If you have been lurking on this blog the past week, you know that I have begun a conversation about Christian community and the mission of Christ in the world, by considering the “spiritual discipline” of stability. Yesterday I told you that perhaps the most important lesson from seminary was learning that the “yous” are better translated as “y’alls.” That is, the “yous” are plural. Today let me make a more explicit connection on between the NT “y’alls" and stability: Y’all is where God dwells in this world.
Most often when we talk about where God dwells, we think of a place. Indeed, even the Temple was an actual place. That the Jews labored to rebuild every time a conquering empire tore theirs down. But Jesus replaced the Temple in Jerusalem with himself and then promised that in the same way that he embodied the presence of God, his body the church would be the new temple.
Six times in the New Testament Paul uses the word here for Temple. It is the word for the actual holy of holies, the dwelling place for God. Five of the six times it is plural. It refers not to the human physical body, but the spiritual body of the church. Another example is found in Ephesians 2:22, where Paul writes about Jesus: “In whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.”
God doesn’t dwell in a place but with a people. The temple is not a church (building). The church (body) is the temple.
But let me say something specific about this. When people hear this they have a tendency to say, “Cool. God’s not at church, he hangs out where ever I hang out with my friends. So, I really don’t need church, because Community, The Body, The Temple, is me and my friends.” Indeed, they may even quote a verse from Matthew 18 where Jesus says, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
Nice try. If you look at that verse in context it is talking specifically about the formal work of the church. The Church body is not just anybody we want to include. The Greek word for church means “gathering” and it irefers explicitly to the body of people whom God has gathered together, not us.
And that is exactly the point of this passage. Notice that Paul didn’t say, “Look if you guys can’t get along break up into little groups of people who will get along. God will make all your groups into little temples.” No. Instead he insisted that they had to pull together as the one church whom God has gathered to be his temple. The Church belongs to God. It is his dwelling place and if whomever he includes it, we have to include, love, care for and be unified with.
This is so important to God that in v. 17 we have one of the most strongly worded passages in the New Testament. If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.
God tells the Corinthians through Paul, that if they stop being a good, holy, and pleasing temple, he is going to tear it down. Just like the temple of Jerusalem that Jesus condemned, if we are not together as God’s dwelling place he will wreck it and go somewhere else.
Whoa. This seems harsh. But why? Because God is not just with us for his sake or our sake. Which leads to our second point. God dwells with y’all for the world’s sake.
Paul was so strict about the people of God in Corinth being a holy and unified body because they were God’s strategy for reaching the broken city of Corinth. And that is true today in your city and mine.
In his commentary on 1 Corinthians, Gordon Fee writes these challenging words. Seldom does one sense that the church is, or can be, experienced as a community that is so powerfully indwelt by the Spirit that it functions as a genuine alternative to the pagan world in which it is found.” ((p. 150)
A genuine alternative. We are meant to be a genuine alternative to the unbelieving, searching, culturally infected world around us. But we can only be that if we offer people the love, peace and unity of the Spirit that reveals the very presence of God with us. And, as you’ve been reading all that week, that takes, at the very least, hanging around and staying put.
Tomorrow, I’ll wrap up this series of posts with some reflections on Reformation Sunday and when staying put is the last thing we should do.
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