The day was overcast with a light drizzle of rain. I and Simon, the architect we had chosen to design and supervise the building of our church, were getting acquainted. We were the same age. The year before, he had returned to his hometown to open an architectural practice. And I was just eighteen months into being a pastor. He had never designed a church. And I had never been a pastor. It seemed a little risky—two newcomers to this church business pooling our inexperience. But we had both grown up in the church, Simon right there in that small town and I in a town of similar size in Montana.
We were having our conversation while strolling over the six acres of farmland that had only recently been a cornfield and was now the site for building a new church. The land had been purchased by the Presbyterian Church four years earlier, anticipating population growth as the city of Baltimore spilled out over the surrounding beltway that contained it.
Simon had suggested the six acres as a good place to get acquainted. “Let’s get a feel for that land together. For the next couple of years it is going to be common ground for us.”
“So, Simon, what is it going to be like for you to build a church? Isn’t it a little scary? You know, don’t you…that you are going to have to please a lot of people? Wouldn’t an office building be a lot safer when you are just getting started?”
“Maybe safer, Eugene, but not as interesting—or challenging. You know what First Presbyterian in town is like. I grew up in that church. It was built a hundred and fifty years ago—a fine piece of architecture to center and anchor a small town and farming community. When I was in high school and thinking I might like to be an architect, more times than not during the sermon I would sketch a church, both inside and out, a church that would fit the times I live in. I imagined and sketched hundreds of churches. Believe me, I’m no newcomer to this. Later while studying architecture, I learned that building a church is the most interesting task there is to set before an architect. It brings the best out of us—so many things working together, everything you see but at the same time, everything you don’t see. But not many architects get to do this anymore. Especially today, when everything else has become so functional, church is still a work of art. I can’t wait to get started. And how about you?”
The rain had picked up and there were no trees for refuge. We drove back into town for coffee in the shelter of a local diner.
“Unlike you, I didn’t have that long, imaginative preparation going for me. But about three years ago several things converged for Jan and me, and the pastoral vocation became both clear and compelling. I realized that a lot of what I had been experiencing as I grew up were bits and pieces of a pastoral identity that had now come together—earlier I just didn’t have a word for it. Now I do: pastor. When I was given the opportunity to organize and develop a new church here, the adrenaline kicked in. I’ll tell you more of the story as we work together. But I hold an advantage over you. You have never built a church, and I’ve already been a pastor for eighteen months.”
Our building committee, seven of us, had selected Simon to be our architect after a disappointing meeting with a consultant from a large architectural firm that specialized in churches. The consultant had been recommended to us by my denominational office that was responsible for supervising the organization and development of new churches.
Brisk. All business, he introduced himself and asked for our names and occupations. He learned that Ralph, our chairman, managed a farm equipment and feed store, Jeff sold asphalt to road builders, Harry was in charge of music for the public schools of the county, Ethel a homemaker, Andy recently retired from an insurance agency, and Miles owned a food-catering business.
He was crisp. “I see. Since none of you has experience in planning for church building, I’ll start with the basics.”
I told him that I had some building experience in carrying boards for my dad as he built our summer cabin when I was sixteen years old. He was not amused. He opened his briefcase and began pulling out building plans for us to consider.
“Here’s a colonial. This is historic colonial country you are living in; I think this might suit the ambience of the culture here. And here is a kind of neogothic. It has a distinctive “church” look—it would probably attract people who don’t know much about church but are looking for something solid and safe.”
And then this: “I think you would be interested in considering this one. It’s very popular right now—a multipurpose building, easily convertible from sanctuary to church suppers to community gatherings. Very functional. Given your circumstances, I would probably recommend this. Give me a call and let me know what you decide.”
The man left. Mr. Consultant had been with us about half an hour; he had another appointment. He had not asked us a single question beyond getting our names and functions. He left knowing nothing about who we were or the way we understood church. Harry was irritated: “All he knows of church is in those half dozen building plans in his briefcase.”
What he didn’t know and didn’t bother to find out was that we had been worshipping together for well over a year in this multipurpose house basement, the catacombs, in which our meeting with him had just taken place. What he didn’t know and didn’t bother to find out was that we were already a church, a church-in-formation.
What he didn’t know and didn’t bother to find out was that in Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Library we had discovered several large folio volumes of churches damaged and rebuilt in Europe after World War II, complete with photographs and commentary. The seven of us had spent an afternoon in the library with these books spread out before us. Some of the best architects in Europe had been enlisted in that work.
One French architect categorized the forms in which churches took shape in the terms cave, fortress, and tent. The great cathedral churches of Europe were fortress churches. They dominated the landscape and provided a center and sanctuary, protection against the barbarians, a visual statement that church defined and ruled everything around it. The first three centuries of Christian churches were cave churches—unobtrusive house churches and catacombs. We had combined house and catacomb. Churches took the form of tents in a nomadic society, inexpensive and impermanent for a people on the move. The first biblical form of church architecture was a tent, the wilderness tabernacle. “People on the move” certainly described the suburbia where we were living. The French architect we had come across in the library was urging that in this postwar, post-Christendom society, Christians should be building tent churches, modest churches that don’t overpower the neighborhood but, rather, enter it, becoming neighbors in the neighborhood. That seemed right to us.
And, finally, what our consultant didn’t now and didn’t bother to find out was that the seven of us had been taking field trips for the previous six weeks, visiting new churches that had been built in the previous ten years or so. (We got their locations from denominational offices.) Every Saturday we loaded up two vans and visited churches within fifty miles that included Baltimore and parts of Pennsylvania and Delaware. We usually managed to visit three, sometimes four, churches each Saturday. After six weeks and twenty churches we decided we had seen enough. Out of twenty church buildings, only two showed any evidence of artistic imagination or liturgical integrity—two “tent” churches.
The consultant was off to his next appointment. We were dispirited. Nobody said anything. We all felt Harry’s irritation. We didn’t need to take a vote on “what to decide.” Ethel broke the silence, “Do you realize what has just happened? We have just been shown the building plans of all those churches we visited on our Saturday field trips—stereotypes of ‘what looks like a church’ along with a depressing number of ‘multifunctional’ nonchurches ranging from bland to ugly. And not a hint of what can give expression to who we are and are becoming. But we know it can be done. Remember? There were those two tent churches.”
We agreed that we didn’t have the energy for anything more. We quit for the night.
Alan, our denominational supervisor, was not happy with our decision to reject the “expert” (his term) counsel that he had provided for us. He warned us that we were being very foolish. He used the word “headstrong.” He had been through this process dozens of times; we knew nothing. Which was not quite true. We were new at this, true, but already well on our way in discussing the nature of worship, the nature of congregation, and the part that architecture played in expressing and shaping our identity in this local neighborhood. Week after week we had been accumulating a sense of church. And we knew we were not a set of blueprints.
At our next meeting Ralph, our chairman, said that he had just learned of a young architect who had recently begun his practice in our town. He knew his parents. I was sent to talk to him. He had never designed a church but was very interested in what we were doing. He agreed to come and talk with us. A lot of questions were asked, back and forth. We liked one another. We asked Simon to be our architect. He asked for some time, that first he would like to worship with us to get a sense of who we were as a congregation. After he and his wife, Deborah, had worshipped with us for a few weeks, he was ready. Yes, he would like to be our architect.
At the same time that my pastoral identity was in formation, the congregation was discovering its unique identity. What does it mean to be a church of Jesus Christ in America? We had let Luke’s storytelling in The Acts of the Apostles give us our text. We saturated our imaginations in the continuities between the conception, birth, and life of Jesus and the conception, birth, and life of the church. As we let Luke tell the story, it became clear that being the church meant that the Holy Spirit was conceiving the life of Jesus in us, much the same way the Holy Spirit had conceived the life of Jesus in Mary. We weren’t trying to be a perfect or model or glamorous church. We were trying to get out of the way and pay attention to the way God worked in the early church and was working in us. We were getting it: worship was not so much what we did, but what we let God do in and for us. These months of worship in our catacombs sanctuary had made their mark on us: we were a people of God gathered to worship God. The single word, “worship,” defined what we were about.
The congregational consensus emerged not so much by talking about it but by simply doing it: worship was our signature activity, the distinctive act that set us apart from all other social structures—schools, businesses, athletic teams, political parties, government agencies. It was not achieved through a Bible study or a discussion that pooled our various expectations and came up with something we could all live with. We simply met every Sunday and worshipped God. We sang together, prayed together, listened to scripture together, received the Sacrament together, baptized our children and converts, and went back to our homes ready to enter a week of work with the blessing of God on us. Our infant son, Eric, was the first child I baptized in our catacombs sanctuary. He did his part in making sure we wouldn’t romantically sentimentalize the holy moment—the moment the baptismal water touched his head, he set up a loud wail.
The ordinariness of our lives and the circumstances of the catacombs cleared our minds of romantic and utopian illusions regarding church. We weren’t a church that “looked like a church.” No prayer groups, no Sunday school, no social groups—just worship. As our church matured, some of these ancillary activities were added, but not until our basic worship identity was well established.
And it was well established. The catacombs had served us very well as we found our formation as a worshipping congregation. But more and more people were arriving. Basic hospitality required that we make room for them—a place for worship, a sanctuary to preserve and cultivate our identity as a people of worship.
As pastor to these people in these circumstances, what was my part? I asked God for guidance, for wisdom. It didn’t take long for clarity to come. Just as I had used Acts as the text for our being formed as a worshipping people of God, I would use Exodus as the text for building a place for welcoming others to worship with us.
The Exodus world was full of congregation-in-formation stories. Moses rescued as an infant from the river, his long years of formation as a pastor while tending sheep in Midian, years he didn’t know he was being formed as a pastor, the voice from the burning bush, the ten plagues, the Red Sea deliverance, thunder and lightning from Sinai, the Ten Words.
Moses: leading his people out of Egypt into a life of free salvation and forming them into a congregation. Moses: developing a sense of community that was held together by the providence of God, a people understanding themselves in terms of the revelation and action of God. Moses: leading a people into an understanding and practice of being a people of God, a church. Moses: my mentor in forming a people-of-God congregation. Moses: building a sanctuary for worship in the wilderness.
I wanted to make the most of this unprecedented opportunity of being in on the ground floor, rethinking, reliving the basics—God’s salvation, God’s community, God’s revelation, God’s church, God’s congregation, God’s sanctuary—with variously informed and uninformed people. This was not only new territory for me but for everyone in my infant congregation. Not exactly wilderness as it had been for the people to whom Moses was pastor, for we all had running water in our homes and Safeway bread on our tables. But all of us were in a position to rethink and refresh our memories of just what being a people of God consisted of. The life and words of Moses as he led his congregation from Egyptian slavery through uncharted wilderness to Canaan freedom gave us common ground to work from. I wanted to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work through the ways in which we lived theology and ethics and worship.
As I was living into this Exodus story, finding ways to include my congregation in it—this text that I had so recently received as Holy Spirit given, an answer to prayer for pastoral guidance at this transitional time—I came across a name that I had never paid attention to before, Bezalel. I thought I knew this Exodus story inside and out. How had I missed Bezalel?
Every three of four weeks Simon and I got together and conducted an informal seminar on what we were doing. Sometimes we did it while walking on the site where we would be building our sanctuary. Our vocations merged. We began to discern common themes in our respective vocations—the perpetual interaction between visible and invisible, sound and silence, flesh and spirit, materiality and spirituality, order and chaos.
It was now April. The juices were running in our imaginations. We were again strolling on that empty cornfield that was filling up with hints and guesses of the Shekinah of our yet to be constructed sanctuary. Simon stopped, kicked up a piece of dirt, and said, “This is where we’ll pitch our tent. I think this is just the right location.” And then, as an afterthought, “too bad just the two of us are present for this groundbreaking.”
A few moments later Simon said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about our Exodus text. I think I have found my name in it—Bezalel. Bezalel the architect of the tent of meeting. I’m Bezalel.”
For Moses and his congregation all the basic stuff of salvation was packed into a story that covered about three months. But the three months in which the salvation had been accomplished and the revelation defined was just the beginning. A foundation was established, but after four hundred years of Egyptian slavery, this was a lot to take in. This was going to take a while. Forty years for a start: salvation, the God-shaped life, absorbed—assimilated—into their lives. The assimilation would take place through worship. Bezalel was the architect responsible for shaping the place of worship that would shape the worship of the people, that would in turn shape the way the people lived their common lives, their lives in common.
Later that day I wrote in my journal. “Wednesday, April 1963. This morning while a spring breeze played on the grass, Bezalel, architect of the wilderness tent, made his appearance in Simon, architect of Christ Our King Church: ‘I’m Bezalel.’”
There are forty chapters in Exodus. I had never read, really read, past chapter thirty-four. Those first thirty-four chapters are where all the action is with Moses at the center of the action. At chapter thirty-five the action comes to a stop. The chapter opens with Moses talking about Sabbath keeping—what the people don’t do, withdrawing from daily work in order to give God time and space to do God’s work in them, God’s congregation. The first thirty-four chapters narrate the defining actions of salvation and revelation. The final six chapters narrate the preparations for continuing worship that would assimilate that salvation and revelation into the fabric of their common life, week after week, month after month, year after year after year, for another twelve hundred years, at which time Jesus would bring it all to a new beginning. It is here, at chapter thirty-five, that the name Bezalel appears for the first time. Bezalel the architect. Bezalel the artist.
I had never noticed this transition before, the transition that moved the Hebrews from experiencing the salvation and revelation of God under the leadership of Moses to involving them in a lifetime of living in response and participation in that salvation and revelation under the forms of Bezalel’s art and architecture.
The story of the Red Sea and Sinai with Moses playing a leading role defined the life of God’s people. Telling and retelling that story in a place of worship would keep their identity alive and focused. Now with Bezalel playing the leading role, the account of planning, designing, and constructing a building for worship provided the structural form for rehearsing and practicing their identity in the materials and circumstances of their lives for as long as they lived.
Moses dominates the story in its inception and formation. Bezalel is the architect of its continuation and maturation. At chapter thirty-five, Moses steps aside and hands things over to Bezalel. Bezalel provides the people with the material means for worshipping through wilderness and Promised Land living, assimilating what had been given at the Red Sea and Sinai. For these final six chapters Bezalel is in charge. What he is in charge of is making provisions for worship, building a place of worship.
Simon noticed and took seriously what I had never seriously noticed before: Bezalel designing and supervising the building of the wilderness tabernacle, the portable sanctuary, the tent, in which the people of Israel worshipped God during their forty years of transition from Egyptian slavery to Promised Land Canaan, the approximate half century from 1250 to 1200 BC.
And now our church had its Bezalel. Simon and I had long conversations in which we discussed the formation of congregation. I immersed him in all the liturgy that I knew, the nature and ways of worship. From his side he taught me the aesthetics of space and the ways that color and light and material textures worked together, the “fit” of the structure with the landscape and the community that would surround and inhabit it. The conversations of that year, formed in the ambience of Bezalel and Moses in the wilderness and the congregation at worship in our catacombs sanctuary, developed into first blueprints and then a sanctuary on the six acres of empty Maryland farmland fronting Emmorton Road. It would become a place of worship and learning and community formation: simple and honest—a piece of art for worshipping God in the “beauty of holiness” in this suburban desert of secularism.
As those months of planning and decision making developed, we worked out in detail the ways that worship would keep us connected with our defining story and make adequate provision for its continuous development in the lives of the congregation.
I had never paid attention to a sanctuary as a piece of art, doing what art does—using the sensory (material, sound, texture) to give access to mystery, to the “behind the scenes” of our ordinary lives—to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell the vast world of beauty that inhabits, underlies, and permeates space and time, place and each person. The Holy.
Our priority as we prepared to go public with our congregation was coming into focus: provide a sanctuary for the worship of God, the central formative act for shaping the people of God as a people of God. Not just pilgrims on the way to the Holy Land. Not just a people defined by their place and circumstances in history.
Called to worship each week, we would repeatedly enter a place of awareness of the presence and word and action of God, keep alert and participating in that presence and word and action. It was not me, the pastor, telling them. We were realizing it together, in company with one another.
Back to Exodus. Bezalel goes to work. He designs and oversees the construction of the sanctuary, the tabernacle, also called the tent of meeting. Meticulous detail is given to everything that goes into a sanctuary where every detail of our lives is being integrated into responsive obedience and a life of salvation: weaving the curtains and the covering of the tent, with careful attention given to fabric, size, design, colors, and embroidery work, along with the hooks and clasps to connect them, tent poles (“frames”) and rods to hold the curtains. Furniture to provide tangible and visual witness to what they are doing: the ark of the covenant, a table for offerings with plates and dishes, bowls and flagons. An elaborate lamp stand with six branches, all of gold. An altar of incense. Holy anointing oil. The altar of burnt offering. Vestments for the priests: robes and tunics, some of them trimmed with bells, a turban crown. A huge work crew. Building materials: acacia wood, skins, gold, silver, bronze, gemstones, cords, pegs.
Worship has to do with God, whom no one has ever seen: “Let us worship God” is our standard rubric. But worship has to do simultaneously with all the stuff that we see wherever we look: acacia wood, fabrics and skins, tent pegs and altars, tables and flagons. To say nothing of all the workers in textile, metal, and wood, weaving and carving, smelting and casting.
First salvation from Egypt, then worship in the wilderness. First the great events at the Red Sea and Sinai, then bringing every detail of our lives and all the stuff of our lives into the sanctuary where we are formed into lives of salvation, detail by detail, day by day.
Up until those months of dealing with Bezalel in the Sinai desert in 1200 BC and Bezalel (aka Simon) in the lush greenery of Maryland in 1963, I had considered worship as something that provided a setting for proclamation and teaching and singing, primarily verbal acts. The congregation thought of it that way too. But now we were plunged into revising virtually everything we had assumed about worship. We were understanding it as the formation of salvation detail by detail, day by day, in the bodies of men and women and babies, neighborhoods, homes, workplaces, through the “hopes and fears of all the years.” The salvation “land of the living” was being created in our neighborhood.
Moses led people to salvation freedom; Bezalel paid scrupulous attention to the details of that freedom embodied in a holy life. Moses brought down the Ten Words from Sinai; Bezalel assembled them coherently in acts of offering and sacrifice. Moses and Bezalel.
Moses at the Red Sea and Sinai: the once-for-all events of salvation, the story that we keep telling one another to remember who God is and who we are.
Bezalel, aka Simon, and the Christ Our King sanctuary: the place of worship where a life of salvation identity is formed in time and place, in everydayness and in detail.
Moses the prophet formed my pastoral vocation kerygmatically.
Bezalel, aka Simon, formed my pastoral vocation liturgically.
Without Moses, worship would soon degenerate into aesthetics and entertainment.
Without Bezalel, aka Simon, salvation would blur into generalities of heavenly bliss and fragment into isolated and individualized fits and starts.
Finally, all was ready. We had a groundbreaking. After worship we processed (not quite the right word—“meandered” was more like it—with the children racing and skipping) the quarter mile from our catacombs sanctuary to the site of our new tent sanctuary. Anticipating what was to come, we had chosen a name for our church, Christ Our King Presbyterian. Lucy purchased two hundred seven-inch red shovels and hand painted them to give to everyone there that day:
CHRIST OUR KING GROUNDBREAKING JULY 12, 1964
The next day the Jeager Construction Company showed up with equipment and workmen to build the sanctuary that would give architectural expression to the life of worship that defined and expressed who we were as a people of God. Nine months later the sanctuary was complete.
We had our first service of worship in our new sanctuary on April 7, 1965. After the benediction most of the congregation lingered, talking and commenting on what we had done. Ruthie, the girl who had two and a half years earlier named our basement sanctuary Catacombs Presbyterian, interrupted Simon as he was in conversation with a few others, excitedly grabbed his arm, and said, “I just realized what you did! You modeled the interior of the sanctuary on those praying hands of Dürer—you know, that famous woodcut. That is so cool. I think we ought to rename this place Church of the Praying Hands. That is so cool.”
I was just a few steps away and overheard her. She was right. The abruptly steep, upward sweep of the roof automatically directed attention upward. Interiorly, the church was all steeple—or as Ruthie observed, praying hands. I said to her, “Not bad, Ruthie—you’re getting pretty good at church christening. First Catacombs Presbyterian and now Praying Hands Presbyterian. I like that.”
Our experience of worship in the catacombs had developed into decisions about the architecture of worship. Two and a half years of worshipping together underground provided the experience that would inform what we would continue when we opened our doors to the community and invited them to worship.
In the months that we had spent planning and thinking through the details of what was involved in our worship, and then building a sanctuary, it very soon became clear that what we were primarily concerned with was not what the church looked like but what went on within the church. The interior of the church was more significant than the exterior. And often, the feature of the sanctuary that was commented on was its spaciousness, roominess; a couple people mentioned “elbow room.”
A most conspicuous witness to that spaciousness, at least to me, came from the children. A few months after our sanctuary was completed, we opened a preschool for four-year-old children. Most of those enrolled were from other churches or no church at all. Each Tuesday I would meet with them in the sanctuary to get acquainted and tell them a story. Their classroom was in a separate building, about twenty feet away. On their first Tuesday, the teachers lined them up in a straight line and prepared them for the solemn occasion—going to church! They were to be reverent and talk in a quiet voice. The procession from classroom to sanctuary was dignified. But the moment they entered the sanctuary, they broke ranks and ran. Some skipped. There was exuberance and laughter. There was something about the openness, the sun shining through the expanse of windows, the dramatic upward sweep of the ceiling, the palpable largesse of that sanctuary, that invited playfulness. It was like they had been let out of a cage and were breaking free. The two teachers did their best to restore a decorum of reverence without much success.
I had my banjo with me and sat down on the floor and began singing “Mr. Froggy went a courtin’ and he did ride…” Soon they were gathered around and singing with me. We exchanged names. I told them a story. We did that every week through the school year.
Later that first day the teachers and I talked about what we had just experienced. Neither of them attended my congregation. They were embarrassed that they hadn’t been able to control the children. I was surprised but pleased at the spontaneous sense of playfulness that they displayed. They explained to me that part of their responsibility was to develop a sense of proper social behavior. I told them that I respected that but that I hoped when people entered this place of worship, they would sense that they were being invited into something larger than they were used to. I was hoping that the way this sanctuary had been designed did not suggest socialization but theologization (I didn’t use that word with them—I just now coined it), a sense of God in whose presence is fullness and joy. And maybe we had just been given a demonstration of the biblical phrase “and a little child shall lead them.”
It was a good conversation. And a quiet confirmation that the architecture was doing its work.
A very different confirmation came a year or so later, not from four-year-old children but from a professor and his students. The Roman Catholic diocese of Baltimore had recently constructed a new cathedral church, The Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. I had a friend on the faculty of St. Mary’s Seminary, just around the corner from the cathedral, who told a colleague, the professor of liturgics at the seminary, about our new sanctuary and suggested he come and see it.
Father Dominic telephoned and came out to visit. He had been the theological consultant to the architect of the new cathedral much as I had been to Simon, my Bezalel. We had a lot of common experience. But also a very different experience. He was in on the design and construction of a large fortress sanctuary. Under the circumstances, that was fitting. Baltimore is a largely Catholic city and has a strong historical rootage in Roman Catholicism from colonial times. I was in on the design and structure of a modest tent sanctuary in a suburb that had virtually no history or memory.
That initiated a practice that continued for several years. Each year Father Dominic brought his class of seminarians out to Christ Our King Church and used it as a case study in liturgical practice. These were the years of Vatican II. There was a lot of reform going on, much of it having to do with worship.
There were striking contrasts, the names for a start, the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen and Christ Our King Presbyterian. The church in the city was massive, dominating everything around it. Our church was modest, fitting into the neighborhood. But Father Dominic was mostly interested in observing how our two very different traditions had each skillfully employed architecture, attentive to every detail in order to reinforce an awareness and receptivity of a people of God to the presence and gifts of God.
And he never failed to comment on the sense of spacious simplicity in our sanctuary, using a line from a Narnia tale to describe Christ Our King Church, “Its inside is bigger than its outside.”
Father Dominic was an astute observer and good teacher. His students were lively and appreciative. It was affirming to have someone notice and approve. Mary Our Queen and Christ Our King worked well together.
Earlier we had found a text that gave clarity to what we hoped would take place in our sanctuary. It was a sermon that Martin Luther preached at the dedication of a church in Torgau, Germany, in 1544. He asked the congregation that “nothing should take place therein than that our dear Lord should speak with us through his holy word, and we again speak with him through prayer and praise.” We let Luther’s words guide our discussion on our interior architecture by paying attention to what took place between the polarities of worship: the North Pole of our Lord speaking “with us through his holy word” and the South Pole of our speaking “with him through prayer and praise.”
We wanted the architecture of our sanctuary to give as much sensory help as possible so that precisely that North/South polarity would be preserved, that from every angle the presence and Word of God would be honored, and that our words would be in response to God’s Word.
The North Pole of God’s Word: “That our dear Lord should speak with us through his holy word.”
In our tradition (Presbyterian) the “holy word” is referred to as the “audible word” of scripture and sermon and the “visible word” of the biblical sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. God speaks the same word to his people whether in word or sacrament. Our first decision was to place pulpit, baptismal font, and Lord’s table emphatically in the large central space of the sanctuary, with the pews arranged around them to give visual prominence to the “holy word.”
Earlier we had talked about using local building materials whenever possible. And wouldn’t it be appropriate to use something distinctively local for the baptismal font, communion table, and pulpit? Ted and Isabel were retired farmers who had lived their entire lives in our county. They called our attention to an abandoned marble quarry twenty miles north of our building site—Maryland green marble would be about as local as we could get. Stone as a building material for font, table, and pulpit has a long tradition in the church. And what better way to show the continuity of “the holy word,” audible and visible, than by using locally quarried Maryland green marble in the construction of font, table, and pulpit? It turned out that Ralph, our building chairperson, used to live near the quarry and knew the family who owned it. It was no longer a working quarry, but he thought there was still a warehouse of discarded marble slabs. He went to the family and inquired. He brought back in his pickup several pieces of what he thought might be usable marble. Bezalel, aka Simon, designed the font, table, and pulpit in a way that featured the marble.
The Maryland green marble surface of the font and table and the face of the pulpit anchored our sanctuary in the context of the local.
Baptismal Font. Baptism is the sacrament of entrance into the Christian church, marking the beginning of our life in Christ. The first thing a person meets on entering the sanctuary is the font—God’s first word to us is that he accepts and forgives us. But baptism is also an act of congregational worship, shared by all of God’s gathered people. We placed the font at the end of the short center aisle, which is at the same time the exact center of the church. It was a forceful sign to all who have been baptized that they have been received into Christ, are forgiven, and have passed “from death to life.”
Lord’s Table. Six feet beyond the font, still occupying the spacious center of the sanctuary, we placed the table from which we would serve Holy Communion, the sacrament of nurture for Christians. From the earliest days of the church the Lord’s Supper has been the defining act of worship, the axis upon which all else turns. It is an open table, placed on the level with the congregation, inviting all who trust in Christ to receive the Christ who offers himself to us.
Pulpit. Another six feet in toward the southeast wall and elevated slightly (seven inches) is the pulpit. The Holy Spirit speaking in scripture determines and regulates the life of the church. The open Bible that is clearly visible on the pulpit desk is emphatic that it is scripture, read and preached, and not a human word, that is authoritative in worship. The slab of marble that is the face of the pulpit is quietly dramatic. The green marble has a wild chaotic grain reflecting the stormy, unruly rebellious precreation world that God’s Genesis word ordered into a cosmos. Marcia had earlier designed a symbol for Christ Our King—the crown over the cross over the circle of the world, the crucified and risen Christ ruling the world as King. Loren fashioned the symbol out of burnished aluminum and fixed it on the marble face: the Word of God in scripture and sermon, a witness to Christ reconciling the disordered world into the order of salvation.
Things were falling into place. We had learned a lot and learned it well during those months in the catacombs.
The South Pole of the Congregation’s Words: “And we again speak with him through prayer and praise.”
A place of worship is a place for listening—listening to God speak. But it is also a place for answering, responding to what is spoken. God’s words initiate a conversation. We come together as a congregation in worship to speak “through prayer and praise” with the God who speaks with us.
We arranged the seating to emphasize this communal, conversational dimension to the language used in worship. Our sanctuary measured sixty feet by sixty feet, a square. The pews were in four sections, arranged to face the central open space that held the baptismal font, communion table, and pulpit: two sections directly opposite, two sections on a diagonal separated by the center aisle. No one was seated more than thirty feet from the center grouping of font, table, and pulpit. And the faces of at least three-quarters of the congregation were visible from wherever you sat. We were participants in worship, visually accessible to one another, not spectators peering over the backs of heads.
By placing the pews around the matrix of font-pulpit-table, we were making a statement: we can’t hear God’s love being spoken to us without at the same time looking into the faces of our neighbors, whom God also loves and commands us to love. When we come to worship, we are not isolated individuals, but a family of God. We come to worship not just to see and hear, but to pray and praise God with one another. The aisles were wide, providing a sense of spacious hospitality.
Earlier when the church sanctuary was about two months away from completion, some of us were talking together after worship, and the subject of a chancel cross for the sanctuary was discussed. William, whose father had been a Presbyterian pastor, was of the opinion that if we had a cross, it ought to be a Celtic cross, the style of cross associated with the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. The distinguishing mark of the Celtic cross is a circle fixed behind the cross arms, representing the world for which Christ died. By juxtaposing Christ’s cross and the world, it maintains the worshipper’s attention simultaneously on the Christ who died for the world and the world for which Christ died—the word God spoke to us in Christ and the men and women who respond to the word in prayer and praise.
Robert entered the conversation: “I’d like to make that cross. I have some American black walnut timbers stored in a barn back in Ohio on the family farm. They would be just the thing.” The next weekend he drove to Ohio, lashed the timbers on the roof of his station wagon, and brought them back. For the next two months he worked in his basement workshop, fashioning those timbers into a cross. By the time the sanctuary was complete, that cross was also finished and installed on the east wall, the chancel area, elevated above the congregation in full view of everyone. Eight feet tall with a three-and-a-half-foot crossbeam, it centered the attention of our listening, praying, and praising congregation on God’s complete work for his people accomplished in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Another statement: if out of forgetfulness or inattention our worship doesn’t take place under the cross of Jesus, worship almost inevitably becomes an exercise in wish fulfillment, and praise becomes self-congratulation—private needs and emotions given religious sanction. And notice the proportions: the cross is larger than the world—the action initiated in that cross is larger and more comprehensive than anything that is going on in the world.
Bezalel was not only an architect, a master builder: he was an artist. The piece of art that he is best known for is a sculpture, the ark of the covenant, placed in the tabernacle to center Israel’s acts of worship. The tabernacle, a portable, moveable structure for worship, served Israel throughout their forty-year sojourn in the wilderness. After arriving at their destination, “the land flowing with milk and honey,” it was pitched at Shiloh near the center of Canaan and became the fixed place of worship for Israel. Later it was placed within Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. When that temple was destroyed in 586 BC, the tabernacle and its centering ark were also destroyed.
The ark, placed at the heart of the wilderness tabernacle, was a visible focus for the worship of God. It was a rectangular coffinlike box, four feet two inches long and thirty inches wide and high, covered with gold. The center was designated the mercy seat. It was flanked by cherubim with outstretched wings. But the mercy seat was not a seat at all. It was empty space, a void, an emptiness framed by the angel wings that marked the presence of the enthroned God, Yahweh. Yahweh: “enthroned upon the cherubim.” Yahweh, who revealed himself to Moses as Presence; Yahweh, who delivered his people from Egyptian slavery; Yahweh, who spoke in thunder from Sinai; Yahweh, who fed his people on quail and manna on their way through the wilderness to Canaan. Inside the ark, the coffinlike box, were the Ten Words carved into stone tablets.
The focus and function of the ark was the empty space marked off by the cherubim—nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to handle. But it was not mere emptiness, but rather an emptiness that is fullness, “the fullness of him who fills all in all”: “I AM that I AM.”
The core empty space at the center of the ark provided a way of attending to God as he revealed himself to Moses at the bush in Midian, a revelation that became history at the Red Sea and Sinai and tabernacle. When God spoke from the bush, Moses asked God to identify himself—“There are a lot of gods loose in the world; which one are you? Tell me your name.” The voice answered in a three-word sentence (in Hebrew) ehyeh asher ehyeh. Moses had asked for a name; the answer he got was not a name. A name is a noun. It identifies, locates, objectifies. What Moses heard from the bush was a verb: “I AM…I AM just who I AM…I AM here…I AM present.” The verb in Hebrew (hayah) is the basic verb for “to be” spoken in the first person, “I AM,” and then repeated, “I AM.” I AM WHO I AM. “I AM” doubled—most emphatically: I am present. I am Presence. The nonname “Name” is vocalized in English as Yahweh.
I thought a lot about this. But it wasn’t just me. We talked a lot among us in the congregation throughout those months in the catacombs, gathering into our imaginations the interpenetration of visible and invisible. We had all taken a lot for granted in worship. Now we had both occasion and motivation to think through what we had been doing thoughtlessly, mindlessly as “the thing you do on Sundays.” We kept reflecting on the immense significance of this empty space between the cherubim: we can only know God in relationship. We cannot see a relationship—it is what takes place between persons. We only know one another in relationship, in the between. We only know God in relationship, the Between. We can only be present to the Presence. The art of the ark repudiates all idolatries, all ideologies, all strategies. Most, in fact, of what goes for religion.
We cannot make an object of God: God is not a thing to be named. We cannot turn God into an idea: God is not a concept to be discussed. We cannot use God for making or doing: God is not a power to be harnessed.
Bezalel the artist. Bezalel sculpted the piece of art that centered Israel’s worship of Yahweh. Every detail of the sculpture drew attention to an empty space—the space over the ark and between the cherubim, the invisible mercy seat on which was seated the invisible Yahweh. Yahweh cannot be seen or touched. We can only be in attentive presence, in prayer and submission, in adoration and obedience. Artists do that, use material and sound, color and form to see the invisible, listen to the silence, touch the interior.
Bezalel used his art as a sculptor to lead his people to worship God—to provide a way for his Israelites to attend to the saving action of God at the Red Sea in a way that prevented them from reducing God to a no-god idol they could take charge of and order around. Bezalel as a sculptor used his art to lead his people to worship God—to listen to the revealing Word of God at Sinai without reducing that Word to words of information or incantation. Most of what Bezalel’s ark of the covenant called attention to was that empty silence at the mercy seat, framed by the wings of the two cherubim. A visibility that gave witness to invisibility.
Worship is an art, using the sensory to bring us into an awareness of and attentiveness to the mystery of God. Worship has to do with practicing a way of life that is immersed in the salvation and revelation of Yahweh. Bezalel led the people whom Moses had led out of Egypt into making and worshipping in a sanctuary, a place designed to keep them aware and responsive to a way of life in which all their senses were brought into lively participation in the stuff of creation and the energies of salvation. He designed a worship center, the ark of the covenant, in which all visibilities converged into an Invisibility: Yahweh—a presence, a relationship—who can only be worshipped and never used.
The ark of the covenant at the holy of holies center of the tent that centered Israel’s worship marks God as present to us. Our task now is to be present to the one who is present to us. This sounds simple enough—and it is. But none of us find it much to our liking. We have a long history in wanting to make God into our image and use him for our purposes. The prophet Moses and the artist Bezalel, followed by a long succession of Hebrew prophets, did their best to free God’s people from ideas, attitudes, and practices that prevent us from letting God be God for us on God’s terms, not ours.
All of us were getting a crash course in architecture and art and worship. At our first Easter Sunday worship in our now completed sanctuary the story of the empty tomb was our text. After the benediction, three of our young college youth—Steve, Wanda, and Jim—were huddled in conversation on a back pew of the now empty church. I was returning to the pulpit to pick up my sermon notes. They called me over. Wanda said, “Pastor, we think we might be on to something. That empty tomb—could that be an echo of the empty mercy seat of the ark? That the two angels in ‘dazzling clothes’ who gave witness at the empty tomb of Jesus might be an allusion to the two cherubim marking the emptiness that is fullness at the ark?”
I had never thought of that before. I was intrigued and told them so. Forty-five years later I am still thinking about it. I keep noticing the multiple ways in which artists and their works of art keep taking us inside what we see and touch, taste and hear—enter the mystery. And that worship is the supreme art.