[Sermon:]
“Cornerstone Living”
Point
Reyes Community (CA) Presbyterian Church
Rev.
Dr. Douglas Olds
Sunday,
January 21, 2024
OT Reading: Psalm 48
A Song. A Psalm FOR the Korahites
1Great is the LORD and greatly to be
praised
in the city of our God.
His holy mountain, 2 beautiful in
elevation,
is the joy of all the earth,
Mount Zion, in the far north,
the city of the great King.
3Within its citadels God
has shown himself a sure defense.
4Then the kings assembled,
they came on together.
5As soon as they saw it, they were
astounded;
they were in panic, they took to flight;
6trembling took hold of them there,
pains as of a woman in labor,
7as when an east wind shatters
the ships of Tarshish.
8As we have heard, so have we seen
in the city of the LORD of hosts,
in the city of our God,
which God establishes forever. Selah
9We ponder your steadfast love, O God,
in the midst of your temple [pondering what
we have seen, and:].
10Your name, O God, like your praise,
reaches to the ends of the earth.
Your right hand is filled with victory.
11Let Mount Zion be glad,
let the towns of Judah rejoice
because of your judgments.
12Walk about Zion, go all around it,
count its towers,
13consider well its ramparts;
go through its citadels,
that you may tell the next generation
14that this is God,
our God forever and ever.
He will be our guide forever.
NT Reading: Hebrews 9:1-28
Now even the first covenant had
regulations for worship and an earthly sanctuary. 2 For a tent was constructed,
the first one, in which were the lampstand, the table, and the bread of the
Presence; this is called the Holy Place. 3 Behind the second curtain was a tent
called the Holy of Holies. 4 In it stood the golden altar of incense and the
ark of the covenant overlaid on all sides with gold, in which there were a
golden urn holding the manna, and Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tablets of
the covenant; 5 above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy
seat. Of these things we cannot speak now in detail.
6 Such preparations having been
made, the priests go continually into the first tent to carry out their ritual
duties; 7 but only the high priest goes into the second, and he but once a
year, and not without taking the blood that he offers for himself and for the
sins committed unintentionally by the people. 8 By this the Holy Spirit
indicates that the way into the sanctuary has not yet been disclosed as long as
the first tent is still standing. 9 This is a symbol of the present time,
during which gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the
conscience of the worshiper, 10 but deal only with food and drink and various
baptisms, regulations for the body imposed until the time comes to set things
right.
11 But when Christ came as a high
priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and perfect
tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation), 12 he entered once
for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with
his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. 13 For if the blood of goats
and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who
have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, 14 how much more will the
blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish
to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God!
15 For this reason he is the
mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the
promised eternal inheritance, because a death has occurred that redeems them
from the transgressions under the first covenant. 16 Where a will is involved,
the death of the one who made it must be established. 17 For a will takes
effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it
is alive. 18 Hence not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood.
19 For when every commandment had been told to all the people by Moses in
accordance with the law, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and
scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the scroll itself and all the
people, 20 saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that God has ordained for
you.” 21 And in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all
the vessels used in worship. 22 Indeed, under the law almost everything is
purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness
of sins.
23 Thus it was necessary for the
sketches of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the
heavenly things themselves need better sacrifices than these. 24 For Christ did
not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he
entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.
25 Nor was it to offer himself again and again, as the high priest enters the
Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own; 26 for then he would
have had to suffer again and again since the foundation of the world. But as it
is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the
sacrifice of himself. 27 And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once,
and after that the judgment, 28 so Christ, having been offered once to bear the
sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save
those who are eagerly waiting for him. //
I have two
stories from the turn of the year that I want to lift up about living in
Christ’s heaven-infused world of which our author from the Book of Hebrews
writes as a temple above:
1) consideration of the NRG structure
2) Jody and Peter’s great-granddaughters in the Christmas
dresses here, the youngest looking at me with wide eyes and a shy awareness
absolutely absent of suspicion. Her gaze took my breath away. In those moments
of condensation—the immersion and dance of truth, beauty, and grace, I can only
say, “Amen!” Amen! To the unfolding age.
I’m reviewing a book concerning
temple sacrifice that, in the OT age, was how Israel felt it was to meet God.
To dwell with God by “right
sacrifices.”
Among its many problems, the book
doesn’t *consider the *tension I addressed in my sermon on NYE between temple
and city in the Psalms.
This is relevant today in the
context of recrudescent call of so-called Christian Zionists to build
structures to house God to support their false authoritarian claims.
The Psalms
testify to the tension between seeing God in the forms and furnishings of the
temple, serving God in the temple, and experiencing sublimity and witness to
such as from God.
The book I’m reviewing makes the
*preposterous claim that the stones of the temple themselves resonate with
divine energy--Vs. that the service of God in the temple opens the heart of its
servant subject revealed being transformed by witness—by the repentant witness
of steadied and awakened eyes and disciplined hands and intercessory and thanksgiving
prayer applied for neighbors.
The sublime experience of temple
sacrifice is subjective and sincere attendance to the proper sacrificial
service of the altar described in our reading from Hebrews, an interior
experience of the representation of God rather than an imposed external
sensation flowing from the stones.
This temple service prepares its
witness for viewing the eternal sacrifice to come.
The fall of the
Davidic temple and the exile to Babylon was an existential crisis for
Judahites—that God had removed his residence. Then the Persians conquered the
Babylonians and allowed the Jerusalemites to return. The Persian emperor Cyrus,
whom some misled conservatives believe serves as a type of Trump, then decrees
a new temple based on his—Cyrus’s format.
Near that time,
the prophet Ezekiel had an *ornate vision of the New and *final temple (Ezek.
40-44). The Daniel 9 decrees set up the realization and resolution of the
tension of the city of Zion Jerusalem and the temple newly covenanted therein: both scripture and history will reveal that
the city and its varied ethnic peoples are favored over the hegemonic decrees
of a reattempted stone temple establishment to “purify the people.”
The Book of Revelation later
comes to speak of a heavenly Jerusalem in which the temple serves as the “tent
of witness,” and at its culmination, the temple is the Lord God and the Lamb
alone.
In our tent on earth, we meet
directly with the Trinitarian God.
“Seeing God” in the earlier tabernacle and later
temple is portrayed by some commentators in the furnishings, so to “see God” in
the *representations of the altar. What the Book of Hebrews describes as the
altar representation of God.
But the tension
in Psalm 48 considers that piety is learning to see how the sustenance of the
structures—walls and ramparts—reflects God’s care for the purpose of the common
folk, not that God cares for and sustains authorities because God is being fed
in some way by a *transacted sacrificial system.
Psalm 48 grounds
the science of scanning history and nature for God’s imprint to counter
anxiety: the “not knowing what they do: panic/fear” that leads to the Cross of
Christ:
3Within its citadels God
has shown himself a sure defense.
4Then the kings assembled,
they came on together.
5As soon as they saw it, they were
astounded;
they were in panic, they took to flight;
…9We ponder your steadfast love, O God,
in the midst of your temple [pondering what
we have seen, and ponder the meaning of:].
10Your name, O God, like your praise,
reaches to the ends of the earth.
This is how the temple functions
in the city:
it is a place to train piety, to
reward service with the anxiety-dissolving conviction of God’s steadfast love, and
to send these priest-instructed pilgrims to witness to the steadfast and sustaining
providential properties of God, of God’s primary graciousness.
Our scouring Hebrew poetry for the
traces of the ancient’s interior awareness of God’s imprint—in the principles
we call logos of creation imprinted into the writers’ emotional and aesthetic
sensibilities at the awareness of their surroundings. The stability and beauty
of sustenance to which we join in giving witness to the Spirit-led processes of
repair, what modern Jews call tikkun olam.
This is why the renewability of
the earth—its essence of wild beauty and fecundity-- are necessary for the
human soul to develop its language and vocation in earth repair.
The human imago Dei becomes the
trustee of garden repair, taking on responsibility for its prior degradations
and injustices against providence.
It takes on the hesed constancy of the
will of God to commit steadfastly and lovingly to the Creation of both nature
and neighbor.
God is by *unalterable character
steadfastly committed to God’s creation.
We are to become so too—which
means committing unalterably to every neighbor we encounter and every beauty of
nature and every truth of history.
On earth, Jesus,
the Son of God, manifests his messianic witness of God’s will to love creation
and his mission to repair God’s creation, his ministry to an ethnic people now
universalized to gentile.
This ministry comes to a head on Palm Sunday,
leading to the atonement of the Cross.
The palm leaves signify the
sukkoth watered in the desert—the temple at the oasis we call the Holy
Spirit. The palm branches are the people’s
demonstration that they are in the wilderness sustained by the fallen temple
establishment. They are signaling the
booth festival to the appearance of God. In addition, by waving their Palm
branches the common people are calling for a new temple establishment—a
purified temple along the lines of Ezekiel’s vision.
Let’s read a portion of that
vision:
Eze 41:17–20: on all the walls
all around in the inner room and the nave there was a pattern. 18 It was formed
of cherubim and palm trees, a palm tree between cherub and cherub. Each cherub
had two faces: 19 a human face turned toward the palm tree on the one side, and
the face of a young lion turned toward the palm tree on the other side. They
were carved on the whole temple all around; 20 from the floor to the area above
the door, cherubim and palm trees were carved on the wall.
Ezekiel’s temple altar is
centered and surrounded by Palm trees.
Palm trees mark oases in the
desert.
The Hosannah shouts to Jesus are
for an establishment—which only God can provide—for water in the desert.
Living water in desert of the
people’s exclusion and hegemonic manipulation. Hosannah! God save!
God save us from the current
pharaoh complex of Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.
During their
wanderings in the wilderness, the Israelites had camped at a place notable for
its twelve springs (living water) and seventy palm trees (Ex 15:27; Num 33:9).
The palm tree thus repeatedly becomes linked with God’s blessing, as in:
Psalm 92:12 (NIV):
The righteous will flourish like a palm
tree,
they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon;
planted in the house of the LORD,
they will flourish in the courts of our
God.
After these Palm branching waving
cries of Hosannah—petitions for the blessing of homecoming from exile, according
to the Gospel narratives Jesus immediately invades the outer courts of the
temple—the court of gentiles franchised to give false witness to the character
of God as concerned with transactional religiosity:
to change money to buy birds to
release.
This is a false witness to what
is intended interiorly in the sacrificial system:
that there was a transactional
rather than an ever gracious character of God revealed by sacrifice.
Jesus overturns the furnishings
(the tables of the franchise, the false front of God) and braids whips against
its practitioners.
The messiah was
expected to come and “cleanse” the temple and legitimate the priestly cadres. But
instead, as other scripture makes clear, this stone temple is already
condemned. Jesus’ outer court acts provide the explanation for those who have
ears to hear and eyes to see.
Jesus comes to Jerusalem to lay
the “cornerstone” of a different temple (Ps. 118:22)—his deeds establish the
foundation of that temple in which we as his followers are incorporated and find
our destiny as we *add on to that heavenly *place.
But these acts
get the temple authorities plotting, and Jesus is turned over by the temple
authorities to the Romans for crucifixion.
Our reading from
the Book of Hebrews notes the necessity of a blood atonement to establish a new
temple covenant—this time a temple of the heart seated in the heavenly tent of
meeting where God and lamb are eternally seated.
The
atonement/hilasterion—the “mercy seat”-- what the Book of Numbers calls
and pictures as the Kippurah-- is not a furnishing but an act—a *deed. Underlying
the Hebrew substantive noun is a verbal root:
The atoning deed is the
supplication for mercy. From which *flows
he expiation of judgement for sin. Amen.
Jesus thus
establishes a heavenly form of the temple foretold by Ezekiel—and that is the
temple of mercy. The throne of judgment
represented in the Book of Hebrews portrayal of the old altar is by Christ’s
supplication for forgiveness is made subsidiary to this mercy, and the palm
trees come forth to the altar—better, sprouting like Aaron’s rod in the tent of
meeting of heaven.
In our
incorporation into this cornerstone, humans must necessarily accommodate,
commune, and commit to the terrain and atmosphere
encountered during its Jesus earthly walk. And then apply this to our neighbors and newborns
who come to partner with us in sustaining civilization both in the intended
ecology and in the partnerships and mutuality of vocational neighborliness.
This is the cornerstone of social
ordering in the performances of love.
We are called to
the witness and ethics of what I’m calling “cornerstone life.”
Life in the cornerstone. Life as
the cornerstone.
1) Cornerstone living means we cannot move from the
*patterns laid down by Jesus’ ministry—the ethical commandments and the
creative work of establishing a civilization of care for ALL neighbors we
encounter. There is no *accommodation with violence. NONE.
2) As cornerstones, we live on street corners rather than in
edifices. We attend to needs on street corners rather than blare accusations
masquerading as prayers on street corners.
3) Cornerstone living is fully Christological.
Cornerstone ethics are
egalitarian virtues rather than the consequentialist/strategic ethics of
Christendom in *league with hierarchy-seeking hegemons.
Nassim Taleb, the Black Swan
author, writes, “If someone told you only a few weeks ago that Iran would be at
war, you would have guessed Israel, the US, or perhaps Saudi Arabia; not
Pakistan. It is very, very hard to keep in mind that we're not good at
predicting and even harder to incorporate [prediction of consequences] into a
general policy.”
Even more so, there is no ethic
to bring about a better world from the top down of human authorities no matter
how machined.
4) All instrumental claims—all doctrines—are provisional as
the Holy Spirit guides history.
The only permanence is the
cornerstone: the commandments by Christ to love. Social order flows and unfolds
*intrinsically from love, not from restrictive legalism.
5) It follows: gentleness and joy rather than “thymos”—
the cultural performance of
“rage” and malicious agitation as a sign of the opposite spirit that we are
seeing take shape all around us.
Rage and agitation disqualify their messages.
Ignore them and its spirit.
6) Cornerstone living is Loyal to planet and place:
our language is shaped by history
and environmental surroundings on earth—its processes, cycles, actions,
metaphors, poetics of locality.
Outer space is where our bodies go to die.
And our languages—our souls—too
go to die in its airless and waterless *sterility.
Do not abandon the earth’s
cornerstone vitality—the earth’s essence of renewability and processes of
repair.
That repair is the current human
imaging of God—to sustain the life-giving qualities of the earth for ever more
generations.
7) Cornerstone living is attendant to the present to sustain
the future—our eternal destinies with new neighbors.
If we are past-oriented—believing
we can only rediscover God in some idealized and nostalgic past, we sense the
future as bringing catastrophe. In order to hold on to the illusions of our
favored orders, this past orientation calls us to ever align with “lesser
evils” to preserve stasis.
Kissinger realism.
Cornerstone life NEVER aligns or
accommodates with evil, no matter how relatively lesser.
Thus as I preached on New Year’s
Eve, Christians lament and give humanitarian aid in the case of wars, but do
not arm lesser evils or bomb “greater evils.”
That would be to sustain the
operation and flow of evil.
It’s well-past time to cease
transferring arms to the Levant and Ukraine—to stop trying to make money on
death. Jesus’ overturned those tables.
8) Finally, cornerstone living is other-directed—golden rule
directed.
Directed to the sustaining
renewability of the planet for future generations and the aesthetic value of
nature to revitalize our language and our souls.
Cornerstone living is a temple
that rejects self-interest that zeroes out the other and which degenerates into
the recurrent crises making of strategic cognitive programs and programming:
Our zeroing out others by deception leads to
our own hollowing out, our nihilism, its shadows of despair prefaced by *debilitating anxiety
because we know that we can be zeroed out by others who think, hollowing, mirroring us. We drag each down into voids. The way we look at the world is the way the way the world looks back at us.
By contrast, cornerstone living both recovers
and is renewed by the heart—Jeremiah’s covenant of the renewing heart of flesh
rather than the sickling intentionality of programmed machines.
The temples of the machine are
all around us.
They are the pyramids and tables
of finance unjustly amassed.
For the
cornerstone of virtue ethics, the heart is more foundational than the mind.
The mind of ego is to follow the
heart of Jesus.
Far more than coming to Jerusalem
show us how to die with a *vague hope, Jesus incorporates us into living in the
heavenly city built by God through him. We are, like church alcoves, here and now
building on and building in this cornerstone Jesus’s call is directed to create
civilizations of care and now repair—committing as God’s creatures to the
creation.:
We are earthbound to the broadest
expanse of the emerging threshold of historical ethics of earth repair, not
rejecting but *supplementing this mission by which we build character that builds
confidence that builds hope enduring.
Be sure, the old
way of institutionalized coercion is always the point of its end times.
It ever is as new generations
come in to repeat the mistakes of their parents and the sins of history.
The end times of earthly temple
worship resolve the dialectic of temple and city.
We move through
the cities inside or outside the heavenly temple of Christ, humbly, like riding
a donkey, prophetically coaxing institutional temple authorities to abandon
their social desertifications in search of “order” to embody the oases of
egalitarian *plenty gushing from the spirit.
So which age is
for you?
The old bombs bursting in air
billion dollar death machine necropower flyovers supporting temple builders of
ego and slavery
or the new wide-eyed angel
child’s wonder without suspicion of her backyard, her park down the street by
the neighborhood school, the seashore hikes alongside the cascading ocean?
Are we captivated by the
incursions of imperial wolf packs and eagle flags afar and in virtual reality
of AI propaganda promising pleasure palace pods on Mars,
or the flagless and healing green
pastures of Gilead?
The balm which leads to life, or
the increasing shouts of a dying culture ragingly attempting the impossible: to
create a living order through war and trauma and escape from accountability.
The quiet, the
generous, and the meek in our tender of the heavenly temple, the cornerstone
not laid by human appetites but extends a welcoming and caring hand—that is the
cornerstone built by the divine hand—inviting all to find purpose and a legacy
that endures eternally, beautifully, luminously.
It’s here, it’s not going away.
So I return to
Jody and Peter’s little great-granddaughter who took my breath away on
Christmas Eve:
Let us say “Amen!”
Amen! To the unfolding age of
openness without suspicion.
The age where religion is the virtuous
promotion of neighborliness.
An age where humanity gets down
to imaging Christ in the repair of the earth—
the stage of new generations for
us to teach of nature’s beauty and processes that shaped our historical
languages and allow us to know what is sustaining and what is destructive.
For new generations to take
flight in new discoveries of nature and history and civilizations of care here
on earth.
We’re at a threshold of ages.
Make that a pivot, a cornerstone
for new life—for yours by giving life others.
Please join me in giving truth,
beauty, and new creative and inspiring life an AMEN whenever encountered.
AMEN: may it be so.
AMEN: as it does in the beginning
is now and ever shall be.
AMEN for you and me, our
construction of worlds without end in the enduring city of the Spirit of God.
Amen.
