As I was working on my sermon for this Sunday, I ran across a word that intrigued me. Ephesians 2:8 reads, "For by grace are you saved, through faith ..." Faith is a word we hear all of the time; it is central to who we are and what we do. And I talk to a lot of people who wonder if they have "enough" of it. So I decided to do a little research on it. It turns out the Greek (the original language in which most of the New Testament is written) word for faith means something a shade different that what we mean by faith. It isn't a mind game, screwing up our face and mind and heart and trying to the best of our ability to believe something. It has more to do with trust, allowing oneself to rest in something. What a wonderful picture that is of who we are as people of faith--not people who are trying hard to believe "10 impossible things before breakfast," as someone described Christianity, but people who are simply experiencing, resting in, and trusting the goodness of God.

In my scripture reading lately, I have been sloshing through the instructions given to the people of Israel for the construction of the tabernacle in Exodus. It seemed like every verse of that part added a few ounces to my eyelids. It is not exciting reading. As I kept going, a little bit of anger started to build. "What is this bull#%^$?" I started thinking. Where did it come from? I have a hard time believing that God cared about all this pomp and pageantry. It's just religion run amok. Church always runs the risk of falling into this nonsense, it is in all sides. We make crazy rules about decorum, political correctness, dogmatic correctness, etc., obscuring the simple call on our lives to come to Jesus.

When I cooled down a bit, a spark entered my imagination. What if the tabernacle was re-imagined as an interior structure, ala the interior castle of St. Teresa of Avila. I come to God so often on my own terms, when I want, lackadaisically. How much good does this do me? Not that God cares, I am sure. But would it help me more to really start to tend that relationship--to put practices in place which provide some structure to my relationship with the Divine? An interior tabernacle, not built for the sake of legalism, but built to nurture and strengthen my relationship with God.