Sunday, June 04, 2006

The scent of holiness

There's a frequent visitor to our church and everyone agrees that he stinks. Or she, as the case may be--so far no one has managed to get close enough to determine the visitor's gender. It's kind of difficult to properly welcome a visitor who adds a certain distinct tang to the service but insists on hiding under the sanctuary during daylight hours .

A skunk is what we have, or perhaps skunks. Apparently the crawl-space under the sanctuary is an ideal nesting place for a mother skunk nurturing young 'uns; this morning the chair of the church board kindly invited me to crawl in there and find out for myself, but since my experience with skunks has been limited to road kill, I deferred that pleasure to someone more, um, qualified.

Unlike many other problems facing today's churches, a skunk under the sanctuary cannot be ignored, nor would it do any good to appoint a committee to study the matter and come up with five bullet points and a new creed. I'm not aware of any clear Biblical guidelines regarding skunks--there's no "suffer the little vermin to come under the sanctuary and forbid them not," so it's difficult to answer the question What Would Jesus Do? The Wesleyan quadrilateral is no more helpful, and the Methodist Social Principles wisely steer clear of the controversial topic of poison vs. traps. Suppose we kill the skunk; then we're left with a dead skunk under the sanctuary, and I doubt that a dead skunk would smell any less pungent than a live one. But then suppose we trap it: we will then have a trap full of angry skunk, not something you'd want to deal with while dressed in your church clothes.

I suppose the Christian thing to do is to turn the other cheek, to live and let live, to peacefully coexist with all God's creatures. If you sincerely believe that, send me your address--I'd be glad to send you a skunk by parcel post. Be careful opening the package, though; by the time he gets there he'll be very, very angry.

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