And the name of the city from that time on shall be, The LORD is There.
And so we finish Ezekiel. He’s been taken to the Jerusalem and given explicit descriptions the Temple, its size, windows, trim. Today, he hears more about the altar itself, and the doors into and out of the Temple. After this, he is instructed on the overall size of the land of Israel, and how it should be divided up, to account for the 12 tribes. And at its conclusion, Ezekiel is told that the name of this city is “The Lord is There”.
This morning, I’m thinking about the waxing and waning of the importance of place. For the Israel people, taken from their land, having a home base is something they’ve been missing, and needing. A city called The Lord is There, supports their notions of God’s presence in that holy space, a space that was destroyed, and from which they were exiled. It’s no wonder that there is so much clarity about the space itself; the space is the outward example of their understanding of God’s presence.
We do the same thing, the same value ascribed to a place-based experience of the Holy. Our churches and other houses of worship are important to us. We want the setting to be just so. It’s where we experience God. It becomes an outward sign of our understanding of God’s presence.
But after a while, these place-centric understandings serve to hem us in. We mistakenly confuse the building with the notion of Holy. I GO to church. I experience God at church. It is beautiful, and I want to protect it. But Jesus didn’t leave us a building to go to, to call Church. He left the Holy Spirit, that made US church. True, when we spirit-filled people gather at a building, we can more easily worship God, but to be clear, God is not constrained by the walls of the building, and God presumes we aren’t either.
My new community was largely populated by people from many other countries, peoples and languages, who came to work in the steel mills. Like the Israelites, they needed a place to gather, to experience God as they’d known God in the old country. Within a three minute walk from my home, I can see a dozen different beautiful 100 year old stone churches, many of which are rooted in the old country. Hungarian Reformed, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, as well as a smattering of other mainline Christian denominations. These were important places where the people experienced God, and as strangers in a strange land, they needed an outward expression of their experience of God.
Now, the mills are closed, and 85% of the population has left town. The churches are either boarded up, used for other things, or in some cases there is a faithful remnant doggedly worshipping in the space.
It feels to me that the pendulum perhaps has swung towards a more boundary-less understanding of God’s presence. God isn’t contained in the building. And we should not seek experiences of God solely in these crumbling beauties. The soot-stained exteriors look tired, and the magnificent interiors are a little tired, but mostly empty. I suspect this is just an example of the building/no-building dynamic that’s happening in Christianity throughout the country. Whether it’s needing to gather in smaller numbers because of the pandemic, or the inability to heat the full sanctuary, we are being forced to imagine Being the Church, rather than Going to Church.
What an exciting time to imagine what being the church looks like, and how these beautiful old houses of worship might be outward expressions of God’s kingdom come.
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