Den økumeniske bønneuken for kristen enhet nærmer seg (18.-25. januar de fleste steder) og vi blir utfordra til å ha bl.a. bønnegudstjenester sammen med andre kristne – slik pave Benedikt skal 25/1 i Roma, i kirken St. Paulus utenfor murene.
Enkelte forslag til ting man kan gjøre sammen er ikke like gode; som f.eks. å avlyse alle søndagsgudstjenestene og heller gjøre en innsats for lokalsamfunnet den dagen. Katolikker forstår hvorfor dette er et helt sprøtt forslag, og hvis andre kristne ikke forstår det, viser de at de står langt borte fra oss – skriver F. Richard Neuhaus i First Things:
Faith in Action is a program sponsored by three leading evangelical organizations, World Vision, Outreach, and Zondervan publishers. It proposes that churches cancel their services on what it calls “outreach Sunday” and urge their members to use the time to engage in some form of community service instead. “A church that puts its faith into action focuses not on themselves but on Christ’s teaching and his divine example of compassion,” says Zondervan’s director of church engagement. “Our hope is that churches across the country will unite and show their community a true servant’s heart.”
To be sure, there are sabbatarians and other evangelicals who have a quite different understanding of the imperative of communal worship on the Lord’s Day. For the informed Catholic, the proposal of Faith in Action will be simply incomprehensible. The Church’s understanding of Sunday, from the apostolic era to the present, is comprehensively set forth in John Paul II’s 1998 apostolic letter Dies Domini (the Lord’s Day). It is precisely in the community gathered for worship, and most expressly in the Eucharist, that the Church “puts its faith into action,” “focuses on Christ’s teaching,” including the command to “do this” in remembrance of him, and offers its chief service (Greek: leitourgia) to God and to the world. The Eucharist is, in the words of the Second Vatican Council, “the source and summit” of the Church’s life. The observance of Dies Domini is not optional but constitutive. It is the supreme expression of “faith in action,” as is Christ’s presence with the gathered community the source of all other faithful actions.
I expect the misguided proposal of Faith in Action will have relatively few takers among evangelicals. But the fact that it is even proposed lends a measure of credibility to some people’s claim that evangelical and Catholic are two radically different and incompatible ways of being Christian.
(Det har blitt litt for mye uforsiktig kommentering på denne bloggen i det siste, antydninger om at alt protestantene driver med en ganske meningsløst o.l..
Mitt poeng med dette innlegget var ikke å latterliggjøre noen, men å vise at hvis noen kan tenke seg å droppe søndagsmessen – og jeg var borti slike synspunkter i min tid som luthersk prest – da har de et syn på kirken som er svært forsskjellig fra oss katolikker.)
Jeg husker et intervju med biskop Even Fogner i Borg for noen år siden om hva han skulle gjøre i påsken. Det året skulle han på fjellet med familien, men holde en «skiandakt» 1. påskedag. Da innså jeg at det nok er svært stor forskjeller på lutherske og katolske presters forhold til liturgi og helligdager…..