Traveling Sanctuaries--June 3, 2024

Traveling Sanctuaries--June 3, 2024

"Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body." [1 Corinthians 6:19-20]

It was an honor just to have them riding in the back seat of my car. Seriously.

Years ago, when I was in seminary, there were going to be some visiting "big names" who were going to give a presentation as guest speakers. (Well, they were Big Deals in the small pond of the Midwestern Lutheran Seminary Church Nerd community, so they seemed like celebrities to me.) As it turned out, I got to be the student who drove to the airport and picked them up from the concourse.  After all, a modest Ohio seminary is not really the sort of place that pays for a chauffeur and car service if you can get a student to do it for free--we are, after all, preparing for life in The Church, which is typically a Let's-Be-Economical kind of community. And like I say, I was honored anyway.  I was familiar with some of the works of the people I was to be picking up and felt like I was meeting some heroes of sorts, or at least people with notable talent whose names I knew.  

So anyway, I made sure my car was cleaned out before I picked them up.  Not that it was a pigsty beforehand (and this was WAY before kids, so there were no random socks, broken toy accessories, or fruit snack wrappers in the back), but I wanted to make sure I had taken any books or class materials out, and moved aside the umbrella that often ended up in the back seat, and that I had vacuumed out the upholstery.  None of this was because I was afraid that the Special Guests of the Seminary would scold me or refuse to get in the car if it didn't meet their standards, but because I felt honored that they were going to ride in MY car--my very ordinary, very utilitarian 1997 Dodge Intrepid sedan.  I felt like I was the one being given the privilege of making small talk for fifteen minutes with these Big Deals, and I was swelling with pride that I got to be the first face of the seminary to meet them and greet them at the curb.  

Well, I mention this brief moment from twenty years ago because there's something of the same feeling when the apostle Paul talks about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within us.  It's an honor, a privilege--a gift of grace!--that we get to be the dwelling places of the very Spirit of God!  We are, in Paul's words, "temples" of the Holy Spirit--movable houses for the divine, and traveling sanctuaries! That's meant to be a word of honor for us.  So when Paul says, "therefore, glorify God with your bodies," it's not meant as a threat or intimidation. The point is not to say, "You had better clean up your lives well enough, or else the Spirit will deem you unacceptable and will refuse to have anything to do with you!" but rather to say, "You lucky dogs are fortunate enough to get to have the Spirit abide in you--recognize what an honor that really is!"  He isn't trying to make us afraid of "not being good enough" but rather to take seriously what it means to say that the Spirit of God dwells in us, and that these bodies of ours are important enough, worthy enough, for the living God to be seen in.  

When you think about what Paul is saying in his first-century Greco-Roman context, it's simply astounding.  In the first century, every god and goddess had ornate temples and impressive shrines--that was where you went to commune with your deity of choice.  Nobody in Paul's world would have said, "I commune with Zeus daily, since he lives in my heart!" or "The goddess of Rome goes with me wherever I travel!" You had to go to their temples to connect with these deities.  Even Judaism in Paul's day would have seen the Jerusalem Temple as a focal point for relating to Israel's God.  But Paul makes the outlandish claim that each of us, these walking assemblages of muscle, bone, and organs, is a mobile temple in which the Spirit of God dwells.  It flew in the face of what everybody in Paul's day "knew" about the gods and how they worked.  And here Paul just takes it as a given: "Don't you know you are already traveling sanctuaries for the Spirit of God?"

The idea of a god who was in touch with people anywhere, apart from the proper rituals in the proper shrines, was ludicrous to the religious world of the Roman Empire, and Paul just assumed it was true for us.  Because we are followers of Jesus, we are the dwelling places of the Spirit of God--and therefore, we want to make sure there's no trash on the floor or umbrellas strewn on the back bench seat.  We are the ones honored by the Spirit's presence in our lives.  We don't have to be afraid of that presence, or worry that we won't be deemed "worthy," but rather we are encouraged to take seriously what a gift we are being given.

If I geeked out to have a couple of moderately-known church figures in my car between the airport and the seminary, how much more thrilled should I be that God's own Spirit chooses to dwell within me, even as ordinary as I am?  And what would it do to our day today if we saw ourselves in that light--as people who are walking, talking temples of God, in whom God's own presence comes near?  What if we no longer had to worry about whether someone else thinks we are tall enough, short enough, thin enough, tan enough, or whatever--and instead we simply said, "I'm going to see myself as a dwelling place of God?" How would we take care of ourselves, not with fear of being judged unacceptable, but precisely because we know God has accepted us and chooses to take up residence within us?

That's the invitation today.  That's our calling. You already are a Temple of the Spirit--the only question is whether you and I will take that claim seriously.

Living God, help us to sense your presence within us, and to offer our lives as a fitting place for you to dwell.