1 Peter 2:1-10; Deuteronomy 29:10-15

September 12, 2021 (Wilck’s Lake)

  • How can we be more Temply?

I suppose you can call me a “blockhead” after reading this passage.  You might even biblically be able to get away with saying the preacher is “thick as a brick,” if we are in fact meant to be building material.  I am ok with that in this context of 1 Peter chapter 2 and the gift of being made into a spiritual stone for a spiritual house.  I have always liked this passage from 1 Peter, part of which I read last week regarding Solomon’s Temple.

Being built into a spiritual house as living stones into God’s Temple seems like a powerful, strong, and enduring image.  I have been to temples in Italy, Greece, Mexico, and India that date back millennia – that’s thousands of years.  They are still there because they were built with massive stones.  Herod’s Temple, which I also mentioned last week, still has one wall standing – the Western or Wailing Wall, which is still there even after the Roman army tried to destroy it.  Of course, the foundation stones are intact, being incredible pieces of rock weighing many tons each.

And here in Peter, we have another Temple.  You know, when I read this passage in the past, I could not help envisioning something like a cottage – this was my notion of a pleasant spiritual house image, something small like homes of the day but Anglofied to resemble American roots in Europe (cottage all the way!).  But having done this study of walking through the lives of Saul and David and Solomon, I have come to see what is really going on here in greater clarity.  A house for God is nothing short of a full-fledged, massive temple, not some quaint cabin.  It makes a lot more sense to see this passage that way because that is where we would be carrying out priestly duties and offering spiritual and acceptable sacrifices – at a temple.  Yes, AT A TEMPLE.  We are both God’s holy place and God’s holy people.  God is with us in this dramatic way, inhabiting us and being glorified through us by the grace of Jesus Christ.  None of this is possible without Jesus.  Without him, the whole structure falls, literally.

This is critical to remember as we hold in our hearts this weekend of the 20th anniversary of 9/11.  September 11, 2001 speaks to us in painful and world-changing way because buildings fell and many people with them.  This destruction of both meaningful buildings and even more the tremendous loss of life created a flashpoint for us as a nation.  For a little while, at least, we looked more like a temple to God as people came together in worship and shared in grief and love in new ways.  Even though our culture harbored suspicion and aggression toward Arab Americans (and may even still), there were also counter responses in which people tried to reach out to those communities because they were being demonized, somewhat like Asian Americans were targeted in the emergence of Covid 19.

Even with that fear and prejudice, the last best time of our people was our willingness to suffer and mourn and share grace as a people in the aftermath of 9/11.  There was a lot of coming together and seeing past some differences and the idea of being together in the unity of our identity.  Folk returned to faith and witnessed a better spirit.  Sadly, it did not last, and as we have seen, we are more divided than ever in just about every way.  Since 2001, we have witnessed the splintering of our church over marriage and the ability of people to be who they feel they need to be.  My parent’s church is one that left the denomination over these issues and others.  The specter of racism runs deep through our consciousness back to the first Presbyterian churches in our area, and it has dogged us ever since.  Our nation struggles; our community struggles; our church struggles with so many things.  While our faith calls us to be strong and secure and established as God’s Temple, we too often find ourselves also a people of broken buildings.  Twenty years after 9/11, we are less resilient as a people, more divided, more fearful, more angry, more inwardly focused, and not really safer, either.

Just as Moses brought the people together to make them the witnesses to God’s everlasting covenant and not just them but those to follow, we are here today to witness and to remember God’s faithfulness.  For that, I am going to bring in another building, the historic Polegreen Church (meeting house) in Mechanicsville, VA (see below).  This is the home of Presbyterian worship in the Commonwealth of VA and where religious freedom was being worked out decades before it was legal in Virginia.  We are talking the early 1700s here.  It is a fascinating story to me about how those folk in Hanover Co. in a sea of Anglican Churches, which was the only official church in the colony, wanted more from religious observance and to be able to do what they believed was faithful.  The government gave permission for four “dissenter houses” where people could meet and study and pray without the Anglican Church.  Even though it sounds like they were in marked as troublemakers, these dissenters were essential to religious freedom in Virginia and everywhere.  Eventually, they were allowed a Presbyterian minister by the name of Samuel Daves, who was the first licensed non-Anglican minister in Virginia.  Long story short, they created a church there that endured into the Civil War 100 years later.  In one of those battles, however, the church found itself smack in the middle between the forces and was artilleried and burned by the South.  It was never rebuilt by the congregation, but today there is a creative monument to this mother church in VA.  A simple frame outlining a simple structure but with no walls or roof, just lines and space, calls us to remember that through our history, we have worked for greater freedom of worship and freedom to be God’s people.  The freedom of this church’s faith paved the way for Thomas Jefferson to pen our Virginia religious freedom, and as an aside, young Patrick Henry was brought up in that church.

Polegreen brings me back to what the Temple is, what the church is, what Peter says the church is… people standing on Christ.  And it can change the world.  A house of God can and should be inspiring, encouraging, and equipping greater devotion and freedom in Christ.  Even when the dominant culture says to get along.  If you remember Solomon’s response to his own completed temple, he said that it is basically silly to think that somehow God is going to live in a building or that the Temple can really be God’s home, per se, so the usefulness of the Temple is in being a focus to God’s presence and work.  People should be able to look to the Temple and find God’s presence.

So what does that mean when the Temple is without walls and a roof and even a floor?  What does that mean when there is no Temple and that the church itself is really all about people?

First, it means that Jesus really is our ground and foundation, but this is the same Jesus that was rejected by the authorities and executed because he called everyone to God’s greater kingdom of love.  We must put our faith in the author of faith.  It is not our wisdom that guides but the wisdom that calls us out of the boat, that calls us to embrace the sick, the despised, and the lonely, that says we are a giving people who has been given so much.

Second, if the house stands by our strength, our politics, our hardness, our agendas, or our demands, then it will not endure.  When we build the house, it is not the house of the Lord but the house of Fred, Gail, Rex, and Tammy.  There is a reason why our Lord instructed us to deny ourselves and follow him.  Take up our cross, not to our glory, but his.  This story, this life, this church, this service is not about us at all but about the glory of God.

Third, the glory of God is shared when we love each other as we have been loved.  I can love God with my whole heart all day long, but if I walk right by my neighbor in need even if my eyes were on heaven, then I missed the boat, my friends.  As Jesus said, “as we do to the least of these, we do to him.”  We serve our Lord and show our love of God when we love God’s children on God’s behalf – all of God’s children.

If we are serious about standing on the stone that was rejected, there might still be some rejection of us.  It is not easy to really associate with Jesus.  He challenges everything about us because he is not of the world.  He was in the world but not of the world, and he has made us his.  I cannot tell you what the future has in store for us, but there is a future for us as the house of God.  When we dare to worship our God with our service and open our hearts, even to our enemies, then we are being the Temple that Jesus is calling us to be, and then we are making the world a better place for our Lord.

To God be the glory.  Amen.