There was no temple in the city. Heaven is a place without a temple.

A Barna Poll in 2016 found while 73% of Americans identify themselves as Christians, only 37% are likely to be in church (and people typically lie about church attendance in polls).

A 2016 Pew Research Center poll found that 20% of the religiously unaffiliated are turned off by institutional religion. It’s all about being “spiritual,” not “religious,” it seems. 

This vision of the New Jerusalem at the end of time that the writer of the book of Revelation had has a lot to do with life for us today. The connection has to do with the fact that God has become incarnate in Jesus Christ.

The Incarnation: What do we mean when we talk about the Incarnation? First and foremost, the Incarnation refers to the fact that in the man Jesus, God has taken on human flesh. God is found in earthly things. (Preachers believing in Christ’s real presence in the Lord’s Supper might also add how the church believes that God s actually in the bread and wine.) We even believe that God is present in our church buildings when we gather around the altar to worship him. A God who became incarnate in Jesus still becomes incarnate in earthly things today.

Historically, one of the reasons that church buildings have been considered special, even holy, is related to Christianity’s incarnation emphasis. But it is also related to Christianity’s roots in Judaism. Recall that the ancient Hebrews believed that Yahweh lived in the Jerusalem temple (2 Chronicles 7:1; 1 Kings 9:3). This is what makes our lesson all the more striking, when we are told that there will be no temple in the New Jerusalem. There will be no temple there, for its temple is the Lord God.    
  The point of this vision seems to be that we are worship God spiritually. In our gospel lesson for today,  Jesus promises to send the Spirit (John 14:26). God is Spirit! John Calvin made this point nicely: “For God is incomprehensible, a Spirit above all spirit, light above all light.”^[1]

Famed twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich defined “Spirit” as that which includes all that is in a unity, but a unity with a purpose. In that sense, he claimed, God is Spirit.^[2]           

Calvin and Tillich agree. As Spirit, God is not unduly attached to anything earthly. That’s why we can’t ever fully know him, Calvin contends. And if he was attached especially to something earthly, God could not be what unifies everything, Tillich adds, “Consequently, the religiously unaffiliated are correct up to a point. God is not just about religions and their activities!”

Because God is Spirit, worship needs to be spiritual, not unduly attached to visible means like a church building, a favorite preacher, or particular church activities. We should not forget the Incarnation, that God became incarnate. But we need to seek to worship the way we will in heaven, the way we will at the end of time. And that means seeking to worship God spiritually, not just through his incarnate means. 

This seems like a contradiction: On one hand contending that God is linked to earthly things (as incarnate) and also maintaining freedom from these things. And what is the significance of all this for our daily lives and our walk of faith?

Christian faith involves a balancing act. Here on earth the faithful need to seek the golden mean between extremes. We Christians do that with the Trinity, saying that God is three but also one. However, you can’t stress his threeness to the point that God’s unity is compromised and you wind up with three gods. And you can’t stress his unity to the point that no real distinction is made between the three persons. You have to have it both ways. 

Same with the idea that Christ is both divine and human, but still one. You want to keep those two natures of Jesus distinct. But you can’t stress that so much that you wind up with two different people living inside Jesus’ body. The unity of Jesus’ person must be protected, but not to the point of abolishing the distinctions between his divine and human natures.

So it is with God’s presence: We need the “golden” mean here too. We need to find a way to affirm both the spirituality of (defying his absolute identification with anything that is institutional and physical) and also the incarnational nature of our Lord. We want to affirm his presence in Christ, in the church, in the Bible, in preaching, and in worship. But we also want to affirm with the dream reported on in our lesson that God is more than the visible means he uses, that he is a God who needs no sun or moon because his very presence lights up the heavens and the earth. Before such a God all our words, good deeds, church programs, church buildings, and ideas melt away into insignificance. We want to affirm a God not bound by ecclesiastical institution and not too churchy.

Now don’t get me wrong in all this. I’m not suggesting that the way to the Christian life involves rejection of the Incarnation, the ignoring of the sacraments, of preaching, and of church life in order to attain true spirituality and the knowledge of God. No, I’m saying just the opposite, that we need to keep the emphasis on the Incarnation, we need to continue to venerate and respect the visible and creaturely entities through which God reveals himself. There is nothing wrong with respect for church buildings, veneration of the sacraments, and the sermon. Certainly there is nothing wrong with our commitments to and enthusiasm for programs and other work in our congregation and the wider church. The only thing is that these must be kept in the proper perspective, in a creative tension that God portrayed in our second lesson, the God whose majesty requires no temple, whose very presence lights up the heavens and the earth.

It is good that God became incarnate and still reveals himself incarnationally. This is his way of making every realm in life his business, of taking away our excuse that he is not present in every sphere of our lives. This takes away our excuses for not worshiping, because an Incarnate God is present in the ordinary things of life, including our singing and liturgy.

The problem, you see, is not with God’s incarnational propensities but our sinful condition louses things up, our propensity to take creatures and make them our gods. We make our own gods, Martin Luther said, when we put our trust in some physical entity or value.^[3] Too often we are guilty of making money, pleasure, power, or our jobs, even our families and church programs our gods.   

Our second lesson and its picture of the God who needs no temple calls us away from undue fascination with our church buildings. If the majority of church’s time and energy is devoted to questions about property and our programs, if it’s easier to get people to meetings and fellowship events than to study the scriptures in a disciplined way, then something’s wrong, and the religiously unaffiliated are right to call us to task. Then we’re forgetting our second lesson and its picture of the God who needs no temple.

Our lesson calls us away from idolatry; it calls us to spiritual worship of God, to seek more experience of the presence of God who needs no temple, whose glory lights up the world and our lives. This kind of spirituality, faith that puts spiritual development, Bible reading, and prayer at the center of our activities, this sort of spirituality is what it will take to make us a vibrant congregation — a spirituality that can attract the millennials and the religiously unaffiliated.

Let us continue to celebrate God’s Incarnation in our buildings, in our programs, in our organizations, and in our fellowship. But let us not forget that all these must diminish, must take second place in our lives and in the commitments and activities of our church, second place to the God of our second lesson who does not need these things.

Next time you feel drawn away from spirituality, too busy to pray, to contemplate God’s mysteries, too caught up in the accumulation of wealth, influence, power, even church programs, remember the vision of this second lesson. The Incarnate God is present in the most ordinary earthly things you are now encountering. God does not need those things; his glory and presence far outweigh the earthly activities in which we are engaged. Nothing that has been created (even church activities) can ultimately compete with the magnificent, loving God into whose presence we have come. Oh how good and glorious it is to be in the presence of God!  

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