As you dodge your way through bustling and chaotic streets, the first thing that hits you is the smell. There is a pungent aroma of incense hanging in the air. Perhaps it is being burned in some effort towards religious devotion. Just as likely it is being burned to cover the smells of rotting food and dried blood that would otherwise assault your nostrils. Either way, the odorous smoke lends an unforgettable characteristic to these city streets so that the smell and the sights and sounds have become inseparable.
These are the bazaars and colourful noisy places quite different from the angry and car-filled lanes of London. A marketplace in any number of cities around the world. This is another continent, another way of life, and another way of worship.
So too, as I walk into the tiled home of an aged aunty. The fluorescent bluish light assaults my eyes. The mosquitos assault my skin. The heat assaults my wellbeing. And the same familiar smell of incense is hanging in the air. In the corner of the room there is a shrine, with oranges piled neatly as gifts to the ancestors, and a trail of smoke rising from the slowly burning stick.
Many of you will recognise these description from places you have visited. In certain religious practices, devotion has its own perfume; a whiff of deference to a deity.
The same was true of temple worship in the Old Testament. The priests were given a special recipe from God, a patented concoction of frankincense and various other ingredients that were only to be used in temple worship. So, when Isaiah ‘saw the Lord, and the train of his robe filled the temple’ he too notices that ‘the house was filled with smoke’. Just as his eyes are overwhelmed at the sight he is seeing, so too his olfactory organs are bombarded.
When we move to the New Testament, Jesus himself is the walking embodiment of God’s presence, and his own body is both God’s living temple and the sacrifice in the temple at the same time. That is no doubt why one of the magi brings frankincense as a gift for the baby, and why the sinful woman anoints his feet with pure nard. It is all deeply symbolic of worship, of sacrifice, of presence. I’m sure that as Jesus walked about the place later that day, heads turned as the pong of perfume wafted about on the wind. It all spoke of God being here, with us, right now.
And then there’s a shift. We no longer have a temple, and Jesus is with us by his Spirit but not in his physical body. Yet there is still incense. The book of Revelation speaks of the scene in the heavenly throne room where there are ‘golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints’ (Revelation 5.8). Our prayers are incense to God! The picture is of the bowls filling up as prayers ascend, until God’s answer is poured out in response to his people’s pleas for justice. At that point, the bowls of incense are tipped by an angel (Revelation 8.5).
We don’t burn incense any more, but we do pray. There was a sweetness to our gathering last night as we called out to God as one. Praying together is of inestimable worth, even when we only just glimpse the fruit of our prayers. We can be sure that they are as pungent to God’s nostrils as a smoke filled temple. And we can be sure that such prayers bring him deep pleasure.