Revelation: The New Temple

1990 (Year A), 21 January / Epiphany 3

St Peter de Beauvoir Town

Quite often, the clergy here, get accused of blackmail. This might come as a surprise to some of you who think that butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths, but it’s true. It happens mostly when we go into people’s houses to talk about baptism, we suggest that the parents of the children might come to church before the baptism takes place so that they can see something of the way that the church worships, and they can meet some of you. It helps them make some kind of realistic choice about their commitment and to decide whether they want to come to this church here or go elsewhere.

‘Come to church,’ we say ‘And join in the worship’. If the people we’re seeing can see the point we are trying to make, then they come along. If not, then they start to get cross. ‘We don’t have to come to church in order to worship God. You are trying to deceive us. We can do that just as well at home. You’re just blackmailing us with all this talk of having to come to church before we can get our children christened.’ It’s a good job they didn’t hear the reading this morning, not only would it have given them more ammunition to throw at us, hypocrisy would be added to their charge.

Our reply is that of course you don’t have to come to church to worship God, but it helps. It ensures that we do spend some time each week working at being present with God. Offering our worship and our time as symbols of our lives. On our own, it’s unlikely that we would be so disciplined about our time, and we would fill our lives with all manner of things before we got to God.

I hope we don’t encourage people to come to church for our own benefit, although it does feel better to worship with a large congregation than with a small one. Nor do we do it so that individuals might feel more self-righteous when they’re finished.

We do it, because in the process of worship, we can begin to see that what happens in our lives during the week has meaning and is enlightened and sustained because of what goes on here. In the same way what happens here is enriched, by gently recalling the events of the week both as a preparation for and as part of the worship.

The object is of course, to make a whole, not to see our lives as being compartmentalise, but recognise them as a divinely inspired unity. There is not a spiritual aspect to our being and a contrasting worldly one. The two are one, and they are a unity in God. Therefore what we do here on a Sunday is of profound importance for the rest of our lives and what we do in the week has direct bearing on what goes on here in church.

The people who have had particular influence on my faith and its development are those who have managed to live this unity. In them I have felt not only their own love for me, but the love of God flowing out from their worship and permeating the rest of their lives. And lest you think this is only the remarkable few that have had such an influence on me, I can tell you that it happens regularly here at St Peter’s in the lives of those who have discovered that you can’t escape from the world by coming to church, and you can’t escape from God as you leave here after the service.

For some, all this seems to come naturally, for others it’s the fruit of regular reflection. Of trying to understand what God would want from them in any given situation and relating that to other times and places in their lives. It’s hard work.

But the result is that lives are transformed, not only for those individuals but for the many others they meet. We become what God has always intended us to be. Our bodies really do become Temples. And every part of our lives becomes potentially an act of worship.

The transformed lives are lived in blessed communion with the creator. We rely on the promises made by the divine and we try to do in our lives what we have seen him doing in our history. The relation between father and children is one of grateful trust. It is not a matter of constraint and coercion, of having to do what the father compels. Rather, it is a full embrace of the visions and dreams of the father so that they are appropriated and made our own by us his children. Our lives become a joyous identification with God’s own work, and in reality we worship in Spirit and Truth. AMEN