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.
1 comment:
Hi, Pastor Fairbanks --
You have no idea who I am, but I am thinking about joining your congregation, and this blogpost of yours (which a friend of mine who is a high-up muckety muck in the UCC in Wisconsin and I found while researching UCC congregations in my area) made me smile and nod my head.
First of all, it was so refreshing to see a pastor use the word "bullshit" and question the value of his/her reading. I'm a sucker for a liberal seasoning of "vulgarities," and I am a hard-wired critical reader, so yay.
But your second paragraph is what really spoke to what I'm seeking, as someone who has spent her entire life "unchurched" and raised with no particular spiritual structure except the ghost of my mom's (rejected by her at 17, but oh, some things never quite go away!) Catholicism.
>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.
My answer to this question you posed yourself is yes, actually, I think it would help me to tend that relationship. It's an answer that surprised me last night, but less so this afternoon.
Anyway. Thanks for listening. I will try to make it down Sunday morning.
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