- Houses all around the world are temples, and dinner tables are often ground zero for the lessons of God.
She just sat in her car out at the curb, staring at the front door. I approached. “You alright?”
She looked up, teary-eyed. “I don’t need to go inside. Don’t really want to talk to anybody…I just wanted to be here outside…the Temple.”
She was in town, as was I, for the funeral of a dear saint of God who had, for years and years behind that screen door, invested her life into young women with hugs, gentle counsel, Bible studies, prayer, and lots of encouragement along with tears. Now, the disciple-making woman was gone and the house, poorer without her presence.
I knew what my friend was feeling. The saint’s husband had done the same for me forty years earlier in the den of that same house. Plucked me from relative obscurity and chose to pour his life into mine for a few years, before sending me off to do the same in my disciple-making vocation.
What struck me in that moment, of course, was her use of “Temple.”
During the Jewish exile, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the rabbis knew they had a problem: where to worship now that their sanctuary had been reduced to rubble. And so, as Marvin Wilson indicates in his book Our Father Abraham, these teachers of the Jewish nation began to refer to the home as a miqdash me’at or a “small sanctuary” or even a “miniature temple.’ These rabbis taught that, from here on out, the home was not unlike the Temple, serving special purposes for worship, learning, and serving the surrounding community. The altar of this temple would be the dinner table where Torah was taught, blessings delivered, prayer offered, and the festivals of the Old Testament celebrated.
The “Temple,” the home, would be the glue that would hold the people together. So when my friend used that description of the home where we were both discipled, I knew exactly what she meant. Houses all around the world are used similarly today, and dinner tables are often ground zero for the lessons of God. This may be why meals are so critical in the gospel narratives and where Jesus seems to do some of his best work: when called to follow; Matthew assembles his motley crew for Jesus; likewise, after Zacchaeus is beckoned to come out of the tree, Jesus invites Himself over for a meal at his house. Numerous times Acts reports that someone “and all their household” came to be baptized.
For families, the power of the table has been clear for decades. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation reported that its top scholars eat with their families at least three times a week. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University showed that — in contrast with teens who experience five or more family dinners a week — those who eat with their families only once or twice weekly are three times more likely to try marijuana, two and half times more likely to smoke cigarettes, and one a half times more likely to try alcohol. Dinner tables, meals together, home…they make a difference.
They certainly have made a difference in mine. I shared at least 7-12 meals a week with my family of origin and now understand, via the research, what a difference it has made. I met Jesus in a house church in my hometown. I was formed for the ministry in that house mentioned earlier, where my friend was also discipled. And I have tried to use our home in Jackson as a ministry center for both family and friends.
She called it a “Temple.” It is the place where some of the holiest Kingdom work gets done… for the nations. There is, perhaps, something better: to allow Him to make us into His dwelling as well:
Come, Eternal Spirit, dwell,
In this heart, Thy chosen shrine;
Cleanse and sanctify the cell,
Fill it with Thy fire divine.
Make me, Lord, a holy place—
Templed in Thy perfect grace. (source unknown)
Matt Friedeman
