During my last year of high school my parents decided to build
their own house. It was a big event for
them. In a sense it was a rite of
passage into empty-nesterhood and a huge statement of financial
independence. They found a nice piece of
land on a hill with a view. Found some
blueprints for the type of house they wanted; an A-frame with lots of windows
to enjoy their view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They contracted a trusted and gifted
builder. Chose carpets and wallpapering
and the like. They had enough left over
in the budget to add a swimming pool.
This house was very much their house.
For me, the move meant saying good bye to years of childhood
familiarity with a house that I knew the ins and outs of – which windows you
could sneak out of in the night, the nooks and crannies where my big brother
kept stuff hid, how to climb out the dining room window onto the carport then
up onto the roof and I’m king of the world, the closet under the stairs where
the monsters lived. There were a lot of
memories tied to that house.
The new house brought about a change in identity and family
dynamic. I suddenly found myself to be
more of a guest in my parent’s house. It
was time for me to move on into adulthood.
This was their home, not mine. I
would have to go forth and begin to make my own. Yet, that new house, my parent’s home, became
the gathering place for the whole family, all the stepsiblings, on Sunday
afternoons particularly in the summer around the swimming pool. It gave us a place, a cherished opportunity,
to begin to know each other as adults.
The house my parents built and that leaving behind of a childhood
identity and gaining of a new one for our family is part of the interpretive
lens that I bring to this passage in Luke where Jesus tells his disciples not
to get all nostalgic about that magnificent Temple for the days were soon
coming when not a stone would be left atop another. In 70 AD that day came. The Romans levelled it. The Jewish faith and its burgeoning sect, the
Christian church, had to come to grips with being Temple-less.
The Temple in the biblical faith is important. It is the place where Heaven and earth are
open to one another. In the Biblical
understanding of the Creation both Heaven and Earth are part of the Creation. Earth isn’t down here and Heaven way up
there. They overlap and there’s a veil
that keeps us from seeing Heaven. God is
openly present in and to Heaven and in Heaven his will is done and it is from
Heaven that his will is done on Earth. According
the Book of Hebrews the Jerusalem Temple was the image on Earth of the heavenly
Temple and here on Earth in the Holy of Holies, the back room of the Temple,
where the Ark of the Covenant sat behind a curtain, this was where the Presence
of the Lord sat enthroned on Earth. The Temple was also the place on Earth
where humanity’s relationship to God was maintained through sacrificial worship.
When God the Son became incarnate in and as Jesus, God’s presence
on Earth moved from the Temple to him.
Jesus became the Temple: the place on Earth where God dwelt and the
relationship between God and humanity was maintained. This is part of what’s behind the meaning of
the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus like a dove when John the Baptist
baptized him.
That wasn’t the first time God changed his dwelling place. In the
Old Testament, before the Temple there was the Tabernacle, which was an
elaborate tent version of the Temple in which the Presence of the Lord dwelt
among the people in their wilderness wanderings. Then after Solomon built the Temple, the
presence of the Lord moved into it. When
the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and levelled the Temple in 586 BC and
carried the people away into exile in Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel had a vision
of the Presence of the Lord leaving the Temple and heading east to Babylon to
be with his people. Oddly, we don’t hear
of the Presence of the Lord coming to dwell in the Temple that the Jews built
when they returned from exile, the Temple which King Herod the Great
embellished and to which Jesus was referring to in our passage. But we do know that the Presence of the Lord
was again Tabernacling among his people in and as Jesus.
Now there’s a forth time that the Presence of the Lord changes his
dwelling place, the Day of Pentecost when God poured the Holy Spirit into his
people. We are now the Temple of
God. He has made us his dwelling (2 Cor.
6:16). We you and I gathered here, the
people of God indwelt by the Holy Spirit, we are where God now dwells on
Earth. Everywhere each of us is we can
say with certainty that God is. This
means that this church building or any church building for that matter is not
necessarily God’s dwelling place. It is
indeed sacred space but it is sacred not because we’ve shut the Presence of the
Lord up in a box here, but because we the people of God in whom he dwells
gather here to worship.
Like my parents decided to build a new house, so God decided to
build a new house and we are that house.
Jesus is the Cornerstone. The
Holy Spirit is the Mortar that holds us all together. So also, just as my parents building a new
house brought about a new identity in me and a new dynamic within my family (it
pushed us into relating to each other as adults), so also we have to figure out
our identity as the Temple of God apart from this building.
My parents building “their” house in which I would no longer be a
child growing up in but rather an adult guest in forced me out into the world
to become who I was as an adult. So it
is with our being the dwelling place of God, the new house that God is building. We don’t come to a building we call God’s
house and do our religious stuff. That
house, the kind of building-based religion got destroyed once and for all in 70
AD with the Jerusalem Temple.
God lives in us and through us his presence is embodied all over
the world. And so, we must come to reckon
with the fact that discovering who we are as the people of God is going to
happen more when we are scattered out there in the world than here when we are
gathered for worship.
How we are and what we do when we are scattered from this sacred
place, particularly in this day and time, is more important than how we are and
what we do when we are gathered here. If
people today are going to encounter the Living God who has made us his dwelling place, it is not going to happen within the walls of a church. It is going to happen in our relationships
with our friends, families, neighbours co-workers, schoolmates out there in the
world. Here are some interesting numbers
for you. Alan Roxburgh shares in his
book Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the
Church in Our Time:
“If you were born between 1925 in 1945, there is a 60% chance you
are in church today. If you were born between 1946 and 1964, there is a 40%
chance you are you in church today. If you were born between 1965 and 1983,
there is a 20% chance you are in church today. If you were born after 1984,
there is less than a 10% chance you are in church today.” [1]
If we want people to know our Lord, then we have to come to grips
with the wonderful reality that God has made us each his dwelling place and he
will make himself evident, known and felt, through us wherever we are out there.
Psalm 84, which I sang a bit ago, starts out, “How lovely is your
dwelling place, O Lord of hosts.” That’s
you. As a congregation gathered you are
a lovely dwelling place of God. You
really are. But, so are each of you on
your own when we are scattered because God dwells in you. Let God build his new house out there in the
world through you. Go out and be lovely
in Christ with everyone you meet. Invite
people into relationship with you, be lovely in Christ, and through that
relationship God will make him self known.
Amen.
[1] Roxburgh, Alan J.; Joining God,
Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time;
Morehouse Publishing, New York, 2015.
