The Second Sunday after Christmas - January 5, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
The Rev. Suzanne Guthrie
The Second Sunday after Christmas - January 5, 2020

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
Luke 2:41-52

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

Like many Biblical authors, Luke leaves out the very things I want to know. What I want to know in this story is what Jesus and the elders in the temple talked about? What held their interest in the young boy's questions and what held Jesus' attention in the discussion that went on for days?

When scripture leaves off important stuff it is an invitation to imagine what took place.

Imagine you are twelve – on the threshold of adulthood. The Temple is deeply rooted within your soul. In infancy you were brought there and met a great prophet, and a saintly woman of deep prayer - so you are told - over and over. ( Eye roll. Mary's voice: “Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace...” “Mom! Don't sing that song again!”)

You can't imagine life without The Temple's majesty, comfort, its orientation as the center of the world and as Gateway to the Holy One.

And, the Temple is a gathering place. You have visceral memories of the journeys there traveling in caravans to festivals all the way from Galilee to Jerusalem, a time away from ordinary worries and work - your mother's anxious face looks like a girl's as she walks with old friends. Your stern, silent father laughs with the other men. You are going to where God lives, and the adults give you special sweet dates from En Gedi to eat.

Jerusalem itself is pretty exciting, but inside, the Temple! It's s a wondrous GARDEN - like the Garden of Eden! Olive wood and cedar, the bronze pillars carved with pomegranate shapes, golden palm trees, and flowers full of jewels. The lamp is in the shape of an almond tree.

And lustrous fabrics! Purple, red, and gold! And – the veil – you haven't yet seen it in the Holy of Holies - nevertheless you “see” the veil inside your dreams, for just behind the veil – the Holy One.

And space! The space within seems impossible from looking at the building from the outside. Space that takes your own prayer and draws it upward, expanding to fill the cosmos! The Temple represents the universe in its divine proportions holding secrets within secrets within secrets.

And oh, how you wish you could be a high priest – just for that one time to be in the Holy of Holies. For you are in love in God.

But just now you are brooding on a story about David the King.

The kingdom of Israel is mostly at peace, and King David looks out from his palace roof in the cool of the evening, not, this time, distracted by beautiful women bathing, but contemplating his own love of God and God's own ridiculously smitten love of him.

David says to himself, “Here I live in a palace made of cedar, but the Ark of God is living in a tent.” And negotiations for a glorious Temple begin. But God objects.

“All these years I have been moving around with my people in a tent. Have I ever asked for a house of cedar? Would you build me a house to dwell in?” (2 Samuel 7:1-7)

With this story your parents and teachers taught you, “Beware of putting God in a box.” But maybe when you were eleven years old or so, you summoned up the courage to ask, “If God doesn't want to live in a box, why do we have the Temple?”

And all the adults gasp and say, “Don't ask stupid questions.” And you sulk. And then, brood. You know about Solomon and the whole subsequent history of the Temple. Nevertheless the question doesn't go away.

So now Jesus is at the Temple for the festival. He's twelve. And rarin' to go.

Here's what I think Jesus wanted to talk about with the elders. “If God told David he didn't want to live in a box, why do we have the Temple?” (Because this would be my question. And maybe it would be yours.) Anyway, Jesus hangs around the elders, and, citing David, asks his question.

And they're off! Oh, and I wish I could listen in! Here's what I imagine.

An Elder opens, “The Holy of Holies is the center of world. The Temple is Holy because it surrounds the Holy of Holies. Jerusalem is Holy because it surrounds the Temple. And the country is Holy because it surrounds Jerusalem. And so on. This, my son, is called the Hierarchy of Holiness.”

Another Elder says, “But the Romans keep threatening to destroy the Temple, like Nebuchadnezzar did. Where is our holiness located then?”

Then, an argument about how the Romans control them by such threats, and whether those threats are empty or not. The younger ones tend to think the Romans couldn't do such a thing. The older ones have accumulated more somber memories. “This is why we appease the Romans,” says one. And then, this devolves into another unsolvable argument about politics and morality.

An Elder says, “The holy fellows over in Qumran, they have an idea that this Temple was not built to the specifications of God...”

Another interrupts “And they are constantly building ideal Temples in their heads!” Ha ha ha. Everyone laughs. “Qumran. What a bunch of crackpots.”

“But it is an intriguing idea,” says an Elder. “What if we all carry the Ideal Temple around in us all the time? What if Temple is a form, as Plato says....” but the mention of the philosopher is interrupted by a non-verbal cackle of derision.

Another Elder says, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute - many of us carry the Temple in our hearts! The Temple is a TEMPLATE of holiness, a Teacher of how to be holy in the world. The heart IS a temple – and should the Romans destroy it, and scatter us to the corners of earth, in a diaspora like our years in Babylon, we would still have the Temple, in that sense.”

“Yes,” says another. “The Temple here is stone and wood and bricks. A building built by human hands and temporal!”

“That's blasphemy,” says one old but revered and holy crank. “These very stones are holy. Are you saying they are not?”

Okay. So imagine the young Jesus from Galilee - hungry for intellectual stimulation, thirsty for God, watching with a glistening sparks in his eyes as the elders dispute among themselves in these matters.

Those literal minded against those metaphysically minded. The concrete against metaphorical. God, enclosed in the Holy Box. God, everywhere, as if enclosed, enfolded, fluid. They are all having such fun in the most playfully rabbinic way, they lose track of time until the anxious parents came to interrupt them and take Jesus home.

Jesus has twenty years to think about all these things: divine proportion, secrets within secrets, interior gardens, architectural space drawing infinite prayer from the space of your own soul, the veil, the Holy of Holies. All these things he pondered in his heart.

As an adult he loved the Temple enough to risk his life clearing the outer court of the sellers of animals and money-changers with a whip of cords. “You have made this house of prayer into a den of thieves.” (Mt 21:12-13 and citing Isaiah) And once, as his friends are admiring the Temple adornments and precincts, Jesus will say, “Not one stone will stand upon another.” (Mt. 24:1-2, Lk. 21:5-6)

And at his trial, he will be accused of saying, “Destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days.” (Mk 14:58)  John's Gospel adds that he was talking about the Temple of his body.

In a violent world, Jesus died of violence. And the veil of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom (Mk 15:38) as if rending its garments in grief.

The Temple was destroyed by the Romans not long after that. And a world-wide diaspora still moves on, heart by heart in a violent world.

And yet, all over the world, people sing, Joy to the World….
“...let every heart prepare him room.”