The Pulpit's Backside

by Bob Setzer, Jr.
Sunday morning as I was waiting to preach, I noticed a small fan humming away from inside the pulpit. It was angled to cool the preacher as he delivered the sermon on a day the heat index reached 109 degrees. A 109 degree day--plus the additional hot air being generated in the immediate vicinity of the pulpit--might lead to head stroke. An unseen angel thoughtfully added a fan.

That fan was just one more strange artifact to end up on the back side of the pulpit, a holy place most people never see.

In the great Temple of Jerusalem, the innermost sanctum was the Holy of Holies, a small chamber where the Ark of the Covenant was kept and the High Priest went to atone for the sins of the people. No one save the High Priest could venture into the Holy of Holies and he but once-a-year.

Our “holy of holies”--the back side of the pulpit--is available for all to see, though few adults ever bother to look. The children do, though, and they can tell you what is found there: a glass of ice water (just in case!), a box of Kleenex, two reading lights, a hymnal or two, and a foot stool for children to stand upon when reading Scripture during the service.

Then there’s all the stuff that ends up inside the pulpit that doesn’t “belong”: abandoned sheet music, a director’s baton, somebody’s reading glasses, broken pencils, forgotten bulletins and sermon notes, a half-devoured pack of Hall’s throat lozenges, and a necklace or ear ring bound for lost-and-found.

Perhaps those who picture the sanctuary a serene and holy place where heaven and earth meet find the truth about the backside of the pulpit disconcerting: all that chaos, debris, and inelegance! Shouldn’t everything in the sanctuary be in perfect order, prim and proper to a T?

I hope not because if the sanctuary is that kind of place, nobody I know is welcome. Each of us is comprised of both a shiny, presentable exterior and a hidden, interior world filled with anxieties and fears and secret hopes and longings. Occasionally somebody gets to see the “real me,” the “essential you,” but such moments are rare. Mostly the only One to see the back side of the Soul is God, before whom the secrets of every heart are disclosed (Psalm 44:21).

Thus, for Christians, the holy of holies is not some supposed perfect place but rather honest heart where we quit pretending to ourselves, to others, and to God. And this, we can dare to do for we have a high priest who has opened up a “new and living way” to God that starts with being real about our need for grace (Hebrews 10:19-22).

Miss Manners notwithstanding, I don’t worry much about the unkempt nature of the back side of the pulpit. We are a Good News people, after all, a people of grace.