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A Greeting
I will offer in God's tent shouts of joy;
I will sing and make melody to the Lord.
(Psalm 27:6)
A Reading
‘Our ancestors had the tent of testimony in the wilderness,
as God directed when he spoke to Moses, ordering him to
make it according to the pattern he had seen. Our ancestors
in turn brought it in with Joshua when they dispossessed the
nations that God drove out before our ancestors. And it was
there until the time of David, who found favour with God
and asked that he might find a dwelling-place for the house
of Jacob. But it was Solomon who built a house for him.
Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human
hands; as the prophet says, “Heaven is my throne, and the
earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build
for me, says the Lord, or what is the place of my rest?
Did not my hand make all these things?”
(Acts 7:44-50)
Music
Note: we hear the song first in Hebrew, then in English
Meditative Verse
O God, who may abide in your tent?
Who may dwell on your holy hill?
Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right,
and speak the truth from their heart.
(Psalm 15:1-2)
A Prayer
Then shall my soul spring up like grass,
and my heart recover her greenness;
and from the deepest places of my soul
shall flow streams of living water.
- from a prayer of the St. Hilda Community,
found in The Flowering of the Soul: A Book of Prayers by Women
ed. by Lucinda Vardey
Verse for the Day
This is my comfort in my distress,
that your promise gives me life.
(Psalm 119:50)
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In today’s reading, the newly elected deacon Stephen is in Jerusalem preaching to a tough crowd. The whole of Acts 7 is his astonishing narrative summary of all of the history of the Israelites in their journeying with Moses, leading to the present moment. Stephen is recounting a story that his audience knows well, and at the end of it he is offering the image of Jesus as the prophet messiah promised to the ancestors, who can become a new way of thinking about 'temple'. He is returning their minds to an ancient idea -- that God can be worshiped anywhere and does not need a particular building — remembered in the many years the Israelites spent in the wilderness, carrying the Ark around with them. His audience, however, is not convinced. Stephen is suggesting that a vast and great temple, with all of its sacrificial life and worshipful desire to celebrate God, built as a resolution to the very problem of carrying around that Ark --- that all of this can be contained in Jesus, who lived and died and was resurrected. He is asking them to think outside the box, but using images that are very much within their own history. In our own faith communities today, many of us are trying to think outside the box for ways that we can serve God and also give life to the gospel in new and imaginative ways. It can be exciting and also deeply challenging for us to consider options that feel so completely different from what we have known. In today’s music, we hear in the old Shaker hymn, sung by a Jewish cantor, the plea to God to make us ourselves a sanctuary, ‘pure and holy, tried and true’. The hymn moves from the idea of a tent sanctuary of the Israelites to the sanctuary offered by the human heart. As we discern a way forward for our congregations and our church, is it possible for us to move boldly into new ventures while also holding the conviction that our faith will survive, as it has for thousands of years? How can we be challenged to ‘think outside the box’, knowing that we carry the gospel with us always, in everything we do, in the sanctuary of our own hearts?
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LC† Living in the Spirit is a project of
Lutherans Connect / Lutheran Campus Ministry Toronto,
supported by the Eastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada.
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