Faith Works 4-20-19
Jeff Gill
Recall the burning bush
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The churches I grew up in are gone.
My home church, where I was baptized, where I first preached, was condemned and torn down; my mother's church where I attended many times each year, to where I often had my name in the Sunday School class book, burned down a few years back.
The campus ministry and its physical plant, where I met my wife as we both served as student ministers, and where we were married, is a business incubator for the university still across the street.
My seminary church, where I served as a student associate and briefly as associate pastor, burned down a year and a half into my time there on Christmas Day, late that evening. We renovated the education wing, worshiped there after a pilgrim period, and they rebuilt after I moved on; that congregation had another quarter century of solid ministry on that corner, but has since closed and given the property to a new church start of a different tradition.
And the church where I first went from there, after ordination, my first full time calling in ministry, is where I am again now as senior pastor; the building is still what it was when I first came to town in 1989, but then and now we're still haunted by stories of the fire that destroyed our downtown location, still a gap between the Telephone Building and Masonic Temple on Fourth St., in 1946 . . . just a few days after Christmas that year. The congregation was a pilgrim people, much of that time in the Newark High School gymnasium still standing behind the Avalon Apartments, off of Fifth St., for four years until they built the emphatically fireproof building we're in now.
So I don't think a curse follows me for church buildings, and Central Christian would be hard to burn down even on purpose, but we understand about fires, and changes, and transitions.
I don't mean to be in any way flippant about the tragedy of a historic building being gutted by fire. Notre-Dame de Paris will be rebuilt, and the historic fact of the matter is that it has been effectively rebuilt in many ways a number of times since its 1163 foundation. There may have been timbers in the roof trusses that went back that far (and farther, since they were 300 and 400 year old trees when cut in the 1100s for construction purposes), and it's a glory that the 1200s era rose windows were preserved intact so far.
But the U.S.S. Constitution, the Navy's pride, "Old Ironsides" of the War of 1812, still afloat in Boston Harbor: she's got maybe 10% of her original material in the keel and members from the bow to the stern. The ropes and sails of course have been replaced many times, and masts as well, plus a timber here, a bulwark there, and next thing you know . . . . who knows?
And they say the human body turns over its material, our "stuff" as it were, every seven years or so. Yet most of us have memories and a sense of continuity that go back a decade and more, don't we?
It is something ineffable, that breath of life, the Hebrew "ru'ach," our spirit or even the soul if you will, that makes us who we are. There's something of that in a building, a place, a presence of the community that is not reliant on any one arrangement of molecules.
When Moses encountered the living God in Exodus, he saw this divine presence as a bush that burned, but was not consumed. It's as if the basic reality of life and living is in the hands of something or Someone other than just the matter and energy at work in a visible, practical sense.
Notre-Dame will be rebuilt. Again. Churches will be filled on Easter morning. (Again!) And Christ is risen, again and again. Until we understand and come to a full realization that we, too, are made to be risen creatures, burning with a holy fire but not consumed by this world's flames.
May the joy of Easter be known in Paris, and in your life.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's going to be up early for the sunrise tomorrow! Tell him where you see new life ablaze at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
