God Does Not Live Here

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. - Acts 17:22–27

The first two words in Webster's definition of Church, are "a building." That is not a definition that flows from a Biblical understanding of Church, but rather from the practices of Christians throughout the centuries. The early Christians, before they were known as Christians, simply were called, or said to be of, "The Way." They were people who were part of a movement, people who were part of something bigger than themselves; The Way (of Jesus), called to live and to love, to care for people, to make disciples -- to expose and invite people to become apprentices of Jesus, followers of The Way -- throughout their communities and the world. That does not sound like a building, it sounds like a movement.

For the first several hundred years of Christianity, there were no "church" buildings -- The Way was illegal, people had to meet in secret in homes. And an amazing thing happened. The number of Christians grow from as low as 25,000 in AD 100 to as high as 20,000,000 some 200 or so years later. Interestingly, nearly 2,000 years later when Mao Zedong outlawed Christianity in China, taking away all of their buildings, the Church again experienced phenomenal growth, growing from approximately 2,000,000 immediately after it was banned in the mid 1940s to estimates of 60,000,000 40 years later. Perhaps the two most significant periods of growth in Christianity happened when they had no buildings.

But, buildings are not the problem. Buildings are good, they serve an important purpose. The problem comes with what often comes when we begin to think that God lives in the building, that the Church is a building, that our Christianity happens "there." The reason Webster's defines "Church" as a building is that Christians have often lived as if what went on in the building was the start and end of their faith. Now, we have ground to cover to change that impression -- to live into the reality of the Church not as a building, but as a redemptive force, a prophetic community, a counter-cultural people, regardless of where we are -- a people of the Way.

The challenge as we step more and more from the idea of going to church to the reality of being the church is to not minimize what happens when we gather together as church. We do not need to diminish the importance of what we do when we gather together, but actually to elevate it. What does church look like when what we do on Sunday is a celebration of the ways we have been the church throughout the week? What does it look like to create a "thin space" when we gather, a space where the presence of God is almost palpable? What practices and ways of worship do we need to engage in to create this thin space? How can we -- when we gather together -- more fully worship God and more fully celebrate His reality in all areas of our everyday life? These are questions that we all must ask, conversations that we all must engage in as we make our Sunday experience a more integrated (though special and essential) expression of our everyday Christianity.

Do you agree with this understanding of our Sunday morning times?
- If you disagree, what do you think the purpose of our Sunday morning time is?
In what ways have you or do you experience God's presence?
- Is it on Sunday mornings?
- Is it a different time?
How might you more fully experience His presence on Sundays?
How might that influence and inform the rest of your week?

God does not live in a building. Yet when we gather we can meet Him in very special ways.

Peace, hope and love

Belovedness

As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” - Mark 1:10–11

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. - 1 John 3:16–20 NIV

We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us. - 1 John 4:16–19

Hi Everybody

I want you to ask yourself a question; the same question I asked this past Sunday: What do you think God feels when He thinks of you? What emotions do you imagine stir in His heart when you come to mind?

Have you ever thought about these questions? I fear precious few people truly live in an accurate understanding of the real answer to them. The real understanding? Beloved. God looks at you and sees His beloved. Yet, it is hard for us to fully own the fullness of that reality. Each of us knows ourselves too well -- the bad stuff we have done, the things we wish we had not, the stray and not-so-stray thoughts that would mortify us if everybody knew them. One of my favorite songs begins with the line, "No one would love me if they knew, all the things I hide." Is that thought foreign to you? Or, is it as I suspect, a common fear? Maybe it is good that nobody knows all the things we hide. Maybe. Still, God does. God knows all the things we hide, He not only knows the things we hide, He knows us fully -- more fully in fact than anyone, including us. And what's most amazing is that though He alone fully knows, He alone fully loves. He calls us to that love, calls us to Himself, to rest in and be fueled by the reality of our belovedness. God gives everybody a call, inward to Himself and outward to the world, to whatever broken spot in the world that when we enter into it to heal it we find that we ourselves are healed. He loves us so much that He invites us into the only unchangeable thing, Himself, and then invites us into the call or the life thread that He has us to live -- we must go inward toward Him to hear His voice well enough to know where and how we are to go outward.

It is only with an experiential understanding of the love of God for us that we can face the temptation to leave who we are in order to settle for a lesser good. That’s why we need contemplation, because we need to know how much we don’t really accept and live by God’s love and how far we are from true love, and then to be once again confirmed in the love of God, the kind of love we are supposed to have. The verse above says we should be the kind of people who willing to lay down our very lives for one another. What does that mean? We don’t have that kind of love. Only with the prior experience of belovedness, can we begin to live that kind of sacrifice -- and then realize as we experience even more of our belovedness that it actually was no sacrifice at all.

Faith Like A Child

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." - Matthew 18:1–4 NIV

I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. - John 5:24 NIV

This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” - Romans 8:15 MESSAGE

This past Sunday was our last of our seven Summer of Rock weeks. I hope you had fun. I hope God surprised you in some way -- I always hope and pray for that; I love to be surprised by God. I hope that you thought about how creativity reflects the very image of God with which all of us are imbued. Thank you to the worship team and all who worked so hard to make this series possible. I really enjoyed it.

We concluded the series with the song Wake Up by Arcade Fire. I picked that song because of the line which speaks of growing up from child to adulthood, being told what was and was not appropriate once one entered the land of adulthood (crying is not ok, mistakes are not ok) and the realization that although each of us must grow into adulthood and maturity, some of what we are told that means might not be really true. Most of us, the longer we live into these less-than-true tenets of adulthood, push any suspicion that these might have been lied to into a rummage pile of faded dreams never to be reclaimed.

Or so we think. Jesus invites us to reclaim the wonder of a child -- requires it actually, if we are truly to see the Kingdom of God that exists around us. Adulthood says "Worry about death." Jesus says, "What death?" (Children say "What death?") Adulthood says, "Worry about your status in life." Jesus says "Seek the Kingdom -- it really is a real thing, look, don't you see it?" (Children say "Don't you see it? It is not make-believe.")

There is a scene in C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, Prince Caspian, where the children find themselves lost. Lucy sees Aslan off in the distance, but nobody else can see him; though they have seen him in the past, they doubt that he is really there. When Lucy insists she saw him, her sister Susan asks, "Where do you think you saw him?" Lucy replies: "Don't talk like a grown-up . . . I didn't think I saw him. I saw him."

Jesus started His discipleship plan by announcing "the Kingdom of God is at hand." He then invites us to become like children (full of wonder, innocence, humility, awe, questioning, laughing, crying, searching, exploring and abandon) in order to enter into it. And when we do, we will see that it is indeed real. When we do, we cannot help but with childlike joy exclaim, "I've seen it!" And, when those around us ask what we think we have seen, smile and tell them, "I don't think I saw it, I saw it."