Chatting in the Chapel (Friday Devotional)

 

And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

- Acts 2:42

When we entered the Sistine Chapel last Friday, we were given two strict instructions: no photographs and no talking. So serious is the Vatican about maintaining a sense of reverence in that holy space that a guard repeated the instructions over a microphone when the murmurs of the crowd became too loud.

I’m a rule follower by nature, so I kept my phone in my pocket and my lips sealed. But as I made my way through the chapel, admiring the beauty of its legendary ceiling, I was momentarily distracted by a pair of guards. Unlike the man who’d sought to enforce the Vatican’s noise policy, these two were carrying on a friendly conversation right in the middle of the room. Talking about the events of the day, laughing at shared jokes, maybe enjoying some water cooler gossip—whatever they were discussing in Italian, it was clear they weren’t critiquing Michelangelo’s masterpiece. 

Initially, something about this felt wrong to me. This was a sacred place, a holy site. They should have more respect, more reverence! Couldn’t they talk about football scores somewhere else? 

But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that they were offering a picture of what fellowship is supposed to look like: life together in the presence of God. Sometimes our conception of fellowship leans too hard to one side or the other of that definition—friendship without holiness or worship without shared life. But God neither calls his church to be a social club nor a monastery—he calls us to be a community knit together by faith.

Believers serve together and play together, we sing together and laugh together, we exchange prayer requests and recipes. In doing so, we show ourselves to be not just many members, but one body. When our lives are shared in Christ, we are made better by that communion.

A sanctuary is not only a place for God, but for his people. So let’s worship there—and, yes, let’s chat there too.