I Have Indeed Built You a Temple
Twenty-first
Sunday after Pentecost
1 Kings 5:1-5; 8:1-13
October 29, 2017
1 Kings 5:1-5; 8:1-13
October 29, 2017
Rev.
John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
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."
This
work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a
copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to
Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View,
California, 94041, USA.
No comments:
Post a Comment