Feast of the Dedication - Friday, October 4, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Feast of the Dedication - Friday, October 4, 2019

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

The problem of a temple
It begins with a few stones to mark a place; the human impulse to honor the spiritual event with some physical object.  Certain moments must be preserved; the voice comes, “it happened here, we must remember.”  Surely the Lord is in this place, Jacob says after wrestling with the angel.  This is the dwelling place of God, this is the gate of heaven.  Put the stones here, give it a name.  Simple monuments evolve into more elaborate holy places; a tent in the wilderness, an ark to hold the tablets of the law - the most sacred objects, then songs in strange lands when there is nothing left but the memory of what was left behind, what is gone.  During the reign of King David and then his son King Solomon, the way of honoring and marking God’s presence takes a great leap.  They symbolize their identity, God’s presence, in stone and wood and silver and gold.  God commands David to build the Lord a house, and Solomon inherits the task of the main construction of what becomes the first temple.  But the Lord is not like other deities whose presence is localized and contained in an object or place.  The earth is the Lord’s.  The heavens declare the glory of God.  As Solomon dedicates the temple to God for worship, he is quite aware of both the potential and the danger of what he is doing.  This will be a place of true devotion and celebration.  This can also become a place of idolatry and hypocrisy.  What does it mean, Solomon wonders aloud, to build a house for a God who is everywhere?

Between Solomon and Jesus
The completion of the temple only makes the issues more urgent.  Solomon’s question is revived and echoed by the prophets who appear century after century to renew the covenant and return the people to their true identity.  After the return from exile the people of God rebuild their homes and God’s house. The prophets are there to say, “remember who you are, what this house is for, what is real and true and important.  Worship the Lord, but also welcome the alien.  Offer sacrifices, but also care for the widows and orphans.  Keep the feasts, but don’t fancy yourselves a class of spiritual elite who are too holy to be tainted by your hungry, dirty neighbor.”  In other words, don’t follow the ritual and go out and practice idolatry or oppression or violence.  Don’t make the temple a place of magical moral immunity rather than a place that births justice and righteousness.  Solomon is right, they will say.  God does not dwell solely in buildings made by human hands.  Let the presence of the building help, the prophets say, by pointing beyond itself, to the God who is everywhere, watching everything, and caring for all.  The purpose of the temple was to embody and celebrate God’s love for all, especially the poor, sick, and other outcasts.  It devolved into Solomon’s worst nightmare.  It became a nationalistic weapon used to divide and exclude.  Ultimately, after generations of apathy and carelessness by many, the gentile court, the place that marked the welcome by God of all the nations, had become a trading post, and an unjust one at that.

A house of prayer?
Jesus comes into this world.  Many of the temple elite in Jesus’ day did not occasionally fall into corruption and injustice and then repent, they institutionalized their evil and justified it with claims to covenant faithfulness.  They established patterns of injustice in the name of God, rationalizing prejudice in the guise of ritual purity, modeling exactly the opposite of the vision of the temple in the name of preserving the holiness of the temple.  Jesus’ cleansing is a dramatic reminder that the human relationship to the sacred place or object or ritual can become corrupt if it is preserved solely for reasons of power, enrichment, or the preservation of boundaries around the holy that mark some as worthy and some as unworthy.  In his rebuke to the money-changers, Jesus says, “my house shall be called a house of prayer; but you are making it a den of robbers”.  The cleansing of the temple is not an act to get the temple back into right sacrificial worship, but the beginning of a complete redefinition of the nature of God’s presence on earth.  The joining of heaven and earth was no longer symbolized in the building, but made fully present in Jesus, a walking temple.

Before we pat ourselves on the back because we are so much better than those nasty money-changers, we would do well to be aware that, while our temptations to injustice may not be that obvious, they are no less present and real.  Our selfishness can creep in in a variety of ways and make our time in this place of worship, in our lives with God, a den of denial and judgment rather than the encounter with our true selves.  We can succumb to the robbery of performance, of legalism, or, more popular, going through the motions day after day with little or no real engagement with the inner journey of growth.  The apathy which may gnaw at our spirits may not be obvious or visible, and we can content ourselves with having followed the form with our bodies, when our spirits may be asleep or far away.  Lifeless routine and vain repetition, wearing the mask of holiness, is a tragic avoiding of the call to be the very temples that we are.  If we believe that by performing the prescribed liturgy in the prescribed way at the prescribed times with an appropriate amount of outward reverence and piety grants us immunity from the call to conversion, then we are in danger of making this beautiful and sacred place into a den of religious performers, not a true house of prayer.

The church goes to a church
“But will God indeed dwell on the earth?”  In the coming of Christ, the answer is a resounding “yes!”  In Christ, the meaning of dwell, of presence, of temple, is changed into something wonderful and powerful.  Because on this side of Christ’s death and resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, we are the temples of that same Holy Spirit, our very bodies are the houses of prayer, the home of God.  A church, then, is not some foreign or alien kind of place, not an escape from real life, but the sign of our true identity, the place where we can enter into the adventure of being creatures fearfully and wonderfully made to worship God, to be renewed in our witness and service to the world as walking temples.

The liturgy, which is the activity of this house of prayer, is an event in which the encounter between us and God seeks to crack through the hardness of our hearts.  Sacred space can provoke and awaken our souls to attend the their desire and longing for God – to find within the space what is most real, what is always present, but often ignored, avoided, repressed.  In a culture so driven by the distractions of hurried movement and countless ways to do anything other than stop and be, the most radical act of resistance may simply be showing up with my whole self.  The house of prayer calls forth from us our honest, unfiltered, and unmasked self so that we may in that place of vulnerability know the delight of God in our very being.  Prayer, chant, silence, stillness, being present are prophetic acts of resistance to the idolatry of doing, going, talking, achieving, performing, earning, and moving.

The church of Christ will continue to build places of worship, we will always seek to join heaven and earth, to mark and remember, and this is good and proper.  But these objects and places are now not reminding us of how we are separated and alienated from the divine presence that we seek, but they are mirrors of the divine that lives most fully in Christ and, in our union with him as his body, in us.  We most faithfully honor this or any house of prayer by always becoming houses of prayer and by allowing the physical house to inspire us to be living stones, set on the foundation that is stronger and truer than all wood and stone and silver and gold. Amen.