The Gospel
Scaffolding Faith
I don’t know if you’ve heard the news yet, but It’s official....We officially have the best scaffolding in all of Boston. At least according to the Boston Courant we do. As they put it, “If there were awards for scaffolding, Old South Church would take top honors.” Scaffolding may seem like an unusual minor detail for a newspaper to take note of. But I think scaffolding says everything about a church’s beliefs. And I’ll tell you why...... Last week I returned with 14 other Old Southers from a Mission trip in New Orleans. We were working with a non-profit called the St. Bernard project. They help restore houses for people without the financial, familial, or physical support needed to rebuild their own house in the St. Bernard Parish, which was the ONLY neighborhood that was declared 100% unlivable after the floods. That means that every single house, 27,000 homes in the St. Bernard Parish were drowned in up to 20 feet of flood water for a total of 4 weeks. That’s water as high as the balconies in the Sanctuary! Even after 6 years, there are still roughly 33,000 people without homes just in the St Bernard Parish. So the 15 of us did what we could to put in a full hard week of work on one family’s house. After a week of sweating bullets.... after a week of mentally and physically demanding construction.....after a week of being so far away from our apartments and houses here in Boston, I can’t imagine returning to a better church home. I love that when I return from a week of restoring a house, I come back to the scaffolding of this sanctuary. It is so fitting that as we go out into the world to refurbish houses, we are also working right here to refurbish our own house of worship. as I’m sure all 15 members of the recent mission trip can tell you, you cannot change the world without changing yourself at the same time. Here is the story of how I was refurbished in New Orleans....... I have always been a corner-cutter. I always did just enough school work to coast into a decent grade, but never anymore. If I could hand in my first draft as the final copy, that was good enough for me. I am in no way, shape, or form a detail kind of guy. When we arrived at our work-site in New Orleans, the home of the Jones family, we learned that we would be putting the final touches on their house. This is a rare treat. I have been on numerous mission trips, and I have NEVER had the joy of seeing a project completed. While an unprecedented joy for sure, this final-touches type of work presented a particular challenge to my corner-cutting sensibility. In fact, final touches is the work that you do to cover up all the other corners that were cut before. So after two full frustrating days of meticulous measuring and floor laying, two full days of lining up each piece just right......I was done. I was ready to move onto the next task. And all that was left was a tiny little half-inch piece of flooring. In that moment there was nothing more important to me than finishing the floor and moving on, and nothing was going to slow me down. Which is why I was overjoyed when somehow, I managed to cut that last piece perfectly; and let me tell you, making a piece of flooring that small, with all those impossibly straight diagonal lines, and in that kind of New Orleans heat, is not an easy task. But I was sure it was the perfect size. Until...... I actually tried the piece. It was the right size alright, but I had cut the wrong end of the flooring. You see, there are these little connector pieces at the end of each bit of flooring, and I had completely cut off the connector piece by mistake. And I knew that this last piece wouldn’t connect. And I knew it would look terrible. And I knew that it would probably mess up the entire floor in the Jones’ bedroom.....BUT......it would be so much quicker to just cut a few corners (literally) and apply a little brute force to squeeze this last piece in. Just as I took out my exacto knife, Just as I was about to hack away at the floor, the angelic yet stern voice of our site supervisor Bridget shouted over my shoulder, “What do you think you’re doing?” I stammered. I stuttered. I was caught red-handed. She asked rhetorically, “Would you cut that corner in your grandmother’s house?” I looked at her with all earnestness and with an undying love for my grandmother Sara Woodyard Davidson, and answered whole-heartedly, “Yes. Most definitely, Yes. I would definitely cut this corner if I were building my grandmother’s house.” At night our group would take time to write our daily reflections in these worship books. On the front cover was a snippet from the Biblical passage from Ezra that Marilyn just read. And every night I thought about this passage from Ezra, “This work is being done diligently and prospers in their hands.....We are the servants of the God of heaven and earth, and we are rebuilding this house....” We are the servants of God and we are rebuilding this house. I thought about the Israelites who had spent several generations living in exile, refugees in a strange land. When they finally got back to Jerusalem, they were ready to be settled in back home. But Jerusalem didn’t quite feel like home to them because there was one major piece missing. The Temple, the physical representation of their belief, the stabilizing center of their wandering faith, the Temple was completely destroyed. Without the Temple, without their house of worship, they were lost and wandering in their own land. They had returned to Jerusalem alright, but they were still waiting to return home. So they started rebuilding. It was not an easy process. There were bureaucratic nightmares, 15 year-long delays, and angry neighbors trying to put a stop to the rebuilding. But they never gave up, and they never took the easy way out. That’s why in our scripture for today, even the angry neighbors trying to stop the Israelites had to write a report admiring their rebuilding efforts, much like the report that appeared in the Boston Courant about our own scaffolding: “If there were awards for rebuilding Ancient Temples, the Israelites would take top honors. This work is being done diligently in the name of their God.” And here was the Jones Family. Like the Israelites, the Jones Family had spent several years living in exile, refugees in a strange land. When they finally got back to New Orleans, they were ready to be settled in back home. But without that solid structure of a house they were lost and wandering in their own land. They commuted from Mississippi for a time. Most nights they lived in a shack in their back yard in the shadow of that empty, broken shell of a house. They had returned to New Orleans alright, but they were still waiting to return home. That’s when the St. Bernard Project entered the picture, and that’s when the Old South Missionaries made their pilgrimage down south. And that’s where I was, with the exacto-knife in my hand, and that half-inch piece of flooring missing the connecting edge. In that moment, I imagined the Israelites coming back to an unfinished house of worship and not feeling like it was much of a home at all. I imagined how delicately they set each little stone in place. As I imagined the Israelites coming home to the unfinished work of their sacred temple, I also imagined myself coming home to the unfinished work of the Old South Sanctuary. I imagined the Consigli workers, up on that treacherously high scaffolding, and I imagined them holding each piece of stained glass with the same tenderness that the Israelites used for the temple in Jerusalem. I imagined the Jones family returning to their house with that unfinished piece of floorboard that piece I had left undone.... imperfect.... incomplete.......not feeling like it was much of a home at all. “Help bring them home.” I heard that phrase over and over from our site supervisors like the refrain of their favorite song. “Help Bring Them Home.” Not “bring them back to a place that some volunteers half-heartedly threw together,” but “Bring Them Home.” And that was our mission. We could have easily thrown together a messy shack for the Jones Family, but that wouldn’t have been much of a home, that wouldn’t have been a suitable sanctuary for these refugees, that wouldn’t have been much of a mission at all. That would have been a self-congratulatory tourist visit. There’s something about the rebuilding work on the house that reflects in the souls of the people doing the rebuilding and in the souls of the people who live there. If there is one thing incomplete, if there is one thing left broken, like a half-inch of floorboard, it would be like the Jones Family themselves hadn’t fully been healed from their 6 years in exile. It would be like I had left myself broken and incomplete. We weren’t there to just rebuild a house, but to rebuild a home....to rebuild a community, To heal the wounds of the people who lived there, to build scaffolding around our own wounded faith. That is how I came to understand what Bridget meant when she asked me if I would cut the same corners in my Grandmother’s house. She meant to say to me, “Jack Davidson, you better treat every centimeter of this house with the same loving respect that you would demand of the construction workers restoring Old South Church.” So I put down my exacto-knife, and I took out my measuring tape and did it all over again. As I drew those impossibly straight diagonal lines, and as I turned on that power saw outside in the blazing sun, a new calm settled over my heart. The old anxiety had left me. The hurried rush had left me. As I snapped that half-inch of flooring in place, I heard these words...the words of Ezra, echoing in my head, “We are servants of the God of heaven and earth, and we are rebuilding this house...” That’s what Mission Trips are all about. That’s what this scaffolding is all about. It’s not a temporary nuisance; it’s a theological reminder. It’s a reminder that along with God we are always under construction. It’s a reminder that Beautiful Sanctuaries and Beautiful Homes and Beautiful Faith all take a lot of work, a lot of work on very small, seemingly insignificant details. If you leave one small pin out of the scaffolding, then the whole thing comes falling down. But if you take care of every minor detail, it’s totally worth it. All of the extra care and work is totally worth it. It’s worth it because it changes the way you see the entire world. It’s worth it because you learn to appreciate every corner of your own apartment, and every little carved flower in this church, and every minor little detail of God’s creation. It’s worth it every Christmas when this Sanctuary is illuminated by 1,000 little candle flames. It’s worth it when you can stand in front of the Western Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem, and you can feel the detailed love of a wall that has stood through centuries of attacks. It’s worth it when you see the pictures that were posted last Monday of the Jones family, with their huge smiles, and their perfectly lined up floor, and the sign posted on the front of the house that reads: “Welcome Home!” That is a scaffolding kind a faith. A faith that is at home, but is never too settled. A faith that is always self-improving, but always outward looking. A faith that is grounded, but ever-evolving. A faith that treats every person and every place with the same care you would use to rebuild your own house of worship. “We are servants of the God of heaven and earth, and we are rebuilding this house.”
0 Comments
|
Rev JackBarefoot & Bearded ArchivesCategories |