Month: June 2021

Sunday’s Lectionary, the passage from 2 Corinthians… “5:1 For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” The writer is using the tent/building metaphor to express the difference between our transitory life on earth and our eternal life in Christ. But it seems to me that sometimes we Christians care more about the metaphor than about the reality behind it: we build buildings, thinking these will last, and all the generations to come will worship here.

But buildings don’t last. And this generous legacy from earlier generations may feel like an unnecessary weight on the shoulders of the Christian community. If we put bricks and stones together to represent the eternal community of Christ’s people, what does it say when the roof starts to leak, or the building eventually decays and tumbles?

In Sunday’s Lectionary, the second of the Psalms includes this… “…my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.” It’s not necessarily very easy for a twenty first century person to understand the power of that comparison. Going back in time, the darkness of night would have been intense. It might have been filled with wild animals and dangerous people. Starry skies are also beautiful. Cloudy skies would have been dark in a way that my experience of clouds lit up from below does not match. The only thing anywhere near that I have experienced was my night in the open by Scutchamer Knob when I was walking part of the Ridgeway (a long time ago). I couldn’t sleep properly because of the April northerly, and I kept waking up and wanting the sky to begin to get light again.