ever hoped to have. And, as we make our way through Lent towards Calvary, Jesus’s own example indicates that it may not succeed in a manner comprehensible to us, at least not in the ways that we can measure. But if we learn nothing else from the faltering symbols of this generation, it is this: that there must be more to life than what we do or do not understand at any given moment. That beyond symbol, or perhaps beneath it, there is something deep and unspoken and real. It cannot be explained, but neither can it be desecrated. It can only be lived. It is Sacrament, and no matter how much is overturned, it endures.
George Guiver CR, “Sign and Symbol,” The Study of Liturgy and Worship, 33.
W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
Joan O’Grady, Early Christian Heresies, 81.
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