In the beginning God gathered the waters together and dry land appeared. God saw that this was good. Moses encounters a bush that is on fire but is not consumed. When he moves toward the burning bush and he hears these words, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” When Jesus died in the Gospel of Matthew, the temple curtain was torn from top to bottom, removing the only barrier between the people and the “holy of holies” in the temple.

What do these three stories share? All of them point to an idea that is has been in Christian tradition since the beginning in Antioch but since the enlightenment has been forgotten. With the dawn of the enlightenment, and the rise of science as a valid way to understand and learn about the world, humanity quickly learned to organize and categorize things in order to better understand the world around us. Animals were classified into Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. We organized a separate order for plants. The rise of the industrial revolution leads to humans creating time into distinguishable blocks. There was time for work, time for home and family, time for play and time for worship. We have become masters at categorizing the world around us like a giant waffle.

However, the walls of the waffle are breaking down all around us with the advent of the internet, social media, cell phones and TiVo. We can do work from home and set our home coffee maker from work. Where once we had to block of time to fly and see friends, now we connect through Skpye and webcams. We ‘pause’ live T.V. in order to answer a phone call from work. As we break down the walls around us, it feels like we are in the midst of the temple curtain being torn. There is no longer a set time for work and only work. There is no longer a set time for play and only play. As such, we have to begin to shift our thinking away from there is a set time for church. The ground Moses stood on did not ‘become’ holy. Rather, the ground, according to Genesis, was already holy; Moses just became aware of it. We need to be like Moses and become aware that all ground and time is sacred. I invite all cultural architects to join with me to begin to break down the waffle walls around us in order to allow the Spirit of God to move as freely as possible. Who knows, you might be waking by a burning bush not only in worship on a Sunday but by the water cooler on Thursday.