Simon Cox Blog: What Emanuel AME Taught Us About God's Unrelenting Love

Thursday 23 June 2016

What Emanuel AME Taught Us About God's Unrelenting Love

They remain his set-apart people, no matter who sets upon them.

Churches are sanctuaries.

But what happens when the sanctuary is violated? When violence lights the sanctuary walls on fire? When the safe haven is riddled with the bullets of those broken and guilty who were welcomed within, with opened arms? How should we understand these realities?

For some, churches are “sanctuaries” because in them, the broken, the wounded, or even the guilty come to take refuge. In the medieval period, English common law and church canons held that a debtor or fugitive fleeing from the strong arm of the law could find a haven in the church.

For others, relatedly, “sanctuary” evokes the physicality of the church. In the early commonwealths of this world, the walls of the sanctuary—reverberating with the gospel of God’s forgiveness in the eternal kingdom—provided some respite. To speak of a sanctuary is to speak of the sanctuary: the building with a steeple, a pulpit, some pews, a baptismal font, and the table. Here is where the church gathers: in the sanctuary, a place set apart for the Lord.

In all these common usages, the idea of “sanctuary” conjures up a sense of safety, of set-apartness, of refuge, and of peace.

A Place Set Apart to the Lord

Typically, the term referred to the great Tent of Meeting and its broader precincts that the Lord instructed Moses to build in the desert: “Then have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them” (Ex. 25:8). The holy, set-apart God saved a kingdom of holy, set-apart people from among the nations to be his own treasured possession (Ex. 19:5-6), and the sanctuary was to be his holy, set-apart dwelling among them:

There I will meet with the people of Israel, and it shall be sanctified by my ...