Maintenance and the Maintenance Man

Num 4:15-26         10/18/2017

The Gershonites are assigned tasks for moving as well as maintaining the tabernacle.

Wearing out is a curious idea. We all know that things eventually wear out. But somehow it has always struck me odd that even God’s house wears out. There’s a part of me that thinks if something is serving the perfect God of all creation, that it shouldn’t wear out.

But for me, it really goes further than that.  What I’m really wondering is why anything has to wear out? Is this a moral principle or just the way things worked out?  Maybe I’m lazy, but I can’t help ask the question: Why should we have to maintain stuff? Why doesn’t it just last?

We build a building and within days things start to break. It’s not vandalism, it’s not even complacency – it’s just wearing out. It’s some kind of entropic drift – like there’s a certain cosmic injustice in things lasting. I don’t get it. If I had designed the universe, wearing out is one of the things that I wouldn’t have permitted.

But that’s not how God seems to see things.

Maintenance. It takes effort to keep stuff well-functioning; to continue the thing in its identity and function. When it comes to the things under our control, it’s a decision we make – or not. If things are going to last, there must be a persistent determination to make them last.  This is a condition of being.

Maintenance. Maintenance is a condition of being. There is a wisdom in this. An insight.

Everything that has being must be sustained.

Existence is good. But participation in existence through limiting essence requires work: Maintenance. Continuity in identity requires maintenance.

Even scrubbing the floor is holy.

“In him we live, and move, and have our being”  Acts 17:28