Reverence

Yesterday my wife and I gave talks in church. Here's the talk I gave on reverence. This is not exactly the way I gave the talk. I cut out stuff and said different stuff. Without further ado...

Good morning brothers and sisters. Today my talk is on reverence. In Exodus Chapter 3 we read, “God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And [Moses] said, Here am I. And [the Lord] said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”

You’ll notice that the Lord told Moses to remove his shoes. Why did Moses need to take off his shoes? The Lord simply says, “for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” But when I read the passage I wonder, “Why does holy ground need to be walked on barefoot?” The scriptures don’t really say. To me it doesn’t immediately make sense that Moses had to take off his shoes. Wouldn’t his shoes damage the vegetation and move around some dirt just about as much as Moses’ bare feet would have?

I thought about this question and came up with this answer: The Lord was teaching Moses about reverence. The Lord was teaching Moses that holy places need to be treated differently than unholy places. I don’t imagine that Moses’ shoes clashed with his robe or his staff, and Jesus only wanted aesthetically-pleasing outfits on his holy ground. Rather, Jesus had Moses do a physical action, the removal of his shoes, to teach him a spiritual lesson. Thus a physical action was linked with a spiritual lesson. The Lord often links physical actions with spiritual lesions. For example, the Lord has designed that the priests kneel when they bless the sacrament. The kneeling is associated with humility.

We teach the Primary children to fold their arms, bow their heads and close their eyes when they pray. Why? Well, first of all, it keeps them still for a moment. But second and more importantly we have children bow their heads and fold their arms because those physical actions help the children to learn spiritual lessons. A bowed head, for example, teaches us humility. When you bow your head before someone, you are using body language to say something like, “You are my superior.” Perhaps it is a custom to close our eyes while we pray because closing our eyes helps us to forget the physical world and think about heaven.

Melchezidek Priesthood holders also do special physical things when they give blessings. They anoint with oil and place their hands atop the afflicted person’s head. Are those physical actions really necessary? My quick answer is “Yes, that’s the way we’ve been taught, that’s the way it says to do it in the priesthood manuals, so yes, anointing with oil and laying on of hands is necessary to give a priesthood blessing.” But my longer answer is “No, ultimately these physical actions aren’t absolutely necessary.” You may have heard the story from general conference about the patriarch without hands. The patriarch was able to give people patriarchal blessings by resting his nubs on the people’s heads. If God had explicitly required that a pair of hands be laid on the head when giving a patriarchal blessing, then surely the handless man would have been barred from serving as a patriarch. What really counts, then, in the giving of a blessing is the sanction of God.

The miracles of Jesus in the New Testament show how Jesus did not follow a strict physical formula when healing people. For example, one time when Jesus healed a deaf man, the scriptures say, “And [Jesus] took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue, and looking up to heaven, he sighed and saith unto him, Ephphatha-that is ‘be opened.’” Another time when Jesus healed a blind man, the scriptures say, “[Jesus] spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, and said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam… He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing.”

And another time when Jesus healed a Roman Centurion’s servant, Jesus wasn’t even in the same place as the sick servant. He just spoke, and the servant, untouched and unseen by the Lord, was healed.

So we see that the Lord healed people in a variety of ways. We can learn from these stories of healings that it really didn’t matter what position Christ’s hands were in or just how loud his voice was when he gave the blessing, and it really didn’t matter whether Christ was kneeling or standing. What really mattered was Christ had the power and authority to heal people.

That may lead us to wonder: Why did Christ bother doing physical things like laying hands on people at all? Why didn’t he just stay at home, see sick people in vision, and heal them from a remote location? Again, my answer to that question is that by doing physical actions, Christ was teaching people spiritual things and helping their faith to grow. The Lord was closely associating physical things and spiritual lessons.

When Jesus touched people as he healed them, he wasn’t touching them because he had to touch them for the miracle to work. Jesus was teaching them that he had the power to heal.
In 3 Nephi 17, when Christ is visiting the Nephites, Christ says, “Have ye any that are sick among you? Bring them hither. Have ye any that are lame, or blind, or halt, or maimed, or leprous, or that are withered or that are deaf, or that are afflicted in any manner? Bring them hither and I will heal them, for I have compassion upon you; my bowels are filled with mercy… And it came to pass that when he had thus spoken, all the multitude, with one accord, did go forth with their sick and their afflicted and their lame, and with their blind, and with their dumb, and with all them that were afflicted in any manner; and he did heal them every one as they were brought forth unto him.” Thus Jesus healed the afflicted Nephites one by one. Couldn’t he have just looked out over the vast congregation and said, “All that are afflicted, be healed?” Yes, he could have. He has the power to do that. But instead he healed them one by one, as if to say, “I care about you individually. I am willing to spend my time with you.”

I’m digressing from my topic of reverence a little, but what I’m trying to point out is that what really counts are the inward feelings, not the outward signs typically associated with reverence. A certain amount of time on our knees, dressed in Sunday clothes, with bowed heads won’t get us into the celestial kingdom; the attitude associated with those outward signs will. The physical actions themselves do not benefit us at all in the long run if they are not coupled with heartfelt reverence. Looking reverent may have its social perks, but actually feeling reverent has its eternal perks.

Since reverence is one of the Christ-like attributes that we are to attain in this life, we ought to be very concerned with obtaining reverent feelings. But how does one obtain reverent feelings? What come first, the outward signs of reverence or the inward feelings of reverence? Should you fold your arms, kneel down, and then wait for the feeling of reverence to come? Or should you wait until you actually feel reverent, and then in an attempt to express your reverence, fold your arms and kneel down? That’s a tricky question; I don’t really know the answer. Asking that question is kind of like asking, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” You can’t have a chicken without it coming from an egg. On the other hand, you can’t have an egg without it coming from a chicken. So you’re stuck and you can’t really answer the question. Similarly, you can’t really answer the question, “what comes first, real feelings of reverence or physical actions associated with reverence?” You could say the outward signs of reverence must come from an inner feeling. But you could also say, “you can’t feel reverent if you’re shaking around, shouting at the top of your lungs, and dressed like a clown. If there are never any physical actions such as dressing up, carrying scriptures, lowering your voice, then there is no fertile soil from which feelings of reverence may grow.” So I can’t answer what comes first.

But it doesn’t have to be one or the other – it doesn’t have to be that one comes first and one comes second, because in fact physical actions and real feelings work together to help reverence grow. And anyway, the separation of physical and spiritual things isn’t as clear cut as we sometimes make it out to be. For the Lord says in Doctrine and Covenants section 29 verse 34, “all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal.”

Also, Moses 6:63 says “all things are created and made to bear record of me, both things which are temporal, and things which are spiritual.” To me that verse says that both the physical side of us and the spiritual side of us are supposed to bear record of Christ. Our bodies and our spirits are to work together to worship God.

Brothers and sisters, it is my hope that both our physical actions and our inward feelings will work together to help our reverence grow.

Switching gears a bit, for the rest of my time, I’d like to talk about the Ark of the Covenant. And not just because it’s an exciting relic of antiquity, but because I think it relates well to my topic.

The Ark of the Covenant was a wooden chest overlaid with gold. It was made my Moses under the direction of the Lord. According to the Bible Dictionary, “It was the oldest and most sacred of the religious symbols of the Israelites, and the Mercy Seat which formed its covering was regarded as the earthly dwelling place of Jehovah. The Ark was fitted with rings and staves, by which it was carried. Prayers were recited before it moved or rested, and during its progress it was treated with the greatest reverence… The usual resting place of the ark was in the Holy of Holies.”

One story from the Old Testament shows us just how holy the Ark of the Covenant was. In 2 Samuel chapter 6, David and his people were traveling with the Ark of the Covenant and the scriptures say, “And when they came to Nachon’s threshingfloor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it; for the oxen shook it. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God.”

This is one of the occurrences in the Old Testament that makes God seem very angry and vengeful. But the Bible Dictionary explains: “The penalty may appear to us severe, but it must be remembered that the ark was a sacred repository, and the people had been clearly warned that only designated persons could touch the ark, and warned also of the consequences of disobedience.” I think that by smiting Uzzah, the Lord was teaching a very powerful lesson about reverence. Surely many people saw the occurrence, and I assume the story would have been circulated widely among the Israelites at the time. Also, David named the place where Uzzah was killed, “Perez-Uzzah” which means, “Breach of Uzzah” That way, whenever anybody passed through the place of Perez-Uzzah, they were reminded of what happened there.
The ark was a physical reminder of the Lord’s power, and of the law of Moses.

Remember though, that the children of Israel didn’t worship the ark of the covenant. They reverenced it. It is the same in our day. We do not worship this meetinghouse, or the temples.

What objects are there in our lives that remind us of holy things? For me, my wedding ring reminds me of the day I was sealed to my wife, and the covenants we made there that day. The picture of Christ on my wall reminds me of Christ himself, my Savior. And the scriptures on my bookshelf remind me of all the history and doctrine and revelations that Latter-Day Saints have continually before them.