Sanctuary rediscovered
A Commentary
By Melissa Lauber
Each of us seeks sanctuary – that indwelling sacred space where God is as close as breath, and wonder, mystery and possibility are ours to simply claim. Recently, I got to return to my home church, St. Paul’s UMC, in Wilmington, Delaware, and heard Bishop LaTrelle Easterling preach.
I sat in the same pew where I used to lean against my grandmother’s side and stand with her each Sunday as we sang the Gloria Patri and said the Lord’s Prayer. The church has an elevated pulpit, and while my grandmother gathered and washed all the little glass Communion cups after worship, I would climb up the pulpit stairs, nestle into that space and daydream.
I discovered and fell in love with Jesus in that sanctuary, was married there, eulogized and said goodbye to my father there, and knew it as a place of absolute and unconditional belonging. On all the special occasions, we sang “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee;” it’s a song that seems to live among the pews there. The congregation met in that space, but I knew that sanctuary was mine—mine and God’s—to share in every way we needed.
And then, a lifetime later, I returned with my mother to hear the bishop preach. Bishop Easterling is one of the leaders who is creating the future of The United Methodist Church. She practices an incarnational faith – of Christ alive in each person, claiming the bold Gospel promises that we are indeed light and salt and can transform the world so that all people know the fullness of God’s love.
She is a prophet of hope, and she preached hope in the same pulpit my little-girl self once unleashed her imagination in. “The kin-dom of God is within you,” she told the congregation, and we knew she was right. The hope of glory is ours to claim.
The bishop is ferocious in the pulpit. She embraces all the colors of the Scripture and sings them back to her people in ways that surprise you and echo into your life.
At St. Paul’s, she preached about the prophet Jeremiah, the stories God writes for us, and the Word, the will, and the way of God. She reinforced her ongoing message to the people of the Baltimore-Washington and Peninsula-Delaware Area that the Lord always calls us not to survive but to thrive. “God always takes us to revival,” she said. “When in doubt, know it’s always about hope.”
With my grandmother and that great cloud of witnesses hovering in the pews of St. Paul’s, the bishop then pronounced the benediction, and it was time to go. But now, I’m renewed in the knowledge that we all carry the sanctuary within us – that I am the sanctuary, and the pulpit, and all the possibilities of a young girl’s spiritual imagination – awakened and fully alive.