Sacred Cows

Isaiah 66:1-2,22-23

          During Advent I challenged you to offer something as a gift to God. The problem is, what do you get for the 'man' that literally has everything. This reading seems to drive that point home. Everything in the world, all the things that we claim ownership of are His. What we call our home, mother earth, God can legitimately called his footstool. We should honor and respect all of God's creations which we are entrusted with while we are here.

           There is a line in this passage about building a house for God and that caught my attention. I have been in many fine houses of worship. My husband and I spend many hours walking the streets of Paris in search of such churches. Sacre Coeur, Notre Dame and onto Chartres and beyond. I love the majesty and yes, forgive me, how unga patchke some are. It amazes me that these memorials to faith, these houses of worship were built by hand, that they are so grand.  I could sit in the silence and pray for hours. And I love the chapel of the Benedictine Monks of the Weston Priory. Any tiny church really, any parish church will do for me.This is scared space. Or is it?

          God is trying to tell us that nothing we could build is really worthy of His majesty. Our places of worship may be fine places to worship and say thanks to God. They may be testaments to community, faith and our willingness to give but they are not sacred cows. They are as God might say, simply a building. We get so wrapped up sometime in material things, oddly enough, especially in churches and especially in the Roman Catholic Church.

          As my mind wanders further, is it only physicalities that we consider sacred?  How crucial is it to God if we dip our hands in Holy water as we enter a church? How crucial is it that we profess a formula in church whose words are dilineated into painstaking and excruciating perfection. It would seem to be more of an incantation as it is a profession of faith from the heart.

         This passage from the prophet Isaiah it would seem has not been fulfilled yet. Isaiah is still speaking to us. What is important? What could we possibly give God that is worthy of him?  God seeks only our love, our companionship and a humble and contrite heart.

          

Thus says the Lord:
Heaven is my throne
   and the earth is my footstool;
what is the house that you would build for me,
   and what is my resting-place?
All these things my hand has made,
   and so all these things are mine, 

says the Lord.
But this is the one to whom I will look,
   to the humble and contrite in spirit,
   who trembles at my word.