Dwelling Place

A sermon for Sunday, October 25, 2020, based on Matthew 22:34-46.

Actually, this one might be easier to watch.

Would you pray with me?

God who is our dwelling place, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. By you Spirit, make your presence known among us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

You know, I’m always saying that Jesus asks us to do difficult things, because to me, it feels like he is. I mean, when I read Jesus’ teachings, I feel like this Play-Doh. I don’t know what shape I’m supposed to be. I don’t know what I’m for.

But, luckily for all of us, Jesus doesn’t start his teaching today with me. He starts with God. The greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart and soul and mind. Now, you could preach ten sermons off of what we mean by heart and soul and mind, but I take a shortcut, most of the time. I say that you are to love God with all that you are. Every fiber of your being is oriented towards God, always looking to God.

But that’s hard too. What are we supposed to think about when we think of God? What are we supposed to see when we look toward God? Is the first person of the Trinity, the person who Jesus called the Father, who I often name God the Parent, who theologians call the Source of Life? The one who’s got the whole world in his hands?

Or the mother bear, always ready to defend us, her young, from whatever attacks?

Or some mysterious something, bigger than we can understand?

How are we supposed to love this?

I mean, people have, over the centuries, tried to love this mysterious, unending aspect of God. Maybe it’s the God we see in the whirlwind, like at the end of Job, or in some of the Psalms, or maybe it’s the God we think of when we see the nebulas in space that seem to be looking back at us. This is our cosmic God, but to be honest, many of us find the first person of the trinity, the one Jesus calls Father, a little hard to relate to. What does it mean for God to be both our dwelling place and the one who makes us? What does that even mean?

And so maybe, we’re supposed to love Jesus.

After all, Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, true God from true God, light from light eternal, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father. Jesus is the Word made flesh, who was with God and was God in the beginning. Jesus is the one who didn’t consider equality with God as something to cherish, but came to earth in the lowly form of a servant without reward, so that we might all be raised in glory with him. And Jesus does speak into fulfilment all of the first testament’s teachings and stories about love.

He is so gracious. He is so merciful. He gathers us to him, like a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, like a shepherd caring for his sheep.

He teaches us how we should be with one another. I think, sometimes, that I can love Jesus with my whole being, with all that I am, because he is so good, though he wouldn’t say so. I think I could be content just letting Jesus’ light shine through me.

But then, what do we do about this? What do we do about the cross?

I mean, doesn’t the cross just show us that all of this doesn’t matter?

No matter how good Jesus was, he was still killed. He still died. A good life, lived well, didn’t save Jesus from the cross. God in all God’s goodness came to earth and taught us how to love one another and we couldn’t take it. We couldn’t hear it. It was too much. Jesus asked us to do too much. And so we nailed him to the cross. And we let him die and we stuck him in a tomb with a rock so big, he could never get out.

And we left him there on Friday night.

And all day Saturday.

And we told ourselves that he would still be there come Sunday.

But then, God did what God always does. God did the unthinkable. God rose up from the grave and rolled the stone away and suddenly, a whole new world was possible. When Jesus was born, God reunited with humanity. That break that had been between us was gone. And as Jesus grew and taught, he shaped his followers to be the kind of people who could stand before the throne like heirs, not subjects, people filled with the grace and mercy and love that flows in unending rivers from the place where God dwells. And even though we killed him, Jesus rose again, showing us that there is not anything in this world, nothing in this life, not even death, that can separate us from the love of God that is poured out on us through Christ Jesus our Lord.

But then, he ascended.

So who are we supposed to love now? The unknowable Father? The Son, this man who is no longer with us? Aren’t we abandoned, just as we were before Jesus came around?

Of course, you all know that we’re not. We have the Spirit, the third person of the trinity, here with us. The Spirit has always been with us, from the first words spoken over creation. The Spirit peeks out now and then in the stories we tell, in the psalms we sing. We see the Spirit as the dove at Jesus’ baptism. The wind and fire at Pentecost. And like a bird, the Spirit has been flying throughout history, throughout all our stories, and alighting just for a moment, just when we’re in need, before flying off again.

It is through the Spirit that our hearts and minds and souls first wake up to God.

We call that prevenient grace, the grace that goes before, the grace that is out there, available to all, to begin to turn us toward God.

And it is the Spirit that speaks to us through scripture, through the stories of Jesus and the stories and teachings that help us understand Jesus, that we receive our justifying grace, that merciful love that pours down on us when we understand that we have been separated from God and long to be given permission to come back home, to the God who has been our dwelling place for generations.

The Spirit moves our hearts at the foot of the cross, helps us to lay down our burdens of sin and grief, and raises us back up again in the freedom and power God has given us through Jesus Christ.

It is the Spirit, too, that then shapes us in love, shapes us to be more like Jesus, more like God, throughout the days of our lives. We call this sanctifying grace, the grace that helps to be more like Jesus. Salvation doesn’t begin and end at the cross. Sanctifying grace, this holy work of the Spirit, touches us at every turn in our lives. It’s the Spirit, living within us, that makes us, each one of us, God’s dwelling place, a little piece of this world that shines with God’s light, completely at home with itself.

And, if we let her, the Spirit touches us, in every interaction, in every conversation, in all that we see and do.

The Spirit, if we let him, can make the world come alive for us, in the beauty of every growing thing, the beauty of all of creation.

The Spirit, if we let them, can show us what it means to love God with all that you are and to love your neighbor as yourself.

Because really, in this life, our love for God and love for neighbor are going to look like all of these things. There will be times that we love God by loving creation, and we love others by showing them the beauty of creation.

There will be times that we love God by showing the light of God’s goodness to others.

There will be times that we love God and our neighbor by taking up our cross and following Jesus.

There will be times that we love God and our neighbor by just being with our neighbor,

or just being with God.

And there will be times that we, like the Spirit, alight in people’s lives, planting a seed, sowing a kind word, offering the smallest glimmer of the depth and height and breadth of the love of God which is shed abroad across our world and into our hearts.

The question for us, then, each day, each blessed day that we wake up full of the love of God who has always been our dwelling place, is how will we be shaped? What will we let God make out of us?

Amen.