Tuesday, January 23, 2018

I Have Indeed Built You a Temple (Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost; 1 Kings 5:1-5; 8:1-13; October 29, 2017)

I Have Indeed Built You a Temple

Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
1 Kings 5:1-5; 8:1-13
October 29, 2017
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
In the last week I've had two chances to tell the story of our church building. You know, I hope, how this building was built in stages: first the sanctuary, then the Fellowship Hall underneath us, then the office wing, and, finally, the Christian Education wing. This space itself has undergone significant changes over the years: the nave ceiling was lowered once and the ceiling over the choir twice. The balcony was added. Over time we have had at least three different treatments of the bell tower. There are rooms that have been sealed off and no longer used. There are spaces that have been made usable. And, of course, we have retrofitted the building to make it more accessible.
All of these--the original building and the changes to it since--tell stories. I don't just mean the stories of how they happened, of how it took about three days to raise the money for the last version of the steeple, or about seventeen minutes to fund the pew cushions. Sometimes the time is just right.
A church building is an announcement of the church's mission in architectural form. We began as a worshiping community. The education of children and adults did not, for the most part, take place here, certainly not in age-level divided classroom space. We felt the need to develop more of a sense of community that centered in shared meals, hence the fellowship hall and what we now call the kitchenette, later relocated to the east end of the hall with expanded meal-preparing and service abilities. Did we see the need for opening our meals to larger community? After WWII, churches all across the country discovered "church administration." Offices were built, secretaries hired, records kept, files retained, and committee structures beefed-up. We organized for ministry. Efficient office space was a new need for organized ministry. Then, as the baby boom generation became school-aged, we realized that we had a huge generation of children that needed to be educated. For some reason school systems were caught flat-footed and short of space. Churches began to see the Christian education of the children of its members as one of its central missions. They imagined that this would happen in those age-segregated classrooms modeled on the public school systems of the day. In fact, so similar were the theories about public and religious education that the same space could be used for both and, as you know, one of the ways that we paid for the Christian education wing was by leasing it to the public schools system until they could build adequate space of their own. That's why, for example, there are five restrooms in that wing, one of them inside the kindergarten room.
Buildings are one of the loudest public statements that a congregation makes. They tell who we are and what we think we're doing here. They are non-verbal billboards. All buildings, really, from the humblest family home to the White House and the Capital Building, are public statements that send a message to everyone who enters or even passes by. Solomon's Temple was no exception.
The project of building a Temple in Jerusalem was not new with Solomon. His father a proposed the idea and Nathan had shot it down. David noted to Nathan the prophet that the covenant box was being kept in a tent. It was a nice tent and all, a cut above what we can buy at Cabela's. But David was living in a house made of cedar and felt a little embarrassed about it. "Sure," said Nathan, "do whatever you want. Yahweh is with you." But then, Nathan checked with God and had to come back to David and say, "Nope. Sorry. No can do. God says ‘I've never had a house to live in. I've never asked for one. Why do you think I need one?"
This was a clear rebuke to David's plan to consolidate his rule over the tribes of Israel. Remember that he had moved the capitol of Israel into a hilltop fortress that he had taken over and called "David's City." We call it Jerusalem. He then had the covenant box moved there along with its tent. |And that's as far as David got.
But Solomon was able to advance the project. Solomon built a Temple. It was intended to be and in fact was a stunningly beautiful piece of architectural propaganda. It expanded the plan of the tent and made it permanent, set in stone. According to the tradition, it was so well designed and so well built that each stone fit exactly as it should without any use of hammers or chisels on the site, so that even the construction of the building took place in reverent silence. When finished it announced to Israel, to the residents of Jerusalem, and to all visitors and would-be rivals or enemies of Israel, that the God who was worshiped here was powerful and bound with unbreakable ties to the kingdom and its king. Anyone who threatened Jerusalem would have to take on Yahweh. It proclaimed in Yahweh’s name, "This is my Temple. This is my city. Its king is my chosen. This is my people. Jerusalem is defended."
The Temple was intended to centralize and supervise the worship of Yahweh. Local sites of devotion to Yahweh and the worship of other gods were torn down from time to time, although they were often rebuilt. There was resistance to the royal program of funneling access to God through Jerusalem. The prophetic movement became a needed counter-balance to the temple and its apparatus. After the building of the Temple, social justice movements seldom came out of Jerusalem and hardly ever out of the royal house. Jerusalem became a place of privilege. It was what Solomon, the Temple priesthood, the nobility, and the royal prophets got in exchange for the great favor that Solomon had done for God: "The Lord said that he would live in a dark cloud, but I have indeed built you a lofty temple as a place where you can live forever." Solomon's plans for God, you see, are so better than God's plans for God.
So we have here two streams in the tradition and--in my opinion--they are not reconcilable. One stream of the tradition is that God does indeed live in a dark cloud where no one can gain control so as to have God in their pocket or at their disposal. God is available anywhere but nowhere more than among the widows, the orphans, and the foreign workers, that is, among those with little wealth or power, those in need of justice, and those who live in the margins and the shadows. God acts from below and outside of the structures of power. God is disposed to overthrow the rich and the powerful and lift up the oppressed, liberate the captives, and give sight to the blind. That I would call the prophetic stream of the tradition.
The other stream of the tradition is the Temple stream. In this stream Yahweh is the one who guarantees the stability of the regime. A tribal God has become the universal God so that the tribes of Israel (and then of Judah) become the legitimate rulers of the world. God guarantees that Jerusalem will never fall, that Judah will stand for ever, and that David's dynasty will never end. God has chosen them and will always support and defend them.
There is not much overlap between these two ways of seeing Yahweh's covenant. I suspect that there are times when we simply have to choose between them, times when we cannot have it both ways. And I don't have to tell you which stream Jesus chose.
If we are to build a house for God, I think we will have to do it along far different lines than we have imagined in the past. For as long as we can remember, churches have been public institutions in our communities. This has been true ever since the days of the Emperor Constantine who saw the Church as a way to centralize and supervise religion to the advantage of the empire.
But that era of our tradition is coming to an end. There is a parting of the ways that is already underway and will accelerate in the coming decades. There is a stream in our Christian tradition that sees God as the guarantor of the nation and its privileges and of their particular privileges within that nation. They have made a theological box for God to live in--and it's a well-built box, a decorated box, a beautiful box--so that God will bless them with prosperity, health, and security from the people they fear.
There is another stream that can't imagine how it could build a structure that could contain God. It can't imagine drawing any circle that places people outside that wouldn't also place God outside. It sees God as free to go where God is needed most and it sees itself as free to follow God into those very places, without regard for respectability or place in the community. It sees its mission as far more important than any building.
As a changing world forces a choice on us, buildings will be at the center of our conversations. Buildings consume an enormous amount of our energy. They are expensive to build, to operate, and to maintain. They can be very important tools for our ministry--and I believe that, on the whole, we use ours pretty well--but they will never be cheap. They also--and this is even more dangerous--focus our attention inward, rather than outward. They disrupt the healthy rhythm between rest and work, between learning and using what we have learned, and between who we are and who we are called to become. They threaten to distract us from attentiveness toward God to attentiveness to a building.
There are some who argue that the time for church buildings has come to end and that congregations should never occupy any building permanently. I can see that as a possibility, although I'd like to see some examples. What I cannot help but see and say is that the time is long past when we could say to God, "I have indeed built you a lofty temple as a place where you can live forever."

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