The
house of God, the gate of heaven:
was
Jesus more like a mental health chaplain than a vicar?
I
walked on to one of our hospital wards, and a young adult male patient called
out to me in a friendly way, “How’s your church?” – to which I responded, “This
is my church.”
He
looked rather puzzled. I explained that
I worked full-time for the hospital and not separately for a parish church or
similar. And I added that in any case
the church was not a building, but simply anywhere that the Lord’s people would
meet together: the very word church simply came from the Greek word for
Lord. So this patient and me meeting
together was ‘church’ – as real and relevant on a Tuesday afternoon in a bare
and slightly malodorous hospital ward as scores of people meeting together in a
fine church building on a Sunday. He
completely grasped the point.
Last
Christmas a number of the adolescent patients I work with expressed real
surprise that I was going to come and see them on Christmas Day. I asked them what Jesus would do, if he was
in Northampton for a few hours on Christmas morning – attend a service at a
town centre church with lots of nicely dressed people, or come along to visit
one of our wards. “He’d come and see
us,” they said without any hesitation, and I think complete accuracy.
It
is very easy for local church leaders and members to be focused primarily,
possibly exclusively, on what happens in their building mid Sunday
morning. A moment’s thought of course
tells us that God fills the earth, and most ministry and mission is out there,
as we go.
In
Genesis 28 Jacob settles down for the night in a remote spot, taking a single
stone for his pillow. He has his famous
dream of angels ascending and descending between earth and heaven, and he
awakens to declare that he had not known that God was there: “How awesome is
this place, it is none other than the house of God, the gate of heaven.” It is the house of God, not because of a
building (there was only one stone lying around) but simply because of his
manifest presence.
I
find the manifest presence of God holding a patient’s hand as we pray through a
seclusion door, sitting on a bare floor sharing holy communion, or listening to
Godfrey Birtill’s song ‘Do you believe what I believe about you?’ with a young
person who has always believed the worst about themselves.
At
a church leaders’ conference earlier this year the host said to me that it was
a problem that mine was such a niche ministry.
My turn to look rather puzzled! Ministering
to the marginalised and forgotten, speaking freedom to those literally captive,
offering words of healing to the sick and oppressed: I do think the New
Testament picture of Jesus’s ministry and that of his followers was out in the
community, and especially in the darker and more difficult places, rather than
primarily in the gathered place of worship.
Indeed Ezekiel’s prophetic picture in his chapter 47 is that the flow of
God’s river of healing is greater the further away it gets from the temple.
