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TODAY'S SCRIPTURES
3Because your steadfast love is better than life,
my lips will praise you.
4So I will bless you as long as I live;
in your name I will lift up my hands.
5My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food,
and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips,
6when I remember you upon my bed,
and meditate on you in the watches of the night;
7for you have been my help,
and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.
*Psalm 63.3-7 (ESV)
10When they came to Gibeah, behold, a group of prophets met him [Saul], and the Spirit of God rushed upon him, and he prophesied among them. 11And when all who knew him previously saw how he prophesied with the prophets, the people said to one another, "What has come over the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?"
I Samuel 10.10-11 (ESV)
28 For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
*Acts 17.28 (NLT)
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Our Psalm sings of the intimacy the psalmist enjoys with the Sacred. The song invites us to enjoy that closeness with the Divine.
Like the psalmist, we can express our desire for Love and sense that Love in places faith communities set aside - consecrate - for silence, prayer, and public worship. My uncle used to go to a room in a sanctuary along his way to work. He worshipped with the faith community there Sundays, but alone in silence Monday through Friday early. Even as friends and couples can have physical places symbolizing and nurturing the relationship, being places of memories over time, too, so with our union with the Holy. The places become sacred, for they are blessed for being a means of Grace.
Yet, the psalmist has intimacy with God as easily expressed at home and on his bed, as in an official holy site. Such is to be the closeness we share with Sacred Presence.
We need both these places for close relationship with God: public-consecrated, everyday-mundane. We need sites made blessed by communal act and recourse. These places, when honored, have an energy that facilitates opening of heart to God and connection with others, even in their physical absence.
These sites, public and private, point us to an inner Truth. They represent an Inner Place. True worship - expression of intimacy with Life - is first-and-foremost an inner Event. The Jesus in the Gospel says:
But the time is coming—indeed it’s here now—when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for those who will worship him that way.
*John 4.23 (ESV)
The "Father ... looking" implies an inner Reality we are all a part of. This Presence is source of our yearning to come close to the Sacred. The Voice of God is our voice of longing to connect with at least a partialness of the Wholeness of Love. We want at least a sip of the Fullness of Kindness. We would like to touch the hem of the garment of Timelessness. We desire to hear one tiny syllable of the boundless Word that holds the cosmos in place and spins our planet throughout space.
Will a touch of a vestige of God change us? The Samuel passage speaks of the young Saul, after Samuel anointed him king, being swept up in spiritual frenzy among a band of prophets. Verse 9 tells of an inner transformation, as Saul turns from Samuel to return home: "God gave him another heart" (ESV). A sign of this is the "Spirit of God rushed upon him." Saul started speaking in a prophetic state of altered awareness.
This story reminds us of the power and independence of Spirit. We never know what will happen by getting close to this Wind. This Wind might move over us softly like a breeze, caressing us with comfort or calm reverie. Or the Wind might be like a tornado lifting us up into loud praise, ecstatic dance, hilarious laughter, jubilant song, or a state of altered consciousness in silence wherein we lose all we had known as normal awareness.
Wherever and however we worship, we do not find God to be more in one place than another, even if we experience more of God in one place or one way of worship. The Acts passages reminds us God is fully present in the Environs of Nature in which we live, and within which we are part of a Whole.
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*This writing ministry is the offering of Rev. Dr. Brian K. Wilcox, of SW Florida, a Pastor in the United Methodist Church, and Senior Chaplain for the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office. To contact Brian, write to barukhattah@embarqmail.com .
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