1 Kings 8:1-11, 22-30, 41-43; Mark 15:33-38

September 5, 2021

  • What does the Temple mean?

This Sunday I thought I would diverge a bit from my current series and talk about everyone’s favorite temple – Shirley Temple.  Get the sermon title now?  I do like a little word play.  Well, it might be fun to dance a little with Miss Curley Top, who I had no idea served as US ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia, each under a different president.  She was even briefly the Chief of Protocol for the US which is the adviser to the president on diplomatic protocol.  Very interesting but sadly not really the temple I am delving into today.

We are still squarely in the story of Solomon which we began last Sunday, and this week, we are talking about the high point of his life and his kingly work, the building of his Temple to God.  Today is about Solomon’s Temple.  And yes, that was surely a temple, an impressive, architectural feat at the time.

Just so everyone is on the same history page, this is NOT the temple that was there when Jesus was walking the earth, so this is not the temple whose ruins are still visible today in Jerusalem at the Temple Mount (including the Wailing or Western Wall).  That is what’s left of King Herod’s Temple, the guy who tried to have Jesus killed as a baby and whose son (also Herod) had a part at Jesus’ death in Luke’s writings. That temple was built much later on the ruins of the previous temple, but that one was not Solomon’s either.  That one was Zerubbabel’s Temple from the book of Nehemiah, but that one was built on the spot of the previous temple, and THAT one is Solomon’s Temple, more than 900 years before Jesus.

Now, Imagine for a moment that there were a number of smaller, simpler, much less impressive structures scattered around the countryside of Israel in places that were considered special or holy – maybe old sacred places like Shiloh or Hebron or Gibeon where Solomon had his dream with God.  Well, remember that before Solomon was born, David had had a conversation with God through Nathan that went something like, “It is not fair that I have a great house and there is no house for God.  I need to build God a house because….”  ***** And I need for you to fill in the blank.  Why would David propose such an idea?  God needs a house because… because other nations, other peoples have houses for their gods, i.e. temples.  If they have a house, certainly, our God needs one – a better one.  No, friends, God needs a house like a submarine needs a screen door.

But don’t just take my word for it.  Perhaps you remember God’s response to David’s initial announcement that he would build a house for the Lord: “Who are you to say what I need and don’t need?  Who said I need a house?  Have I ever asked for a house?  No, but I will allow your offspring to build one.”  This brings us to Solomon who receives the task from his father.  Solomon is in a perfect opportunity to embark on a massive building campaign. The major powers of the day, Assyria and Egypt, are both in periods of weakness.  David had subdued or conquered all the smaller peoples around, so there was plenty of peace.  Solomon controlled the land trade through that crucial area and had a strong alliance with the people controlling the sea trade.  They were the ones who supplied Solomon with his building materials and building experts.  He was all set and ready to go.  For twenty years, he built and built and built in the most massive building spree his nation had ever or would ever know.  And at the center of all of that, the capstone to his building campaign, was the Temple in Jerusalem.  As a side note, even though Solomon’s own house was bigger, he built the first ever national temple, the first official state temple, the first temple for the whole nation of Israel to come and worship God.

Maybe you see what just happened.  Just like that, Solomon pulled something that the Jewish people had never known.  He took the religion of Israel and made it an institution.  No longer was God wherever God was.  No longer did anyone need to cart around the Ark of the Covenant or erect the tabernacle wherever they happened to be.  For a number of years, the Ark, God’s own holy seat, had dwelt in someone’s workhouse.  All that changed with the Temple.  Now, God’s seat, the symbol for God’s presence, could be locked up in a room that no one but a select few would ever live to see – the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctuary.

And this makes me mad.  I had not really planned on going in this direction today, but you need to hear what is on my heart about this crisis of faith that the people of Israel and Solomon were in the act of committing.

  • Whether we realize it or not, we tend to absorb qualities of the other people around us, and there is a special word for when people start acting like the other people around them. That word is syncretism.  It happens in all kinds of ways.  You may have noticed that when you are in a place for a good while that you sound like them, dress like they dress or eat what they eat.  You might even value what they value.  In fact, I will guarantee your ideas will change.  Christmas and Easter are both Christian holidays that were taken from pagan traditions.  Sometimes the ways we begin imitating others is pretty harmless; sometimes the ways can be crushing.  There is a reason why God directed the people under Joshua to get rid of the people living in the Land of Promise, and because they failed to follow through, they ended up absorbing the same cultural practices and even religious practices, like temple prostitution and child sacrifice.  You heard in one of the first sermons I preached in this series how the people of Israel wanted a king like other peoples and God gave it to them.  How much more for a Temple?  We have an inner desire to be more alike others than different.  However, God always wants us free enough to be different.  This world does not own us, and its kingdom is not our love.

 

  • Solomon in his wisdom makes a couple of very interesting statements about the Temple in the passage I read. After seven years and a massive investment of resources, Solomon is there celebrating the magnificence of the holy house for God, but he admits just how silly a notion that is.  Still, he pursues the premise that whether God is in the building or not, the building is still the focus for the Jewish people, for the nation of Israel, and for anyone and everyone who will come in the future when they hear about Israel and her God.  People across the world will consider the Temple as their link for devotion to God.  If we want to pray to God, or look for God’s blessing, or just consider the Divine, we should cast our gaze and our hearts toward Jerusalem and her Temple.  Now, I will be the first to admit that having a focus for devotion can be helpful.  Dwelling on a picture or a phrase or on a melody or on a passage can be a sharpening experience for prayer or worship.  I have been to places, both made by human hands and in nature, that made my heart sing in devotion, but it is also so very easy for that object of devotion to become an idol.

In case you do not remember the crime against Jesus that led to his death, it was the blasphemy over his claim that he could tear the Temple down and rebuild it in three days.  At face value, that just sounds like crazy talk.  It took many years to build.  It is lunacy to take Jesus’ claim seriously unless their appreciation of the Temple was just like their love for God.  The God who had no beginning or ending seemed to be somehow tied to that physical place.  Temple and God were confused and conflated in their minds.  The Temple and God were in some quality the same.

  • Which brings me to my third anger – a box for God. Even though Solomon recognizes the silliness of thinking that God can be contained in a building.  We have been trying to keep God indoors ever since.  Stop and think about how God or Jesus would be affected if every single temple or church or basilica or chapel across the world suddenly disappeared.  Would God or Jesus or their Spirit be diminished in the least?  Absolutely not!  The nearly-island out there at Wilck’s Lake where we will be next Sunday is just as much a suitable place to worship God as any fancy building, and I have been to some of the fanciest in the world between the Vatican and Paris.  I have seen Michelangelo’s work there that looks like living, breathing stone, but at the end of the day, it is still just stone.

The point or use of these buildings is really for something different.  They do not contain God, but God comes, the Spirit comes, the Body of Christ is here when we are gathered – wherever that may be.  This particular space is full of our living history and memory and service.  It is not God or any kind of box to contain God, but it is a vessel into which we place our hopes and fears and faith and doubt and service and love together.  Here we are trying to be one family of faith, but these walls are not meant to contain anything.  This place is meant to set us free.  The building carries us but does not contain us.  We do not need this or any building to be God’s faithful people.

I was in Lexington, VA in the early 2000’s when Lexington Presbyterian Church, Stonewall’s church, burned to the ground.  Such a historic location and a beautiful building.  It was the best thing to happen to them, the pastor told me, though.  They had to be a congregation in Christ without the structure.  They were free from the walls and could be the congregation God was leading them to be.

It is no accident that the moment that Jesus died, the curtain of that most holy of places in the Temple was torn from top to bottom.  In one of the            most important and profound statements from God, we hear the deep   truth, “You will not contain me or any part of me.”

Making a temple led to the disintegration of God’s people and the collapse of the nation and the failure of the people to be the people of God.  By the end of 2 Kings, the Temple of Solomon is destroyed, and the people are hauled off into captivity.  Then, again, they did want to be like every other nation.

Maybe, just maybe, the better way to look at all of this is to say our temple or church or whatever we want to call it is far more than bricks and stones and gold and bronze and wood.  The true temple is you and me, those gathered together in the Spirit of Christ.  It deeply upsets me when we forget this most important and simple fact.  We are surely a temple that God desires.  We are.  All of us.

1 Peter 2:4-6 tells us

As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

In these days, there are many buildings that do not survive between natural disasters, war and violence, and poor construction and maintenance.  We are painfully reminded of this this week with the anniversary of 9/11.  Even temples will come and go, but they are not our god.  That is why there is a building that will endure, not made with hands, that is built on love, for love, with love that is about people, God’s creation, and God’s desire for us to have a future in life together.  This building is the true church, the body of Christ, and it grows every day.  Do not place your hope in stone or brick, my friends, but in our life together and where our Lord is leading us as God’s children, all of us.  To God be the glory.  Amen.