Reflection on Acts 14:1-7
June 27, 2025 8:45 am
On the 4th June 1989, on my 20th birthday, I prepared to travel to Berlin as part of a Mersey Province trip to Germany for Kirchentag, the Protestant biennial congress. There are lots of tales I could tell about that trip from the journey out, to the trip’s end. But for today there’s one particular bit of the trip I want to focus on with you. The day after our arrival we popped over the wall for a daytrip to East Berlin. For those of you not as old as me, essentially this meant that we had arrived in East Germany just in time to catch the aftershocks caused by the massacre at Tiananmen Square. This trip had a profound effect on me – it was a real culture shock. So many images, and feelings are indelibly etched on my psyche. So much so that as I’m talking to you about it today, 35 years later, I can still see it like a movie in my mind. Some things were odd. The plain brick walls, buildings with no adverts on them at all, making red brick feel grey. Some things were funny. The Lada cars so scarce that there was a running gag that, before you put your newborn’s name down to register them for school, you registered them for a car. It’d take that long for one to arrive for them. And some things were unsettling. At a time before camera phones and selfie sticks, there were the cameras on every roof, at every junction – we’ve let privacy go without much thought with the advent of mobiles – still, then, it felt like a particularly ominous intrusion. But I’m getting carried away…this isn’t a reflection about that trip. There are many things I could talk about if that was the topic. But it isn’t. This is a reflection about space. Real and imagined, ancient and new, temporary tabernacles and permanent buildings. Safe space. Welcoming space. God’s space. Church. I wonder what comes to your mind when you look at this image? Given the reading from Amos, you may be thinking ‘tabernacle or booth of David’. Or, given our context, this year’s theme of Resurrection for Tim’s tenure as Moderator, your mind may be drawn to ‘tent revival’. Or you may, like me, have just glanced at this picture with nothing particular in your head and just thought – ‘circus’. There are some key elements to be found in all of those possibilities. There are performances, and participants observe and play roles. Most importantly, all involve the creation of a clearly demarcated area, that exists in the material world and is designated by the physical boundaries of canvas and pole, but that is actually designed to enable those enclosed within its embrace to access something transcendent. Having a discrete area where you can go to connect with God in some way is the origin of church. For the Israelites their skene was an earthly place for interacting with God. Highly portable, it consisted of a fenced off area that contained an altar for sacrifices and, of course, the Holy of Holies, the secluded area housing the Ark of the Covenant, separated from the general congregation by a veil, and only entered by the High Priest, once a year. From here we can trace a throughline from tabernacle to Temple to synagogue to church. Like churches, theatres can also trace their origins back to tabernacles – both are connected to the Greek word for tent or tabernacle – skene.This meeting of religion and performance is nothing new – they’ve walked through the ages, holding hands, like mardy siblings, coming together at key moments in history and then periodically squabbling over which one is the most useful, the prettiest, the most welcoming… As you will all know, theatre’s origin story in the UK derives directly from the Catholic church’s desire to communicate Biblical stories to congregations only able to access the Latin mass in church. Conversely, Shakespeare’s Richard III, one of our best theatrical villains, has his origins in portrayals of Herod in Medieval Mystery Cycles. And today? Well, like churches, many theatres are now under existential threat. The booth of David is in ruins… As Rupert Shortt suggests in his recent book, The Eclipse of Christianity, in this country at least – we are living through a recession of a profoundly Christian nature. Elsewhere, where Christians are being heard the loudest, they represent a very different form of the faith than our own. Substituting dogmatism for dogma, they present an image of Christianity armoured in certainty; its boundaries asserted loudly, angrily, intolerantly. The Christian of popular culture is viewed as, at best, irrelevant, and at worst, as an Evolution-denying, human rights oppressing bigot, whose hierarchical worldview remains grounded in Bronze Age fantasy stories. Like Paul and Barnabas in Iconium, truly it could be said that we live in unkind times, where short form video content and online echo chambers have led us to a place where our tolerance levels for uncertainty have never been lower. And that leads us to tighten ourselves culturally and religiously. To become more dogmatic, more authoritarian, expressing views with unfounded confidence and certainty, loudly and quickly, before anyone spots the enormous, fearful elephant in the room… And so, it is this authoritarian cultural turn that leads me back to East Berlin. 5th June 1989, just a few short months before the Berlin Wall is pulled down. The East German state is in its death throes and its enforcers, the Stasi, are much more dangerous as a consequence. And there, in the midst of all of this, is a space. It exists in the real world and in the imagined. Kirche. Church. During our initial meeting with the church community in East Berlin, one of the ministers apologised because he had to leave us. He had to go to his church to speak to some people who were gathering there to protest against the events […]
