In God [Easter 6A - Acts 17:22-31]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Acts 17:22-31

In God

I walked past the two masked men and into the open door.  As soon as I entered, I was reacquainted with that holy scent – a scent that feels like family, a scent that, I think, will linger on the stone and wood well into eternity.  I allowed my spirit to soak in that beautiful perfume before proceeding down the south aisle, toward the chapel. 

I’m not sure why, but the lights of the chapel were on.  I: like a moth to a flame.  My eyes were drawn not to the blessed Mother with her holy child, but to the corner, to a box, to yet another open door.  And there, at the back of chapel, I stopped and stared.  My spirit stirred in a manner beyond easy words.  It was so obviously empty; its stark white insides exposed to our pandemic world.  The aumbry, the place in which I have come to expect God to dwell in earthly elements, was showing me a startling absence.

I felt like a warden stumbling upon an open cell.  It was as if God had escaped and made no attempt to cover the tracks.  Or maybe was just lonely because no one was visiting anymore.

It was the Apostle Paul who broke my transfixed gaze, my jumbled meditation.  He whispered to me from ancient Athens, “The God who made the world and everything in it…does not live in shrines made by human hands.”  Which I suppose I knew, but often forget.  And so I finished the task that brought me to the church, to place the follower on a pascal candle that is much taller than it should be six weeks into the Easter season, and went on my way – back to my home, back to my quarantine.

But the empty box continued to haunt me.  And I’m not entirely sure why, why that open door and empty space froze me in my tracks.  But it was as if it, in some way, captured my experience of these pandemic days better than any words ever could; as if it told a story that typically can only be felt.

There was both sadness and hope in that barren tabernacle.  Its emptiness represents everything I miss at this time.  It is empty because we are not gathering as a sacred family around the Holy Table.  There is no consecrated bread, no heavenly wine to fill the space.

And its emptiness is why I have hope.  Because God is not confined to shrines made by human hands.  God is free.  And so we are not distanced from God even though we are distanced from our building.  Indeed, even now, God is not far from each one of us.  In God do we live and move and have our being.

What is easy to forget, but that perhaps this time has reminded us, is that our building is not a house for God, as if God could be contained, as if God could be quarantined; it is a house for us – one in which we marvel together at the transcendent divinity that blesses our ordinary, everyday lives.  And that is important.  It is important that we sing and pray and cry and laugh and soak in the presence of God together.  It is important that we eat the bread of angels and practice reconciliation and baptize our new siblings and bury our old siblings.  Our building gives us a space to experience the wonders of God together.  And those shared holy experiences seep into the stone, and hang the beauty of holiness in the atmosphere like a thick cloud of incense. 

But God is not bound by profound structures.  God is a wild wind blowing forever through creation.  We live and move and have our being in the very force that sparked life.  We are drowning in God and too often we fail to notice. 

God is not waiting for us to visit.  God is longing for us to open our eyes to the very presence that surrounds us, to the mysterious Spirit who inhabits our hearts. 

Before I entered the open door, I was in God.  And after I crossed the threshold, I was in God.  Because God does not live only in shrines made by human hands: God is the air we breathe, the ocean in which we are buried.  We are in God and God in us.  No matter where we are, we are found: for in God we live and move and have our being.