Jesus the Camper

My columns recently have been about strong sturdy structures, bridges and crypts and foundations.  Here are some thoughts about movable flexible shelters – tents.

The 1970’s and 80’s TV show M*A*S*H, about army doctors and nurses in the Korean War was funny, sad, sweet, ironic, political (its barbs were really about the Vietnam War) and very popular.  More people watched the final episode than had watched any TV event up till then.

The whole show took place in tents.  Mobile Army Surgical Hospital tents, perched near or in the war zone.  They operated in tents, ate and showered in tents, made love in tents, drank martinis in tents.  Father Mulcahy, the sweet and sort of dopey army priest character, led worship in tents.

Occasionally the fighting came so close that they had to quickly take down all the tents, pack up the whole camp and move to safety.  You can do that with tents.

I am a child of the suburbs and bucket lists.  So for me, a tent evokes vacation and adventure; funky canvas childhood pup tents at camp, and fancy Alpine extreme, sleek, light tents.

But for many world citizens, like nomads and people who follow their flocks, tents are the only kind of home they know.  And for refugees and disaster victims, the gift of a tent is literally a life-saver.

The word derives from tendere, to stretch.  Tents are structures made from fabric stretched on poles - light, mobile, inexpensive (unless you go to REI). 

There’s a great religious tradition of “tent meetings” especially in the African American communities, summer treks to a big field where they would set up huge tents.  For days they would sing and preach and eat and pray and reunite with families from afar, the tents and people assembled just for a short time, but lasting in meaning and memory.

They probably got the idea of tent meetings from the Bible, which is, among other things, the long story of a nomadic people settling down in villages and cities, but never forgetting their tents.  Leading your flocks into green pastures or fleeing Pharaoh into the wilderness – you always had your tent with you.

When Moses came down from the mountaintop with the two tablets, the people built a special tent to house and protect and carry around these new sacred community guidelines.  The King James Version translators gave this portable structure a fancy name, “tabernacle,” but in Hebrew it’s just the basic word for tent, same word used to describe a shepherd’s simple shelter.  In this tent Moses held sacred conversations, both with God and other leaders, and some modern translators use the phrase  “the tent of meeting” or “the tent of presence.”

Those 17^th century Bible translators, commissioned by King James, lived in Oxford and Cambridge and probably had not done a lot or camping.  They just could not bring themselves to use the word “tent.”

And then in the New Testament, when John describes how Jesus took human form, the incarnation, he wrote, in Greek, “And the word became flesh and pitched its tent among us.”  But those proper urbane English translators probably just couldn’t imagine Jesus in a tent.  Their lord was clean and permanent  and high and mighty.  Not a camper.  Likewise their words and buildings and worship; clean, permanent, high, mighty.   

So they translated, “The word became flesh and dwelt among us.”   Such a different image, to dwell, as opposed to “pitching a tent.” But Jesus calls himself a shepherd not a home owner, he certainly knew tents.  He was a carpenter after all, could easily put hammer to stake, and pitch the tent.  Pitch, such an active word, unlike dwell.  Tents are not for wimps.

Sadly, unlike Moses and the MASH health workers and those African Americans folks, we don’t worship in tents much any more.  Instead we sit in solid strong church tabernacles and wait for God to magically show up and “dwell” with us. I wonder what it would be like if we had more tent meetings and tents of meeting.  Our sacred spaces should be flexible places of community, not one-person tents.

Calling our churches tents might also remind us that our fortress buildings don’t serve (just) as a safe shelter for us.  They should also inspire us to help folks who have no home, like all those Syrian refugees, for whom a tent is their only home.

And like those MASH tents, our churches should more obviously be places of healing.  Ever visit a really sick person and see a canopy over their head with moist oxygen, helping them breath?  They call that a – tent.  Lifesaving encampments in hospital rooms.  Tent- like churches could help us all breath a little safer and deeper.

So get out your camping gear.  Stretch yourself, as you stretch that fabric over the poles.  Think of all those millions sleeping on the hard ground tonight.  Pitch your tent.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter