This morning we are winding down the church year. Next week we will celebrate Christ the King and then head straight into Advent when we are preparing and waiting for the birth of Jesus. We are met this day with teachings about endings and beginnings and asked to think again about the direction we are headed and where Jesus is taking us in our walk of faith.
In our reading from Daniel, the
Jewish people have been living in exile, under oppression, but that is coming
to an end. They are given this vision to
carry them through. It is going to get worse
before it gets better. There will be
great anguish. People will be afraid. People will die. And there will be new life, new community,
and hope. Just when it seems that all
hope is lost, God’s light will shine and lead them forward to shine like the
stars.
Just as it seemed that suffering
of the Hebrew people couldn’t get any worse, that they couldn’t be more
oppressed, that they couldn’t feel more betrayed by their families, just when
they thought they might not be able to bear the persecution anymore, just when
it seemed their lives were ending, they have this vision of God making a new
covenant with them, forgiving them, drawing close to them, recommitting to
them, reminding them of God’s presence the whole time, and writing God’s law in
their hearts to solidify that they are God’s beloved people, the community of
God’s beloved.
The Gospel for today was written
after the temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed about 70 years after
Jesus. There was an uprising among the
Jewish people and the Roman Empire cracked down and destroyed their holy place
of worship. Mark addresses the pain that
his community is feeling in this Gospel—his community that was looking at the
temple rubble in despair. The temple
represented for Mark’s people the only place they felt they could access
God. The temple was built right where
God talked to Abraham and kept him from sacrificing his son, Isaac. God’s laws had been carried in the ark of the
covenant from the mountain where it had been given through the wilderness. Later that ark was placed in the Holy of
Holies when the temple was built and it was believed that if you want to
communicate with God, that was the place where heaven and earth touched, the
umbilical cord where the transfer of information passed between God and
humankind. So when the temple was
destroyed, people were devastated not only that this beautiful building had
been destroyed that symbolized their political power and the skill of their
artisans. Not only was their wealth and
art destroyed, but also they felt their access to God was destroyed. It was a very difficult time and it felt like
an ending to everything they knew and trusted.
What both the letter to the
Hebrews and the Gospel are telling us is that we were all distracted from what
God was trying to get us to focus on in the first place. The temple was built for a lot of human reasons—to
impress people, to let them know how powerful the Israelites were. God thought a tent was better in a lot of
ways—the main one being that a tent was movable. God wasn’t that excited about being put in a stationary
box, and knew that it could and would be destroyed and people would see that as
a destruction of God. God didn’t want a
temple, but God let it be built so that people would feel they had a point of
connection and maybe to stop their whining.
God knew that people would start to worship the building and be
impressed by it, instead of what it could do—provide space for community and relationships,
give people hope, teach people love and compassion, and birth new life.
The letter to the Hebrews goes
into the futility of the rituals of the priests. Priests were developed to be servants to
facilitate relationships between the people and God and to help people work
together to do God’s work of feeding the hungry and looking out for widows and
orphans, and lepers and all kinds of neglected people. But what we got instead was a sacrifice
factory in which animal sacrifices were made all day long, over and over, and
justice was not done. We got fancy robes
and self-importance and building bigger and more impressive buildings instead
of what priests were supposed to be doing which was pointing to God.
So here comes Jesus to show us
how to do it properly. He shows up at
the temple a few times, but mostly he shows that God’s presence cannot be
contained in any walls, no matter how fancy, and that we’re not meant to only
gather, but that we gather to be sent out to shape the world into one of
justice and mercy and love the way God intends it. See how the letter to the Hebrews compares
earthly priests with Jesus, our great High Priest. Day after day they stand. Once and for all Jesus sits at the right hand
of God. They offer again and again the
same sacrifices, but he offers himself once and for all. We’d been focused on the work of the priest
and the sacrifices we made and put ourselves and our human institutions at the
center, instead of putting Jesus there.
When we do allow Jesus to be central in our lives and in the life of our
community, that’s when we find first of all suffering, because that’s what
happens when we follow Jesus, but we find this suffering is not for its own
sake, but it is birth pangs because something new is being born.
It is so easy for us to get off
track, distracted by impressive buildings or shiny objects or own power. It is easy for us to put those in the
center. But we get a reminder this
morning that all that is temporary. Even
this church building, I understand probably will not withstand the Cascadia
subduction zone earthquake, that someday it will all be thrown down. However, the fact that none of this will last
is good news, so that we don’t put our faith in ourselves or the structures we
put in place which are always flawed.
We do have something we can rely
on that is steadfast and sure and lasting and that is our Savior Jesus
Christ. What will remain when all this
is gone, is the love and lasting compassion of Jesus.
So what we can do in the
meantime, is to use what we have to put Jesus and his love at the center. This building will not be used to glorify
people and to impress others. These
grounds will not be used to comfort comfortable people. Instead everything we do here must put Jesus at
the center, make God’s priorities our priorities, serve those who suffer and
are poor, and move toward to the kingdom of God in which everyone has the food
they need and no tears to shed.
We have always known that the
church is not the building, and this has been an even deeper learning during
Covid when we have stayed home so much more.
Our homes have become places of worship, more than ever before.
What we are being invited to do
this day is to remember that our churches and our homes are vessels. They are tools for doing God’s working of
healing and serving. They do not exist
only to perpetuate themselves but they are gifts from God to be used in God’s
service. So I invite you to close your
eyes and open your hands to receive this gift.
Make room for this gift of space, this vessel, this tool. Maybe there is something that needs to be
removed, something in the way. Move
whatever that is out of the space in your mind.
Maybe it is routines that you are in, but maybe they don’t serve you
well anymore. Maybe it is ideas that
stop you from truly seeing others—prejudice, anger, fear. Maybe it is something that you think will
impress someone else—let it go. At this
end of the year, what a good time to let go and say goodbye to what is past to
make room for what God is doing going forward.
Now you have this vessel, a gift
from God. You are this vessel, open and
ready. And God has a vision of what will
go into this vessel and what will come out of it. Something new is beginning. What is beginning to grow in your
church? Can you nurture it, even if you
don’t know quite what it is yet? Can you
embrace the unknown and let the Holy Spirit do her work? What is growing in your life—what little
seeds are starting to sprout that need a little more water and sunlight to gain
strength? What ministry is God forming
you for that will ease the suffering of the brokenhearted? What will be born from this church, from you,
from this community, from this world that will move us toward that vision that
God gives us of a new heaven and a new earth, where crying and pain will be no
more, where we will know God’s law and be God’s loving people?
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