Service on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seeyouonsunday/videos/2383956358605848
5 Now King Hiram of Tyre sent his servants to Solomon, when he heard that they had anointed him king in place of his father; for Hiram had always been a friend to David. 2Solomon sent word to Hiram, saying, 3‘You know that my father David could not build a house for the name of the Lord his God because of the warfare with which his enemies surrounded him, until the Lord put them under the soles of his feet. 4But now the Lord my God has given me rest on every side; there is neither adversary nor misfortune. 5So I intend to build a house for the name of the Lord my God, as the Lord said to my father David, “Your son, whom I will set on your throne in your place, shall build the house for my name.”
8 27‘But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built! 28Have regard to your servant’s prayer and his plea, O Lord my God, heeding the cry and the prayer that your servant prays to you today; 29that your eyes may be open night and day towards this house, the place of which you said, “My name shall be there”, that you may heed the prayer that your servant prays towards this place. 30Hear the plea of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray towards this place; O hear in heaven your dwelling-place; heed and forgive.
41 ‘Likewise when a foreigner, who is not of your people Israel, comes from a distant land because of your name 42—for they shall hear of your great name, your mighty hand, and your outstretched arm—when a foreigner comes and prays towards this house, 43then hear in heaven your dwelling-place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel, and so that they may know that your name has been invoked on this house that I have built.
I have to say that there is quite a bit of “Bible” between last Sunday’s Scripture reading and today’s. Still, I can see how today’s passage can be seen as a sequel. For those who weren’t with us last week – or if you don’t remember (Really, I have been asked as early as Sunday afternoon to tell someone what I preached about that morning and couldn’t give an immediate answer!) – if you weren’t with us last week, Pastor Leanne preached on the Bible story of David, sitting in his palace and recognizing that, while his domicile received an upgrade, God’s had not. The place where the people encountered God – through the priests – was still located in a tent, not a permanent structure. The tent was shelter for a portable and ornate chest called the Ark of the Covenant, which was the symbol of God’s ongoing presence with the people, wherever they found themselves. This was the way the People of God venerated their relationship with their God as they traveled about. During the time of Moses and the wanderings in the wilderness which followed the time of Israelite slavery under Pharoah in Egypt, the Ark accompanied these earliest pilgrims of our faith. They were on their way to the land promised to their ancestors, Abraham and Sarah,[1] and the Ark would be carried with them, sometimes traveling ahead of the group to site places to camp. The Ark was also a charm for them when they did battle with various peoples in the desert wilderness. If they didn’t prevail in battle, the Scripture record often notes that the Ark didn’t happen to be on the battlefield. This people with no land to call their own for so many decades of their existence, needed a portable God. Even when they got to the Promised Land, it took almost 200 years before they went from a loose association of tribes to a central government, a monarchy under King Saul. It wasn’t until we got to David, the second king, that there was a named capitol, Jerusalem. The Bible record identifies David as the one who made that city the center of government for Israel. The Ark was then placed there in its most permanent location to date.
As we heard last time, David saw the disparity between his digs and God’s, and he sought to finally rectify this by building a temple as ornate, or more so, as his palace. Pastor Leanne aptly characterized God’s reaction to David’s idea with the response, “No thank you!” Last week’s reading goes on to say that God never asked for what David had offered. It seems that God was happy to be mobile and be therefore present to the people, wherever they traveled. God says, through the Prophet Nathan, that an offspring of David may be the one who finally houses the Ark in a palatial dwelling appropriate for the Deity.
So, now we move to our story today, and we don’t have time to read in an hour of worship – or the capacity to take it all in – to cover the span of 4 chapters of building under the reign of King Solomon, the one of David’s sons who succeeded to the throne. Our episode today begins with Solomon offering an alternate understanding of why the temple could not have been built during his father’s reign. We heard today that there was too much instability and conflict with neighboring countries of the Promised Land during David’s reign to be able to focus on a Temple. But Solomon embarks on a major building campaign in a time of relative peace in the region, a peace that his father didn’t enjoy. King Solomon was able to build great structures to house those administrating government and also the Temple.[2]
Our reading skips over the details of the supply of raw materials and the negotiating with an allied king to the north (Hiram of Tyre) to make all of this construction happen. The rest of the reading is a jump from chapter 5 to chapter 8, and in chapter 8 we have the dedication of the Temple including a long prayer that we can’t read and fully grasp in the short hour. Instead, we read a snippet of the prayer. The prayer is a catalog of petitions uttered in the voice of the King asking God to answer the prayers that are spoken in this House of the name of the Lord. In times of battle or famine or pestilence or other troubles, in times when people have transgressed, may God hear grant petitions and forgive sins. The passage we read asks for the prayers of even those who are not of the faith – foreigners, who call on God’s name – that those may be answered as well. Thus, God is established as not just as the God of Israel but the God for all peoples.
Here let me shift a little to contemporary life. If you wish to immerse yourself in this wonderful story and read the gaps between our readings, you have your Bible and the days to come to do that, and if you don’t have a Bible, I can get you one – let me know! I want us to see this Biblical context to inform the living of this day. You see, the ever-changing nature of worship is an ongoing thing for a pilgrim people, and if you don’t think we are still a pilgrim people, perhaps it is time for us to tear down what we have established and put God in a tent in our backyard again. Such is the way of faith. It is a way, not a destination. Even when the Holy of Holies was housed in an ornate Temple, it should be understood as a road upon which we travel and not an end point.
The Temple of Solomon was destroyed some 300 years later after Solomon built it. It was rebuilt and about 600 years later it was toppled again. Between the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the building of the Temple under King Herod – a Herod well before the time of Jesus, the people of Israel were dispersed under empires that were not ruled by Israel.
What happened to the people who were promised a land for eternity, when they lost that land, let alone their temple to God? Well, they traveled along the way of faith and their relationship with God continued. It was the time of their dispersion among other cultures, when they were surrounded by people of religions other than their own that their faith practice continued. Without the Temple to travel to periodically to connect with God, they established congregations who recalled stories and studied and shared sacred writings and prayed even without their place to sacrifice to God. Worship changed. The beginnings of the worship in today’s synagogues can be seen in their practice set in the break between the Solomonic and Herodian Temple periods, and, you’ll have to take my word for it if you don’t see it, but synagogue worship and Temple worship practices can be seen in how we Christians now worship. The point is the practice of faith and the worship relationship with God is the constant. The particulars change and transform… and RE-form!
One more reference from studied history. Today is known as Reformation Sunday, the last Sunday in October, the Sunday closest to Halloween and the next day’s All Saints Day. It is the day when Martin Luther is said to have nailed to the door of Wittenburg Church 95 contentions, Theses, challenging the theology and practice of the Roman Catholic Church. Luther did not actually call for breaking from the Roman Church. That happened with his followers after Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X in 1521and largely after Luther died in 1546. The beginning of the Lutheran Church movement is hard to pinpoint. But what is easy to see is that the relationship with God changed and transformed and reformed, yet it is continuous!
Now, let’s move closer to contemporary life. My personal history first, but eventually we’ll look at ourselves here at Emmanuel UCC. I was born into a family that worshiped in 1953, my birth year, at the Associated Church of Owatonna, MN. It was and is today, a fellowship with standing in both the Presbyterian Church USA and the United Church of Christ. Back in 1953 we were members of the ancestor denominations of the United Presbyterian and Congregational Christian Churches. There’s quite a story behind that ongoing relationship. In 1963 Dad moved from dairy farming in southern Minnesota to work a government job in Minneapolis with the Food and Drug Administration – surprisingly, he took me along with my mother and brothers and sisters – and we joined a church that refused to own a building. It was a United Presbyterian Church that met in a school gymnasium – as a teen I was confirmed in a worship space adorned with basketball hoops and bleachers! If memory serves, the Presbyterian Church of the Apostles in Burnsville, MN was able to give 30% of its budget to mission and the wider church because they had no building maintenance expense other than renting space in the school.
When we moved to Salt Lake City, where Dad was transferred and promoted to the next level in the FDA, we were members first of a Presbyterian Church and then to a UCC church a few miles away. Long story there, it’s kind of like our jumping about in our Bible story – just not enough time to cover all the details and keep a single point to the story it can tell. The point is that the pilgrimage of faith for our family continued. The practices and styles shifted and morphed and reformed to meet the needs of the moment. Oh! So much more to tell, but I will stop here.
Let’s get to us. But now I wonder if I need to. We have explored stories in Scripture and in Church history and in my history that should allow you to examine who we are in this place in time, where we have been and where we are going.
I have so many messages I want to impart to my church – our church – based on my love for it and for the Church universal. I want to share from my experience as a pastor and a pilgrim who wore a uniform and worshiped in a great number of places. I’ve worshiped in Temple-like structures in traditional buildings, in gymnasiums, in the deserts of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan where we worshiped with makeshift altars, draping a cloth over a stack of MRE’s[3] and other such impromptu inventions. Twice I was deployed aboard ship at Easter, and we created sacred space on the flight deck at sunrise. I could go on, I am sorry to say, but enough about me; back to you and me today!
The pilgrimage continues. We are faced in our day with challenges of how we make our way into today and tomorrow. We will hear in the weeks to come the need to support the ministry of this church. We may even be in mourning about a time when our fellowship was more secure and larger and richer. The Trustees and the Council will likely tell you that we are shy of what we need to meet the expenses of maintaining what we have in physical structure and staffing and ongoing ministry. All of those things are real challenges and will need our attention. What I don’t want us to do is fret about whether we will survive. What I don’t want us to do is try to reclaim what we once had – or what we think we once had – for the “golden age” of organizations is often not as golden as we may have thought. There isn’t an age of a people or organization that is without challenge or conflict. Golden ages are often falsehoods, because they overlook the negatives and think only upon what we see in retrospect as blissful times. Faith is a pilgrimage, a journey. Where we need to place our focus is in our ability to pray a prayer of dedication to who and what we are. In this place in time, can we hope and pray that our practices are still able to ensure that our doors are open to all? Can we pray that our worship and devotion and practices still can recognize God’s constant presence? Can we still answer the call to us to serve God along the way of life set before us this day in faith? This is the nature of faith life that is eternal. I am not worried about whether the church will survive. I am more worried about whether we will still be members of that church. If we forget that we must travel along faith’s road and adjust to new challenges and respond to new needs, then the church will live on, leaving us behind. Friends, let us explore prayerfully how Emmanuel UCC, how you and me, can be faithful in such a time as this. Amen.
[1] It was quite a circuitous route. The wilderness period with Moses spanned decades, even though the time to travel directly from Egypt to Jericho, the place where they entered the Promised Land, could be measured better in weeks, if they walked there.
[2] Interesting that the reading we skipped over notes that it took many more years to build the administrative buildings than it did to build the Temple!
[3] Meals Ready to Eat, military rations troops in the field.