[Sermon delivered at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, The Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, November 17, 2024--the Second Sunday of Expanded Advent]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
“The Lord is in His holy Temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him.”[1]
Words are odd things, rigid when we do not want them to be, yet flexible when we desire clarity. For example, the word temple may seem straight-forward, but upon further reflection we see that it carries great meaning, and that meaning often varies from person to person. When we hear the word, our thoughts either flit to any building associated with non-Abrahamic worship, like the Parthenon in Greece, or Ankor Wat in Cambodia, or any Meso-American step pyramid. Closer to home for those of us in the Southwest United States, we may think of the various Mormon temples dotted here and there in major metropolitan areas. We could also (and often do) consider Christian churches like this one in which we meet today to be temples. St. Paul speaks of a believer’s body being a temple of the Holy Spirit.[2] Yet throughout much of the Scriptural witness there is only one temple, the Beit Yahweh or Beit Adonai, the House of the Lord.
The danger of looking into the Temple is to go down several historical and pseudo-historical wormholes and Wikipedia articles regarding ancient Israelite theology, regarding the origins of Israelite religion, arguing just how many temples were there in Iron Age Canaan and what significance was attached to each location, discussing disputes between the Northern and Southern Israelite Kingdoms, and outlining the impacts of the Assyrian and Babylonian crises not just on the Temple (or Temples) but on the identity of the People of Israel as a whole. I confess it took me a while to dig myself out of that dizzying array of tangents while preparing for this sermon. Regardless of the considerable history, by the time of Jesus, Jewish attitudes toward the Temple had unified, making the Second Temple in Jerusalem the focus of Jewish religious understanding. The Temple was the centre of all worship of the Lord God. The Temple was where God dwelt among His people. The Temple was where the High Priest made atonement for God’s people each year. The Temple was the centre of all teaching. The Temple was, one could argue, the soul of Israel.
Imagine, then, the consternation of everyone around Him when Jesus said, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”[3] To anyone listening Jesus had foretold not just the ruin of the Temple, nor just that and the destruction of Israel, but the elimination of the People of God. Indeed, when the Temple was destroyed roughly forty years later, every Jew AND Christian had to rethink or reconstruct or reconstitute what the Temple meant within the context of serving the Lord God of Israel. For Christians, even prior to the Temple’s destruction, the doctrine emerged from an older Israelite assertion that Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem, Solomon’s Temple, and the Tabernacle were based upon the Lord God’s Temple in Heaven.[4] The early Church did not stop there, asserting that the Temple was also Jesus’ Body, being truly the Beit Adonai as it was the dwelling place of the Incarnate God.[5] Our Lord foretold the destruction of both the Second Temple and His Body, but He while He foretold of the raising up of the temple of His body, He said nothing about the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem. In Christian doctrine, only the Temple of His Body had to be restored because it can be argued that the stone-and-mortar building was only a representation of the reality, that God’s dwelling is indeed among us already, not as a monumental edifice but in the Person of Jesus Christ Our Lord. This Temple persists throughout the ages, not only as the model for the Tabernacle and the First and Second Temples, but beyond the end of time in the New Jerusalem, where there is no Temple building because, as St. John the Divine saw in his vision, “…I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty, and the Lamb.”[6]
This distinction holds great importance for us, because it is in the Temple where we meet God, where atonement is made for our sins, where we find reconciliation with the Father. This is both our hope and our present reality. In the darkness of this age, we can be assured that the House of the Lord is with us. We enter this mystery, this great and ineffable wonder, through the grace of the Sacraments. In Baptism we not only are cleansed from our sins but put on Christ, assuming the new, recapitulated Human Nature cleansed from the taint of the Ancestral Sin, entering into the Temple of His Body. In the Eucharist we sustain that new Nature, fed by the Holy Mysteries of His Body and Blood. In Him we enter the light of the Temple of the Presence of God and turn our backs upon the darkness around us, for His light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.[7]
This indeed is good news, for it seems that the darkness has no end.
Our political leaders frequently and openly espouse reprehensible behaviour and moral corruption.
Trusted spiritual leaders have failed us by covering up or failing to act on horrible evils under their watch.
Inhumane attitudes toward marginalized peoples are on the rise.
Armed conflict continues to grind away in most corners of our globe, whether among nations or among drug cartels or among street gangs or among political rivals.
Existential despair is rampant.
The prophet Daniel paints an even gloomier picture, as we read earlier, “There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence.”[8] Even Our Lord informs us that “…Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines.”[9] However, it is in the face of the encroaching darkness that we should take heart. While God warns us of the evils to come, God has also promised deliverance. Indeed, that deliverance has already come in the Person of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and it is the expectation of that deliverance to which we hold, because, as the writer of our Epistle today tells us, “…He who has promised is faithful.”[10]
Hope, however, is a challenging thing to hold onto for a single person. The darkness around us will do everything it can to shake that hold, for its desire is to destroy us and everything around us. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews makes it very clear that for us to hold fast to this hope we must do so together. Abusers are known to perpetuate their abuse and strengthen their hold upon their victims by isolating them and keeping them away from anyone or anything that would give these victims the strength and courage to leave their abusers. This present darkness is the archetypical abuser. It is the delight and goal of the principalities and powers in high places of this present darkness to keep people apart from each other, to erect barriers between them, to hide their light under a bushel, to corrupt them, to enslave them, and finally to destroy them. When the writer of the Epistle says, “provoke one another to love and good deeds,”[11] the writer is giving us the means to prevent the desecration of those Temples of the Holy Spirit, bought at a great price,[12] that price being the very Body and Blood of Our Lord. When we neglect to meet together, to encourage and uphold one another, then we become vulnerable, easy pickings for the Enemy. When we allow secrecy and isolation to prevail, when we fail to uphold each other, we put the light of the Gospel under a bushel, and so we hide or stifle the Good News.
It is in this season that we proclaim that the Lord God is coming soon, but not until the full number of our fellow servants of the Lord should be complete.[13] Until then we are to persist in the faith, encouraging one another to continue to reject the Darkness and walk in the Light. We are the Body of Christ. In the Sacrament we come before God in His holy Temple. In our breaking bread together, we discern the Body of Christ and bear witness that He has died, He has risen, and He will come again. In our fellowship we must encourage each other to be faithful and bring the peace of God to those around us, feeding the hungry, clothing the ill-clad, healing the sick, visiting the prisoner, giving dignity to the despised, showing mercy just as we desire to receive mercy. In this we show a weary world that there is a better way, that we can all stand in the presence of God, “And in the Temple of the Lord all are crying, ‘Glory!’”[14]
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.
[1] Hab. 2.20
[2] 1 Cor. 6.19
[3] Mk. 13.2. The Second Temple was indeed destroyed in 70 C.E. by the Romans during the First Jewish-Roman War (66-74 C.E.)
[4] Cf. Ex. 25.9, 26.30, 27.8, Heb. 9.11-12
[5] Jn. 2.19-21
[6] Rev. 21.22
[7] Cf. Jn. 1.5
[8] Dan. 12.1
[9] Mk. 13.8
[10] Heb. 10.23
[11] Heb. 10.24
[12] 1 Cor. 6.20
[13] Rev. 6.11
[14] Ps. 29.9
Comments