Over these three nights the theme for our reflections is the
Temple. Charles began on Monday by
looking at the Temple as place and the importance of holy places to focus our
hearts and minds on God. Yesterday
Jonathan explored the Temple as a person in Jesus Christ. He looked at how zeal for the Temple consumed
him in radical cleansing, replacing it and opening to us deeper and more
intimate access to God’s presence.
Tonight my task is to take that on a step further to look at the Temple
as people in holy lives reflecting God’s presence, particularly as the people
of God. And the church is the body of
those people gathered together, called to lives of holiness, purity even, and
radical transformation.
Hmm, I’ll let you into a secret; sometimes I don’t like the
church very much – not all the time, but sometimes. Despite it’s calling we all know occasions
when it misses the point and gets het up about things which are not really very
important and it can be a place where people disagree badly about things which
are important. It can be a place where
injuries borne elsewhere or within it can fester and then trample on the pains
of others. There are times when it can
be shallow, unthoughtful, arrogant and abusive.
It’s been a long a Lent! The
reason it can be these things is because it is full of people and people are a
rich mix of joy and sorrow, all sorts of mixed motives and insecurities. ‘Wouldn’t it be so much better if everyone
was like me’, we might say and with the internet we can create that kind of
fantasy community where we select those whose news we see and those who just
don’t cross our frontiers.
There is a film in the cinemas at the moment about
Noah. I’ve not had chance to see it yet,
because I’ve not had a free moment to do so, but I can see I will have to so
that I know what others have seen. The
point about the story of Noah is not the floating zoo, or even the improbable
nature of the whole venture, but the rainbow.
The point of the rainbow is that desire to reboot creation, or at least
humanity, doesn’t work. Wiping everyone
out who is annoying, and we’ve all had that thought even if we don’t act on it,
just doesn’t solve the fundamental problem.
Within a matter of pages after the flood everyone is back to what they
were doing before and we need plan B. As
NatWest used to say, before the crash and they turned out to be not that
different after all, there is another way of doing things.
That other way came in a short sentence in the reading from
Hebrews (10:19—25).
After a reminder that we have access to God through the sacrificial love
of God in Christ, we are encouraged to have hope, to trust in God and ‘provoke
one another to love and good deeds’. We
are to love each other into a new way of being and behaving because God loves
us into a new way of being and behaving.
The big stick method has not worked and we learn that very early on in
the bible with Noah. There is a fault
line running through the core of our being, which we call sin, because we are
not perfect and that breaks out all the time.
There are the little niggles, the big flaws in our character and the
evil we know we do and still do it and the evil we find ourselves unwittingly
caught up in, and there is the good we don’t do. If how we make this good relies on our
efforts we are doomed to repeat it endlessly.
That is the sacrificial system of the old Temple. It is an insatiable round of repeated actions
which don’t deal with the fundamental problem – we can’t bridge the gap between
what it means to be fallible, mortal creatures and the majesty and mystery of
God.
The only one who can do that is God and God does that
through Christ, through reaching out to draw humanity into the divine life and
heart. Hebrews is an essay on this and
the technical term is sanctification. It
is how we are brought into the divine life.
The 4th century Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, referred to
Jesus as coming among us to share our nature so that we may share the nature of
God, ‘God became human so that human beings may become divine’. It is an astounding statement. It is a declaration of God’s confidence and
commitment to the people he creates. We
are a blip in the cosmic time frame. An
amazing development from the first sparks of life in some hydrothermic pool
deep in the ocean. We are utterly
insignificant in the grand scheme of time and we pollute the planet we have
been given to live on and rely on to sustain that life. And yet, the astounding claim of Holy Week
and Easter is that God thinks we’re worth bothering with; worth becoming
Temples of his Spirit.
In bothering with us we are provoked, nudged, shown that
love changes things. ‘Provoke’ is an
interesting word because we usually use it in a negative way. When we are provoked we generally join with
how God is portrayed in the story of Noah in wanting to flood the world with
anger and violence. Even changing it to
wanting to incite a response means that we are looking to annoy. And it has to be said when we are really
steamed up there is nothing more irritating than someone who refuses to justify
our anger by being thoroughly reasonable and leaving us with no focus for the
huffing and puffing. The idea behind using
the word ‘provoke’ is to stimulate to such a level that love becomes
tangible. A better way is incited within
us. And the church becomes a community
where this inciting flows. If it doesn’t
all of us bear the responsibility for that because all of us are the people
Christ came to incite with love that love may flow into and through us. It won’t do to just say the church is a
community of sinners. We are, but we are
sinners who are incited to love and good deeds; we are provoked by Christ with
a better way. We may be called together
as sinners, but that is not the end game.
The end game is that we be Temples of holiness, of God’s Spirit.
So in removing the curtain that separates human beings from
the Holy of Holies, in taking the sacrificial system and in his own self-giving
life and love making it obsolete, Christ has opened to us nothing short of the
heart of God. The Temple is redefined in
Christ; the cultic practices designed to appease an angry god as if everything
rested on our efforts are turned round to show the only one who can make this
good is God himself. All that cultic
language of blood, sacrifice, offering, is placed on Christ who because he is
God among us, shows the resolution can only rest on God alone. Salvation comes through God’s gracious gift
and not by any deeds we do. The deeds we
do are in response to this gift as we are provoked to love by love in love.
The Temple as a place to focus the presence of God is
transformed in the person of Jesus Christ to dwell among us and through his
Spirit we are called to be the people who are built into living stones to
reflect holiness. The challenge is to
provoke one another to be this, to love and for this love to flow out into good
deeds. This is the better way. No big stick.
No flood. Just arms outstretched
to incite love to be tangible as if the stones of the Temple.
Address during Compline for Holy Week, Peterborough Cathedral, Wednesday 16th April 2014
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