Jesus Takes Manhattan

At the end of last summer I borrowed a car and drove down to the Chesapeake Bay to celebrate the birthday of a filmmaker friend living in a teensy backwater beach town with his girlfriend. Going down, as the roaring highway melted to a two-lane road lined by drapes of kudzu, I didn’t know what to expect. My filmmaker friend–let’s call him Cecil, because we can–is uber-cultured, funny, witty, an oracle of great art recommendations, both low and high, who always seemed to me most at home in the jumbled, omnivorous marketplace of New York. Cecil’s girlfriend–uh, let’s say Simone?–who I hadn’t yet met, was the assistant pastor of a very small church, and lived in a house set on the edge of the church parking lot.

The plan was, crack open a few frosty beverages for Cecil’s birthday on Saturday night, rise bright and early to trudge across the parking lot for Simone’s sermon in the morning.

Simone and I got along easily and instantly in spite of the fact that she knew I was unrepentantly unrepentant. We had common music-circle friends from Richmond, she was droll and incisive and I was really looking forward to hearing her preach.

Except that I was also zinged with nerves: I hadn’t been to church since masquerading as a Christian at Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church. I didn’t know if I’d know how to behave among believers as a nonbeliever not pretending to believe.

I’d tried recently at a DC synagogue, having shown up to services in search of the warm-hug community and rigorous moral inquiry I’d profited from poaching at Falwell’s church, wanting a better fit for my true Jew-without-God identity. But I hadn’t done my research, and the synagogue was conservative, a pretty lousy fit for me. The seating separated men from women with a line of potted trees to prevent you from stealing lusty glances during the service, and the service itself was, ugh, about God: the rabbi used an awkward metal detector metaphor to illustrate that we should trust He exists even when we can’t prove it.

I was mega-uncomfortable. When the rabbi approached me as I waited in line to leave, introducing himself, horrifying me by ignoring my outstretched hand, I had a split-second moment of undercover relapse where I considered lying about my name.

I worried I’d feel as uncomfortable at Simone’s church, but Cecil was sure I’d enjoy it. He told me Simone’s sermons were eloquent, subtle, and drew on her deep reserves of cultural knowledge. And even though Cecil isn’t really a believer, he comes down from the pews during Communion and receives a blessing from Simone instead of receiving the body of Christ. He told me he feels a sense of peace when he receives it, and he likes participating in something that means so much to his girlfriend.

So on Sunday morning I threw a cardigan on over my tank top and crossed the parking lot to church with Cecil and another friend…Tyrone (I promise that’s my last pseudonym). We filed into church, greeting the parishioners (mostly nice, conservative-looking middle-aged people), took our pews, and after I fretted for ten minutes over not knowing how to arrange my limbs in the perfect way to express that even though I didn’t believe, I was still respectful and supportive; ten minutes where I was maybe a little too amped up on my efforts at transparency, all ready to reply to anyone who cared to inquire about my belief in God, “None for me, thank you!”–I started to relax.

The natural light floating into the sanctuary was summery and wonderful, filtered through leafy trees, and even though I didn’t participate in the liturgical call and response or the songs, I rose and sat with everyone else and felt fine doing so.

It was Simone’s sermon that put me most at ease. She based it on a scene from Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas in which Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis goes to find his ex-wife, now working as a stripper in a peep show. The sermon was weird and original, an engaging dissertation on forgiveness, even though it circled back on the familiar Christian blandicism, “You are free.”

I was so comfortable after the sermon that I even followed Cecil and Tyrone down to the altar during Communion, crossing my arms across my chest and closing my eyes as I knelt, hearing Simone and another minister pass down in my direction repeating, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven” (which I mistakenly heard as “the body of Christ, forever and ever”) and “the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” Simone touched me on the forehead, said a few words, and I shifted off the altar before the guy got to me with the cup of salvation.

What a change from the person I’d been before Thomas Road, when religion had been an electric rail. As far back as kindergarten I remember clamping my lips shut and pulling my hand off my heart for the “under God” part of the Pledge of Allegiance, joining back in with a word I liked, “indivisible,” but feeling annoyed and unaccommodated, not part of that indivisibility, even at 5 years old.

After church, Tyrone (also a filmmaker, based in Brooklyn) told me about a church he goes to in Manhattan, Redeemer Presbyterian. The preacher at his church was similar to Simone, he told me. He had a vast command of cultural references at the ready and a firm sense of the life-questions on the minds of New Yorkers, and Tyrone said it made going to church more like going to a lecture at Yale.

That characterization really lodged in my mind. One of the biggest, earliest hurdles I faced at Falwell’s church was the cultural one. When I started at church I didn’t look or talk or act like anyone I saw there: I wore skinny jeans, I drank wine; I liked open-ended movies and the bleak, hollow-eyed portraits of Egon Schiele; I was then reading Jeffrey Eugenides and the New York Times; I lived in crumbling old apartments and liked it that way, liked that the peeling paint and rusted faucets suggested generations living there before me. These differences weren’t superficial. They informed everything about how I behaved and thought and expressed myself, and it took me a long time to learn another culture well enough to participate in it.

I often wondered if it would have been easier to get into a rhythm at church if I’d already known the beat. I wondered if people with my cultural makeup who maybe didn’t have their belief-valve shut off like I do might be drawn to evangelical Christianity if it met them on their cultural terms.

This week New York Magazine did a great piece on the preacher Tyrone told me about, Tom Keller, who is building an evangelical brand in New York on precisely that idea.

Redeemer Presbyterian holds five Sunday services at three packed rented venues (in the morning, there are services at the Ethical Culture Society auditorium at 64th Street and Central Park West and at Hunter College’s capacious, 2,000-seat auditorium on 69th Street, between Park and Lexington; in the evening, there’s another service at Hunter and two at the First Baptist Church at 79th Street and Broadway). On any given Sunday, some 5,000 Manhattanites and fellow travelers hear Keller preach in person, and roughly 25,000 download his sermons every week from the church’s sophisticated website, redeemer.com. Late last year, Redeemer closed the deal on a permanent home at 150 West 83rd Street. What is now a defunct four-story parking garage is, in two years, set to become a $50 million modern worship center. The project is believed to be the first significant new church to be built in Manhattan since St. Peter’s went up, more than 30 years ago, next to what used to be known as the Citigroup Center.

Keller has also been building his brand in print. Last year, after his book The Reason for God hit No. 7 on the New York Times’ nonfiction best-seller list, his publisher, Dutton, conceived the idea for a new Redeemer imprint. Keller’s latest book, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters, out in October, speaks directly to the concerns of New York and New Yorkers. The book, like the sermons it’s derived from, delivers a sharp spiritual rebuke of the very things—ambition and achievement—that brought many, if not most, of us here.

Why Are So Many New Yorkers Flocking to Evangelical Christian Preacher Tim Keller? — New York Magazine http://nymag.com/news/features/62374/#ixzz0YlFGBeg4

The article is worth reading in its entirely, and I plan to write a little more about Keller in the coming days, but the most relevant idea as far as this little blog post in concerned is that Keller–using his fluency in the cultural idioms of New Yorkers, as well as his unburdening message that hyperactive achievement is not the meaning of life–has gotten lots and lots of New Yorkers showing up Sunday, even the ones who disagree with Keller’s stance against premarital sex, abortion, and gay marriage. That’s some clever formula.