When my friend Amber, a chaplain at an Episcopal elementary school, begins to teach her students about God, she offers to draw them a picture.
Now, if you listened carefully to the reading from Exodus this morning, you may suspect that Chaplain Amber is on dangerous ground. After all, isn’t the second commandment a warning against making images of God?
But Amber doesn’t draw a face for God, like Michelangelo did, or many other artists. She draws a cloud. A cloud with a big question mark inside it.
She draws a mystery, the unknown.
Which is exciting if you like big ideas and abstractions, but is actually really hard to relate to for a lot of us.
Particularly, I imagine, for a motley bunch of refugees from oppression, stuck out in the desert – the land that no one else wants – wondering what happens next. Who did they really follow, out here into the wilderness?
They’ve seen fire and cloud and miracles, but how do you build a relationship with a thundercloud, a pillar of fire, or a power that inexplicably makes food out of nothing and manipulates entire seas?
This morning’s Exodus story is the answer. Or part of the answer, anyway.
God longs for relationship with these motley people, with Israel, with us. God wants us to be close to God, to identify with God, to have the sense that we belong.
And God also knows humans well enough to know that we’re fairly bad at relationships with the abstract. Physical presence and nearness make most relationships easier for humans (you are, after all, more likely to become friends with someone who lives or works or learns near you than with someone who lives and works on the other side of the globe. Or in a part of the next county you never go to, for that matter.)
Transendence, infinity, invisibility – these make it hard to connect with God.
And God wants to be close to us; wants us to be close to God, to feel connected.
So God creates a covenant with Israel. A concrete set of expectations and practices – commandments – that give practical form to belonging to God.
We heard the root and beginning of that covenant, those practices of belonging to God, this morning. We repeat those core practices often, and put them on the walls of our Sunday School classrooms, calling them the Ten Commandments.
The prohibition of images, the special respect for God’s name, the practice of Sabbath – these are things that mark space and time and words as special, holy, and sacred, so that we have a way to feel that God is close to us, and we are close to God. And the way we treat other people is rooted in that special relationship with God, too. Loving our neighbor as ourself, as Jesus later tells us, is an important part of being close – feeling close – to God.
God goes on to offer Israel many more ways of marking place and time and actions as holy, as ways to connect and be close to God’s incomprehensible power, ways to mark ourselves as belonging to God.
One of those – the tent of meeting – eventually becomes the Temple in Jerusalem – a place meant to bring people close to the untouchable mystery of God.
The place Jesus smashes up in the story John tells us today.
Less than half a century after Jesus turns over the tables the whole Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed. The Temple practices of sacrifice and worship – that particular form of sacredness, of coming close to God – have been gone from humanity’s relationship with God for nineteen centuries and counting, now.
When the Temple fell, God must have felt impossibly distant once again to the people of Israel.
You and I might feel some sympathy for them, having been mostly cut off from our own place of shared worship, our own practices of God’s closeness – like communion, or singing together – for a year and counting.
Many of us have felt those disconnections before, in some other loss or wilderness in our lives. For a time – short or long – you or I may have found ourselves feeling cut off from the things that bring us close to God. Prayers seem unanswered; God feels far away in some trouble or sorrow, or completely disconnected from the day-to-day demands of getting through life. We might be daunted by the mystery, distant from the incomprehensible power that is supposed to have created us, supposed to guide us.
And that might be one reason why Jesus disrupts the Temple so dramatically.
He grabs everyone’s attention so we’re listening when he says that the Temple – this particular place and practice of drawing near to God – can be destroyed. He can rebuild it in mere days. No one wants to believe something that ridiculous, but John – the gospel author who loves a cryptic revelation – wants us to notice that right here and now Jesus is substituting himself, his body, for the physical Temple. The Temple will go, and Jesus is offering a new concrete way for us to draw close to God.
Chaplain Amber draws Jesus for her students as a human figure with the cloud and question mark of the mystery of God inside. It’s a way to represent the personal connection to God’s mystery and power that the people around Jesus felt from him – and told us about in the stories they handed on.
Those stories of Jesus, told and re-told, are another way of drawing close to the incomprehensible God who would otherwise feel strange and far to us. Telling and hearing those stories is a practice that doesn’t depend on a particular place, or any special object, so it’s a practical way to draw close to God in the wilderness, when we’ve lost other connections.
Those stories also tell us that in Jesus’ physical life, God created a way for that mystery and power to come live inside you and me and others. We celebrate and seal that at baptism, when we are marked as Christ’s own: children of God, filled with the Holy Spirit, the incomprehensible power of God kindled close inside us – just as we saw that power and mystery in Jesus himself.
This Lent, in particular, I’ve come to suspect that over and over in our lives, you and I – all God’s people – are going to find ourselves in the place of Israel in the Sinai wilderness, or the ruins of the Temple, or the foot of the cross.
We’re going to find ourselves wondering how God got so distant, why God’s ways are so strange; why our prayers seem unanswered. Once, or often, we’re going to feel distant and separated from God, disconnected from the invisible, infinite One we can’t really understand.
And that’s actually what the commandments are for. For those times when we need to go back to the roots and beginning of God’s desire for relationship with us; the expectations and practices – commandments – that give concrete and practical form to belonging to God.
Taking special care with God’s name, practicing Sabbath to imitate God, rooting our relationship with other human beings in their relationship with the God who creates and guides and liberates us – all this is how we make our own lives sacred, actively part of God when we don’t see or touch God. And we tell and retell the stories of Jesus, remembering the way God deliberately came close to us, so that we can again feel close to God.
God makes a way, over and over, to be close to us in the wilderness, to come near to us when our ways of coming near to God have been pulled away. Because that cloud of mystery Chaplain Amber draws is also – always – the shape of love that will not let us go.
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