The Indwelling Dwelling Place

Sermon: Exodus 35:1-29

We all have passages of scripture with which we fight. Relevancy is often hard to find. For me, this passage is one of those. Unlike much of Exodus, this passage is one that forces us to pull meaning out. It isn’t easy and it isn’t given. On the surface, it is a list of items to be used to make the Mishkan, the dwelling place of G…d. Chapters 25-40 of Exodus form an instruction manual about how to make the Tabernacle – a Tabernacle we don’t have. A Tabernacle we aren’t sure ever really existed. In order to find meaning we have to re-imagine, reinvent, and rediscover. This reimagining starts with a story.

Imagine we are a father, a mother. Imagine our baby. Imagine Egypt – dry and hot, sand blowing with every breath of wind. We hold our child close as a slave driver cracks a whip, yelling for everyone to get back to work. We quake, bent over, sheltering the baby as blows rain down. The labor is backbreaking. The work is impossible. The demands for perfection are unreachable.

Our leader has promised us freedom, and we know that the time is coming. The rivers of blood have flowed through the land. The darkness has come. Tonight, we will smear blood on our doorposts, and we will be safe. Our leader has promised.

Imagine, now, the call has come. Moses has told us that G..d has spoken. It’s time to run. From Ramses to Succoth, across the desert – heat beating down on us and our families. No water. No plants. No way to feed our baby. We hurl ourselves cross the Red Sea, surviving only by miracle. Then the Sinai Peninsula, living only on the gifts that Our G…d has dropped on us from heaven. Thirsty and tired, scratched from brambles, sore and stiff, bruised from falling from exhaustion. The babies are screaming; the young ones are too tired to walk anymore, and our backs are bent from the weight and ache of carrying them. We stop, as a people. Gasping, panting, wiping sweat from our eyes, praying that this break will last more than the single nights the other breaks have allowed us.

Moses calls us to gather. Again. All we want is to breath. To rest. We aren’t interested in another message from Moses telling us what to do. We want to focus on the air inside our lungs, hold our babies and pray that the Egyptians stop chasing us for just one day. One blessed day of peace and rest.

But we gather, because Moses is our prophet and we do what he tells us. He will lead us to safety. Here is what he says: We will be safe. Our G…d is with us. Our Sustainer, the Creator, has promised us life and peace, a nation and prosperity. He knows we are tired. He knows we are thirsty. He knows our babies are dying of hunger. But we are here. We are at Sinai and we can rest for a while. Not only can we rest, but G…d has given us instructions. We are to build a tent, a meeting place – a tent gold and silver, blue, purple, and crimson; linen, goats’ hair, fine leather and acacia wood. We will give all we have to this tent, everything we brought out of Egypt, everything we have struggled to carry.

It sounds ridiculous, but Our G…d has commanded it and he has promised that in this tent, in this sacred place, we will always know that G…d resides. Ours is a covenant and G…d is looking to uphold his side of our bargain. We are Adonai’s people and Adonai is going to live with us. For always. Reside and protect. This tent will move with us on the rest of our journey, and that means that G…d will follow us on the rest of our journey. We will never be alone again.

This is the importance of the Tabernacle, the importance of the Tent of meetings. It is a promise. We will never be alone again.

Now imagine another story. Twenty years ago. A woman. Battered and bruised, shades of black and blue that aren’t meant to be on a child of G…d. Three ribs broken. In the hospital, she tells the nurse she fell, but he doesn’t believe her. He holds her hand as she weeps, tells her that his strength is there if she needs it. They sit, not speaking, not praying, but it is enough. She goes from the hospital, not home, but to her sisters and a support group. The silent nurse has saved her life.

Another. A fifteen year old boy, homeless, hungry. Lost from his family, wandering in his own wilderness. Sleeping on the steps of any church in any city, because every city has lost ones. Imagine the pastor who finds him there in the morning, takes him in, makes him coffee, gives him breakfast. It is the first meal he has had in three days. He will never forget the taste or the kindness. Six months later, he is running the meal program out of that church, giving other lost ones the same first taste of safety that he was given.

Another. A celebration. A new baby, a gift to a family. Three women stand together, two in their late thirties, one only 14. She loves her baby enough to give it a safe home. They love her baby enough to bring him into their family, cherish him. They know that he is their own, and the young girl knows that he will be loved.

Another. A widower, after only four short years of marriage. Left behind, alone, the man he loves gone. Turning to the words of another great widower he finds solace. In the midst of platitudes and condolences, in the midst repeated “it will get better with time”s, he finds an author and, not peace, but understanding.. The words of one man, lost in grief, reaching out through time to another in grief. Together, they can stay alive, make it though their agony.

The nurse. The pastor. The mothers. The writer. The battered woman and the homeless boy. Hold them in your hearts as we turn back to Exodus. Hold them in your hearts, because these are the people about whom the text is written.

Moses calls the people of Israel, the children of G…d, to bring everything they have to offer to the Tabernacle. Our gold and silver, our yarn of the highest quality. He calls us to bring our skill and our talent, to build the Tent of Meeting. There is much to be done. The Tent needs clasps and frames, pillars, bars, poles, curtains. We have to create tables, lamp stands, lights and incense burners. Our carpenters build altars and the seat of judgment. Our weavers create tapestries, coverings, and altar cloths. Moses calls everyone with a willing heart to bring everything we have to create the dwelling place of G…d on earth.

Over 2000 years have passed since the Exodus from Egypt and the building of the Tabernacle. The dwelling place of G…d has changed. What if we imagine a new kind of tent? An Indwelling dwelling place. What if we are the tables, the tent poles, the altar clothes and the incense burners? What if we are not only the skilled craftspeople who build the tabernacle, but also the craftswork that is being built? What if our nurse is a tent peg holding up the dwelling place of G…d? What if our battered woman is echoing in her bruises the colors of the cloth on the altar?

Exodus calls us to build the dwelling place of G…d. We build this dwelling place by embodying the G…d in all that we do. Each of us, in each of our actions, are tent peg in the dwelling place.

What an awful responsibility.

Charity, justice, kindness, compassion. These are the corners of the dwelling place of Adonai. The nurse, the writer, the mothers, the widower – bruised and broken, strong and healing – we embody the Tabernacle. Every relationship we participate in, every action we perform, a chance for us to contribute to the building of this dwelling place, and this means that we are responsible for the ways in which the dwelling place is built. Will we be, as Moses calls for, people with willing hearts who bring what we have to the Tabernacle? Will we be the nurse, the writer, the pastor who feeds? Will we be both builders and tent pegs, embodying the Tabernacle, or will we shut off our hearts and close our eyes to the needs of the world? Will we feed? Will we love? Will we embody G..d and assure that no one wanders through the wilderness alone?

Exodus is a call. A call to justice and kindness. Compassion and mercy. A call to relationship and awareness of the indwelling dwelling place of G…d. We all have strengths and skills. We all have gifts of gold and find yarn. Our words, our soothing hands when someone is in pain. Our willingness to invite just one more person to dinner, to fit one more mouth at the table. We all have strength to hold the tent up. The question in Exodus is: Will we stand up and answer the call?