Today’s feast is the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, the Pope’s Cathedral in Rome. The Gospel Story (John 2:13-22) is Jesus chasing the money changers out of the temple. In the days of Jesus the Temple was seen as the only place Yahweh God was. It was a physical place. As happens a lot with religion, the people who worked at and ran the Temple over the years came up with a series of rules that true Israelites had to obey or else. Laws became the whole rationale for existence – something Jesus didn’t like. The laws that told the people what animals had to be sacrificed for what purpose, also allowed people into the temple to sell those animals. There was, as there is now, money in religion. In our day, every time the liturgical books are retranslated new issues have to be bought, and so, there is money to be made. The majority opinion sees the story pretty much as Jesus getting mad at how the temple hangers-on treated both the temple and the people. As usual, the minority opinion can be as personal as I let it.
In the Second Reading Paul reminds us who we really are. He shifts the focus from the temple building to ourselves: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?. . . the temple of God, which you are, is holy.”(1 Corinthians 3:9c-11, 16-17). This is not something we think about all that much. This might have something to do with how we see or “understand” God. For many folks God, Abba, is some kind of a “super being” who is “out there” somewhere, watching us, looking for us to make mistakes, to “commit sins”, so he can punish us somehow, and being holy is saying prayers all the time, thinking holy “thoughts”, not committing sins. Yet, when we take the chance and ask to know him in our life we find this is not the case at all. Being holy comes to mean being who we really are, with all our faults and foibles, as we try to be more open Abba happening in everything. It is worth noting that we can not come to know Abba by thinking and definitions, only by openness, trust, and love. All our dogmas and definitions point us to Abba, and at tines we have to let go of them, go where they point us, and so come to understand what they are saying to us in our everyday life. It is not a matter of “earning” Abba’s love, but as recognizing Abba loving us just as we are in our here and now.
Paul tells us we need to build a foundation for Jesus to be in our life, a free will act on our part. Each of us must develop ways to enter into our own relationship with Christ. This can be a thorny area affected by our religious tradition. We have to want to be aware of and experience a relation with Jesus, with Abba, led by the Spirit, and make a conscious effort in this direction. When we allow Jesus to be the foundation of how we live every day, we might well be amazed how real this all gets. It is not a matter of thinking holy thoughts and saying prayers all the time. It is a matter of asking the grace to be open to Abba however Abba wants to let us recognize him, where he wants us to go, what he wants us to do. This becomes a very real matter of experience. It might be along the lines of telling Abba “Today I want to be open to you whatever you bring into my life”. We might get to the point where we say, “By your grace I welcome everything that comes into my life today because it is of you”. This becomes a way of life that impacts us in ways we can’t really believe until we see it happening in us every day. It becomes a matter of ongoing and life changing experience.
With all the turmoil and violence happening all around us these days, we need to get in touch with that quiet place deep within us where we can be alone with Abba. We benefit from a prayer practice that we do every day faithfully. There are many such practices: Centering Prayer, Ignation meditation where we imagine ourselves as the different persons in the Gospel Stories, reading a small portion of the Gospel every day. There is no one size fits all. Our prayer practice isn’t trying to convince Abba to be in our life. It is for us, helping us to be alert when Abba says something to us, or gets involved in our life in unexpected ways, as really happens. It helps us lay aside our expectations and come to recognize the reality of Abba being in our life, and giving us some awareness of what is happening in us. This does not mean we will always be aware of Abba. There are times when we still feel very alone. Often this means that Abba is moving us to a deeper level in our relationship. Again, this really happens.
Our relationship with Abba cuts across all generations and traditions. Abba creates each of us as we are, something we have difficulty getting our heads around. Prayer is a sacred space for us where we come to be open to Abba in the setting of our real every day life with all its experiences and challenges. We don’t look to understand Abba, or why things, good and bad, happen as they do. We come to experience and accept that Abba loves and creates us as we are, with our weaknesses, our sins whatever they may be, our hopes and dreams, us as we are. This goes far beyond religious traditions which so often equate the “will of God” with their own particular practices and traditions.
We come to “know” Abba is in everything. Often, especially in the face of great evil, this makes no sense at all, yet we know it is true. We cannot fit Abba into our ideas and categories, what is of Abba as what is not. As we go through our day a worthwhile goal is to try our best to chose whatever course of action leads to deepening Abba’s life in us. As we look at this and try our best live it, our life, our priorities, our awareness, change in ways that we can see, but cannot explain. Paul’s words “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”, speak truth to us as we move along on our journey with everyone else in our life. Each of us, and all of us together, are “the temple of God, which is holy”. Let’s look at this for a while. Just sayin . . .