God-Bearers

I. Where Does God Live? 00:00

…that you would enliven our hearts to your presence, and that on this wonderful day, as we look forward to Christmas, you would open our eyes to see the ways that you are already showing up in our lives. In Jesus’ name, amen.

We’re going analog today. A little different. But in honor of the Incarnation, I thought, you know, let’s go really incarnate: words written on a page with ink.

I’m really excited to talk to you all this morning. God is just more good than we know, and today I want to talk about what his plan is for us, as we’re in this odd Sunday. This Sunday doesn’t happen very often, where it’s both Christmas Eve and the last Sunday of Advent. It happens like once every ten years, depending on how the leap year falls. It’s odd. And so we’re going to enjoy that this morning, where I get to talk about a couple of things of what I think God wants to do in us, in the spirit of Advent. I think he has some work that he wants to do for us, on our behalf, in us. And I want to talk about the elephant in the room: Merry Christmas, everyone!

I have one question that I want us to think about this morning. Where does God live? Where does he live? There’s been a lot of answers throughout the history of time of where God lives. You might think Mount Olympus. I was really into Greek mythology for a while: the tallest mountain in the world, the land of paradise. Or you might think Asgard. With the Marvel movies they’ve made Thor so much more popular; Norse mythology is back. He’s in this super special place with rainbows and lightning and gold, this glorious place. Or maybe you’re a little more Eastern in your thought, and you think, “No, he’s in the infinite reaches of the dark abyss of space, and he binds everything together.” And all of those answers are wrong. Completely wrong. And that’s what Christmas teaches us. In fact, God chose to dwell among us. He chose to make his dwelling place in us. And that’s what we’re talking about.

II. David Wants to Build a House 02:30

I gave away the answer to the entire question. You’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to leave the question so everybody’s wondering. But I think you know the answer to this question. I just want to dive into what that means for us and how we learn that this morning.

Let’s talk about our Old Testament lesson. I love David. He might be my favorite character in the Bible, because he’s just like us. He makes so many mistakes. And even if you look at this, it’s so relatable. He’s sitting in his kingdom, in a palace, and it says God has made him to rest from his enemies (2 Sam 7.1). Who here wants that? I want that for me. I want to be able to rest from my enemies. But just like any one of us, he isn’t very good at resting. No, immediately he starts coming up with plans of what he wants to do. God has made him to rest, and he wants to go build. That’s the dichotomy in this lesson.

In fact, it’s a good idea: “I want God to live in a place that’s as beautiful and amazing as he has given me, or more.” What a great heart David has. But it’s not what God wants. And thank God for Nathan. You all need Nathans in your life, somebody who can come to you and say… Even though in the moment Nathan’s his bro, and Nathan’s like, “Let’s do it. God is with you,” Nathan still has an ear open to what God wants to say in this situation.

So the next day he comes in and he goes, “Hey, you know that building plan?” And knowing David from the stories, I bet you he’d already started something or other. He’s drawing it out. He’s calling people. He’s dialing their numbers in his phone, thousands of years ago. No. He’s getting people. He’s gathering them. He’s like, “I need the best architects, the best material.” He’s already dreaming of this thing. And Nathan goes, “Hey, did God tell you to do that?” Oops. No. He says, in fact, God says, “Did I ask you to build me a house? I don’t need you to build me a house. I’ve been living just fine for hundreds and thousands of years, for all eternity, without your help, David.”

And he calls him out on that, because God had a much better plan. Not because David’s heart wasn’t good, not because David didn’t have a good idea, but because God wanted to do something that David couldn’t have even imagined. And even when he does allow David’s son Solomon to build the temple, and he comes and he dwells there, it’s never his dwelling place alone. Even when he rests his presence there as a sign to Israel, “I am here,” over and over again the prophets, the psalmist and the writers say, “No, God’s dwelling place is not to be contained in a temple made by hands.”

Now, at the time it made sense to them. “Yeah, God is bigger than the temple. He doesn’t live in just a temple made by hands.” But then we’re told, as we move forward, that that temple actually is going to be flesh and blood, that the God who is uncontainable, that the glory of the temple couldn’t contain, was going to become a clump of cells, to use some modern language. He was going to do something radical. And that’s what leads us to our Gospel this morning.

III. Mary Is the Temple 05:56

So we’re talking about the location of God’s presence. We’re talking about what the temple is. The Old Testament tees it up, and what the designers of the liturgy did is they put that Old Testament with this Gospel, so that you would immediately see, “Oh my gosh, Mary is the temple.” Mary is the temple.

Let’s talk about that as we move through this. In Luke 1:35, the writer of Luke actually makes it super clear, as he uses the exact same language that was used to describe the Ark of the Covenant, where God dwelt before he moved into the temple. He uses the same language that they used when they talk about God dwelling in the temple. He says:

35 And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.” Luke 1.35

That language, “overshadow”: it’s the same word, if you look at the Greek translation of the Old Testament, that describes when God filled the temple with his glory, with his presence.

And so for the first time in history, in fact the first time in anything that has ever existed, the uncontainable, infinite God became a clump of cells in a teenage girl’s womb. It’s incredible. I’ve met a lot of teenage girls. What was God thinking? She wasn’t glorious. I mean, we depict Mary in all these ways to show her cosmic significance, to show her as the queen of the church, to show her as this godly, divine, almost goddess-like figure. But when she was fifteen, sixteen, whatever years old she was when this happened, she was just as dumb and gangly and awkward as many teenage girls are.

And yet God chose her. Why did he do that? He could have picked anybody. He could have picked the emperor. He could have picked some crazy powerful, beautiful woman. He picked this girl in Nazareth, some backwater town, probably someone you wouldn’t have looked twice at if you passed her on the street.

IV. Humble and Obedient 08:26

He picked her for two reasons, and this is what I want you to remember as we go through this lesson. He picked her because she was humble and obedient. That’s it. You want to be used by God? You want to be the temple of the Most High? You want to participate in this thing that God is doing? You’ve got two requirements: be humble and be obedient.

And guess what? If you do an honest inventory of your life, you might look around and say, “Oh, those are the two things that are hardest to do,” at least for me. I’m pretty confident in my own ability to earn glory and wonder and to establish the kingdom of God. I’m like David: “God, let me build your kingdom. Let me go do it.” And he’s like, “Hey, can you be humble like Mary?” Yes, we’re called to be kings and priests to serve our God, but the picture of that starts with this woman, this awkward teenager, who said, “Behold, the maidservant of the Lord”: a line that changed history.

V. Childbearing Redeemed 09:36

Okay, Mary is the temple. And by the miracle of Mary accepting God in her womb, every woman is now welcomed in to participate in that mystery, to accept God’s life in them. And the womb is now sanctified, and every pregnancy participates in the mystery of Christ and his birth.

Did you know that childbearing was cursed in the Fall? It was specifically cursed: bearing a child will be painful for you; it’ll be an awful experience. And then Christ comes through the curse and redeems it, so that now every woman who bears a child, guess what? Your childbearing participates in the suffering of Christ. It is no longer the curse, but your redemption, which is a picture, as Mary is, of the church.

So Jesus was doing a heck of a lot more, even before the cross, than we could imagine. But in this story, when we see the presence of God filling Mary, and we see this pregnancy, childbirth, all of that is now redeemed, and we all get to participate, not in the fallen, cursed world, which Christ continuously overturned, but in the process of redemption, by sharing with him in his cross and resurrection.

VI. Jesus Is the Temple 10:58

So Mary’s the temple. But you might say, “Isn’t Jesus the temple?” And to that I would say yes, absolutely. And so that’s where we’re moving next. You might start to see the flow of this sermon. I’m going to give it away: Mary’s the temple, Jesus is the temple, we are the temple. Okay? That’s what we’re going to remember at the end of this.

I’ve got proof. Jesus says of himself in John 2:19, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2.19). Now, I love John, because he puts that in chapter 2 of his Gospel. That’s way later in Jesus’ ministry; that’s right before he enters Jerusalem. But John’s like, “Let’s cut to the chase.” Jesus is predicting his death and resurrection, as we all now know. But you know what the Jews said? “It took forty-six years to build this building” (John 2.20). They missed the point. He’s like, “Well, it took thirty-three years for me to do this, to become who I was to be, and to die on the cross myself”: the temple, bearing the presence of God into the world.

And Paul, in Colossians 1:19, makes it very clear: “For in him,” Jesus, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col 1.19). That phrase, “pleased to dwell,” you might recognize from some of our Christmas carols: “with man pleased to dwell.” I want to head back to what we were talking about, with Mount Olympus and the infinite reaches of space and Asgard, where all the gods that we could come up with were pleased to dwell. Because guess what? All of us have met each other, and we know each other, and it doesn’t make sense for God to choose us. At least it doesn’t make sense to me. But God looked down from on high, the perfect, infinite, omnipotent, powerful God looked down and said, “I want to be with them.” And to everyone in this room, he looks at you and says, “I am pleased to dwell with you.”

That’s what Jesus the temple is all about, because Jesus is our example. He came to show us the way to be human, and to dwell among us, and to make… what are we told in the Christmas story? “Good will to men, peace on earth” (Luke 2.14). That is the God we serve. That’s where we’re heading. Most of us, nine times out of ten, are convinced that God’s mad at us, that God’s mad at the world, that something must have gone wrong, because can’t you see all the pain, all the brokenness, all the idiocy that we encounter on a daily basis? And yet God again and again reminds us every Christmas: no, good will to men, peace on earth. He is pleased to dwell with us.

VII. We Are the Temple 13:34

And that leads us straight to “we are the temple”: 1 Corinthians 6:19 and 20, which is a great Scripture. Let me just, for a second, detour for one second. What does it say here? It says:

13 Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. 15 Did you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? 1 Cor 6.13–15

I just wanted to throw this one out there, a detour for a second. What is Paul talking about in the context of this Scripture that we’re talking about here? He’s trying to show us: guess what? There is a better way. Don’t you know that you’re a part of Christ’s body? Don’t you know that you are, as he says, a temple of the Most High God? Let’s go ahead and read this part:

19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. 1 Cor 6.19–20

Now, that could be a whole lesson in and of itself, but we’re going to keep it really simple here.

VIII. Bearing God into the World 14:45

You are meant to bear God in your body. When we look at Mary, she is an example of accepting God’s will and bearing Christ’s presence to the world. That’s not just an example for her, or for women, but for all of us.

And a few weeks ago we talked about John. Jesus said of John, he’s the greatest Old Testament prophet, of everyone up till this point, John is the best. And then he turned around and said, but the least in the kingdom of God, the kingdom Jesus came to establish, is greater than he (Matt 11.11). And why is that? Because John could point to God, but we are called to bear God into the world. We’re called to bring him with us.

Now let’s get a little practical here, because this can sound very esoteric, very abstract: “Oh, we’re talking theology and dogma and doctrine.” No. It’s when your son is sick, and he wakes up in the middle of the night hacking up a lung, and he’s miserable. I can walk in and bear God into that room and say, “Let me pray with you, son. Let me hold you,” and be God’s hands and feet and mouth in that situation, and speak words of life and healing. Or when you have that opportunity where somebody at work has really pissed you off, somebody at work has really ground your gears, and you stop for a moment and you say, “Hold on. If I’m bearing God to the world, how would Jesus respond to this?” And guess what? It doesn’t mean that you just go, “Oh, you’re good, no worries.” No. Jesus was more than willing to tell people the truth when the truth needed to be spoken, but he always put it in the context of bringing love into the world.

IX. A Mansion Prepared 17:03

So if you need to learn anything from Advent, it is this. It’s not just about the baby coming in that historical event, Christmas (and I will mention that in a second). But it’s also about what our collect said this morning. It said, “Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself.” So when does God come? Daily. Every single day. Where does he choose to live? With you, and you, and all of you.

What are you going to do in response? Are you going to be like Mary, who said, “Behold, the maidservant of the Lord”? Are you going to say, “Let it be to me according to your will”? I promise you, your Christmas is going to be awesome when you let God show up. Personally, I’ve already seen that happening. I get so tied up in getting the decorations and the presents and the organization, and all of a sudden Haley and I are fighting at the end of the night, and we’re like, “Gosh, how do we get this all done?” It’s like, pause for a second. Wait, what is this all about? This is about welcoming God into our midst. And it may not matter if you get that last batch of cookies baked at the right time, at least not as much as welcoming God among us.

I just want to read a little bit and we’ll end. I’m keeping it short for me today, because I know that we all have so much fun, and we’re going to be living out all day today and tomorrow the reality of the words that we’re talking about this morning. You have an opportunity today, as you celebrate with your family, to welcome God into your midst: God in your brother, God in your husband, God in your sister, your wives, your children, God in your friends.

X. A Historical Event 19:30

I just want to say this before we end. Christmas is about a historical event that really, really happened: a particular moment where the timeless God entered time, and the limitless God became contained, the moment the all-powerful God became powerless. A mere clump of cells was the very essence of being and life and creation. Mary was a real teenager, in the midst of the pain and the awkwardness and the challenges and the mundanity of her life. But she’s a teenager who said yes to God and became the Mother of our Lord.

The historical matters. But as Christians, we believe even more than that: that we are called to enter into history. In fact, every Eucharist we enter into the moment where Christ becomes flesh, in the bread and the wine. And so this morning, and as we enter Christmas, I just want you to look for God to show up. You bear him with you, and you’ll find him in the people you surround yourself with, if you let him show you. Amen. Merry Christmas.