Sacred Spaces

There are two kinds of sacred spaces in our lives - those created by God and those graced by Him.

God creates some sacred spaces. He opens an opportunity, forms a space, makes a path, and invites us to enter into it. It's something He has done, or is doing, and He is calling us to be a part of it with Him. These sacred spaces are often intimidating; they often require courage. Nothing God asks us to do is usually easy. We must dare to believe, dare to hope, dare to trust, and boldly step into the sacred space that God has placed before us. 

As difficult as it is, most of us reach a point in our lives where we become fairly consistent in understanding what God is asking of us and knowing how we must respond. We get better, as time goes by, at believing, hoping, trusting, daring. And we are often blessed for doing so. (Which is not to say that such blessing comes without trial. It can, but it does not necessarily.)

But God doesn't create all of our sacred spaces. Some of them, He simply graces.

Here's the difference: in the first scenario, it is God who creates the space and invites us to step into it. In the second, it is we who create the space and invite God in. This doesn't take courage so much as vulnerability. It still takes faith, hope, trust. It still takes believing. It takes prayer and discipline. But it mostly takes us being willing to lay bare a place in our lives and call God into it. It's hard. It's scary.

And it sounds kind of weird, right? If we are supposed to be followers of Jesus, then we ought to be prepared for His sacred spaces. We ought to be ready to go where He calls us and not demand our own agenda, not even have our own agenda. A lot of churches, for a lot of time, have been preaching this very thing - that if we want to be God's, we give up ourselves wholly for Him.

What we have to consider, however, is whether we've truly been called as followers of Jesus or whether, rather, we have been called as His disciples. Are we supposed to blindly walk the Sea of Galilee, doing what our Teacher does, soaking in His every word? Or are we called to share our lives with Him?

Jesus spent a lot of time eating at other people's tables. He wasn't always the one feeding them; sometimes, they fed Him. They invited Him into their private spaces, into their homes, into the intimate places of their hearts. He came, and by His presence, created a sacred space between them. 

There's something important about God that happens in our empty spaces as He makes them sacred. No longer is He simply the God whom we pursue; He shows Himself as the God who pursues us. No longer is it simply we who love Him and desire to do good for His name; it is He who loves us and is doing good in ours. He's doing good in us. 

I'm taking all of this from a prayer I wrote a couple of weeks ago in a moment of piercing repentance. As I look back over my life, I realize that I'm not too shabby at stepping into the sacred spaces God has created for me. Courage, I have, at least in enough of a measure to believe that if it ever came to it, I could have more. I love God enough to go with Him.

But I questioned, as I considered that prayer, whether I loved God at all if I did not have the vulnerability to let Him love me. Of all the sacred spaces I have in my life, the overwhelming majority of them have been spaces created by God. Meanwhile, I sit here with a load of broken places that desperately need graced by Him, and I'm struck at how seldom I invite Him into them. Maybe because right now, they don't feel so sacred.

It's a hard thing to think about, how often we shut God out of our lives. How often we refuse to host Him at our table. How often we fail to open our homes to Him. It's more difficult, I think, to believe, to hope, to trust when we know the depths of the darkness in which we sit. It sounds noble to think about a life lived in God's places, a journey along His path, a series of altars in the places where God has called us and we have dared to go. It sounds like faith, doesn't it?

It does, but there's a haunting emptiness to it. And not to spit in the face of so much of our Christian teaching, but I don't want to live God's life. I wasn't created to live God's life. I was created to live my life; you were created to live yours. For Him. And the best way to do that is in both courage and vulnerability. It is in giving yourself to God and opening yourself to Him. It's in stepping into the sacred spaces He's created in your path...

...and inviting Him to grace those spaces that gnaw at your heart.

How many sacred spaces has God created in your life lately? 

And how many have you given Him the opportunity to grace?

Altars

There's something else we need to consider about all the sacred things we do, all the altars we try to build in our daily lives in the hopes that God will visit them:

That's not how altars work.

Throughout the Old Testament, people were setting up altars all over the place. Abraham built one on the mountain. Moses sketched one into the Tabernacle. Solomon built one in the Temple. When the people crossed the river safely, they set up an altar. When brothers were reconciled to one another, they erected an altar. An altar here, an altar there, an altar everywhere...that God had already shown up. 

Altars were not invitations; they were remembrances. They were markers for the people to remember what God had done in a certain place. They were spaces for the people to come back and know that, at least once, at some point in time, God was here. He was right here. They looked at the altar and remembered what God had done for them. They prayed, offered sacrifices, thanked God at the places that had His presence all over them.

The altars didn't make the ground sacred; they were simply made on sacred ground.

And then, there's us. We spend our lives trying to do the sacred things, trying to do the holy things, and hoping that when we do, God will show up. Our churches have become houses of this. We go to church - a sacred thing, we think - hoping that God shows up. That's not what church is for. Church is a place where we come to remember, to acknowledge, to celebrate the God among us. How easily we forget that.

But there is also an altar in the Temple, and this cannot be neglected, either. We have to have altars in our lives; God's plans make that very clear. They wouldn't be littered throughout His story if there wasn't something important about them. That something is the remembering. 

It's like making markers throughout our lives, places we can go back to when times get tough or areas we're likely to encounter again and again. The people crossed the River, but they also came back to the River. When they did, they saw an altar - a sign of what God had done in that place. And they worshiped God in that place.

I'm not about to go stacking stones in the middle of the Wal-Mart. I'm not going to build an altar on the side of the road. You can't follow the drips of the blood offering through my house and find any place particularly meaningful. We don't set up a lot of altars in the world any more. Just in our churches, and we've nearly lost those to idol worship (worship of the churches themselves, or of worship itself, or of doctrine or of style or whatever). But we set up altars in our hearts. Or, at least, we should.

We ought to remember that moment when God told us who we are. When He answered our piercing questions and gave us that bit of confidence that we needed. It's locked into our muscle memory, the way we stood a little taller that moment, the way we smiled without knowing we were, the way we breathed a little deeper and slowed down a little bit because it was all okay. We can go back to that moment. We can go back to the way that felt. And we can worship God at that place, at the place where He spoke to us in such a powerful way. And more importantly, we can worship God out of that place like Levites serving at the altar in the Temple. This becomes the place from which we serve Him. 

We ought to remember that time that God rescued us. When He snatched us away from whatever was about to destroy us. It's locked into our hearts, the way we trusted a little deeper that day. The way that we fell a little softer. The way that we let ourselves go, knowing His tender hands would hold us. We can go back to the way that felt. And we can worship God at that place, at the place that He rescued us. And more importantly, we can worship God out of that place. This becomes the place from which we serve Him.

Our lives, our stories, are littered with altars, if we've taken the time to build them, just like the stories of the Old Testament. We're full of places that we keep coming back to, places where we know exactly what happened. Places where we understood exactly who God is. It's important to build those places up as places of worship, places both to worship at and to worship out of. Places to remember Him and to serve Him. When we do that, we find that we don't need to keep building altars to bring the presence of God here; we have plenty already to know that He already is. 

Our altars don't make our lives sacred. Only God does that. But on our sacred grounds, we make altars. 

Lest we forget. 

Mountains and Altars

Sometimes, I just don't know what to do with the God in me. With the measure of God in me, that is.

There's a song by Brandon Heath that has what I think is one of the most powerful lyrics in Christian music. The song is "Your Love," and the lyric says: I tried to satisfy the hunger, but I never got it right. I never got it right. So I climbed a mountain, built an altar.

And I think there's where most of us go; I know it's where I go. Mountains and altars. We start doing the hard things or we start doing the "sacred" things and hope that somehow, these things will bring us to the Someone our hearts are longing for. 

We climb mountains, thinking, well, Abraham climbed a mountain. On Abraham's mountain, God provided. Moses climbed a mountain. On Moses's mountain, God was present. Jesus climbed a mountain. On Jesus's mountain, God sustained. All these prophets, all these fathers of the faith, all these holy men climbed mountains and they always found God there. Maybe...just maybe...I should climb a mountain.

So we set ourselves to work doing the hard things because no mountain is easy. We push ourselves to extremes, take ourselves to our limits, climb until the air is so thin that we can hardly breathe, and we start to think we can hardly make it. Until suddenly we look up and realize we've made it, but there's nothing there. There's nothing at the top of this mountain but hypoxia. All the air has been taken away from us, our very life hangs in the balance, and we're staring into emptiness as far as the eye can see. What gives?

It's rather simple, really; these are not our mountains. This is not the place to where God has called us. Abraham, Moses, Jesus, the others - these men were called to the mountain; they didn't just go. They didn't climb mountains hoping, praying. They climbed mountains knowing because they'd already been told. So many of us spend our lives looking for God the hard way and He's never called us to do it. We won't find Him on the mountain unless He's told us that's where He'll be.

Nobody in the Scriptures ever climbed a mountain and found God by accident. Want to know where He really is? Ask the guys on the road to Emmaus. Ask the guys who were just walking along when God joined them. They were going from one place to another, from one journey to home. They had both feet firmly on the ground and they weren't doing the hard thing; they were doing the usual thing. They were doing the normal thing. They were doing the thing that they would actually do, and God joined them there. And when He did? There was enough fresh air in their lungs that they could actually talk to Him. 

We don't need mountains. Not unless God calls us to them.

And we don't need altars. We don't need to do the "sacred" things to find the presence of God. It's too easy for us to set up the sacred things as idols. We pray, read the Bible, go to church so faithfully, so hungrily that we don't even realize that we've come to believe more in prayer than in the God who hears us, more in the Bible than in the God who wrote it, more in going to church than going to the Cross. All of a sudden, our altars reveal themselves as shrines. We've done what seems sacred and have fallen wholly into the sacrilegious. 

Altars, like mountains, are not simply places where God hangs out, waiting for us. You've heard about the altar call? Well, that's real. You have to be called to the altar. Even the ordained priests in the time of the Temple had to be called to the altar; they had to be invited in. It wasn't a place you could simply go and find God. God had to call you there. God has to call you to the sacred things.

That's a tough pill for most of us to swallow. It just makes sense that God would be in the sacred things, doesn't it? But consider this: how many persons did Jesus encounter in the Temple? Not many, not persons whose stories we are given. He found them at the well, drawing water. He found them on the seashores. He found them in trees. (Okay, maybe just one guy in a tree. Let's be honest, though - if I thought I might see Jesus better, I'd probably climb a tree.) He wasn't waiting for them to do the sacred things, for them to come on holy ground; He met them on common ground and made it holy.

We don't need altars. Not unless God calls us to them.

Then what are we supposed to do? What do we do with the spiritual hunger when we're longing for more and that emptiness is gnawing at us? What do we do when all we can think of is to climb mountains and build altars?

We do the faithful thing. We do the normal thing. We do the usual thing and keep our eyes peeled for the God who comes beside us. We take fresh air into our lungs and prepare to speak should we be given the chance. We do the common things, on common ground, and trust that God, in His presence, will make it holy. We do what we do and let God do what He does. 

If He calls us to the mountain, we climb a mountain. If He calls us to the altar, we go. But if He does not, we stay. We live and love and breathe right where He's got us because it is here that He's most likely to show up. It is here where He will meet us. 

Raisin Cakes

God says the darnedest things sometimes. Example? Hosea 3:

The the Lord told me, 'Love your wife again, even though she is loved by others and has committed adultery. Love her as I, the Lord, love the Israelites, even though they have turned to other gods and love to eat raisin cakes.'

Be honest - how many of you have had the "raisin cakes" talk with your husband or your wife? Clearly, it's fairly common.... And I read something like this and I can't help but laugh because it's one of those moments when God is saying something very powerful and yet, the language...the language is kind of slang. It's rooted deeply in culture and unless you look beyond what God has said, you miss out on what He is saying.

It's not about raisin cakes. (And thankfully not because we're coming up on fruitcake season and, well, who doesn't love fruitcake? Or raisins?) Raisin cakes, in the cultural context of Hosea, were closely associated with a person's fertility. It was believe that you could increase your chances of conceiving by consuming raisin cakes. It would be like today when we give advice to men about choosing boxers or briefs to...assist their little swimmers. It was one of those old wives' tales, perhaps with a bit of a religious component but manifested more as superstition than anything else, to help a woman in her longing for life. 

What God is opposed to in all of this is not the desire to bring forth life but the belief that life can come apart from Him. What He says when He says that He still loves Israel even though they eat raisin cakes is that He continues to love His people even when they look for life outside of Him.

Most of us don't eat a lot of raisin cakes, but we do look for life outside of God. We look for life in all sorts of things - in our work, in our families, in our social status, in our churches, even. We look for life defined in life's terms and have stopped listening to the Giver of Life and the language of love through which He speaks to us. We believe in life's definitions by superstition, trusting that the right series of moves or the right arrangement of pieces or the things that we do or don't do in correct or incorrect ways will bring us life to the fullest. 

But Jesus says it is He who brings life to the fullest. He, and only He.

What is life to the fullest? If we take God at His word in Hosea, it is life in the covenant of Love. It is life wrapped in faithfulness. It is a life graced by forgiveness. It is a passionate pursuit that cannot be turned away. It is the love of a God who loves even the prostitute, because she is beautiful to Him even while she's breaking His heart. It is life in the love of a God who is lovestruck and lovesick. But it's not pathetic; it's pure. God is lovesick over you.

Think about where you find life, about where you go looking for it. Think about what it means to be living and loved, and living loved. Are you feasting at the table God has prepared for you, the wedding banquet of the bridgegroom and His church?

Or are you content to eat raisin cakes?

The Kingdom of Heaven

Heaven is the grand idea for many Christians. It's the place we all want to go one day, the paradise where we desire to spend eternity. We think of it in the grandest terms - pearly gates, streets of gold, mansions. Enough space up there for you and me and Jesus. These are the ideas we get from the book of Revelation, generally, and a few other texts in the Scriptures. But what are we to make, then, of the Kingdom of Heaven in Matthew? Specifically, Matthew 13:31-33:

Jesus used another illustration. He said, 'The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone planted in a field. It's one of the smallest seeds. However, when it has grown, it is taller than the garden plants. It becomes a tree that is large enough for birds to nest in its branches.' He used another illustration. 'The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman mixed into a large amount of flour until the yeast worked its way through all the dough.'

Twice...TWICE...in just three verses, Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to the smallest of things. The tiniest of seeds, a small bit of yeast - images He uses again in Scripture in reference to their tininess. So which is it? Is the Kingdom of Heaven what John says - streets of gold, pearly gates, mansions? Or is what Jesus says - the tiniest of all things?

It is both.

It goes back to the idea of the seed itself, an image I used last week in God's divine imagination and miraculous inception. The Kingdom of Heaven is small enough that God can plant it inside your heart, but it carries the very DNA of Heaven that is required to grow it into the image given to John. Does that mean it's up to us to create the Kingdom of Heaven? Not at all. It's up to us simply to manifest it.

We are the field that Jesus talks about in this passage; we are the soil. We, and all of our mess and all of our stuff...are the fertilizer for the Kingdom of Heaven, which is held in all its glory and planted inside each one of us so that we may become living agents of growing it.

We do that by nurturing the little piece of Heaven God has given us, by loving one another. By leveling the streets so that they can be paved with gold, helping each other get one step closer to Heaven every day. Showing the way. Leading well. Following even better. By pouring the foundation for the mansions, telling people about the lots available and the incredible asking price - simple faith. The development has been paid in full. By giving each other the key to the pearly gates, not because it's our job to unlock them but because simply having the key makes people think Heaven is possible. We tell them that it is and lead them to the Man who can show them how to find it. No, they're not going to need that key; but that key is hope. It's reason to believe that I can go there because now, if I can get there, I can get in. It's giving people everything they need to know what Heaven is. It's growing the Kingdom among us so that, from the tiniest places in the most fallen men, Heaven becomes real to men themselves. 

We don't create the Kingdom of Heaven; that's been done for us. Look into the tiniest seed that God has planted in your heart, and you will see it in its full glory - like Horton when he hears a Who and dares to look closer at the flower. It's there. It's all there in full magnificence. And it's been planted in you, entrusted to you.

So tend your field. For this is the season that a seed falls into the ground and begins to do its thing.