Temple - Part 2
August 14, 2022
Today's message was given by Pastor Jonathan Shaheen. A video of the message is here. Today's message continued a series called "Temple" and further developed the notion of worship. [Conversation Starters will begin again with the start of the next official small groups session in September.]
Jonathan's message was quite good. To worship, he shared, is "to place worth on." What you sacrifice for is what you worship. There is an uncomfortableness to worship, overcome it. Worship is a response to revelation. And more. Let me again encourage you to watch Jonathan's message.
One other tidbit before I get to what I want to talk about... Jonathan mentioned St. Patrick, the song Be Thou My Vision, and Slane (the name of the melody of that song, after Slane Hill). I once gave a talk about St. Patrick, the slides are here.
OK, one final final tidbit before we dive in... Did anyone else get a kick out of Jonathan's clothing looking a bit like a Jewish tallit (prayer shawl), complete with tzitzit (dangling fringes from the shawl, or something dangling in this case)?!
As Patrick pointed out last week, places for worship went from Eden to altars to the tabernacle to the temple to Jesus, and now in you is where worship happens. It also happens that I've been studying the chapters of Exodus that deal with the Tabernacle, so off we go...
To begin the Tabernacle construction (Exodus 25), God tells Moses to "take for Me a gift from everyone according to his heart." The Hebrew word used here means 'take', not give or bring. Take from yourself. Sacrifice. What's another big lesson here? When dealing with God, your heart matters immensely. When dealing with man-to-man ethics, your heart, your feelings, your intentions matter very little; just do right. But when experiencing God, it's all about your heart. "Based on your heart" is very rare for the Torah. The Torah is more prone to just say do it, give 10%, your intentions are irrelevant. But here, when relating to God, it's all about where your heart is.
Remember, in ancient Hebrew, "dwelling" had almost nothing to do with permanence. God can dwell among you anywhere. For ANE people, however, they would be expecting an altar, a shrine, or the like as was ubiquitous in the ANE. My god wins, I build him a building or an altar for that god to live in. Very much in keeping with Jonathan's reference this morning to using old bar tunes with new words for worship, here God is filling old vessels with new wine. As if to say: "You're new to Me, Israelites, you'll want a place to worship Me, so here you go." Even in the verses about the construction of the Tabernacle, God makes it clear that the answer to "Where is God?" is anywhere you reach out to Him.
Sanctuaries are but one bridge to God that God recognized would be very important to these ANE fledglings with regard to monotheism. But in so doing, He also left clues for us today to understant bigger lessons, even in the seemingly humdrum detail of building the Tabernacle (which doesn't even work out if you try to build it today). Exodus 25:8, "Then have them make a sanctuary for Me, and I will dwell among them." Wouldn't it have made more sense if He had said "dwell in it"? It probably would have made all the sense in the world to the ANEs. But the message was for all time. God dwells among those who relate to Him, inside, outside, whereever. You can find God any where. You might ponder where/what/when is your sanctuary, where/what/when do you get closer to God?
The word for sanctuary in Hebrew is mish-ka-na. It shares the same 3-letter root (key to understading Hebrew), and therefor meaning, with ka-da-sha, holy. What God is really saying with mish-ka-na (sanctuary) is I will be anywhere that you are holy. We should aim to experience God, and we can do that any where.
Prager continues this line of thinking by noting that it is no coincidence that these Tabernacle instructions follow immediately the revelation of the Ten Commandments and specific examples right after that. It's as if God is saying, "now that you know how I want you to behave, you will want to know how to know Me."
On a totally different tangent, the details of the Tabernacle's construction tell us something else. Consider the layering: the Ten Commandments are inside the box, the box has a cover, which is guarded by cherubim. The verbiage includes words such as "cover" and "shield." These are not just pretty layers, these are layers of protection for the Ten Commandments. As Prager puts it, "holiness guards ethics." Goodness is fragile. Good civilizations are fragile. They must be guarded by holiness.
The word for cover here is ka-por-et (sometimes translated as "mercy seat"). If you sound it out, you may hear the similarity to Kippur (same 3-letter root thing again). Yom Kippur is the Jewish Day of Atonement. There is a notion of atonement to the cover, and vice versa! Atoning "covers" your sins. What does this tell us? God wants atonement to be part of coming to God, of worshipping. You could argue from this that the most important reason to go to church, or the tabernacle, is to atone. Atonement is literally at the center of God's design for a center of worship.
Bonus
Exodus 23:25-26, "Worship the LORD your God, and his blessing will be on your food and water. I will take away sickness from among you, and none will miscarry or be barren in your land. I will give you a full life span."
Really? Even if the condition presented is met, is this even believebale? Well, Prager suggests it may work in some real ways. If you destroy your environment, you'll suffer. If you have improper sex you may well be more susceptible to certain diseases. If you don't spend on war, you can spend on cancer cures. A good society may well be more likely to live better. Did you know life spans are longer in democracies than in socialist or communist countries? The more government corruption, the less well people live. Another Prager-ism: communism causes the rains to stop. Nearly every communist country had famines that in the aggregate killed tens of millions of people in the 20th Century.