Maintaining Sacred Space

  • April 27, 2021
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  • John Tillman

Scripture Focus: Numbers 4.47-49
47 All the men from thirty to fifty years of age who came to do the work of serving and carrying the tent of meeting 48 numbered 8,580. 49 At the Lord’s command through Moses, each was assigned his work and told what to carry. 

Reflection: Maintaining Sacred Space
By John Tillman

All across the United States, and in places around the world, God’s people worship in rented or temporary spaces. They worship under the open sky. They worship in tents. They worship in rented theaters, schools, or hotel conference rooms. They worship in private residences.

Church workers and volunteers in these mobile churches can uniquely identify with the tasks described in preparing the Tabernacle to move to a new place. The tools and equipment related to each other are packed up together. You’ll never have to go looking for batteries for the lapel microphones, because they are packed in the storage tub with the microphones. You’ll never have to look for a mallet to stake down a welcome tent, because it is packed in with the stakes and the tent.

This labor may seem at first to be all a matter of having a strong back, stout limbs, and a careful checklist. However, like the work done by the tribes who packed and carried the Tabernacle, this work is holy work which makes holy space for people to encounter a holy God.

The Tabernacle is made after the pattern of the heavenly Temple which Moses sees on the mountain. It is filled with artwork representing it as an artificial Garden of Eden where God once again meets with humans. Making sacred space where humans and God can interact is a priestly duty. It is also one each believer bears today.

Our bodies are our “tents” into which we invite the Holy Spirit of God, promised to us by Jesus. They are temporary, holy vessels in which we are united in Christ and united to God. Peter calls the church a Temple of living stones. Paul calls us members of the body of Christ.

Through spiritual disciplines and practices, we maintain and carry with us sacred space. Prayer, Bible reading, meditation, intercession, are our tabernacle walls, frames, and sacred tools. We can access this sacred space wherever we go. In our priestly role, we can invite others into this sacred space as well, allowing them to encounter and experience God through us.

How are you preparing to make sacred space for yourself? In your schedule? In your home? In your work life?

How are you preparing to make sacred space for others, inviting them to encounter God through you?

Divine Hours Prayer: A Reading
Jesus said: “In all truth I tell you, whoever welcomes the one I send, welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes the one who sent me.” — John 13.20

– Divine Hours prayers from The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle

Today’s Readings
Numbers 4 (Listen – 6:11)
Psalms 38 (Listen – 2:14)

Read more about Christ our Temple, River, and City
Christ himself is our temple. He is the gate, the doorway, through which we enter to worship.

Christ our Temple, River, and City

Read more about Intimidating, Liberating Glory
We have the accounts of those who touched with their hands and saw with their eyes the tender, loving, human tabernacle of Jesus.

Intimidating, Liberating Glory

Justice Starts Within

  • April 26, 2021
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  • John Tillman

Scripture Focus: Numbers 3.5-75 The Lord said to Moses, 6 “Say to the Israelites: ‘Any man or woman who wrongs another in any way and so is unfaithful to the Lord is guilty 7 and must confess the sin they have committed. They must make full restitution for the wrong they have done, add a […]

Scripture Focus: Numbers 3.5-7
5 The Lord said to Moses, 6 “Say to the Israelites: ‘Any man or woman who wrongs another in any way and so is unfaithful to the Lord is guilty 7 and must confess the sin they have committed. They must make full restitution for the wrong they have done, add a fifth of the value to it and give it all to the person they have wronged.

Psalm 37.1-6; 37-40
1 Do not fret because of those who are evil 
or be envious of those who do wrong; 
2 for like the grass they will soon wither, 
like green plants they will soon die away. 
3 Trust in the Lord and do good; 
dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. 
4 Take delight in the Lord, 
and he will give you the desires of your heart. 
5 Commit your way to the Lord; 
trust in him and he will do this: 
6 He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn, 
your vindication like the noonday sun.

37 Consider the blameless, observe the upright; 
a future awaits those who seek peace.
38 But all sinners will be destroyed; 
there will be no future for the wicked. 
39 The salvation of the righteous comes from the Lord; 
he is their stronghold in time of trouble. 
40 The Lord helps them and delivers them; 
he delivers them from the wicked and saves them, 
because they take refuge in him. 

Reflection: Justice Starts Within
By John Tillman

We often experience evil that is external to ourselves and acts upon us. This evil, whether the direct actions of humans or not, is a reflection and repercussion of individual and collective sin.

Christianity simultaneously holds an extraordinarily high view of human nature and an extraordinarily low view. Humans are “gods,” Jesus quotes (John 10.34-36; Psalm 82.6) and just lower than the angels. (Hebrews 2.5-8; Psalm 8.5) Yet, we are also rebellious and broken. Evil infects and corrupts our best intentions. (Romans 3.10-12; Psalms 14.1-3; 53.1-3; Ecclesiastes 7.20) Creation itself is cursed because of our sin. (Genesis 3.17; Romans 8.20-23) At the peak of human righteousness we stand dressed in filth rather than finery. (Romans 3.10; Isaiah 64.6; Psalm 143.2)

If evil was just a few regrettable actions by a few misguided people, we’d be “god” enough to handle it. We could just “do better,” as many voices on social media tell us to do, and lock up the “bad apples” who fail this charge.

The problem with evil is that it is not isolated in bad apples. Evil is insidiously embedded in humanity. Solzhenitsyn said, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Paul said, “I want to do good, evil is right there with me…who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7.21-25)

Justice must start within. Jesus confronts our tainted hearts, comforting us when suffering under wickedness, while simultaneously discomforting us by attacking our wickedness. Christ delivers us from an inner evil nature through sanctification. (Luke 11.20-22) If we allow him to, he will go beyond destroying the evil piece of our heart. He will give us a brand new heart that will grieve injustice and work for justice, both inwardly and outwardly.

We join our voices and bend our backs to the suffering and working of all God’s people for justice. (Revelation 6.9-11) There is evil without and evil within, but greater is Jesus than any evil. (1 John 4.4) God is with us through any suffering and his grace to us is sufficient to work in and through us. 

As the Holy Spirit within us contests our inner evils, he also spurs us to act in Christ’s name on behalf of justice against evils that go beyond personal or individual. Justice starts within. It doesn’t stop there. 

May we answer the call, becoming agents of Christ, seeking out darkness and shining a light of justice and truth.

Divine Hours Prayer: The Request for Presence
Be my strong rock, a castle to keep me safe, for you are my crag and my stronghold; for the sake of your Name, lead me and guide me. — Psalm 31.3

– Divine Hours prayers from The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle

Today’s Readings
Numbers 3 (Listen – 6:01)
Psalms 37 (Listen – 4:21)

Read more about Prayer Amidst Evil :: Guided Prayer
We turn to God in prayer, trusting that in past, present, and future sufferings, his grace is sufficient for us.

Prayer Amidst Evil :: Guided Prayer

Read more about Hope for Marred Pots
God, understanding Jeremiah’s grief, sends him to a place he can see that there is hope for marred and broken things—the potter’s house.

Hope for Marred Pots



Living Leviticus

  • April 23, 2021
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  • John Tillman

Scripture Focus: Leviticus 27.34
34 These are the commands the Lord gave Moses at Mount Sinai for the Israelites.

Reflection: Living Leviticus
By John Tillman

When we read Leviticus, we may ponder, “How can we live like this? Are these commands for us today, or are they only commands for the Israelites gathered at the foot of Sinai?”

The themes of Leviticus are gospel values which we should enact.

Do we value holiness over hypocrisy? Even as it lays out the detailed performance of rituals, Leviticus grounds its purpose not in performative religious acts but in the identity of God and our relationship to him.

So let us take seriously the call to be a distinct and different people who reflect the holiness of God. Let us be not performative or hypocritical but take actions based on who God is and whose we are.

Do we value righteousness and justice? Leviticus levels the ground at the entrance to God’s presence. The rich have no advantage over the poor in seeking God. The wealthy are held responsible for the well-being of the poor and the powerful held responsible for the well-being of the weak. The foreigner and the native-born are commanded by God to be treated one and the same.

So let us, in our individual lives, in our communities, and in our governments, take seriously the call to care for the poor, the weak, and the outsider. Let us uphold the rights of the weak and prevent the powerful from abusing their positions.

Do we honor God with all we have acknowledging that we own nothing? Leviticus demands a willing admission that everything which we might think of as “ours” is truly God’s. 

So let us submit to being tenants and no longer claim to be owners. May we recognize that things we have deeds for, receipts for, titles for…they all belong to God. Let us give them over to God and put them to work to earn profits not for our own blessing but to bless others.

We can’t perfectly live out Leviticus but Jesus is our living Leviticus. The Levitical law is completed in Christ, not destroyed. He lived it out on our behalf. 

Jesus is the substitute that redeems us. He is the high priest who sanctifies us. His is the blood that makes us holy. It is under his authority that we can turn to others and offer redemption, sanctification, and holiness. Let us do so with love in our hearts and with open, pure hands.

Divine Hours Prayer: The Refrain for the Morning Lessons
Our sins are stronger than we are, but you will blot them out. — Psalm 65.3

– Divine Hours prayers from The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle

Today’s Readings
Leviticus 27 (Listen – 4:45)
Psalms 34 (Listen – 2:14)

This Weekend’s Readings
Numbers 1 (Listen – 6:21) Psalms 35 (Listen – 3:21)
Numbers 2 (Listen – 3:47) Psalms 36 (Listen – 1:21)

Read more about Shameless to Blameless
Christ was shamed that we could be called righteous. The glory and righteousness he gained, he gives to the humble and repentant.

From Shameless to Blameless

Read more about Stop Following Old Laws
These laws also were intended to shape God’s people into something new. All nations and empires were (and are) sinful and unjust. Israel was to be different.

Stop Following Old Laws

He Is Faithful When We Are Not

  • April 22, 2021
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  • John Tillman

Scripture Focus: Leviticus 26.44-45
44 Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or abhor them so as to destroy them completely, breaking my covenant with them. I am the Lord their God. 45 But for their sake I will remember the covenant with their ancestors whom I brought out of Egypt in the sight of the nations to be their God. I am the Lord.’ ” 

Reflection: He Is Faithful When We Are Not
By John Tillman

God will be faithful to his purposes even when his people are not.

Like many places in scripture, in Leviticus 26 God lays out stark choices and consequences. He says, in effect, “Will you have promises and blessings or curses and punishments?” 

One of the benefits of rereading the Bible over and over is more easily recognizing patterns and recurring descriptions. The descriptions of consequences for the unfaithful are so accurate to the actual events that occur later in Israel’s history they might as well be read as prophecy. Sadly, every one of the events described will occur as Israel continues to turn away from God in the future.

Warnings, promises, consequences, and blessings all seem like they would be effective motivators. “Do this and die or do this and live,” seems easy enough. But it isn’t.

Despite clarity of the consequences, Israel persevered in sin, rather than faith.
Despite miraculous evidence of God’s faithfulness and power, Israel chose to trust false promises of political powers.
Despite being granted the visitation of the invisible God in a visible form (Leviticus 9.23), Israel chose to trust idols of human creation rather than the God who made the wood and stone from which false idols were carved. (Isaiah 44.16-19)

Haven’t we made similar errors in judgment? Haven’t we suffered through anguish persisting in sin yet abandoned righteousness when it got uncomfortable? Haven’t we shown incredible loyalty to political powers who proved themselves to be the opposite of credible? Haven’t we trusted in idols of technology that shape our psyches rather than the God who desires to shape our souls? Our faithlessness was never in doubt. However, our salvation does not rest upon our faithfulness—it rests upon his. 

Whatever his people choose, God is making a choice, too. God knows Israel will be unfaithful. He’s going to be faithful anyway. God knows Israel’s love for him will run cold. He’s going to love her anyway.

It is not only true that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5.8) It is also true that before we had even sinned, God determined he would provide salvation for us. While we did not yet know what depths of sin we would commit, God decided that there was no depth so deep that he would not rescue us.

However deep in sin you sink, lift eyes and hands to him. He is prepared to pull you out.

Divine Hours Prayer: The Morning Psalm
Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy, for we have had more than enough of contempt,
Too much of the scorn of the indolent rich, and of the derision of the proud. — Psalm 123.3-4

– Divine Hours prayers from The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle

Today’s Readings
Leviticus 26 (Listen – 6:22)
Psalms 33 (Listen – 2:08)

Read more about Too Much To Hold
Like Jonah sunk, beneath the earth
A dark and hopeless pit
Into that pit our savior slides
His mission: open it

Too Much to Hold

Read more about The Undeserved Banquet of the Gospel
God sets his table for scoundrels, shaking hands with undeserved trust.

The Undeserved Banquet of the Gospel

Beyond Jubilee

  • April 21, 2021
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  • John Tillman

Scripture Focus: Leviticus 25.9-10
9 Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. 10 Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan.

Luke 4.16-19
16 …He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: 
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, 
because he has anointed me 
to proclaim good news to the poor. 
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners 
and recovery of sight for the blind, 
to set the oppressed free, 
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Reflection: Beyond Jubilee
By John Tillman

Weekly sabbaths bring us freedom and joy in this world. This freedom and joy grows more expansive as we ponder the sabbath of years and Jubilee.

Sabbath years built, in an exponential crescendo, to Jubilee. After seven septennial sabbath years, trumpets were to announce liberty throughout the land. Liberty from debt. Liberty from enslavement. Liberty that brought a national reset of property and land ownership. Every 50 years, the “monopoly game” was to be folded up, properties redistributed, and the game started over with all participants on equal footing once more. This was to remind Israel that the land did not belong to them. It belonged to the Lord. 

It is difficult for us to imagine such an economic system. In the dominant economic systems of their world and ours, the game never stops and each generation starts the game with an inherited benefit or handicap. Generational wealth and poverty are features, not bugs, of every world economic system in history. 

Biblical laws are intended to be a check on our tendencies toward greed, violence, and inequity. Jubilee was a systemic reboot, restoring the moral code God desired—equity, justice, righteousness, unity.

Talking about Jubilee upsets some people. Some dogmatically demand implementation of Jubilee in today’s economic terms, even though they would not submit to any other laws from the Old Testament. Others work just as stubbornly to deemphasize or even ignore Jubilee because it conflicts with their economic beliefs. (It is beyond the scope of this devotional to discuss how some of us have greater religious devotion to and faith in sociological, economic, and political ideas than we do in scripture or theological ideas…)

We must remember that many systems and laws in the Bible, like Jubilee, are bandaids on gaping wounds. For example, Jesus challenged laws regarding marriage and the sabbath, saying they did not complete God’s intention or will. (Matthew 19.3-12; Mark 2.23-28; Luke 6.1-10; Luke 13.10-16) We have little evidence of how Israel enacted Jubilee, but to whatever degree they did, it was insufficient. Great inequities persisted. (Deuteronomy 15.7, 11; 1 Samuel 2.8; Isaiah 41.17; Matthew 19.21, 26.11)

Implementing Jubilee would be insufficient. The gospel compels us to go beyond it. As the sacrifice of Christ surpasses the sacrifice of lambs, and our righteousness must surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees, our sacrificial generosity should surpass that of Jubilee. (Matthew 5.20)

In Jesus, Jubilee is now and forever. Jubilee is the gospel. (Isaiah 55.1-2; John 7.37; Revelation 22.17) 

May our voices and actions be jubilant trumpets declaring liberty, freedom, and joy.

Divine Hours Prayer: The Request for Presence
Be merciful to me, O Lord, for you are my God; I call upon you all the day long. — Psalm 86.3

– Divine Hours prayers from The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle


Today’s Readings
Leviticus 25 (Listen – 7:41)
Psalms 32 (Listen – 1:34)

Read more about The Gospel and the Year of Freedom
Equity is the default setting of God’s spiritual economy.
Leaders (princes) must set an example, creating fairness and justice.

The Gospel and the Year of Freedom

Read more about Loving God by Loving Others
When we collect all the profit to ourselves we are stealing by keeping what you instructed us to leave for the poor.

Loving God by Loving Others — Guided Prayer