It's About the People, Stupid

The other day I went to see my niece perform a role in “High School Musical” for the local children’s theatre. Children are terrible actors-we applaud anyway.

The show took place at my old high school in the auditorium that was built in the 1930’s. There is a new high school building now, with a new auditorium that is in every way nicer and more pleasant to sit in than the one we were in. Never-the-less, I found myself reminiscing and generating warm fuzzies for my old school (goes to show you how good the brain is at blocking out trauma). I remember watching many a school play in that large, amazingly hot room. I remember goofing around in there and hiding in there and debating many existential, political, theological, and personal ideas and issues, not to mention the day-to-day drama that was high school. My junior year I was friends with this really gorgeous girl. We had no romantic interest in each other whatsoever, but we did like to hang out from time to time. One night, neither of us having anything better to do, we went to a school production of something or other. She made a point of walking arm in arm with me, thus raising my social status dramatically and causing rumors that we both enjoyed. I went on my first official date with my wife there. We sat in the back and watched “Little Women.” It took my almost the entire play to get the courage to hold her hand. Sometime in my junior or senior year I was anxious to leave a crowded show; all the old people were taking their time. Rather than wait I decided to hop over the isles of wooden chairs. One of the chairs folded in on me and I managed to make a fool of myself, made all that much worse as a self-conscience high schooler. You would think I would have learned my lesson, but I went home from my niece’s performance with a scrape on my left ankle and a nasty bruise and scrape on my right shin.

There’s really nothing all that special about that auditorium. In fact, it’s really a nasty place. But the memories, the shared experiences, the emotions, insights, and revelations that happened there, these make it a special, almost sacred place to me. I can only imagine what it must be like for those that went to school there when the place was new (or newer). Places, things, these are nothing and they will cease to exist one day. But people, our connections to one another, these are lasting and transformational.

When I went to the middle east I went into a cave. It was dark and dingy and a little bit smelly. It was nothing, nothing but a cave that once house animals who pooped in it. And yet all I could do was stand there, trying to grasp where I was and what it was I was doing. The cave was nothing, but the man born in it some 2000 years ago, he is everything. At that moment I joined the millions (I’m guessing) who have walked through it, both emperors and peasants, believers and mere tourists, a community of pilgrims. The place was nothing, the people were everything.

So too with the church. I flinch every time I see someone place irrational value on some object in a church, whether a bible or a pulpit or a pew or whatever. So often part of this irrational elevation of objects includes keeping people away from it or keeping people quiet in it. Every time this happens any sacredness that was there is diminished because it is not the place, it is not the thing, it is the people. God did not make a cave or a book or a building in his own image, he reserved that sacred honor for us.