2 Samuel
7:1-11, 16.Luke 1:26-38.Advent 4.
I.
One day King David has a
great idea. He decides he should
build a temple for the Lord. At
the time David has this idea, he himself is living in a fine, new palace in
Jerusalem. God, however, still
dwelt in the same old tent that they had used during the people’s wanderings,
and then during the conquest of Canaan.
God had always been
worshiped, according to God’s command, in a portable tabernacle made of tents,
awnings, and curtains, all draped on a wooden framework. When David moved into Jerusalem and the
people settled down to a more urban and less nomadic existence, it apparently
did not occur to anyone that God should live in a house of stone and wood as
well.
David’s idea might have
been a little dangerous. I have
this perverse fascination with the obscure story of Uzzah. When the Ark of the Covenant was being
moved into Jerusalem, Uzzah was assigned to walk in the parade alongside the
cart carrying the Ark. When he
sees that the cart was being seriously jostled by the bumpy ride on the
cobblestones, he thinks the Ark is in danger of falling off. So he lifts his hand to steady it...
and God strikes him dead on the spot.
The meaning I get from
that story is that God doesn’t need us, or anyone, to help, assist, provide
for, protect, defend, or otherwise “handle” God. God is God and God will do what God wants without our aid,
thank you very much. And if any of
you out there think to take it upon yourself to be God’s protector, defender,
or helper, as if God needed us and could not help God’s own self, you have the
example of Uzzah as a warning. God
does not need any favors or help from us.
So, David, who witnessed
the Uzzah thing, might have had some serious trepidation when he came up with
this idea that God should have a real house and that he, David, should take
upon himself the task of building it.
This idea does not come from the Lord. David thinks it up himself. I wonder if David doesn’t worry that he might get the Uzzah
treatment for imagining it is his job to provide a new home for God.
Maybe he feels guilty
about living in a palace while God lives in a tent. But a tent is what God commanded them to make and a tent is
where God still lives, apparently without complaint. No new commands have come down requiring that God have a
building to live in.
David sees that times
have changed. A nomadic people had
become an urban people. Shepherds
had become farmers. The people who
had lived in tents for generations, moving about the wilderness with their
flockes, now live in stone houses.
Shouldn’t we expect God to
change as well? Shouldn’t God’s
dwelling reflect the lifestyle of the people? Does God have to keep living in this old-fashioned, obsolete
tent? Does he have to keep
reminding them of their old, former life?
Is it not even a veiled (so to speak) criticism of their sophisticated,
new, settled life?
II.
We live in a time of
change as well. We may not be
transitioning from one completely different economic paradigm to another, like
the Israelites were going from being nomadic shepherds to urban farmers. But we are moving from an industrial to
an information economy, they say.
We are moving from the Modern way of looking at things to what is called
the “Post-modern,” because that future is so undecided that we can’t even tell
what to call it yet.
The church is in
transition as well, as we move from being in an overtly “Christian” culture to
one in which there are many different stories, religions, and ethnicities none
of them privileged like the Anglo-Saxon Christian one used to be. We do not have the influence or the
clout or the impact we used to have.
And nowhere is this more
acute than for “mainline” Protestants.
All of our denominations — Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians,
Episcopalians, Reformed, Baptists — have lost huge numbers of adherents in the
past 50 years.
And then there are the
social changes: changes in the family, relationships, parenthood, sexuality,
divorce, mobility; and economic changes: remember when if you worked for a big
corporation you were set for life?
What do we want from God
at times like these? Do we want
God to stay the same as ever, our steady, immoveable bedrock, the unchanging
One upon whom we can depend no matter what? Or do we want God to somehow change with us, becoming
relevant to our pressing needs, fears, desires, and aspirations? Or do we somehow want both?
For David it was all
about architecture. Should God
live in a tent, or a building?
What kind of God do we
want? One that lives in a
beautiful, functional structure like this one? Or one that lives in a church that looks like a medieval
fortress, emphasizing how God is our rock and defender? Or a God that lives in a building
barely distinguishable from a Wal-Mart,?
Or does God live in an inconspicuous modernistic building that looks
more like a doctors’ office complex, like the church I used to serve (and where
my wife now serves) in Martinsville?
There are other examples
as well. But my question is, in a
time of great change, where and how should God be present to us? In the past or in the present? Like us or different from us? The houses we build for God reflect
what we want and need from God.
They rarely express what God wants. They proclaim what we think God should be about among
us. God is about memory or
relevance, protection or engagement, power or simplicity, majesty or intimacy.
And we need to be very
careful we do not fall into Uzzah’s trap.
As if God needs us and our architecture to help God do God’s job.
III.
After David has his idea,
and tells the prophet Nathan about it, Nathan is at first quite affirming. “God is with you, if you feel led to
build a temple for God, knock yourself out, Dave.”
But then God comes to
Nathan in a dream and says, basically, “Did I ask for a temple? Have
I ever asked for a temple? Have I ever expressed displeasure with
my living arrangements? NO! When I want a physical house of stone
and cedar I will let you know.
Until then I am content to live in my tent.”
Buildings, says God, are
not all that important. What is
important is that, as God says: “I will appoint a place for my people Israel
and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed
no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more.... Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure for ever
before me; your throne shall be established for ever.”
Not the physical house,
but the spiritual “house” is important.
Not the bricks and mortar but the relationships, loyalties, mission,
connections, and the love, binding people together are important. These are the main things. Christians understand the “place” and
the “house” and the “kingdom” and the “throne” to be moral and spiritual
things. Physical things can be
destroyed. They are subject to
weather and insects and birds and animals, and wear and tear. Fire, flood, earthquake, theft, even an
economic downturn... all of these are liabilities for physical buildings.
In my other job I have to
read a lot of session minutes.
Sometimes, after reading some of these, I get the depressing feeling
that we are not gatherings of Christian believers so much as managers and
maintainers of buildings. Some sessions
tend to spend more time on the physical plant than on anything else, believe
me.
And yet Christianity was,
at the beginning, considered a somewhat anti-Temple movement. The main charges against Jesus and
Stephen had to do with their statements against the Temple. And Christians did not even really have buildings specifically for worship
until the 3rd or 4th century. We worshiped for hundreds of years without buildings at all!
The apostle Paul
understands “temple” to refer to Jesus Christ and his people and even their
bodies. The community is the temple.
That is where the Spirit of God dwells. God is present in the gathering of the believers, no matter
where that happens. God is present
in the whole creation as well, which Scripture clearly teaches.
This is the place that
God appoints for the people, where they may live without disturbance. God’s house and kingdom is established
in all the Earth, under David’s descendant, Jesus. In his incarnation he makes the whole place holy. He makes the whole place a
sacrament. He is present everywhere.
IV.
If anything, God is critical of all our attempts to box in,
define, shape, protect, limit, determine, or control God. This goes for our buildings as well as
for our theologies, our liturgies, our moralities, our histories and memories,
our hopes and desires. God works against and continually bursts out of our architecture. Our buildings and theologies tell us
more about what God isn’t, than what
God is.
The angel Gabriel says
that the child Mary is to bear “will be great, and will be called the Son of
the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor
David. He will reign over the
house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” His kingdom has no end, no limits, no
walls, no boundaries. His kingdom
— his commonwealth — is everywhere.
Jesus says that the hour
is coming when we will not worship God only in this place or that place. The hour is coming and is now here in
him when we will worship the Father in spirit and truth. “God is spirit, and
those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
God is not confined or
defined by our constructions. It
is not our job to manufacture boxes for God to live in. It is
our job to be defined and confined by God’s Word and will. It is our job to live God’s love,
peace, and justice everywhere, with everyone.
Look for those
places. Especially in this season
when we think we know these stories,
and we have all the carols memorized,
and we cling with particular ferocity
to our traditions.
God does not dwell in our
containers. God lives in our
hearts when our hearts expand to embrace the whole creation. This is why God becomes human in Jesus
Christ. In him God inhabits the
creation, God becomes matter, flesh and blood, cells and molecules. Not to be contained by them, but to
fill them with the infinite.
It is so with us, we who
claim to be his disciples, his people, his extended body on the Earth. We have this gift not to wrap in a box
however beautiful, but to let shine like glory everywhere.
May we be that shining.
May we be the love of God we
know in Jesus, and his peace, and his joy, and his justice, loose and shining
and working in the world. May this
reality shine in us and through us in everything we do and say, everything we
imagine and think. So that these
stories are not left as nostalgic boxes in which we think we have God
contained, but as powerful bursts of transforming energy, bringing life and
light to the world.
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