Part 1 of 2
What do you think of when you hear the word “sacred?” Does it make you think of temples, idols, revered objects of some kind? Or does it make you think of people? People you know, people you respect, people you love?
Sacred Spaces
The truth is, the word “sacred” can apply to any of that, and more. While the word “sacred” is often used interchangeably with the word “holy,” the two words are not entirely the same. “Sacred” refers to something that has been set aside or dedicated for worship to God, while “holy” has a more direct connection to God. We can see the difference in Exodus 3:5, where God tells Moses to remove the sandals from his feet and go barefoot, because the place that he is standing is holy ground. The ground became holy because God was there. “Sacred,” on the other hand, is something that is set apart, revered, and dedicated for the worship of God, and so it has a more tangential relationship to God. However, there are overlaps between the sacred and the holy.
Take a church, for example. In the Book of Common Prayer, we have a service called “The Dedication and Consecration of a Church” (p. 567). In this service, we “set aside” this space (or place) for the “ministry of [God’s] holy Word and Sacraments” (p. 567). In this service, the entire church structure is set aside for God’s work in the world. After the building, each of the objects – such as the baptismal font – in the church are given a special prayer. When we get to the altar, the Bishop prays over the altar, “Lord God, hear us. Sanctify this Table dedicated to you” (p. 574). Each of the objects in use throughout the liturgies of the church is consecrated and set aside for God’s holy work in the world. They are now considered sacred objects.
The overlap between the sacred and the holy is when these sacred objects are used for holy purposes. The altar has been consecrated – set aside – for the Eucharist. In Eucharistic Prayer A, which we do every Sunday during the Season after Pentecost, the priest says the words over the bread and wine: “Sanctify them by your Holy Spirit to be for your people the Body and Blood of your Son, the holy food and drink of new and unending life in him” (p. 363). At the end of the prayers, everyone bows, because in the Episcopal Church we believe that the Real Presence of Christ is now with us in the bread and wine. That is, through prayer, Christ has become present with us in the bread and wine through the use of a sacred – set aside – altar, and the celebration of all God’s people. This is the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, the Great Thanksgiving. It is here where the sacred intersects with the holy. It might even be appropriate for us all to remove our sandals at this point, since we are standing on holy ground – holy because God is there with us.
The same intersection of the sacred and the holy is true for Baptism, and for the ordinations of clergy.
Sacred Calling
When you think of clergy, you may not think of them as holy, and likely, not even as sacred. And, in fact, there are clergy who are decidedly less than holy. It is their calling, and their ordination, that is sacred. That is, when deacons, priests, and bishops are ordained, they enter into a vocation that is set aside – sacred – to do the work of God among the people. Each of them, given their ordination, has the privilege to perform various tasks, as each of them have been given a certain authority, and set aside – consecrated – for a particular function within the church. This is why a bishop or priest can consecrate the bread and wine at the Holy Communion, and why a deacon has the privilege of proclaiming the Gospel among the people.
Clergy are set aside, not set above, or set before. They are to be spiritual guides to the people of God, and it is their vocation that is sacred, even when they themselves fail to live up to God’s own standard. Clergy are human, and subject to human frailties and sin just like everyone else. But that does not mean that their function is any less sacred because of it. One way to see the distinction is through one of the rituals at the Eucharist (Holy Communion) that is often overlooked: the washing of the priest’s hands.
The bowl that is used when a priest washes their hands is called a “lavabo.” When the priest washes their hands, there is a little prayer that goes along with it, from which the bowl gets its name. In Latin, it is: “Lavabo inter innocentes manus meas, et circumdabo altare tuum, Domine.” In English: “I will wash my hands in innocence, O Lord, that I may go around your altar.” This hand washing has always been symbolic. It is not intended to clean the priest’s hands.1 Instead, it is like a mini-confession for the priest. The priest recognizes that it is a great privilege to serve at the altar. They get to enter into the midst of the holy at the sacred table. And so the priest says this prayer as a way to admit that they are sinful creatures who have nevertheless been set aside – consecrated – for God’s work of Word and Sacrament among the people of God.
Now, some of you might be thinking, “I vaguely remember something about ‘The Priesthood of All Believers.’ Do we really even need bishops, priests, or deacons?” What you’re thinking of is 1 Peter 2:9, which says that “you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.” Peter is quoting Exodus 19:6, which says – about the whole nation of Israel – “You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” That is, all the people of Israel were to be priests for God, as a light to the Gentile nations around them. And yet, they still had priests who served in the temple. If we look again at 1 Peter 2:9, you’ll see that it ends up saying that you will be a people who “proclaim the excellence of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” That is, all people are called to serve God according to their gifts and capabilities, and that is the excitement of the Sacred Journey that we will be looking at next month.
The Secular and the Mundane
You may remember from several months ago, in a sermon on the Lord’s Prayer, that I mentioned that the opposite of “Holy” is not “evil,” but “mundane.” That is, the opposite of making something holy is to make it commonplace, dull, mundane. To make it so useless that you might ignore it and think nothing of it.
Over the past few centuries, there has been a dramatic shift in how people think of God, the Divine, the Holy. And when people shift their thinking about the holy, then it affects what can be considered sacred.
In the middle ages, God was infused in every aspect of people’s lives. The church was the central focus of town, and no one thought that there could be anything other than God and the church. The Church was the one organization that possessed the Truth, and there was no other explanation that was accepted. And then, along came Copernicus, and later Galilei, who told the church that the earth actually rotates around the sun, and that they had the science to prove it. As science (a secular thing, not bound to religion) became more and more important in the lives of the common people, Truth became something that they consented to. Consider this: if the church ascribed meaning to a Blood Moon, but science could predict when it happened, then is something like the Blood Moon an omen, or the result of a well ordered cosmos? The Church no longer had full sway over what people considered the Truth. And this created a divide in how people viewed the world. Things like Money, Sex, Religion, and Politics became things that belonged to the private realm, where people could consent to their own beliefs. But the worst part about it is that the church became a place where people allowed their public side to do public acts in public spaces, and they kept their private lives hidden.
In later years, the competition became between the secular (the non-religious), and the religious. Youth soccer or other sporting events began to happen on Sunday, rather than other days of the week, and people had to choose what they valued more: God, or their own agenda. And that then created a subtle shift in the way people thought of church. Churches now had to compete to get people in the front doors, away from the other activities that might keep them from church. For the people in the pews, the Church became just another activity, a commodity, a thing that had no more meaning than any other activity available to them on a Sunday.
In this stage, churches become like retail spaces in a mall full of other churches and activities, each of them struggling to get a bigger “market share” of people in their front doors. Everything about church becomes about “more.” If we only had “more people,” or “more money,” or “more children” in the pews, the thinking goes, then we would prove that we are a better choice than other activities on a Sunday.2
The problem with that sort of thinking is that “more” does not mean “deeper.” Rather than focusing on spiritual depth, the church becomes about participation, about competition with the secular, and about performance.
This is something that can shift ever so subtly in our minds. When we buy into the model of a competition between the secular and the divine, then the church quits being a place that is consecrated for the furthering of God’s kingdom. It instead becomes no more than a country club that carries religious overtones. The Eucharist, the Holy Communion, becomes just a symbol and a ritual that holds no more gravitas than tea and crumpets in the afternoon. Clergy are viewed not as spiritual guides – people consecrated for a particular task – but merely seen as employees who are there to keep the activities of the country club in full swing (pun intended). It is when these mysteries of the church have become commonplace that we begin to hold the church in contempt. Not contempt in the sense of hatred and anger, but in the sense that we think of it as just another commodity, something we can acquire and discard at will. If we don’t like one church, we just walk out of this retail space and into another, and see what they have to offer. If we don’t like that one either, we just keep walking through this mall of religious and secular spaces, until we find something that we like.
This sort of thinking is detrimental to the life of the church. And, more importantly, it is bad for the life of every Christian, and everyone who attends a church. Because each individual member of the Church is on a Sacred Journey. They are on a journey to live into the ministry and calling that God has for their lives. And that sort of thinking requires that we reclaim the sacred around us.
But more on that next month, when we discuss this Sacred Journey.
[This article was originally published in the St. Alban’s Church monthly newsletter for November.]
- Even though water does have a decent effect of cleansing hands, we know from science that hand-sanitizer is more effective. I use hand-sanitizer from behind the pulpit for that purpose, but the washing of the hands with the lavabo remains in the service for a symbolic reason. ↩︎
- For a bigger discussion on this, see Andrew Root’s series on “Ministry in the Secular Age” (Please note, if you buy this series, I will get a few pennies from Amazon.) ↩︎
