Sunday: The Mastery of Sacred Places
WEEK 9
SUNDAY
THE MASTERY OF SACRED PLACES
1 Peter 2:9-10
We now look at a new mastery which came into being with the coming of the Holy Spirit: the mastery of sacred places.
The Holy Spirit came upon the waiting group, not in the temple or in a synagogue, but in the upper room. And the upper room was a home: “they went up to the upstairs room, where they were staying. . . . All were united in their devotion to prayer . . .” (Acts 1:13, 14). The Holy Spirit came upon them when they were in the most common place—a place where we all live—a home. Under that apparently insignificant fact lays a deep significance. It was an amazing emancipation for religion. For up to this time religion had been associated with sacred places, sacred vestments, and sacred persons. Now the center of gravity in religion shifted from places to persons, from vestments to vitality, from services to service. It was a most important shift. It saved religion from sterility and saved humanity to vitality. Religion was put where it belongs—in the human heart. Paul, brought up under the spell of temple holiness, announced this extraordinary shift: “Don’t you know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? . . . God’s temple is holy, which is what you are” (1 Cor 3:16-17). Here holiness had shifted from places to persons. And rightly so.
There is no such thing as a holy place. A place has no moral qualities since it has no moral choice. “There is nothing good but a good will, and there is nothing bad but a bad will,” said Kant.* And we may add: there is nothing holy but a holy person; there is nothing unholy but an unholy person. Holy persons gathered together make a holy place, not the other way around.
This coming of the Holy Spirit on persons, rather than on places, was one of the most important happenings in history. It took religion out of the magical and put it in the moral, and in doing so universalized it. And further it saved the temple. For the temple was no longer the center; the persons in the temple were. As such the temple could be used.
O Lord, we stand in awe at your gentle but powerful revolutions. And now our hearts are your temple. That heightens our responsibility. Help us to be true. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Since I am the temple of God, I shall keep that temple unprofaned this day.
*This direct quotation was not located, but see Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and other Works on the Theory of Ethics, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbot (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1879).