The Alter

This past week I built two stone altesr on the stage that were used on Sunday morning December 9th during the morning worship assemblies. I love building stuff  so about a month ago when Mark Howell asked me to build this alter I was excited. I began chewing on how to build it. Should it be cardboard? Styrofoam? A table with a table cloth?

After I thought and prayed about it for a while it struck me that this needs to be the real deal, it needs to be built out of stone. I did some research about alters from the Old Testament and looked at recreations of those alters and then started looking for stone. I had a limited budget so I was more than excited to find the 'clearance aisle' at a stone store at Kirkwood and Hwy 90.  Clearance aisle at a stone store?! That's way better than any Black Friday sale but I digress.

I purchased 3800 pounds of stone for pennies on the dollar and started building the alters.  Projects like this are fun because it exercises your brain. It's like a crossword puzzle that requires gloves and a weight belt. It took about 6 hours to put together and I fully spent a quarter of that time praying over the alters and the people who would use it on Sunday.

It's fascinating how there are some things that never occur to you unless you physically do something. Here are a few things that occurred to me in the process of building and using the alter:

• In the Old Testament when God said to build an alter and sacrifice an animal I had always envisioned those people fretting over locating an animal to sacrifice. It had never occurred to me that they had to locate, move, chisel, arrange, take apart, rearrange, fine tune, and put back together a vast quantity of stone. My alter was hollow and smaller than Old Testament alters and still weighed 3800 pounds. Building an alter was a significant undertaking for God in the Old Testament. 
• Everyone that leaned on the alter Sunday morning was marked with some of the white limestone dust. A number of people will continue to remember the alter as they run their clothes by the dry cleaner this week trying to explain why their clothes are covered with white powdery dust. In The Old Testament anyone who worshiped God at the alter likely had rock dust and blood on their clothes. They had a physical reminder of their commitment to God.
• The pile of rocks that was the alter is now in one of the lawns of the church building. In fact the way it is piled looks a bit like a crypt so the pile is going to move before too long. But it is significant to realize that alters, no matter where they were built in the Old Testament, would have been a long term reminder that someone had worshiped God there. 

We tend to make Christianity a tidy and sterile 'religion' with few physical reminders of our sacrifice and commitment to God. Constructing this alter has reminded me that it's good to put out effort to worship God and its good to have some physical reminders of our commitment to God. In the Old Testament there were many physical reminders of commitment to God; alters, meals, tassels, circumcision!... Some of these reminders were associated with a ceremonial worship and some went with the person to school, work, and in the market.

Today we have the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts but even with the ever present Spirit it is good to have physical reminders of our commitment to God.