April 27 -- Sixth Sunday in Easter

Passages: Acts 17:22-31, Psalm 66:8-20, 1 Peter 3:13-22, John 14:15-21.

Paul preaching in Athens

I will come to your temple with burnt offerings

and fulfill my vows to you-

vows my lips promised and my mouth spoke
when I was in trouble.

I will sacrifice fat animals to you
and an offering of rams;
I will offer bulls and goats.
Selah – Psalm 66.13-15

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. – Acts 17.24-25

In today’s Acts lection, although Paul is speaking to Athenian Greeks engaging in various forms of Hellenistic Greek religion, his words also speak to Jerusalem and Temple Mount. Most scholars date Acts several decades after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. But during Paul’s lifetime, the Temple still stood and was the focus of Jewish religious life. Ritual offerings, as described in Psalm 66, took place there daily. The innermost sanctuary of the Temple, the Holy of the Holies, was regarded by many Jews as the physical dwelling place of the Lord. So when Paul says that God “does not live in temples (naoi/j) built by hands” he is rejecting the Temple’s central role in Early Christianity, which is beginning to distinguish itself from traditional Judaism. In addition to profound implications for the immediate historical context Paul was in, his words present a challenge to modern Christians. How often do churches get lost in the perpetuation of their own facility and institution at the expense of the Church’s wider mission? If God does not dwell in temples, then churches cannot be an end unto themselves, and must be part of a broader understanding of the Church as a body of believers.

Being relatively new to Boston, I was surprised to see so many small, struggling congregational churches so close to each other. In addition to being founded in a time of intense theological divisions, these churches were also created before modern transportation. Now they are historic churches with great sentimental value, but tiny congregations struggling to pay the bills. They have little social programming and the programming they do have is on a shoe-string budget. The ministers and the congregants of these churches may not vision their facilities as the focus of their faith, but the reality is that is where the majority of their time and money is spent.

I do not wish to diminish the importance of holy space and good church facilities. A sanctuary is something that serves the community very well. When I was doing youth ministry out of a narrow temporary trailer, if someone asked me what I needed most to improve the youth program, I’d tell them a big square room dedicated to solely to the youth. The church I used to serve is currently doing just that – they are constructing a building that contains classrooms, a youth center and a Chapel. But I had mixed feelings about the construction project: were we prioritizing our space and our individual church above our mission to the wider Church?

Paul conceived of the Church in highly theological, non-geographical terms. His epistles repeat the analogy of the Church as the body of Christ. To Paul, all believers (both Jews and Greeks, slaves and free) were united into one body and that was the location of the Church, not some centralized location like the Temple Mount or Vatican City. And the body of believers was something diverse, each person with her various skills, but harmonious. Today, parts of Christ’s body is sick with HIV/AIDS or other diseases that are running rampart, in part due to the extreme poverty faced by far too many around the world. Many brothers and sisters are starving, or struggling to put a roof over their head, when other Christians are unnecessarily upgrading their facilities or, worse yet, confined in their ministry by the burden of their own roof. Sanctuaries and churches have the ability to be civic centers that empower and enable the true Church to be more effective in manifesting God’s will and reign on Earth, and to work toward making the body healthy and full. Too often sanctuaries become the focus, not the people, and we need to be reminded – like the Athenians and Jews of Paul’s era – that God cannot be confined in sacred spaces. God is within us and around us.