In our class on Wednesday nights we have been studying a book entitled “Simply Christian” by N.T. Wright.  It has been a good study.  Wright is attempting, in his book, to present the basics of Christianity in a straight forward, story format.  He is attempting to appeal to an audience who may not believe in Christianity but who would like to understand the basics.  In chapter five of his book he talks about our concept of God and where God lives.  We call it heaven. And we call where we live earth. In this chapter he discusses the potential relationships between heaven and earth.  He says there are really only three fundamental options of understanding God’s space and its connection with our space.

Option One:  Some people view God’s space and our space as one.  If God’s place is a sphere and ours is a sphere then they are synonymous. Everything is in God and God is in everything.  God is everywhere and everywhere is God. You are god and I am god.  This chair is God.  This is formally called pantheism.  Pan meaning all and theism, God.   Pure pantheism is difficult.  You really have to try hard to believe that there's divinity in everything, including mosquitoes, cancer cells, tsunamis, hurricanes, and broccoli.  Broccoli is God. That’s hard for me to swallow.  And what do you do with evil.  Either nothing is evil or God is evil.  It is a difficult option.

Option Two according to Wright, is that there is no connection between God’s space and our place.  God’s sphere is completely disconnected from our sphere.  This is called deism.   God cranked the universe up and is off doing his own thing.  So, we are on our own.  “Yeh, God may be out there somewhere but he isn’t going to bother me and so I won’t bother him.”  Lots of people live this way, they are practical deists.  But if the spheres are far apart how do you explain your desire to pray, or seeing God in a newborn or that empty longing in your heart to have a relationship with something bigger or miracles?  It just doesn’t sit well, at least with me. God has abandoned us. That is not a pleasant option.

Option three, you may suspect is the one N.T. Wright advocates.  God’s space and our space overlap.  There are connections between the two spheres there are holy places where God intersects with us.  Listen to a paragraph from his book.

“This strange presence (interconnection of the spheres) is the subplot of many of the early Bible stories. Abraham keeps meeting God. Jacob sees a ladder between heaven and earth, with angels going to and fro. Moses discovers that he's standing on holy ground—a place, in other words, where heaven and earth intersect—as he watches the burning bush. Then, when Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt, God goes before them in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. When they come to Mount Sinai, God appears on the summit, giving Moses the Law. Indeed, a considerable part of the biblical book of Exodus is devoted (rather to our surprise, after the fast-paced narrative of the first half of the book) to a description of the portable shrine where God will condescend to dwell in the midst of his people. Evocatively, it is called "the Tent of Meeting." It is a place where heaven and earth come together.”

Option Three; God’s realm and ours are not synonymous, nor are they distant, but there are special times and special places when the two circles overlap!
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This “Tent of Meeting”, also know as the Tabernacle, later becomes a permanent and gorgeous building in Jerusalem known as the Temple.  Solomon builds this glorious temple and from then on the Israelites understand that the place where the sphere of God’s heaven and the sphere of our existence, our space time continuum intersect in the Most Holy Place above the Ark of the Covenant.  Listen to the account of the dedication of the Temple.

1 Kings 8:1-13 Then King Solomon summoned into his presence at Jerusalem the elders of Israel, all the heads of the tribes and the chiefs of the Israelite families, to bring up the ark of the LORD's covenant from Zion, the City of David.  2 All the men of Israel came together to King Solomon at the time of the festival in the month of Ethanim, the seventh month.  3 When all the elders of Israel had arrived, the priests took up the ark,  4 and they brought up the ark of the LORD and the Tent of Meeting and all the sacred furnishings in it. The priests and Levites carried them up,  5 and King Solomon and the entire assembly of Israel that had gathered about him were before the ark, sacrificing so many sheep and cattle that they could not be recorded or counted.  6 The priests then brought the ark of the LORD's covenant to its place in the inner sanctuary of the temple, the Most Holy Place, and put it beneath the wings of the cherubim.  7 The cherubim spread their wings over the place of the ark and overshadowed the ark and its carrying poles.  8 These poles were so long that their ends could be seen from the Holy Place in front of the inner sanctuary, but not from outside the Holy Place; and they are still there today.  9 There was nothing in the ark except the two stone tablets that Moses had placed in it at Horeb, where the LORD made a covenant with the Israelites after they came out of Egypt.  10 When the priests withdrew from the Holy Place, the cloud filled the temple of the LORD.  11 And the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD filled his temple.  12 Then Solomon said, "The LORD has said that he would dwell in a dark cloud;  13 I have indeed built a magnificent temple for you, a place for you to dwell forever."

God’s presence filled the Temple. That must have been a spectacular day for Solomon and all the people to visually see the two spheres join together in the Most Holy Place of the Temple. God is not everything, nor has God abandoned us.  God cares deeply for us and has interjected his presence into our world.  There are places where the two spaces overlap. One of those holy places was the Temple.
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Solomon’s glorious Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC. For 70 or so years there was no place of intersection, no holy place for God’s presence to be visible on this earth.  But then after the captives had returned from exile to Jerusalem they rebuilt the Temple.  But this Temple was not nearly as beautiful as Solomon’s. But it was still a holy place. Many years later right before Jesus was born it was remodeled to some of its former glory by Herod the Great.  And it was into Herod’s Temple that Jesus walked one Sunday morning and performed a stunningly symbolic act. 

Matthew 21:12-16  Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.  13 "It is written," he said to them, "'My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you are making it a 'den of robbers.'"  14 The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them.  15 But when the chief priests and the teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he did and the children shouting in the temple area, "Hosanna to the Son of David," they were indignant.  16 "Do you hear what these children are saying?" they asked him. "Yes," replied Jesus, "have you never read, "'From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise'?"

What did Jesus mean?  What was he doing throwing over tables in the Temple?  I believe he was symbolically saying, “The temple was under the condemnation of God.”  It was no longer an intersection between the two spaces.  God was not there.

But did you notice the odd verse in the middle of Jesus cleansing the Temple and the response of the chief priests and teachers?  He was healing and he was praised by the children.  Suddenly we realize what Jesus was saying. “No longer is this Temple the intersection of the spheres, instead, I am!”  In the person of Jesus there was the presence of God in this world!  Jesus became the Temple!

Matthew 1:21-23  She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins."  22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet:  23 "The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel"--which means, "God with us."

Jesus is the intersection of the spheres.  Jesus was God’s interjection into our space and time.  Jesus became the Temple where God dwelt.   Not only was Jesus the intersection of the realms he did something that changed everything. 
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Notice a conversation between Jesus and his disciples in the upper room just hours before the cross.  He knows he is about to die and has some last words of encouragement to give to his followers.  Watch what he promises.

 

John 14:10-20   Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works.  11 Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.  12 Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.  13 I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.  14 If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.  15 "If you love me, you will keep my commandments.  16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.  17 This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.  18 "I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.  19 In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.  20 On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.

This is amazing!  This is too good to be true!  This is wonderful!  We who have faith in Jesus, who love and obey Jesus also become intersections of the two spheres.  Those who are in Christ have a piece of eternity within them.  Buzz Lightyear is right is right after all, “We have infinity and beyond within us!” The overlap of heaven and earth is within each of us as Christians.  You have a piece of heaven inside of you.  The Spirit lives in you as the Temple of God.  Just like in Solomon’s day when the glory of the Lord Almighty moved into the Most Holy Place, when you become a Christian you become the Ark of the Covenant and God moves in to live forever! What an amazing concept!

Ephesians 2:21-22   In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.  And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20  Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.

We have a promise from Jesus that we, just like he was, we are in God and God is in us.  We are the intersection of the spheres.
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If you were here last week you might remember that we were talking about dart throwing.  I had listed all kinds of things you might say that could hurt other people’s hearts.  Things like tone of voice, and kibitzing and gossip and lying, and bickering and others.  I told you last week about Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and how they apply to stopping throwing darts. 

Remember I bottom lined it for you.

Then I asked, “Well how do I engage the Spirit stop throwing darts? What’s the trick of allowing the external force of the Spirit to change me?”  I promised that would be the subject of today’s sermon.  Well, it begins – just begins- with this thought; You are the Temple. You are the Most Holy place, the place between the cherubim where the cloud of God’s presence lives.  You are the special intersection of eternity in the world of mortality.  You are the holy ground upon which God dwells.  Now what did God tell Moses to do when he stepped onto the holy ground of the burning bush?  Take off your sandals.  Why?  It was holy.

You must live holy because God is holy.  Be holy because I am holy declares the Lord; the Lord who lives in you.  It’s like washing a car.  I used to have a shiny red 1999 Pontiac TransAm.  The last time I drove it, I drove it threw some tar on the highway.  It was a horrendous amount of tar.  I drove straight to the car wash; which didn’t help.  Then Tanya and I spent a couple of hours painstakingly removing every spot of tar from my car and then washed it again. 

Now at the same time my daughter who now has my shiny red 1999 Pontiac TransAm brought a rental car home to get my car.  The rental car was a dirty, bug spotted Chevy Cobalt.  Do you think I washed the rental car?  Why?  Because it was not special. It was only transportation.  We need to view ourselves as a shiny red 1999 Pontiac TransAm.  We are not rental cars. We are not ordinary.  We are not only of this world.  We are instead the Holy Place where God dwells.  How can we throw darts?  We are the intersection of heaven!  We are the temple of the Spirit.  We must be clean!

As I said this is the beginning point of not throwing darts.  There is more to come. There are additional forces at work on us.  But, more on that… next week.  Let me say here that your holiness, your life without darts begins by owning what you are… You are One with the Spirit!