Dwelling Place of God

How to Pray – Power of Prayer Sermon Series
July 26, 2015
Why Am I a Presbyterian?
September 6, 2015

Dwelling Place of God

Listen to or watch the sermon.

Two weeks ago, I was a small group leader at the Montreat youth conference in the mountains of North Carolina. We start the week on Monday morning with a group of 30 high school students, from all over the country, who were most certainly strangers. The conference very specifically arranges the groups to ensure that no one from the same home church are in the same small group.

We begin as this group of 30 strangers and by the end of the week, the group is bonded—a unit. So, when I was considering the scripture this week, I thought about that montreat experience as an example of strangers building up a community. By the end of the week, it’s a unit and each person has uniquely contributed to making it a sort of family. It was build upon the foundation of a shared desire to grow and to know Christ better, and know ourselves better, through it we came to know one another better. With some openness and expectations, the holy spirit does really good work in that place.

But I don’t want to sugar coat the experience—we were only there for a week. It’s not hard for a group of people to feel close as they spend that kind of intentional time together. But, what happens the week after? How sustainable is that sense of unity if we had continued living and sharing together week after week? Challenges arise, disagreements, misunderstandings. Other priorities take over.

Building community takes commitment and work.

The letters in the New Testament hold an important key to understanding the very early church. They, along with the book of Acts, help us to create a picture of that— what happened next question? Everything that comes after the Gospels.

Paul, and other apostles were traveling around to places like Ephesus, Corinth, Galatia, Thessalonica, and beyond. They would stay with friends, colleagues, or friends of friends. And as they traveled they talked with people, worked alongside community leaders—spent time in the temple talking and arguing, challenging long held ideas of faith and religion, and created community. Some places they would stay quite awhile, and other times they would only stay for a day or two.  

When the apostles were present with these early believers, the communities would flourish and people would be baptized and joining them regularly. But when it came time for the apostles to move on to the next place sometimes those communities would do well and continue to flourish. Other times—not so great. Reports of how they were doing or questions would come back to Paul and others, and so he would write them and respond.  Either encouraging them to keep on as they are or chastising them for some practice they really shouldn’t be doing, and sometimes laying out a whole theological concept in a letter. This is a very general overview of why we have these letters in the new testament.

Now Ephesians is one of those letters that we don’t really know who wrote it. Some, many, attribute it to Paul, but others are not so sure. Typically in his letters, Paul will send greetings to specific people and talk about the time they shared together because he truly knew them and those people and genuinely cared how they were doing, but that kind of greeting doesn’t happen in this letter.  It is written rather generally to the Ephesians, and not to anyone specific. But from the Book of Acts we know that Paul spent a significant amount of time in Ephesus. So it’s a bit of a mystery as to who wrote this letter, because it doesn’t sound like he knew them.    Now, hearing this, might cause someone to ask, why did it end up in the new testament if we don’t even know who wrote it? Why is it important? Well it ended up in there because it was important to the early church.

Let me try and explain how this might have come to pass. During early gatherings of believers, (they weren’t called Christians yet). They would gather together in someone’s house, share a meal of communion and spiritual ritual, and if they had a letter from Paul, or one of the apostles—a spiritual leader—they would read it. One of the educated of the community, who knew how to read, would read it aloud for the others to hear. Maybe the whole letter, or maybe just sections of it.

Scholars who study this kind of thing tell us that at these early gatherings people might share the letters or exchange them from community to community. So, for example, if your cousin from Corinth, was vising you in Galatia you might have had a scribe copy down pieces of a letter or exchanged letters among the gatherings. So these letters, once written and sent took on a life of their own.

So maybe Ephesians wasn’t written by Paul and it was written by a Paul devotee who, introduced himself in the letter as Paul. It’s possible that practice would be to honor his teacher and his teacher’s ideas, and actually authorship wasn’t a big deal in the ancient world, plagiarism wasn’t really a thing.

It’s similar to classical painting masters, when their students would study as an apprentice and learn under a master painter. The work produced would be attributed to that master painter, not the devotee.  

So this letter, maybe, maybe not written by Paul, it’s in the new testament, because it was important to the early believers. And For that reason, we still have it today.

It shares an important message about breaking down the dividing walls and hostilities so that we might reconcile ourselves to God and one another. Today the dividing walls and hostilities might be between different group and factions from what the letter originally contained, but I think we can learn from the message still.        

On Friday I was talking with one of the very active BJC members as he was preparing covenant hall for the evening services and we got into a conversation about the Jewish High Holy Days. He told me that Jewish congregations find themselves more full on high holy days than typical services. Like we sometimes joke about the C and E Christians who only come twice a year on Christmas and Easter. Elliot told me how that happens often for Jews too. However, since the High Holy Day services are so long, sometimes lasting 5 and 6 hours, you can’t simply offer multiple services in the same day, like we do on Christmas Eve and Easter morning.

So for High Holy Days Bethesda Jewish Congregation worships in this space, in the sanctuary rather than Covenant Hall, to accommodate the larger crowd. They have this huge, beautiful banner, that is hung in front of the cross with—the star of David, a representation of the 10 commandments, and the words of the Hineih Mah Tov.  Which translated means, “how good and how pleasant it is that brothers and sisters dwell together as one.” It comes from the Psalms and is often a prayer sung in homes during the Friday evening Sabbath meal rituals.

When Elliot first came for BJC’s High Holy Days, that banner for him, spoke volumes. We share this space as one, not that we are one, not that we are the same congregations, not that we meld ourselves and give up our distinctions by being together. But we share this space and respect and unique friendship, and that strengthens each of our faiths.

The covenant that hangs in our gathering space, proclaims that as two distinct congregations we share space and friendship, and we formed this covenant to honor the Intimate and Infinite God of Creation, the One God we both worship. And among other things it promises to create with each other what we cannot create separately.

This summer in Memorial Hall we’ve had a congregation of Muslims also worshiping the One God we all worship. They worship on Friday afternoons for their prayer services. It amazes me to think about a weekend here beginning with Friday afternoon, and then moving into the Jewish Sabbath, and here we all are on Sunday morning. This I’m sure was not what the Ephesians had in mind. But I believe in its beauty and uniqueness, this picture of unity. No one is merging or muddling our faiths by sharing this space, but we are strengthening our distinct faiths by respecting our traditions and learning from one another and honoring the Intimate and Infinite God of Creation.

When people take down the dividing walls and hostility for that which we don’t know, or that which we don’t understand, then we grow. The letter to the Ephesians addresses the divisions between the Gentiles who were just beginning to believe in God, the one God whom the Jews had worshiped and followed all along, and naturally there were some issues: divisions and mistrust and hostility and rumors and people who disagree…

Thinking about so many divisions in our world today, in our society, in our own community, in our schools, our work places, in our families… I challenge us to think about these words, as if the had been written to us today.

This ancient letter encourages us and instructs us to live and act as members of the household of God. And gives us a useful metaphor. A building metaphor that Noelle shared during the children’s moment.

The foundation for our faith is the prophets, and the history and the stories of the people of God. And then Jesus joins that together for us in a cornerstone, an essential building piece, and it links us to God’s story as well.

This building metaphor continues— as we are built together spiritually, we become and grow into a dwelling place for God. We, ourselves are the dwelling place.

That concept for ancient believers would have been pretty strange because God’s dwelling place on earth, was a specific place. It was the holy temple.

That was where God on earth dwelt.

So the writer is using this building metaphor to describe how the people, not the building, are now the holy temple. God’s dwelling place is you and me, and we joined together are the holy temple.

God chooses to dwell within us.

In unity and prayer and worship and laughter and song, we collectively become the dwelling place for God. God is the one that joins this whole beautiful, messy human structure together.

This week, a church member showed me, a handwritten letter sent by a dear friend and told me about how nice it was for her to receive the stories and love from this letter. And it gave me an idea.

As we enter into this 3-week sermon series on the letter of the Ephesians, I encourage each one of you this week to write a letter—a handwritten letter.

Think about someone in your life who might need some encouragement, or someone who has been important to you in your journey, in your faith formation, or maybe even someone you’ve had disagreements and divisions with… And write them a letter, or a note of gratitude or even harder a letter or note of forgiveness—uplift them with a story or a memory, something in their life, how they’ve helped you or some insight they gave you that you’ve thought about over the years. (That they might not even remember telling you!) And then mail it to them. If you need a stamp, come into the office and tell me and Linda (our office manager) about your letter and we’ll help you post it.

So I invite you to encourage one another and uplift one another, as we continue to build together this beautiful, messy dwelling place for God in our very midst.

Amen.