Intro: **This summer I participated in an ambassadorial trip of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary students to our sister seminary in Lusaka, Zambia. We went to learn and to demonstrate our commitment to a reciprocal relationship between our seminaries. Included in our three-week African journey was a trip to Victoria Falls and a safari park in Botswana. It was then that I developed a deep connection to the physical landscape of Africa. **
Our one-week stay at Justo Mwale Theological College in Lusaka, Zambia had been mostly a study of people and culture - women balancing large buckets of bananas on their heads and babies on their backs; bold bolts of cloth tied in regal headdresses; men selling peanuts, CDs, and steering wheel covers at every traffic light, holding their wares up to the car windows disinterestedly; a slower pace, little internet, tribal languages, and nshima patties served at every meal - these were the things that occupied and overwhelmed my mind.
My focus shifted on our group's journey to Livingstone.
The drive from Lusaka to Livingstone takes five hours -- supposedly. Fifteen hours after departing from Lusaka, we were still 20 kilometers outside of Livingstone, huddling around a reed grass fire behind the now-useless luxury bus. "We're fine as long as the battery holds out", someone had said as our bus lurched and died, lurched and died. Of course, that was all the encouragement the battery needed. Two minutes later the bus was dead and we were staring up through the cold at a million crisp Zambian stars and a moon threatening to outshine them all.
Someone started singing. It was a hymn, something we all knew the first verse to. We sang, our voices coming in barely visible breaths hanging like ghosts in the dark air; the words in a foreign tongue, a foriegn tune, yet praising a universal God to a silent, universal sky.
We were out-of-place, I realized, singing our English hymns on a deserted roadside in the middle of the African countryside, our delapidated tin bus in its final resting place not far away - and yet we were so in place. We were in the perfect place to worship God.
In the darkness of that night, I discovered that, even in Africa, even 20 kilometers away from our hotel, even on the side of the road, we were in a house of worship. We are in a house of worship everywhere. The earth is our place to praise God and we must care for it and tend to it as lovingly as we would any architecturally-stunning cathedral. In Zambia, many congregations have no building at all. They literally take worship in nature - under a tree, sitting on the ground. They worship in their, in our, original sanctuary: nature.
The earth is our universal house of worship on which we worship a universal God. Let us give thanks and be good to it.
Peace,
Shelby