Temporary Tent, Eternal Dwelling (for paper) Dec 23

Temporary Tent Eternal Dwelling for paper               Rev. Terry Goerz, Redeemer Lutheran Church

We are born with a sense of place. We are born into a family, into a community, into a nation. We are Canadians at home in High Prairie, Alberta, or some other defined local. We are not made to wander aimlessly without a place. When God made Adam and Eve, He didn’t just have them roam over the face of the earth. He put them in a place, an ordered place, a garden. The wilderness is no-place, chaotic and disorganized. Wild. The garden of Eden was Adam and Eve’s place, the place where humanity was most like God, reflecting His image to the creation, enjoying the fruits of creation, walking and talking with God in the cool of the day.

Sin displaced us. It drove us from the Garden. It took us from the place where we were most at home and set us in a hostile wilderness of weeds and sweat and pain and death. Sin took away our original place and drove us into lostness. We are now not at home. We’re lost, longing for a home, a place that we can’t seem to find. We’re restless. We move from one place to another, hoping, longing, searching for that place called “home,” that garden place where we can once again be our original selves, be most like God once again, but we can’t seem to find it. The apostle Paul described that longing for home in this way, “Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.” 2 Corinthians 5: 1 – 5

We are, as it were, on something of a “camping trip” in the wilderness of this life, living in an earthly tent longing to put on our heavenly dwelling. And therein lies the difference between our life now and as it originally was. It’s the difference between a temporal “tent” and an eternal “dwelling.” So long as we are living in a temporal tent in the wilderness, we will be restless and not at home.

You know that “groaning” of which the apostle Paul speaks. It may be the groaning of arthritis or cancer or heart disease or any number of other little reminders that you are not living in your permanent perfected dwelling and that this body of yours has an eviction notice and destruction date stamped on it. “The wages of Sin is Death,” and Sin always pays out its wages. The groaning is also a spiritual groaning, a longing to be free from sin and temptation; but being unable to free yourself. It’s the longing for peace, love, justice that seems unattainable in this life. And it is unattainable precisely because your old Adam works against it. He needs to die.

Now this “tent” of which Paul is speaking should be understood as “our body.” To be physically alive is to be in the body. We are creatures of body; and soul and spirit, spiritual creatures with a soul and spirit living in a physical body. As the psalmist said, when the body and spirit are separated, we’re dead, not alive. That’s the definition of death, the separation of our soul and spirit from our body. To be alive is to be in the body. Eternal life is unending life in the resurrected body. That’s why we confess in the Apostles Creed “we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” And we believe that in that order. First the death of our physical body, our tent, then resurrection with a perfected body, and then life everlasting in that perfected body that will then be suited to dwell in eternity. We would not want to live eternally with our present sin inclined body. Now we live in a tent, a temporary home. Then we will live in a house built by God, an eternal home, a “spiritual body” as St. Paul calls it in 1 Corinthians 15, a home eternal on the New Heaven and Earth. Then we will truly have our place again in the fullest sense of place. Then we will truly be at home again with the Lord.

Blessings.