Advent IV: Being Present With Love
Today, December 20, 2023, marks a year since our church decided to do something really big and transformative with our building. In the days leading up to Christmas Eve last year in Colorado, we were anticipating a 30-year arctic weather event where temperatures would end up dipping as much as 10 degrees below zero in Metro Denver.
The leadership of our church, on the night of December 20, 2022, during our annual “Charge Conference” decided we would open our space as a shelter since there were some significant gaps in sheltering available in our area.
I am still so unbelievably proud of that moment, and what came of it. Admittedly, this wasn’t my first time to reconsider how a church building might be used differently than just for worship—in January 2018 I served a church that did just this for similar circumstances in Dallas, TX. It was a transformative moment for me in my faith and my call to ministry—to say nothing about my theology around the purposes of our Christian buildings.
In 2 Samuel 7, God commands Nathan to ask David an important question: “Are you the one to build me a Temple?”
If I am learning anything from these past few years as a Pastor in this unique neighborhood, it is that we have a lot to explore as to what God is looking for in the “Temples” that we build.
What is the purpose of our church building? What is it about our buildings that proclaims God’s love? Surely, it is in the way that our building provides a place for us to worship God, and sing praise to God. A place where God’s people can gather and invite others to join. And the way that we build our sanctuaries for worship is also critical.
And this brings me back to last year, and how a different church sanctuary, for a time, became a shelter from deadly cold for people experiencing homelessness and not just a place to worship God. When I was in Dallas and worked at a different church and experienced this for the first time, I spent one night writing about it. Let me revisit some of those insights with you:
“Over the past week in Dallas, we have experienced remarkably cold temperatures. A week ago, one of the houseless members of our congregation approached our Senior Pastor and asked if she and her companions could sleep in the church to escape the cold. Our Senior Pastor, the Rev. Rachel Baughman took this request seriously—she approached the leadership of the church and, with a remarkable nimbleness, organized our church to become a shelter. We coordinated volunteers, gathered donations, and obtained the means to feed 40-60 people from the generosity of local businesses… and a remarkable thing happened. Everything worked. Folks flooded into our space for refuge from the cold. We built new relationships. Our spaces normally left empty and unused on days other than Sunday were full of people who used it to rest, and receive the comforts of community and shelter. And our worship space, our sanctuary, became just that. The image of our worship space being used as a space for folks to sleep who otherwise would sleep on concrete and be treated by the outside world as trash is a profoundly sacred image.
Our worship space has become more holy because of what has occurred this week. This is the first time our 102-year-old sanctuary has been used this way.
How can we open up our churches to be fully utilized to offer comfort to the afflicted? How can the aesthetic and function of our church architecture be expanded in innovative and tangible ways? I have been blessed to bear witness to the transformation of our building to something that is even more truly what I believe God has called it to be. And I believe everyone who had the opportunity to share in this experience has also, perhaps, experienced a bit of transformation too.” (Read the entire article, here.)
We proclaim that God is love. And so, shouldn’t the buildings we build and the temples we erect be extensions of that love? Shouldn’t the very ways we build our lives and our families (for aren’t our lives and bodies also temples to God?) be extensions of the Love in whose image we have been made?
I think our sacred spaces should be sacred and invite us into an experience of the divine, but if those spaces become sterile environments or ecclesial museums, then I don’t think they are Temples to God anymore. They become temples to our vain conceit, instead.
Let us be Present to God’s Love not just by the marvelous spaces we build and in which we worship, but also by living it out. And in doing so I guarantee that there will be holy surprises along the way!
