Today
we, the Church, celebrate a church, and not just any church: we celebrate the
cathedral church of Rome, the church on whose façade is inscribed omnium ecclesiarum Urbis et Orbis mater et
caput – the mother and head of all churches of the City (that is, Rome) and
the world. By celebrating this one
church, we’re really celebrating every church, from our marble marvel here, to
the grandeur of the Basilica, to the tin roof structure with only three walls I
worshipped in when I worked in Mexico.
And we celebrate these works of human hands, because God made us with
hands, and with feet, and with behinds, and hearts and lungs… with bodies. We don’t worship God neatly in our minds, but
bodily, and bodies need buildings.
What
Robert Wilkin says of the importance of icons can be said just as much of the
importance of church buildings: “We tire easily of abstractions and crave
visible signs. The icon [is] a tangible
pledge that things [can] become other than they are. This [is] no less true of human beings. For if wood and paint [can] depict the living
God, then creatures of flesh and blood [can] aspire to likeness with God.”
Ezekiel
knew what it was like to lose your sacred space. Ezekiel was born in Jerusalem in a priestly
family and knew the greatness of the Temple, the place where God’s people could
come and experience the simultaneous mystery of God’s grandeur and otherness
and his intense desire to be with his people, to accompany them, comfort them, and
challenge them. And Ezekiel saw that
Temple destroyed, by Babylonian invaders.
He experience forced deportation, robbed of Temple, of Land, of kingdom,
of all the ways he knew God’s blessing and love. But, by Babylonian waters, he discovers
something new. He discovers that God is
still present to him, that God doesn’t need those things to reach out and call
him into relationship. He’s gifted with
visions, not just for him, but for him to use to sustain his fellow Israelites,
to help them survive this time of testing and pain. But God knows that we need these things, God
knows that we need concrete, tangible stuff
to form in us an awareness of the reality of his constant accompaniment, so he
gives Ezekiel this vision that we read as our first reading today: he shows
them that the Temple will be rebuilt.
And
the holiness of the Temple is encountered in what flows out of it. Out of the Temple flows pure, living water;
water that can make life grow in a desert; water that gives life to fish and to
wondrous fruit trees that know no winter and produce twelve harvests a year and
whose leaves are medicinal. Out of the
Temple flows water that creates life and the potential for life to flourish:
nourishment and healing for all. The
Temple Ezekiel dares to dream of is one out of which flows the seeds of the new
Eden. Life as life was meant to be comes
from this Temple.
What
flows from our church? Or, it might be
more proper to ask… who flows from our church?
Food, certainly, flows from our pantry out to families in need in our
neighborhood, carried by our St. Vincent de Paul society members. But, the beating heart of what flows out is
us.
What
would it look like if we were to be that water Ezekiel dreamed of for our world? If we were to flow out of this place bringing
nourishment and healing to a waiting world?
What can we discover around us that needs that? And what needs to happen here, in this place,
that we might be transformed into such a spring of life?
Because
we need to be purified too. We don’t
come here as neutral mules, to carry God into the world unaffected. No, we come here to be fed and to become what
we receive, that we might bring ourselves, purified and revivified and be the sanctification
we seek.
The
Temple was rebuilt, as Ezekiel wanted, and it’s that rebuilt, Second Temple,
that Jesus stepped foot into. It’s that
Second Temple that wasn’t functioning as a locus of healing, that Jesus needed
to purify. And Jesus acted to purify it,
but within a generation or so of Jesus’ visit, that Second Temple would be
destroyed by Roman Imperial Power. But
God’s Spirit was not left without a home.
Paul makes the point simply: we are a Temple of the Holy Spirit. And just like the Second Temple, Jesus acts
to purify us. Jesus acts with zeal that
we might be at once Temple and healing river, flowing forth.
We don’t
need animals to purchase for sacrifice anymore.
The lamb has been slain for us. We
have our lives to offer; lives God claims as his own, lives God acts to purify,
lives that can flow out to glorify God.
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