A few weeks ago I posted that God is revealed where God is hidden. God is revealed not only in our religious structures, but outside of them as well. However, I think that this revelation, and perhaps the nature of revelation itself, is just a bit more radical than a passive revelation as that post suggests. What we see in the sorties of how God interacts with the Temple in the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament is that God is not only revealed outside of the Temple, but God participates in its destruction and rebuilding time and time again.
What we see in the Exodus and thereafter is that God does not need the Temple to reside with the people. After freeing the Hebrews from captivity, Yahweh instructs them to build a tabernacle which served as a portable place of worship. Today this does not seem all that revolutionary. The spread of Christianity in the US has a rich history of the use of tents that were raised in order to promote the westward movement of the faith. These tents were also part of an Awakening in traditional church establishments that promoted a levelling function of personal experience with God rather than the need of a hierarchy to legitimate one's faith. Truly, in both cases, God is continually revealed outside of normative structures in other structures that are far less expected to reveal the presence of God – especially in any authoritative way.
Second, after Jesus dies the Temple curtain is ripped open. This could be figurative or literal. Either way, the lesson is that God is not contained in the Temple. Moreover, Jesus predicts that he, as the revealer of God's Kingdom which he thus makes "near" to the people, will destroy the Temple and rebuild it. This is after he cleanses it of the political and economic functions for which is had been used. The irony here is palpable, and the point is strong. If we expect God to remain in the Temple, God will destroy it. God does this because the Temple is not for people, it belongs to God alone.
If these stories of revelation were told today, where would God's Temple be? Would it be among the religious establishments? As religious structures reconfigure and traditions merge, mix, and mash-up to form new ones, keeping in mind that God cannot be contained in any social or material structure of human designs is important. In fact, it is also clear that the fullness of God cannot be contained even in structures of God's own making.
Even the sacraments and the place of the Church itself are always symbolic of God, not the authority for God's revelation. At any point God may reveal the Kingdom by destroying the Temples we have built. Are we humble enough to accept that verdict? Or are we too content in our collective blindness to attend to the reality of our own persistent limitedness in receiving the progressive revelation which God has offered to us by grace alone?
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