Day Twenty-Seven

Day Twenty–Seven // March 19 // In the Holy Places

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” – C.S. Lewis –

In seminary, I had the great fortune of being in a preaching class with an African American student from the Black Church Tradition. He was an outstanding pastor and a terrifically gifted preacher. And as our class drew to its close, as our final exam, we had to preach a sermon to our peers. Mine was… let’s just say that I was a work in progress (and I still am). My friend’s sermon, though, was a powerhouse. It was gripping. It was enthusiastic. It was one of the best sermons I’d ever heard. Still to this day, I remember it: he entitled it, “Jesus Was Late for Church.”

It was a remarkable exposition of an even more remarkable truth: that every place where Jesus went

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became a holy place. No longer was holiness confined to the Temple. No longer was it held behind woven curtains and stony walls. Every place Christ’s holy feet tread became somehow changed, somehow different: refreshed, refocused, reframed. Holy. Like ineffable footprints left across the thresholds of their souls, those who truly experienced the presence and power of the Lord were changed. Around the table with prostitutes. In the streets with tax collectors. When no one else would give them the time of day, Jesus gave them something far better: He simply gave them time. He gave them hope and meaning and worth. He showed them love and respect and a new, better way of living. And in doing so, the Lord transformed common mud into holy ground.

But it was ground on which the religious insiders and spiritual powerbrokers of His day refused to stand. They were consumed with thoughts of power, privilege, and prestige; but Jesus was consumed with purpose. He never forgot why He was here. He never followed His feet into mischief, folly, or sin. He never neglected His mission. He never neglected us.

The ground He stood on was always holy ground because of who (and Whose) He was. And, as His followers, as men and women in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, every place we go is holy, too. Let that thought wash over you for a moment. Think about the places

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we’ve taken the Lord. And let it change you: the places you go and the things you do.

Every space we occupy, every moment we inhabit is holy – saturated with the possibility of the divine. Like Jacob waking from his dream, we declare, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and [we were] not aware of it” (Genesis 28:16). Let us, then, as soot-footed pilgrims, return time and time again to that reality – to that holy ground and to those holy moments that remind us of who (and Whose) we are!