Remodeling Faith part one

Guard me, O God, for I shelter in You.  Psalm 16:1

This week we began renovating, re-imagining, and re-creating our sanctuary.  Since last Sunday, furniture was stored, pews were moved, carpet was torn out, stubborn tack strips were pried up, nails pulled, and the floor from the late 1800s was revealed.  All of that transpired in approximately forty-eight hours.  

Yet, if you walk into that transformed sanctuary this morning, there is something still sacred and familiar.  Last Sunday I shared that the first time I walked into the sanctuary at the church I serve, I was speechless.  I was swept up in the beauty that was beyond words and felt the sacred stirring.  The same could be said today.  Only now stirring in the air with the Spirit is dust.  Now, get swept up are still little bits of construction debris.  Now when you talk there is an echo...echo...echo...of your voice, like when God called out to Elijah in a still small voice in 1 Kings 19. In this passage Elijah came out of that cave he was hiding in, he encountered first the wind, earthquake, and fire. Those are loud natural events and I wonder if the echos of those events still rang in his ears, so that God's normal voice felt like a whisper.  

When the Psalmist today talks about God being a shelter, a refuge, a sanctuary, she is returning to one of her favorite images in the Psalms.  On the one hand, we need a place where we can escape from and feel protected from the problems of this world.  Right now our Congress has shutdown causing thousands of people to be without pay, mostly the political pundits just keep on wanting to tell us what the scores is.  There are people who are hungry and suffering.  There is too much violence in the world.  So, sometimes, like Elijah, we want to run away, escape.  Elijah was fleeing for his life because Jezebel, the queen of Israel, worshiped Baal, a foreign god.  In chapter 18, Elijah defeats the priest of Baal in a mountain top showdown.  But then, realizing he offended the queen, he ran so fast there were skid-marks in the sand.  How many of us run to church in order to just get away from it all?  Not that this is bad.  We need safe places where we can catch our breath.  We need places where we can be honest and open.  We need places in this world where we can let down our carefully guarded public persona, and be vulnerable.

And yet, when church is a place of escape, it can also become compartmentalized.  We start to think of our faith and our "real" life as two separate things.  We have Sunday, then we have Monday through Saturday.  And it isn't too long before we start compartmentalizing other parts of our life too.  We have work, then we have our church committee.  We have our bank account, then we have our pledge.  We have our time, then we have the time we give to the church.  Yet, God did not craft us, create us to be anything less than whole and holy loved.  God is interested in our whole life.  One pastor I listen to says that there is no such thing as your spiritual life and your real life, they are the same.  Our life is our spiritual life, like some tangled string of Christmas lights you cannot untwist. So, we cannot pray, "Thy kingdom come" on Sunday and then go to work on Monday and live as though those words down echo in our soul challenging our words and actions.

We need to re-imagine and renovate our faith to notice God's presence not only in the sanctuary we call churches, but also to see the shelter of our home as sacred space; the roof at our office as sacred space; the walls where we volunteer as sacred space.  This will take some work, perhaps even harder than pulling up a stubborn tack strip.  But, I also sense this kind of work has more than a trace of God's grace.  Prayers for you and for me to notice God here in our lives every moment this week with that still small voice calling us into our real life where whole life can be found.

Blessings ~