The Altar

Toward a Higher Meaning of the Cross “We are most truly human when we are on our knees before our Creator.” (John Stott) “Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God; it whets our appetite.” (Eugene Peterson) Because humans are incurably religious – inveterate worshipers – there is at the core of every human life an indestructible altar. On some days, it is hot. On others, it’s abandoned or broken or desecrated and given over. In secular societies, like ours, these altars are invisible. We deny them. We avoid them. But they’re there and sooner or later, the soul is in front of it, there is something on it, and someone is over it. And the only posture the soul knows is to bow. Thus throughout the Bible, the perennial threat is not that men would be pagans, bowing to nothing but idolators who bow to everything. What they worship, they become. And what they become, they have worshiped … knowingly or unknowingly. Religious people sometimes swear by one altar yet bow at another.

In secular societies we democratize space. One place is as good as another. God is everywhere which means, of course, He is nowhere. But from the beginning, the Presence of God has been associated with the altar. In this series, I want to explore the significance of an altar in the temple, in the Church, in us. My bias is that the altar, as a physical, symbolic place is vanishing in the evangelical Church and with it go the functions associated with an altar, things like sacrifice, confession, covenant, thanksgiving, awe and spiritual intimacy. With the loss of these things, all the attention has shifted toward personalities (“everything rises and falls on leadership”) because there is nothing left to draw the public. There is nothing worth coming to Church for. With the loss of an altar, there is no place for the Holy to dwell and yet He will not go, so we have moved Him into our heads (thru sermons), or into our emotions (thru worship), or more recently into our convictions (thru causes). In the absence of an altar, these are the places where the Most High dwells.

It would be easy for a series like this to come oP as either too abstract, too “catholic,” or too critical of other churches. We want to avoid that. Instead, I want to raise the awareness of the importance of an altar in our worship and in our daily lives. I want to help recover some of the functions of an altar. I want to connect with the person trying to connect with God – the “spiritual but not religious” – and bring language and structure to their search. I want to restore a sense of the sacred, to connect the altar in our sanctuary with one in our homes by encouraging members to establish one there. I want to raise our appreciation for the liturgy and for things performed at an altar.

Now because the cross is a kind of altar – a place where God and humanity meet – each one of these functions are also present in the cross. But this doesn’t mean that we no longer need an altar. Rather, the altar is what the cross means. We need to make of our altars, not less, for in them Christ is Present in the Church today.

The pattern for preaching, then, is to first, tell the Old Testament story and explain the function of the altar in that story. Then connect that function to the cry of people today, especially those who are already religious. After that, link the altar’s function to one of the meanings of the cross. Then, finally, call for some tangible expression or response using either the altar, the cross or both. Ideally, the action called for at the end of the service will be something that can be repeated in the homes of our people.