Last Minute Reflections

Now we are in Malpensa Airport on Friday Nov.19, seventeen days since we began this journey. We are bound for Paris, Minneapolis and Bismarck, with scarcely enough Euros left for coffee. When George Mattson came back from a summer of camping in Europe, he said his dominate impressions were of "Christ and War". I (George) might have to use three terms: Power, Money and Art.
In Rome, power, both ecclesiastical and secular
In Florence, Medici money
Art in both places, chasing the money.
It's a paradox; art, which we know is the most interior, private, lonely, driven activity on earth, is sustained by filthy lucre from popes and bankers who want their rooms decorated. I am thinking too of the sermon I might give Sunday, health permitting. I would begin with the BCP, since we are using the 1549 Rite this Sunday, but then move back to the Protestant Reformation, linking the prayer book to the fundamental shift wrought by Luther, from institutional faith to an individual one with people praying and reading scripture daily...scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone. But without the Church, all the Duomos in the world don't mean squat. But behind the Duomos is the vast clunking machinery of the church. Without that, it's hard to see how Luther would have had access even had a scripture.