Smoked Meat, Country Music, and Church

 

Trips through the South Carolina Low Country with my dad at the wheel included multiple forays into the parking lots of any place that advertised barbecue. Dad never trusted the signs out front, so stops consisted of my dad driving or walking around the back of little blocked and wood-framed buildings in nondescript places to see where the cooking took place. We would immediately drive away without a smoker and a stack of wood. He was a purist about smoked meats and old-school country music. The music part meant we listened to many songs by Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, and Jim Reeves. The barbecue thing caused us to go hungry at times while on trips. I’m afraid my love for Ferlin Husky’s music never took hold, but the barbecue was a different story. I, too, look for smokers out back or another initial evidence: smoke!  

 Before a barbecue restaurant can serve the best meat, it and everything about it must smell the part. It doesn’t need to look nice, and sides are pretty optional. Meat, sauce, and white bread, and if the cooking is outstanding, leave off the sauce! The billowing cloud coming from a brick chimney or metal pipe on the roof told the tale. Optimum conditions demand that smoke deeply penetrate the floors, walls, ceiling, and furnishings. The experience is enhanced even more if everyone in the place smells like hickory, oak, and pecan.

I have a friend from the Midwest who was writing on Sacred Spaces for his Ph.D. project. I never read the paper but confessed to being intrigued by the subject. Combining my thoughts concerning barbecue with my thoughts on church yields an interesting parallel. Revelation 5:8 likens the prayers of saints to bowls full of incense in the hands of heavenly creatures who surround the throne of the Lamb of God. Prayers are incense that fills the houses where we worship with the scent of heaven. I have visited places of worship that contained a sense of the holy, not because of the architecture or the sign out front but due to the prayers of saints.

After her trip to the British Isles, I heard a Seminary professor describe particular “thin places,” which is how Celts describe spots where the distance between heaven and earth is reduced, and the veil that separates has faded. I have been to similar places that have been made so, not due to their location, but by sacred activity. I believe God is everywhere, but his presence is more significant in areas where he is worshiped, and his name praised.

I believe that we desperately need those places filled with the smoke, cloud, and fire of his presence, and like my dad, we must search until we find them. Don’t stop at the sign out front; be prepared to go hungry if necessary. These sacred places must bear the cloud of his presence and the marks of people who have offered themselves on an altar that leaves them smelling like the incense of heaven.