Churches

One of my favorite buildings (up there with the Smith Center and the planetarium) is the old sanctuary from my church back home. It's not around anymore, not since we tore it down to build the new sanctuary back when I was in elementary school or middle school, but I love it in my brain. I love the ugly green carpet and the dark wood paneling and I especially love the way the stained glass windows would light up the room on Wednesday afternoons when I was a kid in kid's choir crawling around on the pews. I loved the way I could sneak out of my pew at the end of the last hymn and run over to the nursery to provide what I saw as a vital service to my mother, to tell her the service was ending and to pack up the kids. I love the memory of feeling small in the choir loft, and being too short to look over the divider between the congregation and the choir loft. I loved standing in the very front of the chancel when I was in kindergarten to deliver my one line in the kid's choir musical: "I wouldn't miss it for the world!" I don't remember what I wouldn't have missed, but I'm pretty sure I was precious and adorable, so just smile and laugh at kindergarten me. I hear she was a good kid.

I also remember sitting in the pews and Ron teaching us the words to Handel's Messiah, the kid version, and I was convinced the angels were singing about Oreos in egg shells, day-o, and I was really confused as to why the angels got oreos and why they were in egg shells, but ours is not to question why. I mean, I also thought that the flying monkeys sang about Oreos. Or orioles. Anyway. Beyond all of that, I remember time and again being told to be kind to the pews because they were furniture in God's house. The church is God's house, the adults in charge of us would say. You wouldn't put your feet up on your sofa, so don't put your muddy, mulchy shoes up on the backs of the pews. This problem was, of course, handily solved by leaving your shoes somewhere else, but somehow, I don't think that made anyone any happier.

God's house. I think one of the problems with growing up in the same place with the same church is that I was convinced that God only had one house. If I'm being honest, if you asked me where God lives, He lives in the old sanctuary at St. Luke's. He's got a penchant for green carpet and wood paneling and he loves colors in the afternoons. He's also got other sections of His house he can go chill in, though I'm pretty sure He stays away from the office. I mean, if you were the deity, wouldn't you avoid paperwork at all costs? But He definitely stopped over in the children's building all the time, and in the fellowship hall. He also chills in the courtyard a ton, everyone needs some sun. All in all, if I was God, I wouldn't mind having my house there.

Old Testament Hebrews thought that God had a home, too. He lived in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple, and it was quite a blow when the Temple was destroyed. Ezekiel talks about His glory leaving the Temple stage by stage, and then leaving Jerusalem so that the invading forces could come and break everything down. God has a home, He has a land, He has a building, and if He's gone, so is His grace and so is His protection. You can mess up and you can make God angry, and God's going to peace out of His house and then, my friends, it sucks to be you. Or so my Intro to the Hebrew Bible class taught me.

Now, of course I don't actually believe that God lives in one place. He doesn't have one house that He lives in. I mean, it's not like God needs a place for an afternoon nap or anything like that. He doesn't need a kitchen and He certainly doesn't need a TV with all the comedy that my life provides for Him. But, you know, I always put my feet down off the pews when someone reminded me that the sanctuary was God's. I love to be in sanctuaries by myself because God's there. And when you say that God's everywhere it takes away from the feel of the building. If God's everywhere, why do you need a church? And we have an awfully large number of churches.

I know that a church is more than a building, but what about these buildings? What about these huge houses we have laid out for God? Is it limiting? I mean, you can never build a ceiling high enough for Him. The Ark of the Covenant was God's footstool, for crying out loud. You can't hold him in a church. Do we just use them to gather? Maybe God can just peek in when He's interested in what's going on, one giant eye staring in through a window. Is it just for the music? Maybe we just intended these spaces to amplify the sounds of our songs, so that God will hear our worship and forget our acts.

I spent the last week staring at 324 churches, narrowing them down one by one to put them into a proposal to go to Europe next summer to study sacred space. Did you know that churches are patterned after the Jerusalem Temple? In the temple, you had an outer courtyard for the Jews visiting the temple, then an inner holy space where the priests could go and finally the Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest could go once a year. (Point of reference- I always thought that janitors could go anywhere, or repairmen, or people like that and it made me laugh to think that a cleaning lady dusting could go into a place that even the High Priest couldn't. Oh, the things you don't understand when you're a kid.) We put our altar or our pulpit in the place of the ark in the Holy of Holies and we've torn down the curtain (though we still keep a mini-one, if we have a chancel rail) and especially in Protestant churches, anyone can go up to the altar- there's no inbetween space where only the priests can be. After that basic pattern, we added on columns when we mixed in basilicas and the temple and later we added the horizontal hall to make our churches shaped like a cross, and then afterwords, we threw out these designs to make our sanctuaries functional for the kinds of modern churches we wanted to have. But traditionally, liturgically, this is where we've come from.

Of course, it's all more complex than that, because it always is. You have to add in nuance, and I hoping (fingers crossed) that I'll get the funding to see the nuance first-hand. But you know, I never once looked at a cathedral and thought, "That, that has to be God's house. Just look at it! If I were God, that'd be my place." You know what I think, though? I think we have these buildings to remind us. To remind us of the beauty of God, of the grandeur of God, of the power of God, of the ancientness of God, of the practicality of God and of the diversity of God's designs. I think the buildings remind us. I think we bring God in with us. 

Or maybe God was always there, just waiting on us to notice. Did you ever notice?