Open Posture
Last Friday someone did some minor damage to our church. At some point in the late afternoon, after Jack Cleghorn had finished practicing and before Albert Gray came to help get the church ready for Sunday, someone broke the Paschal candle, tossed the brass follower onto the ground, folded up the dust cover on the altar, and moved the cross down from the reredos to the altar itself.
When I received the phone call from Albert, who found the mess, I could tell both that the damage was minimal and that the impact was significant. This is a holy space. These are holy things. This is the center of who we are and where God meets us. This is the place we enter with the greatest care and intention. “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place?” the psalmist asks in Psalm 24. “He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false, and does not swear deceitfully,” the psalmist answers. To desecrate the sanctuary of our church is to attack the very holiness we seek to encounter in God.
No matter how sacred the church feels to us, we should not be surprised that it is vandalized from time to time. Back in September 2022, someone smashed the back window of our church van and etched some obscene images into the welcome center doors and a parishioner’s car in the parking lot. That episode did not impact our worship space directly, but it still felt like an assault on our church.
I reread the piece for the newsletter I wrote after that incident, and much of it still rings true. We are vulnerable. Our overnight guests consider themselves members of our church family, and they help keep our property and people safe. But leaving our church doors unlocked during the day exposes us to attacks like this one, and allowing people to sleep on the property overnight invites similar incidents.
How might we respond to this latest vandalism? Do we want to keep the doors locked all the time? Do we want armed security guards to patrol the property day and night? Do we want to install security cameras that cover the entire property so that we can identify and ask the police to arrest the offender? Do we want the police to keep our grounds clear all the time and trust that the people who regularly sleep at St. Paul’s will find another place to camp out?
If we did those things, life would be simpler around here. Volunteers would not need to pick up trash every morning. Staff and parishioners might feel safer walking to and from their car in the parking lot. Parents would not have as much to worry about when their children are playing on the playground. We could probably stop most incidents of vandalism before they start. But what kind of church would we be?
The Bible contains complex depictions of God’s holiness and the people’s need to protect it, and, at times like this, I feel acutely those complexities and contradictions. One of my favorite stories that seems to bring those competing approaches together is found in 2 Samuel 6, when King David brings the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem.
In a lavish display of wealth and power, which was designed both to honor God and to legitimate David’s reign, the priests lead the ark toward the capital city. The Bible tells us that David and the whole house of Israel danced and made merry before the ark with all their might. Then, tragedy struck. The oxen pulling the cart that bore the ark stumbled, and the sacred chest upon which the glory of God was said to dwell threatened to slip off the side of the cart into the muck. Uzzah, one of the priests, instinctively reached up to steady the ark and prevent it from crashing to the ground, but the sacred ark was never to be touched by human hands, and the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him down dead on the spot.
David was furious. Perhaps he was upset because he knew that the ark was not supposed to be pulled on a cart but carried on poles by the priests—upset because he should have known better. Or maybe David was angry because everything had been going so well, and the death of Uzzah had sucked the joy and enthusiasm out of the crowd. Regardless, the Bible tells us that David’s anger gave way to fear—fear of the Lord and of what God might do to David if his anger got the better of him. So the king ordered that the procession cease and that the ark be placed temporarily in the nearby house of Obed-edom. And, just like that, the party was over.
Three months later, however, word came to the king that God had blessed the household of Obed-edom richly because of the ark—a sign that it was time to finish the job and bring the ark into the city. This time, the ark was carried on poles, and every six paces David sacrificed an ox and a fatling calf—a gesture of devotion to God and generosity to the people. As the ark approached Jerusalem, David again danced at the head of the procession with all his might. So enthralled was the king with this triumphant moment that he forgot himself and stripped off his robes and danced while wearing only his linen ephod—his undergarments.
From up in the palace window, David’s wife Michal, who was also the daughter of his predecessor Saul, looked upon her husband with dismay, despising him in her heart. Later, she confronted the king about his unseemly display, saying, “How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants’ maids, as one of the vulgar fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!” Cutting through the layers of conflicted loyalties (and anticipated adultery), David responded, “It was before the Lord, who chose me in place of your father and all his household…that I have danced before the Lord. I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in my own eyes; but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honor.”
We cannot ignore David’s record of infidelity to his wives, which complicates any criticism that he or the biblical text has for Michal, but, in this episode, her disdain for David’s inappropriate behavior had less to do with his faithfulness to her and more to do with her understanding of how God’s anointed king should behave, especially during such a holy occasion. In a sense, she was probably right: the king of God’s people had no business dancing around publicly in his underwear, especially in front of the holy seat of God. Yet the text makes it clear that David understood something Michal failed to see—that sometimes God is present among God’s people in ways more likely to be discerned by “vulgar fellows” than proper kings and queens.
The same God whose holiness demanded the life of Uzzah also called for David’s uninhibited and ecstatic display. We believe in a God whose holiness requires our utmost respect, and we believe that, in some cases, that respect means dancing like a fool before God. To hold onto both of those requires vulnerability—in us and in God. If we sealed off the holiest spaces in our church and only allowed approved personnel to enter them, we would never encounter the God who is primarily manifest through the lives of the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, and those who suffer. Yet, if we degraded our worship space and made it indistinguishable from a secular auditorium, our worship might not enable us to ascend to the heavenly places and approach with humility the throne of God.
After examining the damage done to our church in this incident, I believe the individual responsible was suffering from a mental health crisis and not someone who was seeking to do damage to our church. There are so many ways that someone could inflict more significant harm upon our building or our congregation. This feels more like a defiant gesture toward God than an attack on St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. It still stings, but I think we can wear this scar like a badge of honor rather than a token of shame. This is a sign that we are making ourselves available and accessible to ordinary people and the challenges that they bring with them. Sure, it gets messy, but that is sometimes true about God, too.
We must be willing for things we care about to get messed up from time to time. There is a cost associated with that, but the cost of closing ourselves off to the messiness of the world is far greater.
Yours faithfully,
Evan D. Garner
