The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Proper 24B
The letter to the Hebrews is an intricate meditation on the priesthood of Christ. For us thousands of years later, it can seem strange and abstract. The letter to the Hebrews was written in a context of priesthood – in the Temple at Jerusalem, and in pagan temples throughout the Mediterranean – where priests were sprinkling animal blood on altars. In the present day, the only blood on the altar is the blood of Christ in the chalice of wine at our Eucharist. But then, the priesthood was animal blood and fire and clouds of incense.
Imagine being in the middle of that – in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Psalms chanted and incense smoke rising while the sacrifices made. For us moderns, perhaps that would seem ghastly, scary – we are far removed from that context, and we buy meat butchered far out of earshot and eyesight so we need not think too hard about how a living animal becomes food for dinner.
The Temple was not a place of sanitized ritual and ephemeral song – it was a place of purity filled with the matters of life and death, the connection between the Creator and the creation. It was reality itself. The raw intensity of it – where the high priest going into the Holy of Holies needed to be aware he was entering into the intimate presence of God Most High – where heaven and earth were joined.
The Temple was not a tidy, neat, metaphorical, metaphysical symbol of something – it was where the highest heaven and the stuff of earth met and mixed and mingled. The Temple was not a mere symbol of God or God’s power, and the sacrifices were not symbols of gratitude. The presence of God was real, the work of God was real, the power of God was tangible and touchable. In the sacrifices, the power of the blood washed away sin like a soap, and the power of the blood glued together the people and their God. It was a reality too intense for lingering long. (Side note: CS Lewis explored these themes of reality, ritual, and religion masterfully in his books “The Great Divorce” and “Till We Have Faces” – if you’re up for deep reading!)
It was the flip of where we often find ourselves – where spirituality is the add-on to the everyday. The workaday problems occupy our minds and hearts – how do we pay the bills, how do we plan for the future, will there be a future for our children and grandchildren, how do we get our checklist done – and the big questions of meaning are left for moments of tragedy, pain, and the rare moment of silence with our own prayers. We busy ourselves daily until we can no longer hide from these questions, and we hope that we have cobbled together enough spiritual meaning to help us when the world falls apart.
We inhabit a world where we have built ourselves into a rigid version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – that we have to have every physical need met first, then our psychological and social needs, and only after that can we engage in spiritual needs. That we build our pyramid brick by brick from the bottom up. But we are not pyramids. We are temples of the Holy Spirit. We are flesh-and-blood, yes, but we are also spirit and soul. Yes, we have basic needs. But do you know what the most basic need is? Hope, purpose, meaning, value, all the existential stuff that our culture has us put on the back burner to boil away.
Viktor Frankl was a Jewish Austrian psychologist who was imprisoned in a concentration camp during the genocidal Nazi regime. In the camp, all the basic needs went unmet. Food was scarce. Insufficient clothing. The social fabric was torn apart by the camp hierarchy that used some prisoners called “kapos” to enforce the rules and rat out fellow prisoners. Dr. Frankl noticed that the prisoners who could not find something meaningful or purposeful or hopeful at all were the ones who died most rapidly. When the spirit inside is dying, the body will too. Despair was not just a sign of death – despair brought death about.
In these times, despair seems to be lurking at our doors. While some trumpet the economy as healthy, I’m not so sure that an economy where so much wealth is concentrated in the hands of so very few is healthy at all. We face a national election in the United States that intensifies the fear and vitriol we’ve seen in the last 15 years of our politics. We finally breathe that the intensity of summer fires is over for now, but we know that climate change and environmental degradation continue to happen because it is not “economically feasible” or socially palatable to change our economic policies. We feel exhausted, burnt down to the root, our nerves dulled.
And it is for such a time as this that we are called to our spiritual lives, the realest part of ourselves, where heaven and earth are joined.
Christian spirituality points to each human being as a temple of the Holy Spirit. Not a temple as in a “nice sanitized ephemeral place where spirituality stuff happens” but a Temple, where life and death and meaning and love and God mingle together and take root. Where a meal is blessed, bread is broken and eaten to sustain life and connect ourselves with those who have none and to drive us to mend the world around us. Where a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving casts out despair, washes away sin, and glues together what was broken and divided. Where our spirit meets the Holy Spirit not only in high and lofty things but in the dirt of our daily lives. It is in the Temple inside you that Christ our Great High Priest is doing his most wonderful work – not as a symbol, not as neat and sanitized ritual, but as offering his life, his blood on the altar of your heart, to make you holy, to bring your scattered self together, to heal you, to sanctify you. And you, the Temple, take this redeeming work with you wherever, to be yourself part of this redeeming work. Your hands, your heart, your soul and mind, to heal and redeem and liberate, to make real and give flesh to the power of God in our midst. This is most wonderfully true: you are a Temple of the Holy Spirit, and Christ our Great High Priest is at work in you and in our midst! Jesus Christ offers up his own body, his own blood as sacrifice – to cleanse, to redeem, to bind together, to heal, to sanctify – not only on this altar, but on the altar of your heart, and soul, and mind, and body. You are the Temple, and he is the Great High Priest at work within you. Amen.