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The house of God

Trigger warning. This essay is not about any parishioner who may have a legitimate reason to miss Sundays. They may have a job that force them to work on Sundays. They may be ill or housebound. They may be on a much delayed vacation. This essay is not about them. It is not about any particular person. This essay was written about what appears to be an epidemic in American Christianity. Apparently there is bad teaching out there that is leading more and more people to think of Sunday morning service as just one more option among many for Sunday morning. More and more people seem to consistently prioritize other events over spending time with God in the service.

The other day I overheard a parishioner saying that “god says we can talk to Him anywhere, don’t have to be in church”. Of course this is true. It is also over simplified. When people avoid meeting god in the church they often talking to a god that they invent themselves. That is because the true god often makes us feel uncomfortable. The God of our backyards rarely challenges us.

So the question is not where can we talk with a god? The question is where does god agree to meet us? Meet us in a full way. A way which can challenge, and transform us.

There is in genesis 28:10-22, the story of Jacob’s ladder. Jacob who is traveling stops in a valley for the night. He sleeps. He dreams. He dreams of a ladder to heaven. He dreams of angels and he dreams of god. In the morning he declares the place he slept Bethel which means house of god.

Now days we think: how cute, Jacob thought that god has a house. But is really such an odd idea, that God would have a house?

Ah! You say god is omnipresent (everywhere). To which I reply, yes of course but scripture teaches us that god is in heaven. Try Matthew 6:9 when Jesus teaches us to pray “our father who art in heaven “.

Then you might say that god is in all of us. To which I reply that scripture teaches us that Jesus ascended to the right hand of the father in heaven. Luke 24:51- Acts 7:55

But what about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit? Yes it is true that believers receive the gift of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. It is true that in the mystery of the trinity that means that the “being” of god is with us. Yet the person of Jesus and the person of the father are in heaven. I know, confusing.

Scripture shows us that while God is God and therefore impossible for us to fully understand, he interacts with humans in a particular way. In the Garden of Eden: “And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” (Genesis 3: 8). In some fashion God’s interactions with us are localized.

Think of the exodus; Moses goes up Mt. Sinai to meet with god. God then directs the building of the tent of meeting. The tent of meeting. Its name says it all. It is the tent where god met with the people.

This of course later translated into the temple in Jerusalem. Remember in Deuteronomy god told the people that they were to worship him in the place he would designate. Not anywhere they please, but where god says to. Deuteronomy 12:5

Yes there were instances of worship elsewhere. But on the whole god was pretty insistent on his rules. Think of what happened to Aaron’s sons when they offered unauthorized fire. (Leviticus 10). Or what happened to Uzzah when he touched the tabernacle without authority to do so. (2 Samuel 6)

The point being that god interacts with people in a localized way. Even Jesus did the festivals at the temple and indeed as a boy Jesus referred to the temple as “my Father’s house”. Luke 2:49

Well you might rely on the fact that all that was Old Testament. The temple is gone and new times are here. To which I say, yes and no.

The temple is gone but scripture still indicates that god interacts with us in a localized way.

When Peter declared Jesus to be the messiah the son of the living god. Jesus responds with on this rock I will build my Ecclesia (Matthew 16). Which is a Greek word meaning an assembly and is often translated as church. Jesus did not say he was going to build an individual believer here and another there. He was going to build an assembly.

Elsewhere Jesus says where two or three are gathered in my name I am in the midst of them (Matthew 18:20). He did not say if you call on my name in your Camaro I will be in the passenger seat. Not if you talk to me in the parking lot by yourself I will be there. But where two or three are gathered in my name.

In the Old Testament the temple was the father’s house. People could talk to him and pray to him anywhere but if they wanted to meet with him they went to his house.

In the New Testament, and by extension today, you can talk with god and pray to god anywhere. And believers carry the person of the Holy Spirit within them. But if you want to “meet with god” you have to go to the assembly.

Please no jokes about having an assembly in your hot tub. Ananias and his wife Sapphira thought they could play fast and loose with the assembly in acts Acts 5. It did not turn out well for them and that was New Testament.

Remember Jesus refers to the assembly as himself (Acts 9:4) Elsewhere in scripture the assembly is referred to as Jesus’ body (1 Corinthians 12:27 among others).

There is a real spiritual identification between Jesus and the assembly/church.

Paul talks “we are the temple of the living God” (2 Corinthians 6:16).
In Hebrews it is said not to neglect to gather (assemble) Hebrews 10:25

There are many reasons for believers to attend Sunday services. There is, as I said before, less chance of avoiding the hard bits of the gospel. There is mutual encouragement to be given and to be received. There is the arena is which our faith and our spiritual gifts can mature. In short, time is the assembly is where we meet Christ and grow in Him.

In Matthew 22:1-14 Jesus tells a parable about a wedding feast. The king invites people. They do not want to come. He invites more people, he even has his servants go into the streets and bring everybody, willing to come, into the wedding hall. But when the king is walking through the hall he spots one man who was not wearing a wedding robe. (All the other men were wearing jackets and he showed up in a dirty t shirt.) The king threw him out. It’s not right to disrespect the king.

To sum up. God is god. God chooses to interact with people in a localized way, even today. You can talk to god in your shower. You can pray to him in your garden. But if you really want to spend time with him, and build up a solid relationship, as he invites you to, then you have to go to his house, and his house is his church.

You don’t want to end up not being known by God. Matthew 7:21-22

We’ve been taught that we are to be in a personal relationship with God. Let us not forget that real relationship means spending time with Him.

 

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The Quest for Harmony

The Way of Harmony. First let me define what we are talking about. There are different things we speak of when we speak of harmony; harmony within our family, harmony within our community, harmony at work, living in harmony with the earth (eco-harmony), harmony in our country and harmony among nations (peaceful and cooperative co-existence), even harmony within ourselves – not being in a constant turmoil of emotions.

At its base harmony is living in comfortable relationship with self or someone else or some group of people. For example, when we live in harmony with our spouse our lives are smoother and more enjoyable.

So for a working definition of harmony let us say that harmony is experiencing our lives as a flow of joy, happiness, and bliss, uninterrupted by conflict or turmoil. Perhaps you have seen a movie where the writers and directors give us a character of an “ancient wise one”. I can’t help thinking of the movie Shangri-La. These characters are presented as people who always seem at peace: secure in their thoughts and undisturbed by the day to day trials that so get under our skins.

The quest for harmony, for achieving this state of what some traditions call “impassability” is an Ancient and Universal quest. Plato wrote about a utopia. Lao-Tzu founded Taoism, an ancient Chinese philosophy or religion that seeks harmony and balance as its highest goal. Confucius codified a set of social and governmental rules to try to create a harmonious society.
Indeed if we accept the idea that Confucianism, attempting to develop rules governing how individual members of society relate to one another, as a means of creating harmony then all societies are seeking harmony. Medieval Europe, the society of the Dakota Sioux, the Zulu Empire, modern Islam, all set up rules for the right ordering of our relations. A system of creating harmony.

Indeed part of the culture wars currently engulfing our society is because large elements of our country have very different ideas of how to achieve a harmonious life and society.
It would seem that all societies at all times gave thought to achieving harmony.

In fact there is one group which had and has a very different idea of achieving harmony. The Buddha taught that indifference to want and desire could bring a person back into the original harmony of the universe.

But by our definition harmony is not indifference. Harmony is living in a way that our words and actions do not disrupt the people or world around us – and in interacting with people and the world in such a way as their actions etc. do not disrupt our “flow of happiness”.

So Harmony is not a question of indifference but a question of right living.
So the desire for harmony seems to be inherent to human nature. That is to say that there is something deep within humans that enjoys harmony and seeks to maximize harmony and to achieve “Harmony”. We can see how different civilizations around the world have sought to talk about and sought after harmony. How well they achieved this elusive concept can be seen by history.

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Healing Prayer Part 2: Disbelief

Although raised in church, I grew up with an attenuated sense of God’s power. God was presented as a distant figure: somewhere up above. He was definitely concerned with my eternal destiny but not so involved with my day to day life. The age of miracles was over. The idea of a direct intervention in my life was a theoretical possibility but not easily imagined or expected. Prayers for help were no more than good luck charms. A rabbit’s foot might do as well. Prayers for healing were something we said, not in expectation of physical healing but in to comfort the ill.

One day I was praying with a sick woman. I was praying mechanically. When I had finished I managed to see the woman out and then I collapsed. For the first time in my life I understood the bible story of the woman with the hemorrhage. (Mark 5:25 ff) In the story the woman with the hemorrhage touched the edge of Christ’s clothes and was healed. Jesus, felt “power go out” and turned to see. I understood it, because as I prayed with that woman I felt power go out. So much power went out I could not keep my feet.

All of a sudden it occurred to me that the stories were real. Not just history, not just tales to comfort the ill, but real. I had felt power go out. A few days later I found out that the woman I had prayed with experienced a significant healing. I had experienced something that I thought was not real. I was forced to rethink how I thought about God and how He acts in the world.

In our day spirituality has been reduced to an emotion, or to a state of mind. Yet in the bible we find that the spiritual is talked about not as something internal but as a force that has a direct effect on the material. Elijah stopped the rain. The Red Sea was parted. Water was turned to wine. The blind were made to see, the lame to walk and the maimed made whole. And that is just a short list. These events are all God’s spiritual power physically changing the world around us. Indeed the bible tells us that God’s power will continue to effect and change the material world around us. John 14: 12 “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. Specifically we are told that the gift of healing will continue (1 Corinthians 12:9).

Today many Christians in the west have pushed away the idea of a God who interacts with the world. We have become comfortable with a distant God. One who is concerned with our “spiritual life” defined as our emotional and mental health in relation to His revelation. Perhaps this is why so many Christians today believe in a spiritual heaven and give almost no thought to the general resurrection to come.

Why? Why have we diminished the power of God and the witness of His word written? Could it be that the reality of God’s power makes us uncomfortable? If God actual heals in response to prayer, if God’s power is real and present today, if God can act in the world today just the way the book says He can – what else that the book tells us might be true?

If God’s power to heal is real maybe the idea of angels might be real. If angels are real, what about fallen angels? If fallen angels are real, is Satan real? Is hell real? Is the idea of sin real? Are we really in danger of falling short of getting into paradise?

If the gift of healing power is real, is it all real? Is the devil more than just a character in a horror show? Does Satan actual move about the world seeking the ruin of souls? Do we actually need to have a saving relationship with God through His Son Jesus in order to escape the consequences of our choices? What is the importance of Church? What is it power?

Could it all be real? Hell fire, demons, eternity, the need for salvation, the command to love and the directive to participate in God’s church as it witnesses to His love and mercy.

Perhaps it’s too much to take in. Perhaps it’s too frightening. Perhaps we would rather worship a distant God. Perhaps we would rather have a God that didn’t heal. Perhaps we would rather have a good who phoned in a message of encouragement every now and then rather than a God of real power and real demands on us.

Part of the grounds of disbelief in healing prayer is the fact that we would rather sit in church with our back pain then accept that God is powerful to work in our lives today. We would rather reject the power of God than let it challenge us.

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Healing Prayer Part 1: What it is and is not

A quick note about Healing Prayer. The first thing to remember is that healing prayer is not magic. God is not some impersonal force, or lesser being that we can manipulate into doing our will by the use of certain words, symbols, objects or force of will. There is no magic wand in Christianity. Neither is God some human like agent that we can nag into giving us what we want. Emotional blackmail will not work on the creator of emotions.

Healing prayer is both simpler than that and more troublesome. Simpler because healing prayer is not magic it is relationship. More troublesome because when we approach our Father God, His perspective is so much greater than ours.

Healing prayer as relationship. When we were young and got hurt our first reaction was to turn to mom or dad to make the hurt go away. Quickly we learned that mom and dad could not just wave their hands and make it all better. Still we trusted them to take our hurts seriously and do their best to assuage it; wash out the cut, put a band aid on it, a kiss and we were on our way once more. We turned to our parents not because they were magic but because they loved us and had more “power”, to cure our ills.

God presents Himself to us as King, Lord, Savior, Redeemer, Messiah, but also as friend, brother, and Father. God is Family. For the purpose of prayer He is loving parent. One we, as His children, trust to take our hurts seriously and work in our lives for our good.

Matthew 7: 7-11 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

That is all healing prayer is. It is us, the children of God turning towards our heavenly Father and trusting Him with our hurts and pains.

The troubling part is that God does not always answer us the way we want. We are fallen human beings, living in a fallen world. We want. Especially when we are hurting, we want and we want healing now. We know from hard experience that God does not always do that. This is not to say that God does not love the person praying. It is not that the person is somehow unworthy of healing. (No one is worthy of God’s love or grace. That’s why they call it grace.) What is going on is that God is Dad. He really is bigger than us, knowing more than us and capable of more than us.

For example: A young boy comes home from a little league game. His wrist hurts. He naturally turns to dad to put a bandage on it. He expects some Advil. Perhaps an ice pack. Dad will take care of it and the boy will return to play the next day. But Dad looks at the writs and sees something more. He takes his son to the Hospital, an X-ray is taken and the broken arm is set in a cast. The poor young boy loses out on the rest of the season. However his arm heals properly and the next baseball season is better than ever. The young boy did not get the answer he wanted. He got the answer he needed.

The hard part is that our perspective is too limited. Our understanding too small and our hurts sometimes so great. It is hard to imagine the greater good of pain. It is really hard to imagine that the greater good for our loved ones is not to heal in this world but to go on to be with the Lord.

Romans 8: God. 28 And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

Not magic. Not manipulation. Healing prayer is more complex, more troubling, more glorious than that. Healing prayer is God’s familial love for us in real action. God loves His children and will take care of them. We may not understand the process. We may not enjoy the ride. But we are loved. We are invited into the family. We are to trust God, stand back and watch His wonders.