THE TEMPLE OF THE LORD

A few weeks ago during the Eucharist I was struck by two verses (5 & 6) in Psalm 27: “One thing I asked of the Lord; one thing I seek; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life; to behold the fair beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.” What made me stop for a moment was the thought that it is so easy to miss the point of those verses, as I have over the years; so very easy.

If you ae like me, when I read the word temple, I automatically think of a house of worship: the Jewish temple or local synagogue for those for whom the Psalms were part of their worshipping or a church for those of us who also incorporate the Psalms as part of our liturgy. In other words: a building. But that is not what the Psalm says. I mean, who wants to spend all one’s days living in a church?!

The temple of the Lord that the Psalmist speaks about is this very world where, as one of the prayers has it, “we live and move and have or being.” We are to find God in this temple we call our world. But we only find God if we are looking for God, if we realize God is everywhere, in everything and in everyone. And if you are like me, that realization is not always front and enter in my daily living.

Other than that truth, the deeper problem is that because we do not see God in everyone or everything or everywhere, and because we do not make God’s presence in and through or own lives visible to others, God’s work, which can only be done in and through us, does not get done. God is alive in this world, God’s work is done in this world, only in and through us, or it is not done.

In many ways you and I are the temple of the Lord. When we are in church, the building, we sense the presence of God there simply because it is the place where we gather as a community to worship God or where we, as individuals, come to pray on our own. Yes, we can pray anywhere at any time and we do. But the church as a gathering space is special place where we come into the presence of our God.

But the truth is that we, as God’s children, are to be a temple of the Lord in that when others come into our presence, they are to find the godly, find God living in us. We are to be a living temple of God’s presence to others. That thought is what gave me pause when I was worshipping in one of God’s temples those weeks ago. It still gives me pause, and a great deal of it.

It also frightens me in a very real way. That is a tremendous responsibility you and I have because of our baptism: to be the temple of the Lord, the place, the person, in whom others can find God’s love and care and concern, who can learn what it means to be a Christian, who can discover in themselves that they, too, are the temple of the Lord, the living temple. Does that give you pause as it does me?