Sermon for 8.26.12

Scriptures for this week are Here

Neil Armstrong died yesterday, the first man to walk on the moon.  What you may not know is that the first food and drink ever shared on the moon was the Body and Blood of Christ: Buzz Aldrin brought consecrated bread and wine from his church in Houston, and there in the lunar module, he and Neil shared communion before the moonwalk.

This is going to “out” me as a “woman of a certain age,” but I remember that moonwalk quite clearly.  I was a child – too young to be staying up that late – but my parents insisted.  They said I would never forget the night I watched a man walk on the moon (and they’re right, so far).  So I stayed up late, wrapped in my fluffy purple bathrobe, sat squished between my mother and my father on the old beige couch in the living room, leaned my head on my father’s shoulder, and worked hard to keep my eyes open as the television screen showed fuzzy black and white pictures.  And I watched as a man in a white spacesuit climbed down a ladder onto the moon, and I listened as the static-y voice said, 

“That’s one small step for man … one giant leap for mankind.”

Afterward, later that night before my parents finally put me to bed, my father and I decided to walk outside and look up at the moon, to see if it was different with those dusty footprints on the surface.  We walked out into the warm summer night, he held my hand, and we gazed up.  I looked at the moon, so tiny and so high up, so white and so cold in the darkness, and I said, I don’t see the astronauts up there.  My father smiled and said, that’s because they’re so far away that you can’t see them – but they’re there.

And it seemed to me, as I stood there in my fuzzy slippers, holding my father’s hand and gazing up, that I stood at the center of the universe – that that sidewalk where I stood in an apartment complex in Philadelphia was a little point around which everything else revolved – that the night sky with all its stars, with the tiny moon and the tinier astronauts, made a circle all around us where we stood, and beyond that somewhere, making a big circle around the entire outside of the sky, somewhere beyond everything I could see, was God, encompassing everything, encircling it all.

God was so very, very far away that I could never see him.  But somehow, God could see the astronauts, and God could see all the people standing on the earth gazing up into the sky, and God could see me.  Because God was very far away, yet God was very close – as close as my father holding my hand, and as loving and protective.  That’s how it seemed to me.

Which is not so far from how the ancient Jewish people saw God – God as far away, enthroned in a heaven that somehow encircled the earth and the sky, and encompassed everything there was, with the earth at the center of the universe, and the Temple in Jerusalem as the center point of everything on earth.  They knew that God was far away and higher up than anything they could imagine; yet they knew that God also makes God’s home right here with human beings. 

Solomon’s prayer in the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures today dedicates the Temple in Jerusalem to the God of Israel.  Yet the Jews never thought God could be contained in any one structure, so Solomon calls the Temple a home for God’s name, not a home for God – he knows the Temple can never contain all of God’s glory.  Where other ancient peoples worshiped idols that could be localized in a place or even a statue, the Jews always knew their God to be much bigger than human imagination.  So when they built the Temple in Jerusalem, the magnificent Temple, full of gold and marble, one of the great wonders of the world, they built it not as a home for God – but as a connection point, a passageway between heaven and earth; a place where people could experience God’s presence .

The Jews knew just as well as we do, that God is found everywhere, that every moment of their lives was infused with God’s presence, if only they could open their minds to understand that presence – so God was far away and yet as close as their own hands and lips and hearts.  Which is why they saw every human act as holy and blessed – the kosher laws recognized that the smallest, most human of acts, like eating, was a holy thing, done in thanksgiving and recognition of God’s blessing, the gift of life.

Yet, because human beings cannot always see God’s presence in ordinary life, because we don’t always remember to look up, because we get caught up in the ordinary stuff of human life, and forget that every molecule is a gift from God, we create places where we come together, places where we experience God’s presence in worship.  Places where, as Solomon says in his prayer, God’s name shall be there – a focal point for us to experience God’s presence.

Solomon dedicates the ancient Temple in today’s prayer.  In this ceremony, the ark, which holds the very tablets that God gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai, as a cloud descended on the mountain and Moses talked to God, face to face – that same ark, with the stone tablets, has been carried from place to place until this time.  In today’s reading, it is carried in and placed in the inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies. 

This moment of homecoming for the ark is so holy a moment, so infused with the experience of the presence of God, that the Bible can only describe it as a cloud that filled the temple, the glory of God filling the house of the Lord.  And Solomon stands before the altar and prays that God’s presence will be with all who pray there – all Jews who come and offer sacrifices, and all foreigners too, all outsiders who don’t know God and yet yearn to experience God’s presence; that God may hear their prayers and answer them.

I read this account of the dedication of God’s Temple, and I picture this image of a cloud filling the Temple, and my question becomes: where and how do we experience God’s presence? 

I was lucky enough to go to Russia this summer – a land of contrasts, where you can see the gilded palaces of czars, filled with priceless artworks, next to blocks and blocks of Soviet-era apartment buildings, gray and square and stern, with conscious efforts to erase all beauty and distinction.  In the middle of all this, you can see the beautiful Russian churches, gilded and domed.  At the time of the Russian Revolution, there were 1,000 churches in St. Petersburg.  During the Soviet era, that number was reduced to 5 or 6 – people were too afraid to come – and lovely old churches were used as warehouses.  But, our tour guide told us, people never forgot their religion – they never forgot Jesus – in quiet, people kept telling the stories of Jesus.  And after communism fell, many people came and were baptized, and churches began to reopen – now there are 500 churches open in St. Petersburg.

We visited a number of them, and I had a similar experience in several of them.  One of the was the church called “Savior on the Spilled Blood” in St. Petersburg.  I walked into the cathedral, a feast for the senses, sparkling with color, and I gazed up and up into the golden domes, soaring overhead – and beautiful as it was, I didn’t see God there.

I looked around at the arches, the color-infused mosaics, the icons of Jesus and Mary and other saints, infused with architectural beauty – and stunning though it was, I didn’t see God there.

Then I heard music, and walked over to a tiny side chapel, and saw a congregation gathered for a midday service – a priest in vestments of gold, a small choir singing soaringly beautiful chants, incense rising in the air, and a group of worshipers, standing and bowing and crossing themselves.  I watched a woman enter with her daughter, and she showed the girl how to cover her head, and guided her hand to light a candle, and held her hand and showed her when to bow and when to make the sign of the cross, and I thought of the thousands of people in that church who had done the same thing, and millions of others who stand in worship and pray throughout the world every day, and the one or two hundred of us who do the same thing each week at Nativity. 

And in the middle of that group of worshipers in a resurrected church in a reawakening city – that’s where I saw the presence of God.  Because God is in the midst of us – God dwells in the community of worship.  God is with us when we pray.  God is with us when we tell the stories of Jesus.  And God is with us in the small and ordinary elements of bread and wine that we share, because Christ has chosen to come to us in this way.

And I think we know, here at Nativity, that any place can be infused with the presence of God – we who have created a beautiful place to worship in an ordinary office building on a very unremarkable street – but it’s not the beautiful things that make it holy.  We are building a bigger, more beautiful home for this church now.  But we build it not because God will live there.  We build it to gather a community:  the ones who are here already, and the outsiders that Solomon prayed for, who yearn for the presence of God, who we are called to reach. 

We build it so that in this community, we can experience the presence of God.  We build it so that generations of people can know his glory, glory that encompasses the universe, and yet is as close to us as our own hands and hearts, as close as the bread we eat and wine we drink, as we stand at the still center point of the beautiful turning world.