The Stuff of God
+ In the Name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today we celebrate the feast of the presentation of Christ in the Temple. It's the last feast in the Christmas cycle of feasts, a cycle that will begin again on March 25, with the Annunciation, nine months before Christmas. This feast commemorates the time when Joseph and Mary, following the Jewish ritual law, would have offered a sacrifice to redeem Jesus. To redeem something is to buy it back, and the idea of this sacrifice was that all first born males belonged to God. If they were animals, they had to be sacrificed themselves; but in the case of first-born male human beings, another sacrifice was offered in place of the boy, buying the boy back from God to whom he rightfully belonged.
Luke's story of this feast shows Jesus coming into the Temple in Jerusalem for the first time. For Christians, this is a turning point. Because the Temple was supposed in Jewish religion to be the place where God was uniquely, specially present, enthroned (so to speak) in the Holy of Holies, there's always a tension for Christians between the Temple building, on the one hand, and the man Jesus of Nazareth, on the other hand. For in Jesus, Christians believe, God is not merely present-God is actually living a human life, living out everything involved in being a Jewish man of his time and place. So when the baby Jesus is brought into the Temple, we see God becoming present in the flesh where he has for a thousand years been worshipped as present in Spirit. When baby Jesus is redeemed by the sacrifice of a couple of pigeons, we see that God has become a first-born son, and the prophet Simeon gives us a subtle reminder that this first-born son will in fact become a sacrifice. "A sword will pierce through your own heart also," he says to Mary: and if we picture the virgin mother at this moment in the Temple, holding the happy squirming little baby, we also have to picture her thirty years later, once again in Jerusalem, holding the body taken down from the cross. And when we see Jesus in Herod's great temple, whose foundations remain even today, we remember that Temple of his body was raised again on the third day.
There's obviously a lot of material here for sermons. But after spending yesterday in commemorating this building with a celebration of the Holy Eucharist, I was struck, when I read over this lesson, by how physical all this is. People have often said that God is spirit-which is true, as far as it goes-and that therefore our worship of God should be spiritual. In fact, people have sometimes pointed to the presentation of Christ in the Temple as marking the beginning of the end of sacrifices and the dawn of a new age of spiritual worship. And spiritual worship, after all, doesn't require buildings like this one; it doesn't require guys in funny hats; and it certainly doesn't require sips of wine and bits of bread. But I think it's wrong to read the Presentation that way. Baby Jesus's arrival at the Temple doesn't mean that God is rejecting the physical sacrifices of the Jewish law (and, by implication, the physical sacrifices of other religions) in favor of something spiritual: instead, it means that wherever our ideas of physical sacrifice come from, God is taking them up, and making them his own. It's true that Christians have stopped offering physical sacrifices, but the reason isn't that there is something wrong about the physicality of it all: the reason is that in Jesus Christ God has made the one, full, perfect and sufficent sacrifice, and made it as physically as any human being could. And it's a memorial, a remembering, a making present of that sacrifice, that Jesus commands his disciples when he gives them the bread and the wine.
Can God be worshipped in pure spirit, without the physical world of brick and wood and bread and wine? Surely: the angels have worshiped God in pure spirit from the moment of their creation. But what puzzles the angels is that God did not create us to worship him in pure spirit, but rather with these physical bodies that he gave us: what makes the angels tremble is that God not only chose to take on such a physical body, and be redeemed by the sacrifice of a couple of pigeons, but also offered himself as the sacrifice for our redemption. And what fills the angels with wonder is that, rising from the dead, God promises us resurrection so that we may worship him in physical bodies in eternal life. There was an astronomer, Carl Sagan, who pointed out on a television series some years ago that what we are made of has been the stuff of stars: feasts like this one remind us that what we are made of has become the stuff of God.
--John Wm. Houghton
+ In the Name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today we celebrate the feast of the presentation of Christ in the Temple. It's the last feast in the Christmas cycle of feasts, a cycle that will begin again on March 25, with the Annunciation, nine months before Christmas. This feast commemorates the time when Joseph and Mary, following the Jewish ritual law, would have offered a sacrifice to redeem Jesus. To redeem something is to buy it back, and the idea of this sacrifice was that all first born males belonged to God. If they were animals, they had to be sacrificed themselves; but in the case of first-born male human beings, another sacrifice was offered in place of the boy, buying the boy back from God to whom he rightfully belonged.
Luke's story of this feast shows Jesus coming into the Temple in Jerusalem for the first time. For Christians, this is a turning point. Because the Temple was supposed in Jewish religion to be the place where God was uniquely, specially present, enthroned (so to speak) in the Holy of Holies, there's always a tension for Christians between the Temple building, on the one hand, and the man Jesus of Nazareth, on the other hand. For in Jesus, Christians believe, God is not merely present-God is actually living a human life, living out everything involved in being a Jewish man of his time and place. So when the baby Jesus is brought into the Temple, we see God becoming present in the flesh where he has for a thousand years been worshipped as present in Spirit. When baby Jesus is redeemed by the sacrifice of a couple of pigeons, we see that God has become a first-born son, and the prophet Simeon gives us a subtle reminder that this first-born son will in fact become a sacrifice. "A sword will pierce through your own heart also," he says to Mary: and if we picture the virgin mother at this moment in the Temple, holding the happy squirming little baby, we also have to picture her thirty years later, once again in Jerusalem, holding the body taken down from the cross. And when we see Jesus in Herod's great temple, whose foundations remain even today, we remember that Temple of his body was raised again on the third day.
There's obviously a lot of material here for sermons. But after spending yesterday in commemorating this building with a celebration of the Holy Eucharist, I was struck, when I read over this lesson, by how physical all this is. People have often said that God is spirit-which is true, as far as it goes-and that therefore our worship of God should be spiritual. In fact, people have sometimes pointed to the presentation of Christ in the Temple as marking the beginning of the end of sacrifices and the dawn of a new age of spiritual worship. And spiritual worship, after all, doesn't require buildings like this one; it doesn't require guys in funny hats; and it certainly doesn't require sips of wine and bits of bread. But I think it's wrong to read the Presentation that way. Baby Jesus's arrival at the Temple doesn't mean that God is rejecting the physical sacrifices of the Jewish law (and, by implication, the physical sacrifices of other religions) in favor of something spiritual: instead, it means that wherever our ideas of physical sacrifice come from, God is taking them up, and making them his own. It's true that Christians have stopped offering physical sacrifices, but the reason isn't that there is something wrong about the physicality of it all: the reason is that in Jesus Christ God has made the one, full, perfect and sufficent sacrifice, and made it as physically as any human being could. And it's a memorial, a remembering, a making present of that sacrifice, that Jesus commands his disciples when he gives them the bread and the wine.
Can God be worshipped in pure spirit, without the physical world of brick and wood and bread and wine? Surely: the angels have worshiped God in pure spirit from the moment of their creation. But what puzzles the angels is that God did not create us to worship him in pure spirit, but rather with these physical bodies that he gave us: what makes the angels tremble is that God not only chose to take on such a physical body, and be redeemed by the sacrifice of a couple of pigeons, but also offered himself as the sacrifice for our redemption. And what fills the angels with wonder is that, rising from the dead, God promises us resurrection so that we may worship him in physical bodies in eternal life. There was an astronomer, Carl Sagan, who pointed out on a television series some years ago that what we are made of has been the stuff of stars: feasts like this one remind us that what we are made of has become the stuff of God.
--John Wm. Houghton