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Have you ever been in a TV station control room? It’s like being in the center of the universe. Earlier this week, I was invited to be interviewed on a news program. It was over zoom, so I had to click the link and join in. I sat there watching the news program happening – commercial breaks, other news stories going on. Then, a voice cut through to say, “Hello Rev Forasteros. Can you count to ten for us so we can do a levels check?”
There was a team on the other side of that zoom screen pulling all the different signals in – the anchor, my zoom feed, the commercials and turning it all into one coherent news program. Making it so that the anchor could interview me seamlessly for my little segment.
What seemed like an effortless, simple 5 min news segment took a ton of behind the scenes work and expertise.
I think this sort of control room is a pretty good analogy for how ancient people thought about what happened when they worshiped at their Temple. When you go back to Exodus and look at God’s instructions for the Temple, there’s a ton of Garden of Eden imagery – from the trees to the seas. That’s because they thought of a Temple as a sort of miniature model of the universe.
So God runs the universe from the throne room of heaven. And the Temple is the earthly version of God’s throne room. And worship was the way we partnered with God, the way we do our part to participate in the ongoing creation and sustaining of the world.
The Temple was the place where heaven and earth overlap.
If you were with us a few weeks ago, you may remember we talked about how, in John’s gospel in particular, Jesus refers to his bodily presence as God’s True Temple.
Which makes a sort of sense: Jesus is God and Human. He’s the very place where heaven and earth overlap. And on Easter Sunday, we talked about how Jesus’ resurrection represents the beginning of a new creation.
That’s a lot when some of us are just starting to feel the coffee kick in, I know. But
