March 4, 2018 - Third Sunday in Lent - Where is God?

In today's Gospel, as Jesus drove out the moneychangers for the temple, he said "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up". At this moment Jesus reveals something new to the then current Jewish understanding of God, namely that God would not necessarily remain in the temple.

Pastor Ray preached how in John 1:14 we read, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt (Greek word  “dwelt” is “tabernacle”) among us.  God instructed Moses to build the tabernacle which was a tent. “The tent of meeting.”  And the tabernacle was filled with symbolism.

Photos by Ron Houser

So John is reinforcing the idea of God dwelling among us in describing Jesus at the temple. John 1:14's Word  is singular yet it feels like a reference to God, God's name, and the scriptures. Scripture came alive in the world but it was also there from the beginning the world. The Word is more than a name or idea explained in the Bible.

Jesus makes the Word an event - a happening, reminding us God is more than a verb, and cant be captured by any adjective...even our best words (justice, peace, love, good, beauty, God) fall short. Jesus will tell us about lilies in a field, an ashamed son returning home, prodigious banquets for strangers, loving our enemies and praying for them: all of which not only point to the event we call God, but recreate it, surround us within it.

Pastor Ray also preached about the Celtic "thin places", physical places Celts traveled to to experience the luminous of the kingdom of God on earth. There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in the thin places that distance is even smaller.

It is an attractive idea. It is tempting to want to believe or even feel like we can, at times, experience thin places. They can focus us on the spiritual and can invite us on pilgrimages. My reading of the New Testament ultimately cautions against the temptation in passages like today's Gospel. and the Transfiguration where Peter begins to ask Jesus if the disciples should make three tents for him and the two prophets to name two examples.

Even as Peter appears to attempt to keep the prophets there longer, before he can finish, a bright cloud appears, and a voice from the cloud states: "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him" The prophets are gone, there are no tents either. There is only Jesus and the disciples.

God constantly makes new revelations to give man different understandings. New wine doesn't pour into old wineskins without incident or cost.

Is it really important to argue about which revelation objectively contains more truth?

The congregation also celebrated Eric's birthday today..