I mentioned in my weekly email to the congregation this week that I have a complicated relationship with the New Testament book of Hebrews, a snippet of which we heard a few seconds ago. Frankly, it’s letter and an argument that has never quite resonated with me, something I’ll try to explain in a few seconds. Nevertheless, a couple of thousands of years ago someone did think they were making a clever point about the nature of Christ’s death and the traditions of animal sacrifice used in Judaism and other religions, so much so that others likely attached the apostle Paul’s name to this work, hoping it would get more traction, more eyeballs on the parchment, so to speak – the more important the apostle, the more likely you would get your work read. But no serious Christian or secular scholars believe that Paul wrote it – the use of the Greek language is so different than the way it was used in the known writings of Paul that it’s rare to find anyone making the case he really wrote it, except in very conservative Christian scholarly circles. But it’s simply not just the use language alone that seems off when it comes to attributing it to Paul, but the ideas themselves. It’s true Paul was certainly all about trying to bridge the divide between his Judaism and this new thing he had embraced, this faith in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, something you see in Romans and 1 Corinthians, where he talks about the practical elements of being a Jew who follows after the way of Jesus, with all the practical questions about food and circumcision that came up for new believers in those early years. But the book of Hebrews’ focus on the inside baseball of the Jewish Temple rituals and spaces, and the role of the High Priest, and how Jesus has become that High Priest, etc, well, all that seems not all that interesting to Paul in his other writings. But there is one other thing that makes me wary of this book, which is its explicit belief that Christianity should replace Judaism, that we Christians have it right and the Jews do not because they have not accepted this Jesus of Nazareth as the Jewish Messiah. That belief is found in other parts of the New Testament, no doubt, but here it really shines, so to speak, and now the text comes to us with history tainted by a legacy of oppression of Jews by us Christians, rooted in this belief that Judaism shouldn’t exist because Christianity is Judaism’s natural ending, that Christianity should supersede Judaism, and end it, really. You don’t need to imagine how this warped belief has effected the Jewish people over the centuries – you need only look to actual history to see how we Christians and the strain of anti-Semitism that runs in much of our faith has caused such tremendous suffering to the Jewish people.

So, why would that matter? Well, to me it matters because I’m in a mood, as they say, to start debunking or to at least challenge some of those toxic ideas in our wonderful but imperfect faith tradition, and though I am not particularly a fan of the book of Hebrews as a whole, there are moments that ring beautifully true, including today’s text, which might help us to answer a question that I’ve been asking ever since I became a Christian way back in 1983. What I want to do is challenge a strain within our faith that perhaps has been there forever, but is now more prevalent than ever and that is this: this idea that intimacy, that closeness to God, is something that we should be feeling, that we should be always be experiencing emotionally, that, in fact, emotions are the marker and measure of whether or not we are close to God or far from God. And I think this idea is certainly related to the current way we understand love in our romantic focused culture – love is what you feel, and when the feeling is gone, so is love. Don’t get me wrong – I know that a emotions are part of romantic love, positive regard is part of love, but anyone who has experienced love over the long haul knows that it’s much more than emotions, muchmore than “the feels,” as the young people like to say these days. And don’t get me wrong again – I know divorces and endings of relationships have more complicated reasons for ending than the lack of the feels – I know that personally, as I suspect many of you do as well – and that sometimes the best thing that can happen is the ending of something, including the ending of a relationship. But I do think we still continue to mistake emotions, what we feel about someone in any given moment, as a measure, or maybe the primary measure of the love we have for them. But that attempt to measure love by what we feel really isn’t the best measuring stick, of course, not in romantic situations or any human relationship and certainly not in our relationship with God, with Christ, hopefully another great love in our lives.

So, where to begin in today’s text from Hebrews? First, you need to know that the author has just been making an intricate case about God’s covenant with God’s people, first understood as the Jewish people and now believed by the writer to be the followers of Jesus. Scholars seem to think the writer has been hearing that people have become discouraged at this point in their faith journeys, that they are not as invested as they were once were early on in their spiritual lives. The writer has tried to shore them up with talk of the nature of Christ’s role as the new spiritual High Priest in a spiritual Temple, and he finally comes to this point, where he reminds them that there is no need for anymore for earthly animal sacrifice for sin as was once done in the Temple in Jerusalem, because Christ has become that one sacrifice to God that ends all earthly sacrifices thereafter. What does that mean for them, his earliest readers, and to us, his much later readers? It means that we can enter into the Holiest of Holies, the very interior of the Temple itself, the most sacred space in the Temple, an honor which was once reserved only for the priests who had purged themselves of sin. God was believed to reside in that space like God did in no other place, though, of course, God was also believed to be everywhere as well. The writer of the text wants us to know that a kind of intimacy with the Divine once reserved for only a few is now available to all, to those of us who are not High Priests, or chosen or whatever. We can have that kind of intimacy with God, entering into spaces once reserved for only the few. I can only imagine the emotion some ancient Jewish High priest must have felt when he entered into that most sacred of spaces, after a time of tremendous emotional and ritual cleansing. I think the quote from the wonderful writer Robert Benson in our Modern Lesson captures it – the sheer awe of being in a place completely dedicated to the Holy, a space quite literally created to invoke those emotions of awe and wonder. It would give most of us “the feels,” I think that to be in that place, deep inside the most sacred space in all Judaism, a room in the most interior part of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

I suspect that most of us, not all of us, of course, but most of us, could share a moment like that, one like Robert Benson’s account in our Modern Lesson, or what the High Priest must have felt like, when God’s presence was felt, felt in our soul, on our skins, in the very fiber of our being. We just knew that God was there, was here, was everywhere, and that God was felt to be fully real, or realized, real as you and I have ever known anything. These feelings likely didn’t last long, but they happened, and it gave us a sense of wonder and awe and maybe gratitude that we had been given such an experience. Those moments are truly a gift, they really are, but for most of us they are few and far between. That doesn’t mean that we who craft worship don’t seek to invite you into those moments, into the feels, but I’m always a bit wary of doing it too much – emotions can be so easily manipulated, passions can be so easily invoked and provoked within us that they can be used to invite people to do the wrong things because we are feeling so right at any given moment. Jeanette Winterson, the great novelist, once wrote in her book The Passion that she wanted a God who could meet her with passion with divine passion – and I hear it that desire in her, to have passion always be met with passion, but others also hear that as well, those who know how to work people’s passion, often for nefarious reasons. We have whole swaths of the Protestant Church attempting to make us feel the feels, often with great success, but so much of it is only about the feels, the emotions, that when the emotions desert many of us, there seems to be nothing left of our spirituality – if God is not felt, then maybe God is not there, maybe doesn’t God even exist. You can hear the echoes of those who are not wise in matters of romantic love in that sentiment – if I can’t feel love for my spouse, do I actually love my spouse?

Now, to be upfront, I personally have a surprising amount of the feels, often right here in this room, but I try not to lean too heavily into them, count on them as a barometer of my connection to God, as I don’t count on emotions as a barometer for my love for Douglas, my spouse. The problem with using our emotions, our feelings, as a measurement of whether or not we are close or far from God is that emotions, the feels, don’t always tell us the fullest truth about a situation. Feelings come and go in any relationship – one minute I feel close, and then a second later I feel distance with God, with Douglas, with my sister, and many, many others. But the truth of the matter is that such feelings aren’t the actual measure of my love, our love for each other, it can’t be, because it is not possible to always live within the feels, so to speak, and the feels, our emotions can so often lie to us. But there is something else that its actually more measurable, more grounded, more solid, than what you and I may be feeling about God or each other in any moment, something that the writer of Hebrews hints at in our text today. Remember when I said that scholars think that Hebrews was written to an early Christian community that was likely weary of being Christian, had grown tired of being faithful without getting the emotional results or maybe even the feels they once got out of it? Perhaps it was like a marriage in the middle part, where the passion has died down, where the little annoyances at the beginning have slowly built into large annoyances – and you’re not getting the emotional payoffs you did early on in the partnership. That place is where this early church is likely at – and so the writer of Hebrews points them away from the feels they surely experienced when they entered into the Holiest of Holies, and points them to the mundane, the ordinary ways that we experience God, the slow and continuous turning towards God and each other that is the heart of a deep and wide Christian faith.

You actually see that turning in our text when we are invited to draw near to God with a genuine heart, meaning a truth-telling heart, and to hold onto our confession of faith, our naming of that trust that God has gotten us through what seemed impossible to get through – that is hope, to trust in hope when all seems hopeless. Make the decision to draw near when one does not feel like drawing near, decide to throw in our lot with hope when, really, all you and I maybe feeling is hopeless. That is what the writer is asking us to do, to make decision to hope and trust when we don’t have the heart or the want to do so. And then comes the kicker, so to speak, because the writer invites them back to each other, with these words: And let us consider each other carefully for the purpose of sparking love and good deeds. Don’t stop meeting together with other believers, which some people have gotten into the habit of doing. Instead, encourage each other, especially as you see the day drawing near, the day, of course, being the coming of the Christ for the final time. Continue doing the right thing when you don’t feel like doing the right thing, choose relationship with your spiritual fellow travelers when you don’t feel like choosing to do so, keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep showing up to the rallies, the protests, the soup kitchen, the art studio, the marriage, the kids, all of it. Encourage each other in the long obedience in the same direction, as the Pastor Eugene Peterson once called it. It’s no easy thing, let me tell you, from my own personal experience. God and me, we’ve had our ups and downs, and I’ve had moments where it felt as if hadn’t entered the Holiest of Holies in years – yes, years – a place, an emotional space, where I could feel God, I could know God’s presence in my bones. And during those desert times, in my best moments, I just keep trying to do the right thing, I just keep trying to pray, I decide day in and day out to be there, to not walk away, to show that my love for God is actually not found in what I am feeling but what I am doing, for me, for others, for the ones that are easy to love and the ones that aren’t.

Mother Teresa was called into service for the poor of Calcutta as a young nun, and almost immediately the “feels” she once felt about being in God’s presence deserted her for decades – it was as if God had just abandoned her, at least when it came to her interior spiritual life. From then on, this seeming banishment from the wonder and emotions that come with entering into the Holiest of Holies caused her to find God in other ways, especially in what she did with others and for others, the daily acts of compassion she and her religious order practiced daily. To be intimate with God is to be intimately involved and implicated in God’s world, in acts of love, kindness, justice, goodness, in simply doing the right thing when one really actually wants to do the wrong thing. None of us are likely to go through what Mother Teresa went through, or at least I hope we never do, but when our feelings about God desert us, we need to know what to do when the lack of spiritual emotion challenges our devotion, our long obedience. And what must be done in those periods in our lives is to simply do what needs to be done on the long obedience in the same direction, which is love each other by doing the right thing by each other, by choosing to hope when one FEELS hopeless, to trust when you feel profoundly distrustful of God, or even each other. Still, make no mistake about it – the flood of presence, of emotion that comes when we have those moments when God feels as close to us as the air we breathe, those are real, they are true, but the High Priest in the Temple of old never stayed in that sacred space forever, and we shouldn’t expect to either. Consider it a gift from God when we have that authentic experience, an unmanufactured encounter with the Divine, in all of its wonder – and then, after it has passed, expect to the daily work of being a follower of Jesus, of making those daily choices to be faithful, to do the right thing, to love the profoundly unlovable, to walk in that same direction with others, in that slow and beautiful and challenging journey that leads more fully into the heart of the Holy. Amen.