People need Places

It’s just the same for me in the summer as it is at Christmas and at Easter. I always think it’s going to be quieter afterwards. And it never is!

I guess it was anticipating the busy-ness of returning to the Holiday Club and its special service, Greenbbelt, Church Meeting and the start of an Autumn Programme, the first of our training weekends and then Harvest weekend, that prompted me to choose the theme I did for the first few services of this new session.

I wanted to look for some very practical ideas about the way prayer and spiritually can sustain us in the day to day round of what we do. Spirituality for busy people. I knew would be preaching to myself as much as to anyone else, and that is no bad thing! It seemed to connect with the troubles we had been so aware of through the summer.

As we have circulated our prayer concerns for one another in the couple of weeks since I have been back I have become very conscious that for some people the busyness they thrive on is taken away by health concerns. We have been remembering in our prayer John Wren, Minister of St Mark’s Methodist Church, a good friend and colleague, doing well after surgery and now about to start a progam of chemotherapy. Our thoughts and prayers are very much with Jonquil – how good to hear that she has had her operation – but a long period of recovery now before a new knee replacement can be put in in due course. Our thoughts and prayers have been with Pat Kimber, rarely missing a Sunday but now not able to get out as she awaits consultation and subsequent treatment at Frenchay. Our thoughts and prayers have been very much with Reg in the slow progress of his illness as he has moved into a nursing home.

Maybe a spirituality for busy people misses the mark. Or does it? It was a conversation I had with Pat that made me think differently. Maybe practical ideas for prayer and spirituality are important for us all whether we are busy, facing a forced period of inactivity, or just somewhere ib between.

If the theme of a fortnight ago was the Sacrament of the Present Moment.

Today it’s

People need Places

Just a few thoughts on the way we each of us can value a place where we can be still and seek the presence of God.

It was a dark, dismal, wet day when for the first time we visited Stone Henge. I was quite prepared for the crowds to spoil it for me. They didn’t. It is pretty awesome. Geology, astronomy, a sense of ‘the other’ – it’s all there. A very real sense of mystery. What was it for? Why was it built? For an ancient people a special place.

And on Anglesey a standing stone in the middle of a field. A cromlech – three upright stones balancing a cap stone on top – more than just a burial place. A special place, a holy place.

Seeing such things, my mind immediately goes to that story of Jacob.

Overwhelmed by a sense of the presence of God, what he does is in a different culture, with different meaning, and yet no less a sense of the other, what those other peoples had done far away in these islands.

Lying down to sleep he uses a stone for a pillow, and in his dream senses the reality of God and the wonder of all that God promises.

Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’
So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel; - which means House of God.
The Burning Bush was holy ground, sacred space for Moses as he removed his shoes. In their wanderings the people of Israel valued the Tabernacle with its Holy of Holies, and later Solomon built a house for God, and the Temple became the focus for the presence of God.

When Herod tore down the old Temple building, and re-built it with untold splendour Jesus was affronted by it … my Father’s house should be a house of prayer and you have made it a den of thieves.

Destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days, he said. And when he dies and rose again his followers sensed that it was no longer in stones and mortar but in the risen presence of Christ that God’s presence could be felt. A synagogue was no longer necessary – wherever two or three gather together there the presence of God is real, and God’s presence is there. Each believer is a temple for the holy Spirit, Paul says. Put believers together and as they come together it’s like the living stones and mortar that makes up a temple with Jesus himself the corner stone holding it all together.

It’s a short step then to say location is not important, places don’t matter. The church is people not buildings. And I have been the first to wax eloquent along those lines.

But wait a moment. When he was in Jerusalem Jesus did go to the Temple and valued something special there. It was his custom on the Sabbath to join in the synagogue as people gathered in a particular place to read the Scriptures. He seems to value the mountain top. He goes to a quiet place. In the bustle of the city with all its busyness he finds the quiet of the Garden of Gethsemane.

People need places.

Places that are special, places that are precious.

I want to suggest three places that we can look for and value as we seek the strengthening that comes from prayer and the presence of God.

First, a quiet place. Jesus went out into the mountains, to the hill side, to the Garden. Is there a place for us where we can have a sense of the presence of God – maybe on the top of the hill, a walk through the park, a space in the garden – maybe a place we have visited and sensed that something ‘other’. Good maybe to know the places we can have that sense of the ‘other’ – and there give thanks to God. And when we cannot visit it ourselves, visit it in our mind’s eye – maybe a photo to remind us, or simply an image deep within our minds.

Then there is the value of a place in the home. There’s a wonderful story about David which gives a glimpse of an ancient home- where there were ‘the household god’s there were some statues that were an aid to worship. Any Roman villa would have had its shrine to the Roman gods – it’s absolutely fascinating that it is in that shrine at Chedworth that there are the rough etchings of a chi-rho symbol. Was there at the time of Jesus a strong sense of the presence of God in a home – marked by something – that was the Roman culture – was it adopted and adapted by the followers of Jesus? Whether or not it is the home used by Jesus in Capernaum that first century house with its Christian inscriptions etched on the wall – is it an indication of the value of having something in the home that prompts the connection with God.

Maybe a cross – for me a picture of the praying hands, the light of the world both on the wall in one room of a house where I have lived since I was born. Part of me, a moment’s reminder. Something of value.

Is there something in the home that can remind us of the presence of Chrsit with us, the power of prayer, his light coming into our lives? Not a shrine but a place.

It was Pat who brought those two first ideas – the open air space, the space in the home together for me. She was telling me of a lovely book of prayers given to her she had read that morning. The prayer invited you simply to look out of your window. It asked you to put your elbows on the window sill and your head in your hands and just look. And then sense the presence of God maybe in the view you have, or it could be in a single leaf or plant that your eye rests on. The wonder of God in the view through the window.

But there is one more place that I believe is important. Jesus did go to the synagogue, did go to the temple. Followers of his who remained in Jerusalem continued to go to the temple at the hour of prayer, Paul would go to the synagogue, and where that wasn’t open to him he met in a particular place. In some places a particular person hosted the church in their home but it was that place they went to.

This is a place that for us is special. It is where we have gathered together Sunday by Sunday to sing the praise of God, to share our prayers with God, to hear God’s word. There is something special about this place that we need to value. I believe it is good that we actively encourage others to use this place – in doing that it is my hope and prayer that they too will sense something special about this place, something special that has about it a sense of God’s presence with us.

It is a place made special because people meet together in this place to seek the presence of God, to share the presence of God, to celebrate the presence of God. It is a special place. And we must not be apologetic about that – it is a place that we need. And those friends of ours who cannot make it now – well they know we are thinking of them as we meet here and they have associations with this place.

That’s why it has been good this last couple of years to share in Back to Church Sunday. And we can again this year. The date 25th September. Harvest – not Parade, at Church Meeting we felt it would be better to have the kind of service we usually have Sunday by Sunday. It is not something for general publicity, but rather something for us to give personal invitations to. Do take an invitation card – think who you might give it to – and make a personal invitation. To share with us here in this place – and sense the presence of God.

People need Places – be it in the open, in the home, or here in church – it is good to have somewhere to go where we renew that sense of the presence of God with us. Then we can take that presence into all the places we are in wherever we are as the presence of God in all his love is released into the lives of others through the faith we put into practice.