Where the Holy Resides – sermon on March 8, 2015
Scripture Lesson: John 2: 13-22
When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”
The Jewish leaders then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.
Where the Holy Resides – sermon on March 8, 2015 by Rev. Doreen Oughton
A few years ago there was an article making its way through church and clergy gatherings everywhere. Called “Spiritual But Not Religious, Stop Boring Me,” it is by Rev. Lillian Daniel of the UCC, and here are the opening lines: On airplanes, I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is “spiritual but not religious.” Such a person will always share this as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the religious status quo.
Next thing you know, he’s telling me that he finds God in the sunsets. These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops, hiking trails and . . . did I mention the beach at sunset yet?
Like people who go to church don’t see God in the sunset!
Church folks loved this. Rev. Daniels makes some excellent points about the challenges and blessings of being in community with other people, not all of them like-minded; about being connected to a great cloud of witnesses through scripture and church folk through generation after generation.
I thought about this article as I pondered this morning’s scripture passage from the Gospel of John. The story may be familiar to you. It is in all four gospels – Jesus disrupting Temple business. The synoptic gospels – Mt, Mk, Lk have the story occurring the day after Palm Sunday, but here John places it at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, right after the wedding at Cana.
Jesus went Temple in Jerusalem for the Passover. This Temple was not just a place of worship; it wasn’t like a local synagogue, only bigger. It wasn’t a house of worship for God’s people. It was considered the house of God. In the Temple was a room, the Holy of Holies, which held the Ark of the Covenant, a vessel holding the stone tablets on which were written the 10 commandments. It was believed that on those tablets, in that vessel, in that room, dwelt the word of God, the holy vibration, the sacred name. The Word was with God, and the word was God.
The Hebrew scripture laid out all the rituals by which the Jewish people would approach this place, would worship their God who dwelt there. These instructions were believed to have come from God. The books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy were specific about what kinds of sacrifices should be made to the Lord, and by the time Jesus went for the Passover, the rules and rituals were well established. During the three major festival periods – Passover, Pentacost and Tabernacle, over a million people came, all eager to worship God in the ways their scripture told them to. Israel was under Roman rule, so the money all had images of Caesar. It was considered idolatrous to bring such images into God’s house, so money was supposed to be changed to an acceptable currency before being brought into the Temple or used as an offering. So the Temple offered that service.
People wanted to offer sacrifices to their God – lambs if they could afford them, doves if they could not. The animals had to meet a certain standard. Scripture called for unblemished sacrifices. Someone could chance it and bring their own sacrificial animal from home, but what if blemishes were found. It was a service that the Temple offered unblemished animals for sacrifice. And it accommodated people of lesser means by offering acceptable, but the less expensive doves.
This is the Temple business that Jesus disrupts. In the version told in the synoptic gospels, Jesus says the place has become a den of robbers, but here in John the critique is that they are making his Father’s house into a marketplace. The religious leaders challenge him – what right does he have to do this? Under what authority? And Jesus responds by saying, “destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up.” John helps us understand his meaning by explaining that Jesus was talking about his body, not a Temple of stone and mortar. By the time this gospel was written, the Temple had long been destroyed.
So you might be wondering by now what made me think of the Daniels article. Well she critiques those who are spiritual but not religious, but here I think Jesus is calling out those who are religious but not spiritual. The Temple has claimed to have cornered the market on God. This was where God lived, and if you wanted to even get in the building, there was business to be done. The religious laws dictated what one must do to please God, and what would bring God’s wrath. (stuff from NT lectures about other religions being about rituals and not beliefs – Judaism differed, meant to be brought into daily living, but often became more about the rituals than what the rituals were meant to do – foster relationship with God). Might all of these rules and laws have become a barrier for people in encountering God? Might they have made God less accessible instead of more?
Jesus, I believe, sought to challenge all of this. I think he wanted to remind everyone that the purpose of the rituals was to bring people closer to God. And I believe he was challenging the notion that God resided primarily in the Temple. I believe when he talked about his body as the new Temple to be raised in 3 days – he was saying there is another way to get close to God. The new way he brought was through himself, but I would be surprised if he saw his body as the the replacement for the Temple in that it was now the only place God resided.
Rev. Daniel says in her article that the psalms, the Creation story, and throughout Christian tradition we are reminded that God is found in the natural world, but sometimes I worry that we churchies get so caught up in what we have here that we do indeed overlook God in the sunset. Do we know to recognize the holy without stained glass, choir music, and candles? Can we find the Word of God in literature other than the Bible? Do we have any idea of how to live our lives as a prayer rather than just reciting them?
And so I asked for your help this week in preparing the sermon. I sent out an e-mail asking people if they might be willing to share with me about having encountered God in places other than the church. I got two responses. One person told me she encountered God in books other than the bible, and that when she shared those books with family members, they often had the same experience. I know in our Monday night book group people have had powerful spiritual encounters in the writings we explore, including myself.
Another person who lives in Florida shared this beautiful response: When we first moved to Florida, we did not start searching for a church for several reasons. Replacing our home church felt unfaithful, like replacing a lost pet or loved one. Also our then rental residence was temporary and we did not know where we would end up in 6 months or a year. Lastly there were no Congregational churches nearby. So we morphed into stay at home Christians. Our long life under the Christian Faith guided us to continue living in that manner. We began looking closely at our surroundings and came to see we were living in one of the most beautiful places in the world. As time went by, we found ourselves soaking in “our” view as we drove across any one of several beach front bridges or looking out our living room window at the water, community and beach view. We began to thank God for our life as it was and the gift we received in living it.
On Sundays, when weather permitted, we would go to a nearby beach early in the AM. It would be almost deserted. We left our towels and sandals on the shore and wondered into the 85+ degree water. There we would float on our “noodles”, watch the sun rise through the palms over the distant city. Often we discussed how we felt closer to God there and then with dolphins playing nearby, then we often did in church. And so it was that we never got around to finding a local church. Each morning, when I arise, I say a prayer and thank God for our blessed life in this place and for our family (which is another whole “Divine encounter”) and friends, past and present.
I am so very grateful for these responses, but I have to wonder at how few there were, and why. I’m glad you all are here, and I hope you are fed by our worship together, but I hope you can all experience divine encounters out there – yes even in the dirty-snow-covered lawns, the gray skies, the barren trees. God is out there. My hope is that church is a place that might prime people to see God everywhere, might increase your vision, and the reflection from our out-of-state friend indicates there might be some truth to that. But perhaps that is the exception.
We have been worried and grieved about the people, the generations, for whom church has become unimportant. We believe there is a richness and depth and joy in living a faithful life – a life that includes regular communal worship, religious rituals, and sacred texts – and we want to invite and welcome others into this way of living. But I believe we may also benefit from learning from the SBNR’s about encountering God elsewhere, in books, in art, in secular music, even movies and tv, and of course, in the sunset. Can we develop a common language for this, a more open heart and mind? Might a greater willingness to learn from them open up a channel where they might likewise be willing to learn from us? And we must remember that the temple Jesus talked about raising was his living body – a moving and active, teaching and healing life, not an established destination, and not a building. Amen.
