At risk of seeming pedantic, this post is in response to a rather mundane question, which is usually phrased as "what's with the suit". To expand on that, despite my swim over the Tiber, people frequently question my clinging to High Church approaches to worship, ecclesiology, and the sacraments. They have a right to do so; especially since I have made no bones in the past about my belief that the alternative betrays an inconsistent hermeneutic of the Christian life, if you will. You can call that worldview what you like: traditionalist, hide-bound, "old man James syndrome", etc., but I write to ensure that the one thing it cannot be called is closet sacerdotalism. At the core, many of the things I think, say and do are bound up in my belief in the existence both of sacred time and sacred space. The commitment to these in Catholicism was a large part of the draw for me, but I believe that they are scriptural, which is to say Christian concepts that transcend denominational or religious differences, and so I will defend them as such here.
This is certainly an appropriate season of the year to discuss sacred time, and it is as a general rule the more widely accepted of the concepts in American Christianity, not least because of the Christmas season. We are all aware of the well-meaning if paranoid ministers of the gospel in our midst who suppress all acknowledgement of the incarnation in late December due to its alleged papist/pagan origins. While this mindset may not be bedfellows with the brand of Protestantism which brandishes a KJV in one hand and a microscope for checking under rocks for Jesuits in the other, it at least can wave at that brand from its apartment across the hall. By and large, however, the majority of American churchmen, even the Reformed variety, have seen fit to accept and acknowledge Christmas, as has my local congregation.
This means that to one degree or another, the majority of American Christians already accept, in the Christmas season, a form of sacred time, that is to say a time of the year with special significance to Christians, in which certain parts of the Christian walk, in this case the importance of the Incarnation to the Gospel are commemorated. While Christ is "incarnate" in our hearts constantly, and praise for the Incarnation should spring readily to the lips of the Christian at all times, this does not mean that Christians who celebrate Christmas should tear down that season as an "idol" to be thrown in the great leveling fire that low churchmen often seem to treat the new covenant as. Christmas derives no magic power from it's celebration, and it has no intrinsic capacity to commemorate the Incarnation and the virtues of love, peace and giving any more than other time, indeed unless you celebrate Advent in Spring it is not even historically relevant to the event being commemorated. Nothing receives "intrinsic" characteristics apart from the decreed will of God anyway. In celebrating Christmas, the church says "we set apart this time to do something. As time-bound creatures we accomplish the purposes of God by sanctifying this time to Him for a purpose."
Sacred time is itself part of the character of God in creation. God, being totally unbound by time, and its Creator, marks off the boundaries of time and reserves a seventh of it to himself. God of course, neither needs rest nor is limited by His creation, all of which is His by right. So why the Sabbath? To reveal a behavior to be reflected by we, His time-bound creatures, in reserving a part of that time in a special way. God does not need us to make the Incarnation peace-giving, or his Sabbath holy: he commands us to do so to conform imperfect and temporal creatures to his image.
In the same way, it is obvious that an omnipresent creator who "fills the Earth with His glory" (Is. 6:3), has nothing He cannot see, and nowhere His hand is not. But the great egalitarian leveler of Low Church ecclesiology and worship, in saying the new covenant has abolished places and spaces, and yes, acts that are holier or more worshipful than others, has, in my opinion, laid the axe at the root of covenant continuity, and in the extremes, subordinated the idea that Scripture can reveal proper worship to God, to a false conception of the nearness of God.
It is true that the Holy Spirit resides in the hearts of God's elect, that Christ mediates for them day and night before the Throne of Glory, that the veil was torn, that Jesus is the author of a new and better covenant. All the Reformed truisms are true, because, strangely enough, they are biblical. But it is also true that God was triune in the old covenant like he is triune now, that he is holy now like he was holy then, that his ways are not ours and weren't then either. The God who slew a man for touching the ark, the God whose Levitical priesthood tied ropes around their waste in case they were slain in the temple, is the God of Romans one, and even the God of Romans eight. Therefore to treat church services, covenant ordinances, corporate worship, and even the places where such are held with anything other than scripturally inspired reverence and awe is to play with fire.
To deny this doesn't just fly in the face of Reformed history, as Calvin on the regulative principle of worship will attest, it rests on the fundamental conviction that Christ's constant presence with his people, or even in the world generally, trumps God's ability and desire to manifest his presence in greater or lesser degree in time and space. While we have already noted examples to the contrary in the old covenant (did God's presence in the burning bush, or the holy of holies, mean he was not on His throne? Absurd), and in the Incarnation itself, (surely God was present in a unique way at the Last Supper), but the teachings of Christ are relevant too. "When two or more are gathered in my name, there I am with you"....so Christ isn't with one of us? "Surely I am with you even until the end of the age" ...so the Father wasn't with Israel or the apostles before then? "My Children, yet a little while, I am with you" ...Jesus is leaving? Perhaps most notably, the reasons Paul gives for the qualifiers for church office he passes to Timothy are because ministers and deacons, who "desire a noble task", must know how to "behave in the household of God, which is the church, a pillar and buttress of the truth".
Time, space, tasks. No time, no spaces, no tasks, are uncreated. All owe their allegiance to their maker. And none are worthy apart from God of his presence. But while God sanctifies the time, the household, the task and the one doing it with his presence, when we have received the gift of holy time, space and offices, how can we do anything else but seek scriptural ways to set them aside for God's purposes, to "remember them and keep them holy"?
~JS
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