March 15, 2015
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
On this spectacular Sunday morning in the Bay Area, why are you in worship?
I suspect that some of you are here hoping to learn more about the Christian faith. Perhaps you may be a seeker and a searcher after God and you have come here to continue that search.
You may be visitors who have come to our beautiful city and thought it would be nice to worship someplace and you just happen to come upon FCBC. Others may be going through a rough patch in your life and you are here seeking comfort and consolation to help you make it through that difficult time.
I know some of you are here because God has been especially good to you and you are here to give thanks. Or maybe you are here to simply wish to join in warm fellowship with good friends.
All of those reasons are good enough reasons to be here. But I asked, what is the primary reason for being here? We are all here, in one way or another, to worship God. Worship is the one thing the church does that is not done at any other time or any other place, or by any other major body in the world.
And yet how do we worship God? To make contact with the holy and living God is not an easy task. Sometimes we gather to worship God, and we are simply worshiping an idealized image of ourselves. At other times we come to worship and we say we’re listening for the word of God, but honestly we hear what we want to hear.
Therefore, the worship of God is no easily accomplished task. How can sinful, finite creatures such as we are able to climb up to a good, holy and loving God such as we believe God is?
Building Temples
We try by building temples for ourselves. For what is a temple but a place where we human beings attempt to make contact with God? Our own beloved church here is a temple of sorts. This is a holy place whereby we hope to shed ourselves of all of the distractions that keep us from focusing upon God. This beautiful sanctuary is a way we hope to find a path toward God. This is where we pick up the Gospel lesson for today.
Jesus enters the beloved temple of Jerusalem, the very heart of Israel’s faith, and what does he do? He drives out the merchants from the temple courts. His actions are offensive to those who observe him. After all, these merchants are only selling the necessary means for worshipping God in the temple. They are selling sacrificial animals that will be offered up to God. They are exchanging coins with images of Caesar and other gods for Hebrew coins so that their offerings wouldn’t be blasphemy against God. No good Jew would present a gift with Caesar’s image on it.
But even when the intentions of the people were to prepare themselves to worship God, Jesus says that they have badly perverted the temple, turning God’s house into a business.
Jesus tells them that if this temple is destroyed, he can build it back in three days. Some of them are confused and scoff at the idea. This temple took almost 5 decades to build. But John says that Jesus was talking about his death and his resurrection. Jesus is saying that he is the new temple—the new means by which humanity will make contact with God.
By the way for your information, the Romans destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem just a few days after Jesus spoke these words. And if the magnificent temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, what hope have we of making contact with God? The people who were around Jesus thought about that.
If we look around in our rather modest temple, what are the ways that we have tried to help you make contact with God? We created and preserved these colorful stained glass windows. We invite you to sing hymns and hear anthems and recite prayers to prepare you to hear the Word of God. We make sure that you are comfortable with good lighting, a PA system and hearing aid devices, and even fresh flowers. But are these things helping you to be in contact with God?
God’s Son
Christians came to believe that God gave his only Son to be our primary way by which we could get to God and God could get to us. This is the message throughout the Gospel of John.
In Jesus, the reign of God broke through to the world. He doesn’t only make a reality of God’s reign visible; he also makes it possible. He not only healed people as a sign of the future kingdom’s coming; he also invites sinners and outcasts to join that kingdom now. He rendered God’s coming kingdom not as some fuzzy future possibility but as a joyous party in the present.
To participate in this new kingdom was to be in the company of Jesus and to trust that what Jesus said about God and us are true. We are to live lives that showed that this God—rather than any other popular gods in those days as well as today—was in charge.
When the first Christians believed in Jesus, they did not simply believe that he had some good ideas. They believed that by his action and his invitation, Jesus had made a decisive difference in human history. God is doing what Jesus does. In Jesus, God was not only revealing God but Jesus is acting as God. We see this when Stephen, the first Christian martyr without hesitation prays to Jesus as he dies (Acts 7:59).
And those devout Jews who would be praying the Shema, “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one,” now are praying to Jesus as the same, one God. These early Christians are now able to answer questions like: “Who is this that the winds and waves obey him?” or “Who is this who presumes to forgive sins?”
Who is this? None other than God, the one and only God of Israel, with us, God doing for us that which we could not do for ourselves. God in Jesus Christ is mediating himself to us.
If we say that Christ is “only human,” then he has no more to tell us about God than the average, well meaning, inspired teacher. On the other hand, if Christ is only God, then he has little relevance to this frail, finite, fragile thing called human life. But when God Almighty decided to be joined with humanity in Jesus Christ, we have Jesus who is both human and divine.
Our Worship
The Christian writer, Annie Dillard said, “People in church seems like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute.” Get out of bed, get dressed. Drive to church, open the hymnal, sing the songs, let your mind wander during the scripture reading, get a little dose of the divine, get a little doze during the sermon, stand for the doxology, say goodbye to God, and go home. Worship is for many a monotonous rite of passage every week.
When Jesus speaks of himself as the temple that is being destroyed and will be rebuilt in three days, I believe he is asserting the truth that we as his followers should attempt to embody in our earthly, human lives the divine mystery of the God who refused to be God without us.
When the Apostle Paul exclaimed, “You are God’s temple and God’s Spirit dwells in you” in 1 Corinthians 3:16, it means that Christ, the light of the world, commissions us to be lights of the world. If others are to experience the light of Christ, it will be through us. If we are to see God, we must see God through Christ. And here is a daunting truth: if the world is to know Christ, the world must learn of Christ through witnesses like us. We believe in a God who refuses to be God without us.
While we cannot ascend to God through our human thoughts and experiences, it is true that God descends to us, and when that happens, we experience the truth of the incarnation. We bump up against a God who is physical and not just an abstract projection. It’s more concrete and not just a testimony of our inner human experiences. When we worship, we experience God coming to us—we who could not come to God.
At Sunday worship at FCBC, we follow a pattern of prayer and praise as a very human activity that takes place in earthly space and time. We wash with water in baptism; we ingest grape juice and crackers in the Lord’s Supper. In so doing, we become vulnerable to the coming of a God we did not concoct for ourselves. We dare to believe that God uses these thoroughly human activities—bathing, eating, and drinking—to come very close to us in all of God’s holy presence.
We experience—maybe not every Sunday but often enough to keep us at worship—the presence of God moving among us in our earthly worship. We hear of a healing when there was once serious worrying.
We testify to a change of heart when there was once a heart of stone. We come to church feeling lonely and to our pleasant surprise, we leave having met new friends. We sing a familiar hymn and our eyes water up because we remembered so intimately how God is merciful and gracious.
While we might think that we are only going through the rituals in our temple, we are only to be surprised by the undeniable descent of Christ, the true temple, and we shout out like Jacob, “Surely the Lord was in this place and I did not know it!” (Gen. 28:16).
But let’s be frank with ourselves, we don’t expect enough out of worship or put enough of ourselves into worship. We sit through the acts of worship and lose sight of the one we worship. Something is wrong when we come to church and then leave the same as we came.
Worship is giving ourselves to the one who can transform us. Worship is God’s people listening, hoping and praying. We are here to be changed by the mystery beyond our comprehension.
If we truly worship, then we’ll leave as different people because we have invited God to see through our pretenses to our fears. In worship, we move past the trivial to our deepest concerns to the God bigger than all of our troubles.
In worship, we bow before God because we urgently need to give of ourselves and our foolishness to the One who is infinitely great. In worship, God intrudes upon our routines, breaks our complacency, overturns tables, set wild birds loose, clangs coins on the floor. In worship, God’s presence is the sting of a whip driving us out of our comfortableness to pray for all of God’s children.
Today, we hear people say that they are not religious but only spiritual. Being only spiritual means that one has cranked down religion to a vague, inner, private feeling to oneself.
But being religious as Christians, we say this morning that we believe that Jesus Christ as the real, bodily bridge that God built to connect us to God.
We could not come to God, so God came to us. Why do we worship at all? We worship because the risen Christ is the physical, earthly, human means whereby we are able to connect with God. To that, we are thankful!
Thanks be to God!
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus Christ, we come to you during this time of worship in order to draw near to God. We give you thanks that through your death and resurrection you have provided us access to the Father. We are not left to our own devices to try to make contact with God. Rather, in your life, ministry, death, and resurrection you have made it possible for us to come to God who has graciously come to us.
We thank you for providing the means whereby even misunderstanding, misbehaving sinners like us can be embraced by the heart of God. Amen.