Sunday Service 11th January

The place of the church

11/1/26

Call to worship

Hymn 641: Seek ye first the kingdom of God

Time for all 

Hymn 250: Sent by the lord am I

Reading:  Luke 19:45 -20:8 Liz

Prayer

Hymn 543: Longing for light

Sermon

Prayer

Hymn 457: All hail the power of Jesus name

Benediction

Welcome to our meditation for 11^th January.

Over the last few weeks we have went from Jesus being presented at the temple just after he was born, his encounter at the temple when he was a young boy and now an encounter near the end of his life.

Sometimes it feels like we are whizzing through Jesus’ life, and sometimes it feels like our life is whizzing by.

So what do we do when life is going so fast?

When our life is a blur?

Well maybe seeing how Jesus coped with the constant of the Temple in his life, will help us see if we can have a constant in our life that can help anchor us.

We will look at this after our prayer and reading from Liz.

Sermon

Sometimes I feel as if my life is flying by.

I can feel as if life is slow and I waste so much time doing nothing,

and yet my life can also feel  like it is going like a blur and it has passed before I have the chance to make a difference.

What am I supposed to do with that?

And to a certain point the way we look at Christ’s life is just as bad.

Last week we were looking at Jesus as a youngster, his parents thought he was lost but he was really debating with the Temple leaders,

and now Jesus is an adult, actually near the end of his life, and he is chasing out the merchants who changed impure sacrifices for worthy sacrifices, and teaching and debating with the leaders.

It seems like Jesus’ life has just flown by.

It seems like as he got older his feelings about the Temple radically changed, and the leader’s feelings for Jesus radically changed over that time.

At face value it may seem like Jesus was accepted wholeheartedly as a baby when he wasn’t a threat,

that the priests had a rather patronising admiration of him when he was a child trying to debate with him,

and that in the end they were just against him as they saw him as a threat.

And if we go along those lines then we then end up with a sermon attacking the Temple; that it was corrupt and pushing people away from God and deserved to be destroyed.

That the worship at the temple was replaced by the worship of Jesus, as it should have been.

The only problem with that is that I don’t think that was the intention of Jesus, I don’t think that Jesus was anti-temple.

I think that Jesus had a far more complex relationship with the temple because our life is far more complex.

Let’s start off with some truths.

The temple was always part of Jesus’ life.

It was a central part of his faith.

Even though for most of his life Jesus didn’t live near the Temple;

for most of Jesus’ life he lived in Galilee to the north of the country, in fact the closest he lived to the temple might have been the first few years of his life when the family lived in Bethlehem.

But every year he would have travelled, maybe two or three times a year, to the temple for various religious feasts.

Even at the end of his life, when he chased off the merchants, the temple never banned him from teaching there.

I think, and this is my personal opinion, that Jesus saw the temple as an important part of the faith.

Why?

Because no matter what part of people’s life they were in; from birth to death, the temple gave a consistency.

No matter what was happening in people’s lives;

good harvests, bad harvests,

problems within the family, being blessed within the family,

being joyous with God, being angry with God, struggling to believe in God at all...

the temple was there.

Supplying a place where questions could be asked,

maybe a place where questions could be answered,

maybe a place where you could hold onto your questions for a while,

maybe a place where you could decide the questions didn’t matter in the end.

Even when the chief priests and the teachers of the law came up to him with a trick question to undermine him, Jesus didn’t say,

‘I have had enough of this; I will replace the temple with something better. I’m off to make my own church.’

Jesus could have condemned them. Jesus could have told them that they were wrong. Jesus could have attacked them back.

In fact if you look at how he responded, Jesus gave them a question to think about, to reflect on their own faith and what it meant.

Jesus was on their side.

Jesus didn’t want to win a victory over them, Jesus wanted them to grow.

I know it is easy to look at some of Jesus responses and think that every time Jesus is winning some kind of theological battle.

That was the way the religious leaders saw it.

But look at how that ended up.

Every time Jesus supposedly won a theological battle the religious leaders didn’t think, ‘Oh he has a point, I will have to believe what Jesus thinks now.’

Every time the religious leaders thought they had lost a battle it drove them further from Jesus, and inevitably drove them to try to kill him.

But that wasn’t what Jesus was trying to do.

Jesus wasn’t trying to undermine the temple; he was trying to save it.

Jesus wasn’t trying to undermine the religious leaders; he was trying to save them.

That is why, more often than not, Jesus leaves them with a question for them to reflect on.

That way they could go away and think for themselves about their actions, and the faith that led to those actions.

So what does that have to do with us?

Well we might not have a temple, but we do have lots of buildings.

And I am the first to say that at its basic...all this is a building.

The real church is the community of faith; the church is the people that God has brought together.

But the building is important, not the most important thing, but still important.

Because the building is the place that is here when we need it,

also,

the building is the place where the community needs us.

Like the temple, the building became a focus for the community of faith.

People could come and go, ministers and priests could come and go, but the building stayed.

It was the place where the people of faith could be reminded that God was present.

As I look out at the congregation on a Sunday I see people who have drifted from God, maybe been angry with God,

maybe been ashamed to be near God, or just ashamed of themselves,

maybe been frustrated at God, or themselves,

or maybe they had just got out the habit of coming,

they had gotten lazy, or indifferent, or burnt out, or disillusioned.

And even though for a while they felt that they couldn’t be part of the community, when they were ready, the community was waiting for them, and they could see that when they turned up some random Sunday.

No matter what stage of life they were in,

no matter what was happening in their lives at that time,

there was the building,

and there was the people in the building.

People of faith or no faith or uncertain faith could find a place here.

Maybe through groups like the craft group, of the food larder, or Zones.

Maybe through the internet and reading the thoughts for the day on the Facebook page.

And here is the most important thing.

Not the temple building, but the faith of the people in the temple building...if Jesus challenged anything, then it was that.

The priests and the teachers of the law spent so much time looking after the

temple building that they forgot the faith that was needed in the temple building.

And it is easily done.

There is a Buddhist story about a Guru who was so impressed with his young student that he thought that he had nothing more to teach him.

So he left him on the banks of the river with his simple hut and his sole possession of a loin-cloth. With those two things he could dedicate his life to prayer and meditation; he could be a true example to the people of the nearby village of what it was like to be a holy person...relying on the generosity of others that he inspired to get his needs.

Each morning after his washing in the river the disciple would hang out his loin cloth to dry.

One day he was dismayed to find it torn to shreds by rats.

So he had to beg for another one.

When the rats nibbled at that one too he decided to get a cat. Now he had no trouble with the rats but he now had to beg for his own food and the cats.

‘Too much trouble begging,’ he thought, ‘and too much of a burden on the villagers. I will get a cow.’ But having got a cow he now had to beg for fodder.

‘Easier to till the land around my hut ,’ he thought. But that provided too troublesome as it left him little time for meditation and prayer. So he employed labourers to till the land.

Now overseeing the labourers became a chore so he married a wife who could share the task with him.

Before long he was the richest man in the village.

Years later the Guru returning to see how his disciple was getting on and saw a palatial mansion where once a simple hut was.

The Guru said to one of the servants, ‘Isn’t this where a disciple on mine once lived?’

Before the servant had a chance to answer the disciple himself emerged for the house.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ asked the Guru.

Sheepishly the disciple replied, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but this was the only way I could keep my loin-cloth.’

That was what had happened to the chief priests.

The temple leaders had got so distracted with the building;

and how to maintain it and look after it,

and creating fundraising events and policies to keep the building,

that they had forgotten the faith that they needed to live in their hearts to make the building meaningful.

That was what Jesus was getting at.

That was what Jesus was challenging the priests to see.

And really that is what we need to remind ourselves of as we start through a new year.

Are we giving space in our life to reflect on what God is asking of us?

Are we giving space in our lives to reflect on how we look after ourselves, or look after others?

Are we giving space in our hearts for God just to be there and share our lives with him?

Maybe God wants us to just stop for a while and look around us.

Sometimes we will see wonders and be amazed at the hills and the stars and the glory that is not dependant on us, but a gift freely given by God to inspire us.

Maybe we will see our neighbour and see a need that we can help in.

This building will be here long after we are gone.

But it will only have meaning if we keep and grow the faith within us that gives it purpose.

Let us pray

Heavenly Father,

We admit that we have great fondness of this building.

But as we think on how you challenged the high priests, and we ourselves are challenged;

 we realise that it is not the building that we have fond memories of,

it is the people that we have met here,

that have inspired us, that have comforted us, that have challenged us...that is why the fondness is felt.

It is the people we have shared with, cried with, laughed with; those are the sources of those wonderful memories.

Thank you for giving the people with the vision to create this holy space where we could find and maintain and renew our faith.

Thank you for those throughout the centuries that have passed on that faith to the next generation until it was our turn to inherit this wonderful gift of sharing our life with You.

Thank you for the many times that we have expressed our faith in care and love to others.

Thank you for those times you have inspired us to be brave enough to show others that our faith matters to us, our relationship with you is a foundation stone of who we are and what we do.

May the community of faith that meets here always be a focus of us and may we be open to the help and care that they offer to us in our lives.

Equally may the community of faith that meets here be an inspiration to us to help and care for others

So may our journey of faith be a lifelong adventure.

And may we continue our adventure

in our communities

among our friends

and those we do not yet call friends.

May we model Jesus

in our gracious response to those who challenge and provoke us

as we challenge and provoke ideas counter to the Gospel we follow.

Amen.