26 July 2014 - greenhouse

26 July 2014 - greenhouse

But here you are, putting your trust in deceitful words to your own loss!

What do these deceitful words tell us?  They say to trust in the things that are made rather than in the one who makes all things.  The deceit tells us that we will be fine to trust in the temple of the LORD without trusting in God.  We think we can give God an hour in his temple and then go out and sin boldly, burning incense to Baal, or consumerism, or entertainment, or sex, money, or power. We are too wrapped up in ourselves to give God more than an hour in his temple and yet we imagine that he will remain with us.

He wants to remain with us.  That is the whole of his temple and the various church buildings in which it manifests itself to us.  These churches are meant to be beautiful.  They are meant to make us say "How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord, mighty God!"  We are meant to desire them, not use them as leverage to go out and sin.  Our soul should yearn and pine for these courts precisely because it is where God is found.

The LORD tells us to reform "so that I may remain with you in this place."  He does want to meet us in the Church he establishes for us.  But to do so we must be there in heart and not just in body.  We must bring all that we are and not just check off a box on a list.  We need to recognize as the early Christians do "Sine dominico non possumus" without the LORD's day we cannot live.  For them it is a worthy reason to be martyred, more important than their physical lives.  We need to begin to see it this way, too.  Without Sunday, without Mass, without the LORD in his temple, our lives begin to fall apart.   On the other hand:

Blessed they who dwell in your house!
continually they praise you.
Blessed the men whose strength you are!
They go from strength to strength.

His temple can be a place where we can spend time in good soil.  We can expend less effort competing for the nutrients we need because they are so abundant.  We can grow in the light from the Son who dwells in these courts.  No wonder the psalmist would rather have one day here than elsewhere.  We all bring weeds and wheat in our souls when we step through this threshold.  But when we choose to enter intentionally, trusting in God, we do find that the weeds are unable to steal from us the water of life or to take our share of the good soil.  When we come before God with all that we are and trust in him we find ourselves gathered into his barn.  He will use us to feed the world!