A Pile of Rubble and the Smell of Soot...

...was all that was left of the River Church's sanctuary as I drove past earlier this week. I had decided to take the "back way" to the hospital to avoid Route 9 (those of you who live here know what I mean!), and I knew that I'd be passing by the site of last week's fire, but I wasn't prepared to be able to smell it, even with my car windows closed. I also didn't know that the building had come down; I had expected to see the charred shell of the building that I would pass whenever I took the back way to the hospital, but it was just gone!

I circled the block to find a place to park so that I could snap some pictures with my cell phone. There were some walls still standing -- looks like walls shared in common with the adjacent buildings. It's hard to tell in this photo, but you can make out the remains of one stained glass window, and for the time of day I was there, the sunlight was streaming through. Rays of hope amid so much destruction and loss?

But the real hope is the statement that you can read on their web site, betheriver.com: "Our church is not a building, it is a group of people joined together by a common love and a common purpose." That is a good thing for us all to remember. We often think of church as a building, but it is really the Body of Christ, of which we are members. Our Lutheran Confessions describe the Church as the congregation of believers gathered around God's Word and Christ's sacraments.

The members of the River Church are meeting at an alternate location, and the church goes on. They say on their web site that they have insurance, so I suppose they will build another structure. But most of all, they have their treasure in heaven, which neither moth nor rust, nor thieves, nor fire, can destroy. Thanks be to God for a faith like this. We hold them in our prayers.