The Adventure of Holiness
10.30am
Churches and temples are risky places, for you never quite know what will happen in them. From the outside they can look very solid, stones that have stood for centuriesimpervious to change. But step inside, and the reality is surely very different. For Churches are places where we come to encounter God – the God whose holiness is beyond our control, beyond even our imaginations of the highest heavens. To set foot into God’s House is to take the ultimate risk, to allow oneself to be caught up into the divine life, into the heavenly chorus of praise. It is to leave behind the old ways of doing things and to step out instead into a new direction, into a new community.
This may not, perhaps, always be our experience of Church but it is, I think, the vision which runs through much of the Scripture. And it is a vision which Solomon holds out to the people as he dedicates the Temple in Jerusalem. We hear in our reading of the moment when the Temple has finally been completed and King Solomon is now at last able to stand before the altar, to gather the whole people, and totake the next step in this great adventure. Solomon has been overseen the building of a vast and intricate structure, its courts gleaming with gold, its doors alive with carvings of palms and flowers, and its enormous gold cherubim in the inner sanctuary. Under the wings of the cherubim he has now just placed the ark of the covenant, containing the tablets with the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God. This was a place of beauty and splendour, and yet a place too of mystery, for the art and skill of human beings could never capture the immensity and eternity of God.
When Solomon gathers the people together, he acknowledges that God cannot be contained in the wood and stone of this building, however grand and splendid. But he trusts that God will be with the people, will guide and uphold them, as long as they keep the covenant of love, follow God’s commands, repent of their sins. But what that covenant might mean, and where it will take them – that is the adventure. All that Solomon can know is that it will be a journey guided by the mercy and power of God. It will take them well beyond the walls of the Temple, into exile and beyond, into new lands among new peoples. What will be constant will be the underlying covenant, sustained by the rhythm of prayer and praise, worship and repentance, a relationship of trust and faithfulness symbolised by a Temple which points to an infinite God who can never be contained.
The House of God is built to excite and inspire, to remind us of the divine presence so that our lives may be drawn into the pattern of God’s life and love. Yet this radical adventure is unsettling, taking us well beyond the structures and stability of our human lives and disrupting the practices and hierarchies we become so used to here on earth. The temptation can so often be to try to reassert our own control, to create our own rules and regulations for God and for worship, to keep God’s action predictable and tame. It’s so easy, isn’t it, to make religion all about rules, a set of procedures that we can learn to follow, and that will comfort and calm and reassure us. But those rules will shortchange us, deny us the adventure. And they quickly become instruments of power and exclusion, that will devalue our lives and dishonour God’s House.
It is this corruption of worship, in which it becomes transactions and rules rather than love and mercy, that so angers Jesus when he enters the Temple. He targets the moneychangers, and especially those who sell doves, the birds bought by the poor to be offered as sacrifice. Moneychangers profited from those wishing to worship God properly, turning a system which should bring people closer to God into one of barriers and boundaries. As he enters the Temple, Jesus dismantles this system; he turns over the tables, shattering those structures which seek to confine God’s presence, and he opens it up instead to all. But our gospel story is not only about destruction and cleansing, it also tells of healing and wholeness, of new patterns of worship, new songs of prayer and praise. Even the children out in the temple courts are singing, responding to the presence of God who is with them with joy and thanksgiving. Worship now is spilling out into the city, not the mechanical worship of exchange and regulation, but the love and prayer of people who recognise the goodness and compassion of God, and share together in hymns and praise.
In our gospel, this scene in the Temple comes just after Jesus has entered Jerusalem, as his earthly ministry comes to a close and the passion draws near. It is part of that great demonstration of divine love and self-giving that we see in Jesus, as the depth and strength of God’s goodness are revealed. For we see God’s power not in shows of might and domination, not even in splendid ceremony or well-choreographed, organised ritual in the correct setting of the stone Temple. Instead Matthew guides us through the Last Supper to the Cross and Calvary and then to Easter, offering to us Jesus’s death and resurrection as the pattern of divine life, of the faithfulness and love binding Father and Son together. And we are invited to share in this relationship of love through our worship, not tied to temples or buildings but overflowing out into the world, even into its forgotten corners and neglected places, through grace and the Holy Spirit.
And so there is, perhaps, a paradox in our service of dedication this morning. We give thanks for our wonderful Church of St Mary’s, for its beauty, for the stories contained in its stones, for the communities and friendships nurtured over the centuries, and for the faith it has nourished. But like the graceful arches which surround us here, Churches always point beyond themselves, to the reality of God which exceeds our imagination, and the love which is more than we can desire. At their best, our churches invite and encourage us to draw closer to God, to find something of God in Word and in Sacrament, and to seek too the divine reality which lies beyond. And if we are willing to accept the adventure, then we can step out from them into new life, a life in which we recognise the whole human world as the theatre of God’s presence and all human beings as God’s children. A life in which we are freed from dry rules and the illusion of control, a life where we can serve God and each other in liberty and in love.