Daily Lesson for September 6, 2016

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Psalm 48 verses 1 through 3

Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised
in the city of our God!
His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation,
is the joy of all the earth,
Mount Zion, in the far north,
the city of the great King.
3 Within her citadels God
has made himself known as a fortress.

On Saturday night I listened to a Garrison Keillor show broadcast live from the Minnesota Fair. He joked about how in the age of revival the church pulled in the masses with threats of Jesus' imminent return only to then ask that the people contribute to the building fund.

We can never quite make up our minds. Are we living in the temporal or the eternal?  The interim or the long term?  Are we pilgrims on a journey or is a mighty fortress our God?

Richard Rohr would say the answer is both/and.  The nondual mind and heart can embrace opposites and hold space for both extremes.

I come mostly from the pilgrim side of faith. My Baptist spirituality draws a strong line from Roger Williams, who was kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founded Providence Rhode Island, the first colony to build a city without first building a church house. It's in our bloodline not to confuse a building with the trueCity of God; and we can point to John the Baptist as our model -- he who left the walled city of Jerusalem to go out and Baptize in the wilderness.

So, let me cross to the other side of the non-dual stream and say what is beautiful and good about a church building or walled city:

These are places of refuge. A place for the weary to rest. A secure space for the victim to feel safe. A covered house of protection from the elements of nature and also from evil.

These are good things. These are Godly things. And they belong within the Baptist theological imagination just as "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" belongs in our hymnal.

A mighty fortress is our God -- a bulwark never failing.

Sometimes we just need to sing and hear that.