Advent 4: Where Does God Choose to Dwell?

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2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16

Luke 1:26-38

Where does God dwell? Does it seem like a trick question? You’ve got a hint built in this morning, since it’s Christmas Eve, and all the classic carols are floating around in your head. The name Immanuel itself means “God with us.” We know God came to dwell, to live, with us, it’s the whole “reason for the season”! But our Scripture lessons this morning wink at us, elbow us, invite us to ponder what it means for God to dwell with us in a different way. Like all Scripture, these passages reveal something to us about who God is and how he chooses to be with us. 

In the Old Testament lesson, David wants to build a temple for God, since God had no dwelling place in the time of David. As the passage from 2nd Samuel tells us this morning, God was living in a tent. And then when we get to the Gospel lesson, we see this striking interaction between Mary and the archangel Gabriel, as  he proclaims to the first human that the time for God to dwell with humanity, truly be one with us, had arrived. 

So they’re both about where God lives, where God chooses to settle his presence. That’s important stuff. But I wonder too about the interaction between God and humanity, or in these cases God and each individual, when it comes down to his choosing where to dwell, where to live.

I see David trying to repay God, to respond to God’s grace and goodness by evening the score, offering to God a great gift – a place to dwell – a grand palace on earth – and it might be a symbol of his gratitude, but it also might be a way to relieve the tension of inequity in the relationship between them. A way for David to have some power, to bring his own strengths to bear to not feel so vulnerable and so indebted to God. 

We know that God graciously receives gifts and thanksgivings, indeed, he does not want sacrifice or to take he-goats out of our pens as the psalms say, but to give our glory and thanksgiving to the Most High God.

Let’s look a bit closer at what God sees in the heart of David, revealed in the lesson we read this morning.  I think what we’ll find is that God doesn’t see sincerity of spirit but instead in this case, God finds David is trying to even the score. It’s just a hunch, but the responses God gives aren’t the ones I’d expect if it was a freely given gift of gratitude and thanksgiving.  It seems like David is grasping for something, as if he wants to make things more equal again between himself and God.

“Are you the one to build me a house”? God says “Did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel saying ‘why have you not built me a house of cedar?” Thus, remind my servant David, “I took you from the pasture. I have cut off your enemies. I will make you a great name. I will appoint a place for my people. I will give you rest. I will make you a house.” God is declaring that he is the actor. The one who does things, builds, things, decides things. There isn’t a parity in this relationship, there never ever will be. There is no delusion that humanity has anything to offer God, not really. It is all out of God’s grace and goodness. Do not be misled, David, you do not hold the keys of this covenant. This is not really a two-sided covenant. I, God, walked through the sacrifices for BOTH SIDES of the covenant with your forefather Abraham. I am the one in charge and don’t forget it. 

So there’s this outpouring of power, this reorientation – and it’s not the only one that happens with David, but this is the one about God’s dwelling and presence with humanity. We see this theme over and over throughout the story of David. It is the burden and fault and sin and problem of humanity to take power and twist it into something that we can use to try to control and manipulate God. 

“Let me build you a place. Let me tell you where to be and let me choose what your house will look like, let me take care of you.” David says.

God reorients David’s desire to place God in a temple box, to determine where God will dwell and where his spirit will reside, and then, paired with that reading, we hear in our Gospel lesson from Luke where it is that God decides to reside, where it is that God chooses to dwell when he comes to be in the midst of his people.

He chooses a young woman, an illiterate, though clearly faithful, girl on the cusp of womanhood. He chooses a country girl, no one accomplished or well-heeled or elegantly outfitted. The message, brothers and sisters, is that God looks at the heart, God knows what your heart is and what my heart is – indeed, to him all hearts are open, all desires known and from him – we pray with trembling – no secrets are hid. 

When God comes to dwell among his creation, he does not choose a palace of stone or a grand building of sumptuous decoration, he does not require elaborate sacrifices or lengthy and learned prayers. He chooses sincerity. He lifts up the humble and lowly. He exalts the poor and hungry and sick and suffering. He comforts those who are afflicted. Mary herself tells us this in her Magnificat, a prayer put on the lips of our blessed virgin, spoken in the tradition of prophetic songs of old. 

How easy it could have been for Mary to exalt herself. How reasonably we can imagine that she could have taken the reins and created a whole movement around herself. Can you imagine how David would have responded to Gabriel’s news? We are all so talented at manipulating power to fit our needs and desires. We can take news and information and permission and we can form it up to become very cushy for ourselves indeed.

But the very point, of course, brothers and sisters, is that Mary doesn’t do this. And that’s why God chose her. He knew her heart before he sent Gabriel to give her this news, and God chose not a building in which to dwell, but in our very hearts. He makes room for himself in each of our lives, and then it is a cooperative adventure, of our cleaning out in companionship with him, making room in our hearts as the christmas carol says, following, we pray, in the example of the blessed virgin Mary, that our hearts would prepare him room. 

God chooses us first, God chooses where to dwell, God places himself where he wants to be. We cannot hope to stand against his plans, or to strong arm him in to whatever machinations we may devise, there is absolutely no outsmarting God. But we also know that God has chosen us and wishes so desperately to be the inhabitant of our hearts, the desire of our days and nights, the consuming fire that lights our lives. 

We are called today as Gabriel brings the good news of great joy for all people, to make room in our hearts for God’s dwelling, to allow our lives to be upset even as much as a country girl from Bethlehem does, to surrender our grasping for control and power and plans, and instead, to rest in the goodness and provision of our Lord who comes to be with us for his love. Amen. 

“And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.” (Mark 1)

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Can you imagine being eager to repent of your sins? Are you one who would have rushed into the wilderness, hopped in your car and high-tailed it to Cameron Parish, if you’d heard that some prophet had showed up there and was baptizing people? 

That sounds nice for other people. Maybe somebody else needs to go unburden themselves, but I’m okay right here. God can change a heart from anywhere, he doesn’t need me to go to Cameron parish or West Texas or Honduras to find salvation and listen to some fire and brimstone preacher. I can repent just fine right here in the quiet of my pew, without any histrionics or wailing or embarrassing outbursts. We have order – we are Episcopalians, for goodness’ sake.

But it’s not really about being Episcopalian or avoiding uncomfortable shows of emotion. It’s about fear, isn’t it? I wonder if we might be afraid of what God requires of us in judgment. 

Last week at the 8:30am service, Fr. Jake preached to open the Advent season, and he relayed a striking image from a C.S. Lewis novel that opened to us the way it might look when Jesus comes to judge and cleanse us. I think it might have looked different than we expected. 

So maybe that’s a good question to ask: what do we expect the exposing and purging of our sins to look like? 

Did any of you see the Anne of Green Gables with Megan Follows from the 1980s? (Who didn’t?!) There’s a scene where she’s a teacher trying to inspire her drama students to really get into playing Mary Queen of Scots, and she throws herself across the stage to cling to the skirts of whoever the other character is, maybe Queen Elizabeth the First, and yells, “Save me, sweet lady!” That’s one of the first images that bursts to my mind about begging for forgiveness. The debasing oneself, the physical and figurative lowering toward the dust. T

And we can easily imagine, too, the way that we might have experienced confession and punishment growing up – a stern voice saying, “well, tell me what you did wrong.” That hot, prickly feeling on your neck and back, maybe even bowing your head in shame and sadness in this expectant silence. Perhaps there were physical consequences too, privileges removed, or pain inflicted to help teach us a lesson.

Our world judges wrong in courtrooms, with testimonies and standing up alone in the truth or in sin. We are not so far removed, only a few hundred years, from pillories and the cutting off of ears or hands. 

Gosh, who would want to invite that kind of awful pain, and to be exacted from the Lord of Lords – the almighty one of ultimate power. What excruciating destruction he could bring to our lives! Surely it’s more than we could even imagine.

Yes, I would be one of those who would demur the invitation to go and be cleansed in the wilderness. I am not eager to have my sins nailed up next to me, or to have a scarlet letter sewn to my shirt, or to serve a sentence in a dank dungeon. Nobody really does, right? 

So I wonder if the exposing and purging of our sins for Jesus’ sake might look different than what we expect. I wonder if Jesus’s redemption and facing of our faults might be surprising in view of what the world teaches us that restitution looks like. 

Consider: back in the garden, when Adam and Eve had disobeyed, God sought them in the cool of the day. He didn’t come immediately the moment he knew they’d sinned. He didn’t stomp over and throw lightning bolts, he didn’t nail them up to a cross literally or figuratively, he didn’t even slap their behinds or waggle his fingers at them. With compassion and regret, he laid out the consequences of their actions; I get the sense that if it had been possible to ignore the price of their actions, he would have, but you see, they’d made a choice to not-trust God, and from that point, God still wanted to protect them as much as he could, and so the consequences provided a sort of boundary line to do what he could to keep them safe while being in the wide world. 

Later, we see in the Gospels how Jesus interacts with those who come to him with humility, knowing their sins. Often these are the people who society reminds of their shortcomings all the day long. But Jesus doesn’t pile on with the cultural expectations of shunning tax collectors and ignoring prostitutes. Those who recognize their imperfections, those who are humble about their sins, those who come to Jesus holding their sins out in front of them, are received how?

Jesus looks with compassion, Jesus takes time to sit with these people. Jesus gently wipes their tears and listens to their burdens and pronounces them forgiven. 

This isn’t the shunning or shaming we might expect. This isn’t the hot anger and lightning bolts that we often assume power will wield. This God revealed in Jesus Christ deals gently with those who recognize their darkness and who seek to heal from evil. And that’s the difference, isn’t it? I wonder whether the people who went out from Judea and all the surrounding countryside and who poured out from Jerusalem were the ones who knew they were already in darkness and already mired in the wilderness of sin. 

I wonder whether these people who sought John the Baptist and his cleansing in the river Jordan recognized that the trip to the wilderness was really not so much geographical as it was spiritual. And that they were, in truth, already there. 

Already in the wilderness. Already lost and parched. Already feeling heavy and burdened by the weight of their lives. Already wandering in guilt and regret. I wonder whether any of this feels familiar to you.

What we find in Scripture, not least in the prophecy from Isaiah this morning, is that this God, unlike rulers in the world or idols of ancient times, uses his great power when he’s doing good, not when he’s meting out consequences. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is a God of mercy, the prophet Hosea tells us, and when “he comes with might, and his arm rules for him, his reward is with him… he will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms.” This God is abundant in his power for mercy, for gentleness and nourishment, for forgiveness, for light and health and thriving and hope. 

The powers of this world are harsh and dark and full of punishment. The consequences are dire – the wages of sin is death – but the gift of God is eternal life. God’s kingdom, the ruling order that Jesus ushers in through the incarnation, is founded on the power of God’s love, not the power of pain or punishment or shame or evil. So as we approach God’s throne of grace, our confession of sin need not be fearful or defensive. We may rest knowing that the purging of our sins will hurt only in so far as it is hard to extricate ourselves from darkness, and that the love of God is a cleansing, healing salve to our sin-sick souls. 

Overwhelmed

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One bridge further (All Saints Sermon here; yesterday’s post which rides on the sermon’s coattails, Bodies Talk here, today completes the spontaneous trilogy):

Yesterday I preached in school chapel to the first through seventh graders, and my assigned text was the story of David and Goliath. Gosh, it’s a great story, and “Goliath” is a descriptive and evocative word in our parlance today because of the origin story. So it’s a real, real familiar story. Especially to kids who have been in a Christian school their whole lives (or who have lived in the south, Bible-story-soaked area it is).

As I turned the story over in my head, wondering on a way in that wasn’t just telling the same thing again (nothing wrong with that!), an application slapped me upside the head.

My back’s been hurting this week, and it feels a bit overwhelming at times. Specifically when I try to move. When this mother-of-three can be still, it’s okay, I don’t notice much pain, and I can focus on whatever I’m doing. But have I mentioned that my “three” are boys in first grade, Pre-k 4, and 18 months old? Ahh yes. There’s not much stillness, cleanliness, or silence in our home (and praise God for it!). So my bodily reality has felt a little overwhelming.

Is there anything in your life that feels overwhelming? Anything that looms so large you can’t see around it? Maybe it’s so big it just blocks the sun right out. Something at work. Bills coming due. A wedge between you and a loved one. Health concerns. The truth is, we’re all facing down Goliath-sized situations.

But what does God show us about himself in the story of David and Goliath? God is big enough to defeat any insurmountable obstacle. God will protect and bring victory. It may not look like we expect (a slingshot), and it may not have the outcome we assume (a switch in the royal line), but God will look out for us, for anyone, who calls on him for help in the midst of problems and worries and situations that feel just too big.

Bodies Talk

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I preached my All Saints sermon for the first time about 8:45am on Sunday. By 10:30am, my lower back hurt, and it hasn’t stopped yet.

When we start to let loose the truth of our condition, our bodies kick into healing mode. Pain is communication, and my low back is communicating to me — through my understanding of chakras (maybe this is a bridge too far for you, that’s totally reasonable, just discard it) — that my sense of stability and security has been shaken.

Our low back/pelvic bone (the whole spine, really) is where our stability (anatomically, and I’d argue, energetically) resides.

What I’ve learned in yoga is this: our bodies store pain, and our bodies communicate in pain (well, hopefully it doesn’t always take pain to listen, but, I’m a stubborn sort). If your throat or jaw hurts — maybe there’s something you need to say; if your shoulders hurt — maybe you’re trying to carry too much; if your back hurts — maybe your center/roots/stability/security feels threatened.

The way to heal is to acknowledge that pain. Let the pain guide you to treatment, movement, change, whatever can relieve you.

Maybe a momma with a super sick baby in October is feeling off-kilter, unstable — that’s really not so wild an idea, is it?

So here’s my message: God made our bodies to communicate powerfully with us, I’d even say that God communicates with us through our bodies (“You’re carrying too much.” “You need *rest*, my child.”).

When God speaks; when your body speaks, may you listen.

Sermon for All Saints Sunday

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Revelation 7:9-17 + Matthew 5:1-12

Sitting down to write this sermon was the first time I’d spent any time at my desk since the first week of October. My monthly desk-blotter calendar was still showing “October” as I spread out my Bible and print outs. And I just couldn’t start writing. I texted Jordan, I texted Jillian, another friend who is also preaching this week called me and we talked. I even started a load of towels to strip in the bathtub. 

When I came back to my desk, I looked again at the calendar. As y’all may know, I spent a week of October, fully 7 days, in the hospital at Women’s and Children’s with Jacob who was battling RSV. He was baptized last year on All Saints Sunday, and as I’ve grown, I’ve found that our lives and experiences and feelings are cyclical. Is there a time of year that always feels heavier to you? Is there a season that brings up twinges or tickling in your chest, a joy or sentimental nostalgia? Sometimes I’ll even find on specific days that my body feels more achy or I have a headache that I can’t shake, and then I’ll realize that on that day 10 years ago my grandpa died or I graduated from college, or some other big event, happy or sad, took place and I hadn’t really recalled it, but some part of my body, my being, knew it was happening, and was even remembering the impact of that event on my life while my brain forgot it. 

I love that God made our selves so complex and so memorable that pieces of us will be sensitive to God’s movement even when our minds are oblivious. 

And so as I sat down to write this sermon, I realized, staring at that calendar, that my body and spirit needed a little acknowledgement of what had transpired in our family in the last month. So I got a pen, and I drew an arrow through the seven days that Jacob and I spent in a tiny room, hooked up to oxygen. I wrote, “Hospital” “Jacob in the Hospital” under the arrow, and then I just looked at the paper. I took a few deep breaths, I told myself “that was a big chunk of the month.” “That really broke up October.” “You didn’t think that would happen again this year.” 

And after a few more breaths – I love to think of breathing as a way to acknowledge the Holy Spirit, in both Hebrew and Greek the original languages of the Bible, the words used to name the Holy Spirit “ru’ah” and “pneuma” are words for breath, for breathing. After a few breaths, I rolled my shoulders, tore off the “October” page, and set down to read and write again. I felt better. It’s a way I was able to feel the bigness of what October had meant for our family, a way to give space for and honor the grief and fear and powerlessness and restlessness of that month. And then, a way to let it go. 

Y’all will know from your own experiences and your own lives, it’s not over, the feelings and grief of our hospital stay and of our child’s illness will come up again in some other way, spurred by something else, and it’ll be my work then to listen again, slow down and welcome the stirrings that pull at me. 

I tell you all this because we find echoes in today’s Scriptures, too, and we will each hear ripples that might slosh at us sideways in the liturgy today, maybe in the names prayed for and listed in our bulletins, maybe in the memories of baptisms-past, maybe in the way the light angles through the windows at this time of year. And I pray, my precious brothers and sisters, that when these stirrings pop up, whether they bring waves of joy or grief or headache or achiness or ease, that just as you welcome visitors into your home, you will welcome these movements of the Holy Spirit, that you will ask them to sit down and stay awhile, that you’ll have the courage to sit and listen and learn from these visitors that the Holy Spirit has sent to you. With that in mind, let’s turn to the readings for today.

“After this I, John, looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,

“Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God.” 

I hear an echo from Babel here. Do you remember that story? Way back in Genesis, before Abraham, before Moses and all the prophets, God saw that people were putting themselves up as idols, as the center of the universe, and he made different languages and scattered the people to protect them from themselves. Of course a consequence of that has been our division and strife against each other tribe since. But here in Revelation, at the end of time, we read that it won’t be that way anymore. That people from every nation all tribes and peoples and languages will be gathered and oriented toward the real king, the true center of the universe, of all creation, which is God, and the Lamb, Jesus. This echo of grief, of division that’s written in our bones as humans, that longs for connection instead of misunderstanding and isolation, will be put right, will be overcome, only by God and through his grace. 

Later in that same passage, somebody tells John, the writer who is relaying this vision: 

“For this reason they are before the throne of God,

and worship him day and night within his temple,

and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.

They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;

the sun will not strike them,

nor any scorching heat;

for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,

and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,

and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Do you recognize that? Did those words stir in you? We hear here prophecies from Isaiah and from the Psalms. You may remember from Isaiah 4 the lines about being sheltered by the one on the throne; you may recall from Psalms 49 and 121 the promises that no one will hunger or thirst anymore; you may hear the echo from Isaiah 25 the vow that God will wipe away every tear from every eye. I wonder if you’ve had moments, or glimmers of these truths in your own life, a sort of little promise or little fulfillment of God’s goodness and grace as we still await God’s big overhaul of evil’s eradication from existence. 

Leaving the hospital surely felt like a little fulfillment, lying in my bed that night with all my boys under the same roof surely felt like a small grace and a moment to cherish and note and welcome into my house and listen to. *take a breath* Do you have those, too?

Then as we move to the Gospel lesson for today, those ladies in the Luke Bible study will have heard big echoes everywhere in these 12 verses. These passages are shared almost verbatim in Luke as here in Matthew, with a few notable adjustments. Y’all don’t have to be part of the Bible study for them to be familiar words, and maybe you remember another sermon you’ve heard on these words. Maybe you recall your momma quoting them as she instructed your behavior as a child. Maybe you feel unsettled, wondering what persecution for righteousness’ sake might require of you. 

God, in inspiring the composition of Scripture, intends for these echoes to poke at us, to reveal himself to us ever more deeply, to resonate on both deep intellectual levels and on levels in us that are too deep and hidden for words at all. Do you know that verse from Romans, about prayer and the Holy Spirit? “Likewise, the Spirit, helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” 

When our sighings are too deep for words, when our grief or echoes of love are too strong for us to stay standing, when our joy is too mighty to keep from splitting into a smile, may God the Holy Spirit help us in our weakness, in our fear or freeze in the face of such power so near us. May God the Holy Spirit intercede for us, drawing us along with him in prayer as we offer these echoes of holy stirrings back to God himself. May God give us courage to sit still with the memories that he offers us, may God be present with us – just as he promises he always will be through the cross – as we seek to learn what it is that God reveals to us about himself in our hearts, in our families, in our communities, and in our world. Amen.