Holiness in unexpected places

The Bible is clear: most of the time God meets ordinary people in ordinary places.

He meets Moses in a bush in a desert and Elijah in a whisper at the doorway to a cave. Jesus met Zacchaeus up a tree on a street and the woman at the well, while she was doing her daily tasks. He met Peter on a beach, which was his workplace, and Mary Magdalene looked for him in a tomb but found him standing right behind her.

This fact always seems to surprise God’s people. Take my favourite example: Jacob’s encounter with God in Genesis 28:10–11. We read,

‘Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Harran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep.’

Jacob begins to dream. He sees a stairway from earth to heaven with angels moving up and down it. At the top is the Lord himself. The Lord promises great things to Jacob: to multiply his descendants, to make them a blessing to all people, and to be with Jacob wherever he is. Then in verse 16 we read,

‘When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.”’

For Jacob, this very ordinary place becomes extraordinary: he understands it’s a touching point between heaven and earth. A holy place. And he wasn’t even aware of it.

A God who works in our workplaces

One of the places I show up to work is a local community theatre. It’s volunteer-run and packed-out week to week with local groups putting on shows. Every now and again I’ll be asked to play guitar for a week: which means showing up on time, being prepared, getting on with people and doing the best work I can do. Could this also be a holy place, even when I’m not aware of it?

It absolutely can. As can all our workplaces, be they theatres, construction sites, offices, coffee shops, homes, or anywhere else. God is here already. All we have to do is watch and listen for what he’s doing … and join in.

LICC’s Frontline Sundays resource explores this theme in more depth. In the series’ films, ordinary workplaces places become ‘holy’ places: for the plumber, it was his customer’s house; for the businesswoman, the office; for the football coach, it was the pitch. None of these are the kinds of places or tasks that are usually celebrated at the front of church on a Sunday. But they encourage me to imagine how God might work through me in my ordinary places, too.

So I do my best to pray on my way to work – that God would help me to perform well. I try to glimpse the kingdom on stage and in the music – in moments that take the audience out of themselves, reaching a little higher and feeling something a little deeper. And I get to know my colleagues in the ‘in between’ moments of a shift. Sharing who we are, what we do, and why we do it.

Musicians on the scene get to know each other over time. The same faces play the same shows in different combinations with different companies. And I’ve been able to share what I believe about the God who is already here, in this ordinary place, with these people.

The mission in the Great Commission

I’m certainly no super-Christian. Even though I believe that, biblically-speaking, God shows up in the ordinary, I also notice how quickly my readiness to encounter God dissipates between Sunday and Monday. But I don’t want to miss out on what God is doing around me, and in the people around me.

And I’m betting that if you’ve read this far, you don’t want to either. It’s good news indeed then that God isn’t waiting for us.

Where are you going later today? Tomorrow? He’s already there. His kingdom is breaking in. All we have to do is show up believing it. That seems to be what Jesus urged his disciples to do when he gave them the Great Commission. He stood in front of those who believed and those who struggled to believe, and told them the same thing: ‘Go, therefore, and make disciples … because all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me’.

It’s been preached many times, but it bears repeating: Jesus assumes his disciples are going to ‘go’. And because he has authority over all the places his disciples go to, there’s no place they’ll go that’s so ordinary that he doesn’t sustain it, govern it, care for it and reveal himself in it. As Jesus’ disciples today, we inherit that commission and that reality. As theologian Christopher Wright puts it,

‘The missional mandate of being disciples and making disciples is similarly ubiquitous wherever Jesus is Lord. And that means everywhere… Mission is not an exotic vocation reserved for special people… Mission is the mode of existence for the whole life of every member of God's whole church.’¹

That’s you. That’s me. That’s us. Wherever we are, no matter how ordinary we might think that place is, God is present and he’s at work. If this fact surprised God’s people throughout the Bible, then we might be surprised too. But I want to be surprised. And just like Jacob, I want to awaken to the reality of divine presence around me, to be able to say, ‘Surely the Lord was in this place, and I was not aware of it’.