Pointing to the Real--July 12, 2021

Pointing to the Real--July 12, 2021

"Now if he [Jesus] were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. They offer worship in a sanctuary that is a sketch and shadow of the heavenly one; for Moses, when he was about the erect the tent, was warned, 'See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.' But Jesus has now obtained a more excellent ministry, and to that degree he is the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted through better promises." [Hebrews 8:4-6]

We know that God doesn't live "up front" at the altar of our local church building.  We do know that, right?  

And we know, too, that the particular style or design of your congregation's sanctuary isn't "the ONE right way" to make a space for worship, too--right?  

You may well have personal tastes and aesthetic preferences for stained glass and stonework or a stage and screens.  You may feel most at home in an old country church with clapboard siding, or the gilded walls of the Orthodox style, filled with incense, or meeting in a storefront space in folding chairs.  You may feel most at home with a praise band full of guitar players and a drumset, or with the rich harmonies of chanting voices echoing up to a vaulted ceiling, or the hot densely-packed pews of a Baptist church with swaying Gospel choirs and dancing in the aisles. Any of those may be true for you and your personal style... but we're all clear that none of these are God's officially endorsed style.  These are our constructs, our traditions, and our attempts to create space where we can pray and praise.  But none of them is so sturdy a construction as to box God in.  Each of our many and varied ways of building spaces for God's people to gather may have strengths and weaknesses, and some may have a lot of weaknesses compared to their strengths (this may be my bias here, but to me, the megachurch, stage-and-screen design is mostly weakness, and very little strength, but I ain't God here).  But none of our designs for worship space is actually able to contain God, anymore than any of our church buildings an contain ALL the air in the atmosphere.  They are full of air, but not of ALL the air.  Our worship spaces are full of God, but no single one of them has ALL of God.

That was true even when we the worship space in question was "The Temple" in Jerusalem--the place the ancient storytelling recalled as the "one place" you were supposed to go for sacrifice and festival observance in Israel's memory.  That's what the writer of Hebrews is driving at here in these verses, and it's a big deal he's making here.  That's because, unlike your local church building, which was probably designed by some architect in an office (or, like a good many small country churches, may have been just built by members as a one-room rectangle with a pitched roof and a steeple to look like every other church they'd ever seen), the Temple in Jerusalem had details described in the scriptures themselves for how to build them. They had designs given in the Torah for their lampstands and curtains, the size and the shape of the rooms, and the correct vestments for the priests to wear--all of it, as the storytelling went, dictated by God for how to do it.

And yet, even though there were actual Bible verses telling the ancient Israelites how to make their worship space, the writer of Hebrews wants to remind them, that our buildings, altars, and all the rest are pointers, not cages, for God.  The design of our worship spaces will communicate something about the God we say we believe in--church architecture can't help but convey something of our theology.  But whether it is good theology we are communicating or not is a separate question. And just like no catechism or theology book (or even the Bible) can contain all that there is to be said about God, no single building can say all that there is to be said about God through its design.  A massive Gothic cathedral may move you to awe and praise of the God who is expansive and majestic.  A modest and humble one-room church building may speak to you of the simplicity and unpretentious nature of God.  A church with clear glass windows may remind you of the beauty of God's world outside the walls, and a church with stained glass depictions of Bible stories may teach the faith to those who can't read.  But none of them gets it all.

Just that reminder is important. Especially in a time when we can be so territorial, so parochial, and so divided about who's doing it "right."  It's easy to slide into thinking that church can't "happen" unless it's with wooden pews and a communion rail, or a high altar and chanted liturgy, or a forty-minute sermon and an altar call, or fifty-three repetitions of a one-line praise chorus.  But each of our ways of worshiping God is at best a sketch--and only a sketch--of the fullness of who God is.  Some sketches may fill in a lot of details, and others will be pretty impressionistic. Others, you sometimes get the sense that the message is that God shows up even in the least likely places--but even that says something important about God.  And again, each of us  our own traditions is going to have reasons for why we choose the approach and styles we do--as a Lutheran Christian there are commitments I have to a space that centers the Word and the sacraments, the font and the table, over other kinds of designs.  There are reasons I believe that the megachurchy stage-and-band approach mostly communicates bad theology rather than good, but even with those beliefs, I have to concede that "my way" doesn't contain or constrict God, and that God reserves the right to show up and be present in places that aren't designed the way I would choose.

Today, then, maybe it's enough to remember that God is bigger that each of us and each of our traditions.  And with that, it's important to remember that whatever styles, traditions, and designs shape our ways of worshiping God, none of them actually is God.  Just like a sketch of a person is not the same as the actual person, no matter how realistic the detail, our spaces for worshiping God are not themselves God.  Remembering that allows us to see that God is showing up for the people at the church down the street, or across the country, or across the ocean, and God doesn't need your or my permission to do that. God just shows up.

Keep your eyes open, then, today.  Pay attention to how your tradition's style and approach speak of God, and also how your neighbor's tradition speaks of God as well.  And let the sketches all around us keep pointing us to the Real Thing.

Lord God, help us to use our traditions as channels that point us to you, so that we never confuse our religious structures with the Real You.  Help us to love you fully, both through the traditions we bring and beyond them.