Itinerant Altars--July 26, 2024

Itinerant Altars--July 26, 2024

"In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you are also built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God." [Ephesians 2:21-22]

There are buildings where Christians gather, meet, and worship, but they are not temples.  We are the temple, ourselves.  We in these bodies of ours--this flesh and bone, our creaking joints and aching backs, our laughter lines and watery eyes, in all our colors of hair and shades of skin--we are the temple in which God dwells, rather than being confined to a building or a shrine or a statue.  Wherever we go, and whatever we are doing, we are the "thin place" where God's presence is meant to be somehow clearer and more knowable.  The people of Jesus, in other words, are itinerant altars in the world, and our hands, feet, hearts, and voices are the channels where others should be able to see the face of Christ.

Now, that idea isn't necessarily unique to these verses from Ephesians, at least if you have spent much time at all in the New Testament letters.  The imagery of us as people being the "dwelling place" for God or the "temple" of the Holy Spirit runs throughout the New Testament, not just in these words that many of us heard this past Sunday.  But it really is a radical notion to say that the people of Jesus do not need a building to meet with God, because in fact we are the meeting place between Christ and humanity.  

In the ancient world, every god had a temple--actually, they each had many shrines, sanctuaries, places of worship, and statues of every kind.  You went to the building as your act of devotion and offered your prayers or your offering or your sacrifice there, and the act of being in the right temple, the right place, was part of how you knew you were offering to the proper god or goddess for the proper need.  Poseidon was god of the sea, for example, so you knew you went to him to request a safe voyage across the Mediterranean, but not for help with your wheat harvest.  Athena was for wisdom, but you didn't ask Athena to help your fishing business get a catch big enough to make ends meet on your next outing.  And therefore, you made sure to offer the proper sacrifices and prayers at the proper place to make sure your acts of piety were heard by the right divine ears.

But the claim of Christians was that there was no single "right" place you had to go to meet Jesus, or to connect with God, because Christ showed up wherever his community gathered.  "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst," Jesus had said in the Gospels.  The early Christian community didn't insist you had to go to the Temple in Jerusalem, or to any other single spot on earth, in order to connect with Jesus.  Instead, we ourselves were the meeting point, and we ourselves became the temple--walking stones and bricks that assembled themselves into a "house" of sorts when we gathered in worship, and then scattered out into the world as we lived out lives during the rest of the week.  So when the actual Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the occupying Romans in the year 70AD, the Christian community was ready to head in a new direction.  They didn't say, "We need to rebuild that temple so we can meet with God," but rather, "God was never trapped inside that ol' box anyway--Jesus comes to meet us in the breaking of the bread and the pouring of the cup, and in our assembled community, wherever we are!"  To the rest of the Greek and Roman world, this was utterly preposterous.  But to the Christians, who were basically chased out of every respectable place for worship anyway, it was Gospel Good News.

Now, if it really is true that we, the people of Jesus, are the living "temple" and "dwelling place" for God, it means at least two other things.  First, it means that I have to accept that God is dwelling in other people that might well be different from me, or who come from a different background from mine, or who disagree with me on things.  It's not just ME that is the temple of God, but ALL of US.  And that means, as we've been seeing throughout this week's devotions, that God has chosen to include both "insiders" and "outsiders," the Judeans and the Gentiles alike.  For the earliest disciples of Jesus who were Jewish, that meant recognizing that God was doing a new thing and including "those Gentiles." And for the newcomer Gentiles it meant recognizing that the "old guard" who did things the "old way" were not being kicked out, but that they had a place in the family, too.  It also meant realizing that God didn't merely "let the other group in," but deliberately chose to work through the "others" and to build this living temple out of both groups of people. The living Temple of God called "church" was made of insiders and outsiders, Jews and Gentiles, and they were not forced to fit someone else's cookie cutter expectations, but rather were used and valued as they were.  That took some getting used to for the early church.  It still does today, honestly.

The other thing that we have to take seriously, if we accept that we are the living temple of God, is that all of our lives are meant to be a meeting point where others can encounter the living God.  It's not just that "we have to be well-behaved and pious on Sundays in church," but rather, that all of our lives are meant to be reflections of the face of Christ and the love of God.  There's never a time when we get to say, "Well, that's just not how the REAL world works! We have to be cutthroat and mean-spirited in the real world, but on Sunday mornings we'll do the lovey-dovey stuff."  We are always "on" as the people of Jesus.  We are always the meeting point where others might encounter Christ.  A temple is a dedicated space for the deity that is worshiped and glorified within it--you don't have a building that is a temple in the mornings, a bowling alley in the afternoon, a weapons factory in the evening, and a strip club at night.  There is a sense that a temple is meant to be wholly dedicated to connecting you to the divine, whenever you go there.  In a similar way, when we say that we are the temple of the living God, it is to say that our whole lives are meant to be indwelt by the person of Jesus and reflections of the character of Christ.  There is no time when we get to turn off the Christ-likeness setting and just resort to being selfish, arrogant, bigots or greedy, obnoxious gluttons because it's "Me Time." And we don't get to disconnect from the way of Jesus when we find it inconvenient--not during "business hours," not "because it's the playoffs," and especially not because "it's election season." We are meant to be a place of sanctuary in a world full of meanness, and we are meant to be a point for others to encounter Christ in a time of indecency and dishonor, because we are the temple of the living God.

Look, I know there are times when others may say, "We have to do whatever it takes to win!" and will justify all sorts of rottenness and selling out for the sake of whatever success they insist on pursuing.  But for the people of Jesus, we don't get that option. Being a dwelling place of God isn't a job we can set aside when we're off the clock. It is a way of being in the world--a way of loving, a way of speaking, a way of acting, and a way of listening, that reflects the presence of Jesus for others.

What will it look like for you and me today to be temples of the living God--places where people encounter Christ?  Where will you set up an itinerant altar, a walking sanctuary, in which others will meet God?

Lord Jesus, let your own love and goodness be seen in us, and let us be a point at which others are brought into relationship with you.