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There is an ancient saying that compares God to a circle, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. In Biblical teaching God is omnipresent, and yet, alongside this belief, we find the veneration of special places, where God makes his presence felt in a peculiar way.

The service for the dedication of a church uses the words of Jacob when he awoke from his vision of angels at Bethel: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:17). When God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, he admonished him: “Put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5).

Throughout Israel’s wilderness wanderings, the tent of meeting, where the ark of the Lord was kept, was considered to be the place where God dwelt, above the cherubim (cf. 1 Samuel 4:4). In today’s first lesson the temple where the ark of God was is the place where Samuel receives his calling to be a prophet.

After David had captured Jerusalem from the Jebusites (2 Samuel 5:7), he transferred the ark there (6:1-15). In the temple built by David’s son Solomon the ark was housed in the holy of holies (1 Kings 8:6).

After the Herodian temple was burned to the ground by Vespasian in the year 70 A.D., the ark disappeared, to become the object of myth and legend. But in the modern Jewish synagogue there is something which takes its place, the Torah shrine, where the holy scrolls of the law are reverently vested and kept ready for public reading.

In Christianity this sense of holy places is not universal. In some Christian traditions the church is nothing but an auditorium, and people arriving there for worship find nothing inappropriate in engaging each other in conversation before the service beings. After all, “God was in Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:19), and so God’s dwelling place is now in Christ, in the heavenly places (Ephesians 1:3).

But some Christians have preserved a sense of God’s special presence in holy places on earth. The church of the holy sepulchre in Jerusalem encloses the traditional sites of Christ’s crucifixion and burial. The burial place of martyrs has been accorded special veneration. In Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic churches the tabernacle where the sacrament is reserved is a special place where the faithful go to pray.

We do not have that practice here, but our parish church, as the house of God, is a place sanctified, even outside the time of service, by the presence of the altar, the pulpit, and the baptismal font. Someone once told me that when she was a little girl, she was firmly persuaded that God dwelt in the organ pipes.

Such holy places serve to focus the intensity of the divine presence, as the rays of the sun, when focused through a magnifying glass, can produce a fire. There is something uncanny about this divine presence. In 2 Samuel 6:6-7, when the oxen carrying the ark stumbled, and Uzzah put out his hand to steady the ark, “the anger of the Lord was kindled against him, and God smote him and he died.” It is as though Uzzah had inadvertently touched a high-tension wire.

There is something distinctly unsettling about such a deadly outburst of divine energy, and it is not surprising that these verses have been dropped from the lectionary. But they call to mind the awesome and unpredictable mystery of God’s presence.

In the words of another ancient saying, “Invited or uninvited, God will be there.”

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