The World as God's Temple

3 Lent B March 4, 2024
Exodus 20:1-17 Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25 John 2:13-22

Lectionary Link

What is undeniable about the Bible is that it is a collection of texts, a collection words.  And it is evidence of the age when writing arose as technology of memory.  Text was a way of preserving the spoken words of people who had once been present.  A text is also an art form creating stories about people who never existed but were inventions of writers who believe that creation in writing was a way of forming community identity and passing that identity with certain values onto another generation.

The Bible like many of the classics, is revered because of the general paucity of writing in ancient times and the lack of general literacy of ancient people.  It is our task today to look at the words which convey the art of living for ancient people and who provide us not only with their words but with the example of being active language users to promote the very best of what language users should be doing.

In our appointed lessons for today, the famous ten commandments are presented to us.  These words are evidence that people in community were seeking best practices for how they could live together in the very best possible way.  In their wisdom story, they present Moses as a wise medium between the greatness of God and how that greatness could be funneled into human living.  The ten commandments assert that love and justice are the best ways to live in life.  The ten commandments are based upon loving one who perpetually greater than us so that we might then practice love as justice with each other, with parents, spouses, families, property, knowledge, truth, life.  This is accomplished by learning of impulse control, stated as "thou shall not covet."  Namely, if only God is worthy of the profundity of our desire, then from worship we learn to direct our desire to mere enjoyment rather than be driven to harmful addiction.

The appointed Psalm today is in part a poem of praise about the great insight of living in love and justice because of the discovery of the great insight of a law which was founded upon respecting first the one who is greater than us and then living with such loving respect for those who are most like us.

The words of the Bible include a narrative of judgments about the behavior of people when they failed to live up to their highest insight or for when they misused the very notion of being lawful.  If the commandments of loving God and neighbor are great, then so is the precise specification of what laws could mean in all of the specific circumstances of life, in how to wash dishes in the temple, or how to eat, or what is appropriate offerings to present to God.  Certainly every society knows about the proliferation of rules and law, even to micro-manage the cleaning up after our pets in the park.  All kinds of law are good, useful, and functional for community order, but when minor laws are treated with the same respect as the great laws of love and justice, then the priorities of the community can get skewed.  When legalism becomes the only valid use of language, the fullness of human experience is missed.

One might say that philosophy, the love of wisdom, is the great gift of the ancient Greeks to our world.  But what if such wisdom get reduced to saying that something is only meaningfully true if and only if it can be presented in a logical proposition?

When St. Paul had his life completely renovated by a mystical experience, he had to confront some contradiction regarding what was meaningfully true.  Jesus is God's Son, who is the Messiah, who died, reappeared, and is mystically known after he can no longer be seen.  What kind of heroic Messiah is this?  Compared with a Messiah like David, Jesus dying on the cross is a scandal.  Paul's experience also seemed to be logically inconsistent with the wisdom of the Greek as it came to the Roman era. This foolishness is presented in the skepticism of Pilate about to crucify Jesus: "So, Jesus, you are a King?"   St. Paul could have easily pointed to fact that the Greeks and Romans held to their law and logic even while believing in stories of gods and goddesses with quite fickled behaviors and violating all norms of empirical verification.

What St. Paul was showing is that in the mystical experience of love, law and logic must give way to other kinds of meaningful events within the life of people.  He, and others had this mystical experience which changed their lives and it contradicted preconceptions of people who were Jews and Gentiles.

St. Paul and the Gospel writers were trying to persuade regarding meaningful presence of God everywhere, which was made known through the appearance of Jesus Christ.  In the past one could intensively locate the divine in stories of the gods and goddesses, or in meeting places such as temples and shrines, or in revealed writings such as the law.  In St. Paul and in the Gospel, Jesus became known as the unique temple for the dwelling of God in human experience, so that each person could come to know oneself as a dwelling place of God as well.

This is the meaningful and mystical truth of Paul and the Gospel writers who knew themselves to be temples of the God Holy Spirit who proclaimed this as a meaningful experience for everyone.

The Gospel for us today is that if the heavens declare the glory of God, so God's glory can be declared everywhere, and especially within each human being.

This is the witness of Jesus as God's Temple in history, who became the Risen Christ who is able to make everyone today a temple of God's Holy Spirit.  Amen.