Reflecting on Hebrews 10:11-25 - a sermon for November 17, 2024

For weeks already, I’ve been listening to people groan about how out of control life seems as we move towards the end of the year. Just as Christmas jingles and decorations appear earlier and earlier in grocery stores and the dog-eared catalogues stuffed carelessly into every postbox unprotected by a “no junk mail please” sign, so too has the traditional angst around finding the perfect presents, planning for visiting friends and family, clearing the desk and the diary before end-of-year exams and school holidays, and, maybe, giving some sort of thought to the lonely, the hurting, the homeless, the hopeless for whom Christmas spirit has little meaning crept steadily forward from December to October. It’s as if the first fruit pie hitting the shelf signals the start of a marathon into madness – at the speed of the hundred metre sprint.

Many church leaders are already exhausted just thinking about all the services over Advent and Christmas and the New Year. There are the usual debates over the best times to gather as people seek to balance family and church as separate commitments; plus repeated pleas for volunteers to fill in gaps on the rosters so that any imagined newcomers who might stroll into our sanctuaries in search of the Christ-child will be warmly greeted and leave pleased.

I, too, am grappling deeply with the usual desire to enter this significant spiritual season with intention, anticipation, and reverence – and panicking that, once again, I’m going to let God down, let myself down as the pressure to produce, provide, perform pushes me along.

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And then this text from Hebrews grabs me and slows right down my reading, my thinking, my breathing. It’s a theologically dense passage full of imagery around the temple and sacrifice and priests so I read through it in several translations. In one Bible, it’s headed “The way through to God is Jesus.” In most, there are words to the effect of “Jesus opens a new and living way …” and I realise that although I’ve been a Christian for forty years, I’m still looking for that way ….

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There is a Godly Play lesson entitled “the Ark and the temple” which tells the story of how the people of God found a new way of experiencing God’s presence to the ways that their wandering ancestors had known.

Stone cut from the mountains, wood from the great cedars of Lebanon, carvings of olive and gold were joined and shaped and polished into a home for God in which incense smouldered, lamps burned, and a table was set with bread for each tribe. These were signs and scents which held memories of the God who had walked with them as fire and cloud from slavery to liberation, from poverty to plenty, from death to life.

On the day on which all was ready and the Ark of the Covenant was carried by the priests into the Holy of Holies and hidden behind a heavy veil, the King came before all the people and prayed:

O God, God of Israel, there is no God like you in the skies above or on the earth below who unswervingly keeps covenant with his servants and relentlessly loves them as they sincerely live in obedience to your way. You kept your word to David my father, your personal word. You did exactly what you promised—every detail. The proof is before us today!

Can it be that God will actually move into our neighborhood? Why, the cosmos itself isn’t large enough to give you breathing room, let alone this Temple I’ve built.

Even so, I’m bold to ask:
Keep your eyes open to this Temple night and day, this place of which you said, “My Name will be honored there,” and listen to the prayers that I pray at this place.
Listen from your home in heaven
and when you hear, forgive.

Excerpts from 1 Kings 8, The Message Paraphrase

And a great cloud of dazzling light filled the temple: God was here. This became the place to which people would come to draw near to God in search of justice –

as Hannah did in the season of barrenness,
and Jehoshaphat did in a season of invasion,
and Ezra did in a season of repentance,
and Jesus did in the ongoing season of the whole realm of God drawing near.

Yet, though God was in that place, there is no place that can contain God. All of God is everywhere, and the tendency to think otherwise only leads to a restless searching for the true and living God when no stone is left standing upon another.

Jesus offers a way through all the barriers, all the limits, all the distance, all the dissonance between our deep yearnings and our daily reality. He is, the author of Hebrews says, priest and temple and sacrifice and curtain who allows us to experience, again, that dazzling, sustaining, companioning presence of God in the right here and right now … but we need to be open to it as the ancient wandering people of God once were.

Once it was fire and cloud in the desert, then incense and light and bread in the temple, that served as memories and markers of God accompanying and abiding with us. Yet, as we remember over Advent and celebrate at Christmas, the ultimate sign of God-with-us is the Christ enfleshed, embodied, embedded in human form and earthly life.

The stories of the flesh-and-blood Jesus give us a perspective on what it is to truly live in the complex relationships with God and family and colleagues and neighbours and strangers. They reveal how words and actions in a particular and a particular time can be about deeper, eternal truths. They affirm how difficult and costly and disappointing and confusing it can be to follow. And, constantly, they remind us of how immensely we are loved by the crucified Christ who could not be contained by human expectation or cruelty or fragile flesh or even death. His broken body changes everything.

We remember that each time we engage in rituals of baptism and holy communion, in Christmas celebrations of Incarnation and Easter proclamations of Resurrection, and in hands extended in friendship and forgiveness and sharing peace. In each of these special times, we are essentially declaring “Through Jesus I am perfect; now I long to be made holy as I abide in God and God abides in me.”

Where does that leave us? What significance does Jesus as the way through to God actually have in our daily lives as Christian community and individual spiritual seekers? How might these words shape our entry into Advent with all its realities?

To paraphrase those last few verses from this passage:

Draw near to God.

Let go of the guilt and the shame and the self-criticism and the judgment that you carry.

Hold on to what you hope for.

Be inventive in how you can offer encouragement or show love to another.

And make time for worship – though you might want to think carefully about the how and why and when and where you do that so that it’s really and truly about an openness to the uncontainable God of the cosmos and the Christ who loves the whole world.

In other words, the body of Christ broken for me and for you that we might live with a sense of God present and loving and near, is to be embodied – in us. There is a kindness and a care for us that we sometimes cannot even comprehend or imagine as we try to navigate the busyness, the tiredness, the illness, the relentlessness of our lives. And the invitation to us as individual Christians and as Christian community is to become the body, the memory, the living sign that holds this truth before one another, day in and day out: God is here.

So …

Take a moment to scan your body from head to toe, paying attention to parts that feel sore or tired and tense. Let it go with loud exhalations, then, breathe in deeply the assurance “God is here.”

Then …

Think about what you really hope for and want to hold on to in the day, the week, the season that lies ahead.

How might the body of Jesus open up a new and living way for you through story, through ritual, and through a loving community?

How might you be part of opening up a new and living way for another?