Budd Schulberg preached a powerful sermon in ‘On the Waterfront’

Old movie buffs had reason to mourn Budd Shulberg this past week. He wrote the screenplay for the 1954 Academy Award Best Picture, On the Waterfront. Besides being a movie about mob corruption on the docks of New Jersey, On the Waterfront preached a powerful sermon –especially pertinent to an Episcopal Church determined to focus on mission — on how we are to live; not hidden in the church, but alive as the church in the world.

Early in the movie, kindly, disinterested Father Barry, played by Karl Malden, pronounces last rites over the longshoreman Joey, who had just been thrown off the roof of his Hoboken row house by a couple of goons because he was going to testify to the crime commission about the mob corrupting his local union.

“Time and faith are great healers,” Father Barry says to Joey’s enraged sister, Edie, but she’ll have none of it. “Time and faith?” she cries. “My brother’s dead and you stand there talking about time and faith?”

“Edie,” he responds, “I do what I can. I’m in the church when you need me.” So often still, this is the church’s response to the needs of the world. We wimpily mutter, “We did what we could,” and retreat into our sealed-off sanctuaries with the inch-thick stained glass that keeps the outside world at bay.

But Edie delivers an indictment current still: “You’re in the church if I need you?'” she cries back. And then the line worth the rental: “Did you ever hear of a saint hiding in a church?”

She’s right. We don’t remember Mother Theresa because she hid in the church, saying her prayers, but because she left the church and waded into the streets of Calcutta to touch the untouchable. President Barack Obama isn’t giving Archbishop Desmond Tutu the Presidential Medal of Freedom because he spends six hours a day in prayer, but because he had the courage to face the evils of apartheid and, while risking his life, proclaim the dignity of every human being.

Our mission is not to go to Church, but to be sent from Church. Our worship must not be a destination, but a launching pad. The most important word in a liturgy must be the last one from the lips of the deacon: “Go!”

And each of us needs to stop trying to be on the saintly dream team. Leave the all-stars to the future editions of saints’ calendars, and focus on the smallest of actions, in the real world, that affect the mission of God.
Going to church doesn’t make us saintly outright; being the church in the world is our best shot.

The saints of the church, every day, teach school, empty hospital bedpans, care for elderly parents, litigate cases, drive carpool for other parents who can’t leave work, bake casseroles for the neighbors, and get arrested for civil disobedience at protest rallies. Up against the overwhelming threat of global warming—the environmental equivalent of mob corruption in On the Waterfront—a simple saintly action is taking extra care to put all qualifying items into the recycling bin.

The saintliness of our actions comes from the “why we do what we do:” our response to the Gospel. One of the reasons we come to the altar in a church is for grace and strength so we can find God on the altars of the world where we live our lives. Our task is not to wonder how to do something Godly in life, but, with wonder and awe, to be Godly in all we do with life.

In On the Waterfront, Edie delivers to Father Barry the sermon we all desperately need to hear: Give up the institutional needs of the church and become the church in the world.

Edie converts Father Barry. Not long after Joey’s death, he stands over another dead body lying in the belly of a cargo ship, killed by the goons, because he too was going to tell the truth to power, as we all are called to do. Father Barry tells the longshoremen listening that this death is another crucifixion of a righteous man, just like Jesus crucified at Calvary. “And anybody who sits around,” he preaches, “and lets it happen, keeps silent about something he knows has happened, shares the guilt of it, just as much as the Roman soldier who pierced the flesh of our Lord to see if he was dead.”

A stevedore shouts, “Go back to your church, Father!”

“Boys,” he shouts back, “This is my church!”

Wherever we find ourselves each day — in our offices, at the kitchen table, on the streets and in the stores — is our church, demanding the saintliness sustained by the weekly remembrance of the life, death and resurrection of our Lord.