“The Lord whom you seek will
suddenly come to his temple”, said the prophet Malachi in our first
reading.
He was writing sometime in the 5th
century before Christ and it sounds as if everything was going pear-shaped for
the people of Israel. They’d come back from exile in Babylon full of hope that
they could rebuild a better, stronger, more just nation, but human beings are
human beings and it hadn’t worked out that way. From the end of the reading we
can tell how much of a mess things had got into. Personal relationships were
poisoned by unfaithfulness and manipulation, injustice was rampant, the
vulnerable were exploited, those in need went unsupported, trust had
failed. It sounds depressingly familiar.
It could be today, really. But then or now, where do you even start to sort it
all out? Malachi was clear that he knew. In the Temple, that was where. The
Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his Temple, he says.
That might seem a bit odd. Surely
the answers should lie in politics or economics, in new laws or better
administration. But I think Malachi was right, and to understand why we need to
know a bit more about the Temple. For Jewish people the Temple was at the heart
of their national life. Originally all they’d had was a tent, made to house the
Ark of the Covenant which contained the Ten Commandments God had given them.
Eventually King David decided that a tent wasn’t really grand enough for his God.
He’d built palaces for himself, so surely God deserved a better house than this
tent. According to the prophet Samuel, who advised David, God wasn’t really all
that bothered. A tent would do fine – after all the world and all that was in
it was his home, as we heard in our Psalm today – but David insisted that only
a fine stone temple would do, and his son Solomon finally built it. After the
exile a new Temple was built and eventually King Herod almost completely
rebuilt it.
So the buildings came and went,
but the significance of the Temple was always the same. It was the place where
the people of Israel believed they met with God. It was where they offered the
sacrifices that were central to their worship, where they came to pour out
their hearts, where they came to set themselves right with God. It was
where they were reminded about who they really were – God’s children – and what they were called to do – to “do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God”.
It was a place of encounter.
The word temple comes from
the Latin templum which literally
means a place that is marked out. We get template from it too. It is a
shape, a space that is set aside. But it is only a space. On its own it
is empty. The point of a temple wasn’t the building but what happened inside
it.
Time and time again the people of
Israel forgot this. They were distracted by the splendour and the magnificence
of the building, their work, and missed the real point of it, to meet with God,
to bring themselves, their joys and their sorrows, into his presence. It’s
something that we fall into just as easily. We love our church building, with
all its history and beauty. We cherish it and we are proud of it. We take
seriously its importance to us and to others, and we do our best to take care
of it. But it’s not supposed to be an end in itself, and there is an
ever-present danger of that happening. We may value our buildings
but the true Temple, the true meeting place we have with God isn’t supposed to
be made of stones; it is in our hearts. If we are going to encounter him here – or anywhere else for that matter - it will be because we
have made a Temple, a space, for him within us.
Perhaps that’s why it is only
Simeon and Anna who recognise and acclaim Jesus when he comes to Jerusalem on
the day we heard about in our Gospel reading. The Temple would have been
crowded that day; people bringing sacrifices, priests and other officials
bustling around, people debating theology and philosophy. It would have been
full of the noise of animals too, and the smell of blood. Into this melee come
an anonymous looking mother and father carrying their six week old son. They
could be anyone.
There are probably plenty of
other families there on the same mission. Every family had to present an
offering when their first child was born. This baby doesn’t glow in the dark;
his parents don’t have haloes. They aren’t rich or important. They bring the
smallest sacrifice the law allows as a thankoffering for their child, two
pigeons ; it’s all they can afford.
So how do Simeon and Anna
recognise him? We aren’t told, except that it is clear that they have spent
long years waiting, long years praying, long years with their eyes and ears
open to God, and in doing so they have created a Temple within themselves, a
space where God can dwell. Over those long years of prayer their hearts have
become tuned in to his heart.
Everyone else goes on with
business as usual that day in the Temple. After this encounter Mary and Joseph
slip away with Jesus, still unnoticed by the crowd. But for Simeon and Anna the
world is utterly changed.
On that day in Jerusalem, just as
Malachi promised, God has indeed come to his Temple, but it isn’t the building
but the people who are that Temple, and it will be in them – in people like Anna and Simeon - that God will get to
work, building his kingdom.
For most of the early centuries
of Christian faith places didn’t really matter at all to Jesus’ followers. They didn’t set up shrines in Jerusalem – why would they want to mark the tomb where he had lain, or
the cross where he had died? Jesus wasn’t there; that was the whole point. They
met in one another’s houses, or down in the catacombs – the burial chambers under their cities - sometimes in
secret. There were no church buildings. It wasn’t until the fourth century,
when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire that places
started to become important.
The Emperor Constantines mother,
Helena was partly responsible for that. She decided to set out to“discover” the sites
where Jesus ministry, death and resurrection had taken place and mark them,
just as other faiths marked their sacred places. Before long a thriving
pilgrimage industry grew up – often little more than tourism
really. Churches began to be built, on the pattern of the grand Roman basilicas
– audience chambers – where
powerful rulers met their subjects. If Christianity was going to be a proper
religion, fit for an emperor, surely it was going to need the trappings of
empire too.
But Christian faith was never
meant to be about bricks and mortar. In its essence it is a matter of flesh and
blood. That is what is so distinctive about it. Its message is that God comes
to us in the body of Jesus, in a child, in human form. The Word became flesh
and dwelt among us, a living person. Living people don’t stay still like bricks
and mortar do. Our meeting with Christ isn’t tied to a particular place, any
more than our meeting with anyone else would be. If we bump into each other in
Sainsbury’s we are the same people as if we met in church or at work or on the
train. We may be doing different things in each setting, but we are the same
people. It is the quality of our relationships which will determine whether
that meeting is worth having, not where we have it. We can pass each other by
with barely a nod, or we can share a smile or a greeting or a word or two that
uplifts or comforts. It all depends on the space in our hearts we have made for
each other, our willingness to listen and be open to one another.
It’s the same with God. If we
make space in our hearts, a Temple, a place where we are ready to welcome him
then we will find him wherever we are. “The Lord
whom you seek will suddenly come to his Temple.” He may not come in the
form we expect, or with the message we expect, any more than that little child
of a poor family was what people expected, but he will show up. It may be in a
moment of wonder. It may be as we are helping someone in need. It may be
through the words of the Bible or in the stillness of prayer but he will show
up, and his presence will change us if we let it, refining us like silver or
gold. Our part is to make that Temple, to make time and space, to lift our eyes
and ears, if just for a moment, from the busyness that consumes us, from the
self-important bustle of our lives.
Today we celebrate the feast of
Candlemas. At the end of the service, I will go to the font, the place of
baptism, the place where we are first called to open up our lives to God.
We will light our candles to remember Christ, the Light of the World, but then
we’ll blow them out. We do that to remind ourselves that that light we really
need is now inside us, in the Temple of our hearts, where the living God
promises always to be present.
Amen
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