Wisdom, Empire and Prophets

 

1 Kings 3-11  (Read Bible Story Here) Maybe every Evangelical kid did this, but I specifically recall after hearing about young Solomon as a child, praying and asking God for wisdom. I did this in my bed at night for years. It seemed to me there was something special, timeless, unbreakable about wisdom, and I wanted in.    A group of researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine study wisdom. They say that while “Intelligence seeks knowledge and seeks to eliminate ambiguity...wisdom…resists automatic thinking, seeks to understand ambiguity better, to grasp the deeper meaning of what is known and to understand the limits of knowledge.” (Sternberg [1]).)   Wisdom is attunement to the way things are, to being itself. It is like glimpsing the inner alignment, sensing the deeper coherence underneath it all.  And wisdom always moves us beyond ourselves and connects us with others. Wisdom flows from our shared belonging to God and each other, whether it speaks directly of that or not. Wisdom was brought into being before anything else, scripture tells us, watching God create time, and space, and us, and everything else.  (Prov. 8:1-4,22-31)   Solomon says in Proverbs, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (9:10) This phrase in English ‘fear of the Lord’ means something like deep awe, and it is linked linguistically with the word for seeing – Abraham Heschel wrote, Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing, the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe." (Heschel: God in Search of Man).   Wisdom begins at awe. Wisdom listens to the silence beneath the noise. So, it necessarily recognizes the noise for what it is– it is honest about what is in front of us but knows that is not all there is.   And then wisdom grows not in the simple parts of our lives, but in the most messy, complex painful, death-into-new-life experiences. Suffering births compassion, despair pushes deeper into hope, failures produce humility and resilience. And we participate—we can choose to receive and walk the paths that wisdom is carving in us.   All the exemplars of wisdom studied by the University of Virginia researchers had one thing in common– they had all, at some point, made a deliberate choice to pursue something that was hard. They faced their addiction, they owned their wrongdoing, they stepped up to adversity. When hardship came, they chose to remain vulnerable and changeable instead of hardening and becoming bitter and shut down.   When the researchers asked the wise people what had given them the courage to step into something difficult, their answers could be summarized in five things:  a community that held their experience  cultivating gratitude and hope some kind of quiet reflection or prayer doing something to help others, and  having some kind of spiritual grounding to help guide them as they made hard but good choices.   Since wisdom is from God, it doesn’t surprise me that these things sound exactly like church.     The wisdom researchers describe, “…a wisdom atmosphere as one in which doubts, uncertainties and questions can be openly expressed, and ambiguities and contradictions can be tolerated, so that individuals are not forced to adopt the defensive position of…“too confident knowing”.’ They state, “When we foster compassion, empathy and forgiveness, in ourselves and in others, we are opening up the possibility for wisdom. When we foster the capacity for self-reflection in our children, or our community, we are creating the matrix for wisdom to develop.  When we foster gratitude, wisdom is likely to follow. When we accept the complexity and ambiguous nature of things, and refuse to accept a simplified black and white explanation, we are increasing the likelihood of wise decisions.    When young Solomon takes the throne, he asks for wisdom.  And God is very pleased with this request.  Because while wealth, or power, or revenge would serve Solomon, wisdom will serve the people.  So God gives him wisdom, and then God gives him wealth and power as well, because wise leaders use wealth and power for the goodness of all. And at first, Solomon did.   But, contrary to popular opinion, humans do not, in fact, naturally get wiser with age. If we resist the hard lessons, avoid vulnerability, shun community, pursue the noise instead of the silence, invest in the self-construction of pride instead of the deconstruction of prayer, ignore the needs of others, and disdain guidance, we lose attunement, the deeper seeing dims. We may be smart, but we will no longer be wise.   Solomon, for all the wisdom he began with, lost his awe. And unlike David, he did not have a prophet Nathan to confront him when he went astray. There was no one who spoke truth to power. Who reminded him of his vulnerability and humanity? Who called him back to God when he got distracted by his own power and cleverness, or enslaved to his own desires and drives? Solomon stopped seeing God and those he was anointed by God to serve.   And so, for all the good that Solomon did, he also did a catastrophically bad thing.  He turned Israel into an empire, and the people of God adopted the mindset of the empire.   An empire mindset is numb to imagination. It has no ability to envision a future outside of what is presented in the present. Its goal is to build and maintain stability. In all things it reinforces the authority of the king.  And it keeps people accepting what may not be good for them, because that serves to keep order and ensure the longevity of the empire.  (See Bruegemann: The Prophetic Imagination)   Walter Bruggemann says Solomon’s reign did three things: 1- it shifted the economic focus from equality to affluence. No more everyone-in-it-together provided for by a generous God, like with the manna in the wilderness, now it was looking out for oneself and one’s own interests and building wealth at the expense of others.   2- it shifted the political focus from justice to oppression. The law of Moses in Leviticus says, “If your brother or sister becomes poor and cannot maintain themselves with you, you shall maintain them, as a stranger and a sojourner they shall live with you. Take no interest from them or increase but fear your God; that your brother or sister may live beside you…For they are my servants, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves.” (Lev.25:35-42) But Solomon built this empire with forced labor.    And 3- it shifted the religious focus from God’s freedom to God’s accessibility.  In the time of Moses God was available, but on God’s terms. God cared for the people but remained uncompromisingly free, saying things like, I will show mercy to whom I show mercy and you cannot see my face and live. There has always been this tension between God’s freedom and God’s accessibility –God is available to us but not ruled by us. David lived in this dynamic tension with God – both the fear of the Lord and the intimacy with the Beloved. If Moses erred on the side of God’s freedom, Solomon obliterated this tension in favor of total accessibility. Now there is no sense that God is free and can “act apart from or even against the regime.” God is on call. God is boxed in. God is used to bolter our point and back up our power.    Brueggemann explains the empire mindset further, “Solomon traded the vision of freedom for the reality of security.  He…banished the neighbor for the sake of reducing everyone to servants. He…replaced covenanting with consuming, and all promises…were reduced to tradable commodities.” In other words, Solomon exchanged the Way of God for the Way of Fear, and Israel became a successful empire.   Solomon’s reign came to be known as the “golden age” in Israel, where the Kingdom united by David reached its pinnacle in wealth, stability, power and global influence. This lasted Solomon’s lifetime, and then it all crumbled apart spectacularly.    That’s what happens to empires; they rise and then they fall. They dominate, and then they collapse, or they fizzle out. Even a cursory glance of history proves this to be so- no empire lasts forever. The Egyptian Empire lasted 3000 years and is now so far in the human review mirror that most of us have no idea how much of medicine, religion, science and so many other aspects of modern life were begun by them. They’re just etchings on walls and mummies in museums. The Roman Empire lasted 1600 years and people visit the crumbling structures with their selfie sticks and make movies about dead gladiators and philosophers. Empire after empire, ruling in such dominance and power: gone – the Ottoman, the Spanish, the Mogul, the Russian, the Quing Dynasty, the British Empire, the 1000-year reign envisioned by Hitler that collapsed after 12 years (thanks be to God).    All this to say, if we put our faith in empire – which is to say, in the might of our human constructs and power – we are building our house on sand. And if we live with the empire mindset, we not only close ourselves off to wisdom, we choose a life of guardedness and fear instead.   “Nations are in an uproar” – our Lent text will tell us on Wednesday– “and kingdoms falter and wobble, but the earth melts when God merely raises his voice. The God of all heaven and earth and of our ancestors is with us. Our security and well-being are in this One alone. So,” we are told, “Be still and know that I am God.” (Ps. 46)   I feel deeply sad about what is happening to our country and what is happening to the world because of what is happening to our country, and what will likely happen next to our country and to the world. I am listening to the noise, and I am grieving, it turns out.    But I am not afraid. I am trying also to listen to the silence beneath the noise. Because if we trust in the One who has remained constant throughout history, the rise and fall of Kings, the changing earth and shifting civilizations, who has always held the hearts of human beings in love and given us to each other to encounter Christ right here, the God who came to be with us and actually is with us, who has broken the reign of even death itself, and promises wholeness for all people and this beloved earth, then we are secure.  No matter what happens.   I trust. Lord, help my distrust!   Because of Solomon, because of what he did to Israel, they needed prophets. We are going to be spending Lent with the prophets. The prophets are the anti-empire voices that shake the façade that keeps us all quiet and content and accepting the unacceptable. The prophets criticize by speaking for justice rather than stability, and they energize by remembering the promise of another reality toward which we can move, “to live in fervent anticipation of the newness that God has promised and will surely give.” The prophetic tradition shakes us out of the numb imagination of the empire to embrace the imagination of God.     Brueggemann explains, “The real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right.  Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right – either in the dean’s office or in our marriage or in the hospital room.  As long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism.”   So, I guess it’s a prophetic act to grieve, and I will embrace that. It’s also a prophetic act to call a leader to show mercy, and it is a prophetic act to phone our leaders and remind that their power is for the goodness of the whole, not the greed of the few, and their influence is for global cooperation, not global dominance.   It's also a prophetic act to rest, lest we forget that God is God. It’s prophetic to receive joy, feed connection and speak hope. It’s transformative to lift up beauty, to call out goodness, and to bolster kindness. To seek the living and active God and not an idol of accessibility, sense the ultimate in the common, and watch for the movement of transcendence is prophetic wisdom work.   To live in the Kingdom of God in the midst of the empire is radical and powerful participation in something both subversive and everlasting. It not only grounds us, it calls others back to the belonging that holds us all, instead of caving to the lies of division and despair.   We need a community to do this with, a ‘wisdom atmosphere’ to hold us.  So we will be that for each other and for the world. Together, we will ‘assume the inner stance of least resistance’ to the presence of Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit right here and now. We will foster compassion, empathy and forgiveness. We will grow our capacity for self-reflection. We’ll practice gratitude, and accept complexity, and embrace ambiguity, and refuse simplistic categories and easy explanations. We will live in the messy, hard, complex and painful places alongside one another because that is where Jesus is, and we will help each other make the hard but good choices and do the hard but good things. We’ll surrender into God’s care and calling, and trust in our belonging to God and all others, and we live accordingly. We will not fear. We will be still and know who is God.   Amen.

How Wisdom Grows

1 Kings 3:3-28

There is something to be said for unflinching honesty that doesn’t sugar coat things.  There is a fascinating tension in this whole portion of scripture (Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Chronicles and 1 and 2 Kings)– the people have been freed from Pharaoh, delivered from slavery, to be the free people of God. But it’s really hard to be free, and they have begged to have a king, like the other peoples. So God gives them a king, and they struggle after that with the political reality of having a king, as God said they would.

But God bless their honesty, the scriptures are ambivalent about their kings – on the one hand they praise their achievements- we see how powerful and wealthy, successful and wise they were, how they ruled in righteousness or built up Israel and brought prosperity and strength, but on the other hand, they also blame the kings for breaking the covenant with God, for turning away from the promises and words of God and their choices ultimately lead the people of Israel into exile. 

And throughout, for most of the kings, the prophets are continually calling them back to covenant and reminding them who is really in charge.  And the bible holds both of these things in tension – their great success and their utter failure, and in the midst of it all, God’s desire for relationship –to be their God and for them to be God’s people, a light to the nations, hope for the world.

So despite David’s murder, rape, etc. he is known for his faithfulness and his righteousness, and for his love of God.  And Solomon, who has 300 of concubines and 700 wives and builds shrines to foreign gods and builds opulence and wealth on the backs of the poor, was known for his wisdom.

So let’s just get that little bit aside here for a second – these are not clean characters or easy stories. They are messy and scandalous and frustrating, and the writers of these texts acknowledge the disappointing side of their heroes readily.  Because – and this is important to keep in mind throughout – this is God’s story. God who works in and through and in spite of the best and worst we can throw at God, and who never gives up on us – that is the story they are all telling, and they are committed to telling it right.

We left things last week with David’s household - which is a not the most peaceful one - God tells him the sword will never leave his house, and it never does.  In his old age there are several attempts by sons to take over after David, lots of bloodshed, and finally, Solomon - Bathsheba’s second son (the first one dies as punishment for his killing of her first husband, Uriah) Solomon is the one chosen by God, appointed by David, and anointed by Nathan, who ascends to the throne of David, but even he is involved in some scheming and has a potential usurper half-brother killed in the process.

So Solomon, who has already shown cunning and savvy, now begins his reign of the Israel in the most ideal way possible- at least from God’s point of view. God says to him, Ask what I should give you. And Solomon asks for wisdom.  And God is very pleased with this request.  Because while wealth or power or revenge would serve Solomon, but wisdom will serve the people.

What is wisdom?

Like love or hope or foolishness, it almost can’t be explained or explored in the abstract, it appears in circumstances and situations, in the word and actions of human beings in real life.  So wisdom researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine study people who are considered by others to be wise, and look at the kinds of experiences that make someone wise, and what it looks like in context to be wise. 

In order to illustrate Solomon’s wisdom, we are given a story, a context in which to see wisdom enacted.  It’s a horrid story, really, about two women on one of society’s lowest rungs caught in a tragic situation and at the mercy of the king, who holds the power of life and death in his hands. It’s a story of loss and despair, of what desperation and grief can do, and of what love looks like too.

In this story, Solomon peels back the curtain of wisdom for a glimpse, and shows the roomful of people not a dazzling display of his own intellect or power – though to hang a child’s life over a sword is certainly power- but a simple doorway to wisdom. He doesn’t judge or condemn either woman, and he doesn’t try to get to the bottom of anything, or figure out rationally what is right and what is wrong, and who is to blame and what their punishment should be. He taps into the deeper reality.  He starts with the love that will care for the child enough to let him go, so he might live, and exposes that.

Solomon sidesteps the drama and (albeit with considerable drama of his own) lays the truth bare.  The consequences will still be theirs – one will need to face her loss instead of denying it, and will grieve terribly, the women will have to work out their relationship and living arrangements with one living child and one childless mother. But Solomon’s actions in this moment leave open the possibility for reconciliation and forgiveness, for honesty and a way forward, without in any way simplifying or trivializing the complex reality of life and living for these women and anyone else there witnessing this moment. 

Of course, we want to know, Would he have sliced the baby in two? The absurdity of this as a solution – it’s sheer illogic and shocking non-solutionness makes me think no, of course not.  Unless it is simply to shut them both up and get the problem out of his presence, which, as a powerful king, is risk enough for them to take him seriously. A king could do what he wanted, so if he wanted to make a mockery, or cause pain, or show his might, he certainly could have.  

But that’s not where he was headed.  He offers the solution of dividing the child as a test, one that actually treats the women as participating human beings and not as problems to fix or objects in his way.  By this absurd gesture he allows reality to be exposed – the deeper truth is spoken, the one who loves the child, and would give the child up to see him safe, this is the true mother.

Wisdom is not knowledge; it connected to the way things are, to our very being. It is like glimpsing the alignment of things, sensing the deep truth underneath it all.  And it is always something that moves us beyond ourselves and connects us with others, it is always for others, never for our own personal gain.

Included on the long list of words people use to describe those who are wise are “things like compassion, ability to see the big picture, to put things in perspective, to see things from many points of view, to be able to reflect on and rise above one’s own perspective.” Dr. Margaret Plews-Ogan, who studies wisdom, explains, “Wisdom is different from intelligence. Intelligence seeks knowledge and seeks to eliminate ambiguity. Wisdom on the other hand, resists automatic thinking, seeks to understand ambiguity better, to grasp the deeper meaning of what is known and to understand the limits of knowledge.”

Where does wisdom begin?  

Solomon gives us some insight into this.  He is credited with Proverbs, (and Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes – the wisdom literature).  And we hear there this very often-repeated refrain, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (e.g., Prov. 1:7; 9:10; 10:27; 14:27, 15:33; 16:6).  This is where Solomon started.

The word for “fear” can mean being afraid or scared, but it can also mean reverence, wonder, amazement, mystery, astonishment, honor, in other words, something like awe.  And it is linked linguistically with the word for seeing –

Abraham Heschel wrote, Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing, the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe."

The fear of the Lord, the awe and the awareness of the eternal beyond the within the ordinary, the seeing into – this is the beginning of wisdom.  Wisdom is speaking from the great truth bigger than ourselves, the silence beneath the noise, the real reality that holds us.  But, it begins with an honest assessment of yourself and the world.  Lord, How can I govern so great a people? I am but a small boy! Give me an understanding mind.  I am limited and you are beyond all – help me see with your vision, help me glimpse with your insight, that I may serve these people rightly and do what is best for them.

Solomon asked for wisdom from God and received it.  But most often wisdom is gained not from studying or listening to someone else wise, but from experience, often tragic, difficult, painful, real life experience. Where these things can cause post-traumatic stress, they can also lead to what some have called, post traumatic growth. Plews-Ogan asks, “What better teacher of compassion than one’s own experience of suffering? How better to learn humility than to make a mistake? And what better to discover the deeper meaning of one’s life than to face a circumstance that forces you to focus on that which is of most value to your life?”

And we are participants in the process, we can receive the paths wisdom carves in us.  All the exemplars of wisdom the University of Virginia researchers looked at in their Wisdom Study had one thing in common– they had all, at some point, made an intentional choice to do something that was hard.  Plews-Ogan describes it like this: “It may not have been what they really wanted to do, and certainly not something they thought would necessarily end up well. But it was something they felt they had to do to set things straight. They chose, in many cases, the harder course of action. They chose to face their circumstances face on. We say, they “stepped in”. They may have decided to apologize to a patient or family, to go into a room full of intense judgment. It might have meant that they had to face their addiction, or take control of their health. At some point they made a courageous choice to make a difference in their own lives.”

But what leads people to make hard choices in the face of adversity? To remain vulnerable and changeable instead of hardening and becoming bitter and shut down?

When researchers asked what gave those people the courage to make their hard choice – to step into something they’d rather avoid, their answers could be summarized in five things: a community to hold your experience- a place to tell your story, cultivating gratitude and hope, some kind of quiet reflection or prayer, doing something to help others, and having some kind of spiritual grounding to help guide you as you make hard but good choices.  Since wisdom is from God, it doesn’t surprise me that these things that open a place for God’s wisdom to grow in us sound exactly like church.

Solomon had the gift of wisdom from God, for the people, to see the greater truth and help others live in it, to connect him to God’s reality and bring that reality to be in his leadership, but he also had his own cleverness and intellect in spades, and it is easy to see when he relied on one and not the other. 

His rule was characterized by stability and peace within the borders of Israel’s huge territory, and political and social order. He was a prolific writer and composer, beloved for his wisdom, and he gave the people of God the Temple. 

But he also used slave labor from conquered peoples to build the temple, built shrines for the worship of foreign gods, and taxed the people heavily to support his lavish and excessive lifestyle.  He made the people work as soldiers, chief officers and commanders of his chariots and cavalry, and gave preferential treatment to the tribe of Judah, which angered and alienated the other tribes.  By the time his 40 year reign came to an end, the people were weary, burdened, frustrated and disillusioned, after his death, the kingdom he had built broke apart. 

Wisdom keeps us human and connected to others. It keeps us human and connected to God.  But, Solomon did not have a prophet. There was no Nathan for him like there was for David.  Was there anyone who spoke hard truth to power?  Who reminded him of his vulnerability?  Who called him back to God’s ways when he got distracted by his own power and ingenuity, or became enslaved to his desires and the drive to satisfy his own wants, even at the expense of those he was called to serve?  

One researcher describes, “…a wisdom atmosphere as one in which doubts, uncertainties and questions can be openly expressed, and ambiguities and contradictions can be tolerated, so that individuals are not forced to adopt the defensive position of…“too confident knowing”.’ (John Meachum)

Perhaps Solomon, for all his wisdom, did not have this.

These wisdom researchers were not studying church. They were not looking at the Bible or the faithful from the generations who’ve gone before us, or those of us who seek to live in wisdom in a community of Jesus Christ with and for one another. So they couldn’t have realized what it would sound like to us gathered here tonight when they said this:

“When we foster compassion, empathy and forgiveness, in ourselves and in others, we are opening up the possibility for wisdom. When we foster the capacity for self- reflection in our children, or our community, we are creating the matrix for wisdom to develop.

When we foster gratitude, wisdom is likely to follow. When we accept the complexity and ambiguous nature of things, and refuse to accept a simplified black and white explanation, we are increasing the likelihood of wise decisions. Wisdom does not arise out of the easy, simple parts of our lives. Wisdom lives in the most messy, hard, complex and painful of our experiences.”

This, my friends, is Church. They are talking about church.  They are talking about us. We are people called to live with one another in the messy, hard and complex experiences, called to foster gratitude, to make space to openly express doubts, and to accept ambiguity and mystery.  

We are called to hear and hold each other’s stories – stories that God works in and through and in spite of so that we can be with God.  We are to be, for each other and the world, the people who help one another step into hard things, and who remain open and soft when life wants to make us bitter and shut down. 

We make space for silence and pray together, we can be brave and trusting instead of afraid and guarded, and we can dwell together in the fear of the Lord, that place where awe and wonder well within us and open up to us a seeing that otherwise remains closed. 

And when we look at David and Solomon and all these faithful who have gone before, in all the raw ugliness and beauty of their lives, it can help us to foster compassion, empathy and forgiveness in ourselves and others.

We are the Church, the Body of Christ, the living and breathing reminders of grace, experiencers of grace, spreaders of grace amidst life’s joys and struggles.  We are the community where wisdom grows.  May we come in honesty and awe before God and “feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal." (Heschel)

Amen.

The place God promises to meet you

1 Kings 5:1-5, 12-13; 8:1-6, 27-30

John 2:13-22

A couple of weeks ago, our session of elders gathered on a retreat.  Among other things, we asked one another the question, what is worship to you?

And some of the things that some of you said worship is were…

Something bigger than myself

keeps me grounded in the here and now

place God and us talk and listen to each other

puts my story in the context of scripture and the world around me

place where God and people meet, where heaven and earth touch

puts us back in touch with God again

Not about how I feel

happens in community

reminds me of the truth

helps me live the rest of my life with integrity

We do it to connect our stories to God’s story, we come somehow into God’s presence.

and many more…

What happens when we worship?  What is this strange ritual of coming together like this, and why do we do it?

Israel built a temple to worship God.  After hundreds of years in slavery, forty wandering in the dessert, hundreds more in the promised land but at war off and on, there was finally peace and prosperity in Israel.  And King Solomon picked up his father David’s building plans and set about doing what it took to fulfill his father’s dream – to build a temple, a house for YHWH, one central place of worship for the One Holy God. 

There had been other places – alters built on hills, piles of rocks to commemorate a meeting place with God, local sanctuaries and the tabernacle tent, the temporary structure that moved with them throughout the wilderness and which still housed the ark of the covenant with its stone tablets containing the law given to Moses.  But when the temple was built, it became the place that all of these were foreshadowing, anticipating, waiting for.  And scholars tell us it is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the temple to Jewish worship and life.  

"This is the place," one scholar says, "where Israel’s worship finds its heartbeat." (Craig Koester) The center of their life, where the Ark could come to rest and the people could come to worship. It was here the psalms became corporate songs of praise, here that almost all we know as worship found its beginnings, its language and rhythm, here the people were reminded in sacred and practiced forms who they were and to whom they belonged.

Now later - when the temple is destroyed and the people are be scattered – they’re  devastated, and have to figure out all over again, how are they God’s people? and how is God is their God? It becomes the open gash of their exile; their homelessness and banishment is most expressed in the grief of the loss of the temple.

 Later still, it gets rebuilt, as center of Israel’s faith life.  The second temple becomes a prominent place in the New Testament, the place Jesus is dedicated and where he comes as a child, a gathering place for the disciples.

The temple was it, folks. Their touchstone.  The place where the God who cannot be confined nevertheless promised to meet them. It was called “the footstool of God.” The Temple was place God promised to meet Israel, the sacramental place.

So how deeply offensive was it, hundreds of years later after Solomon built the temple, when it had stood for centuries as the home of God, the place God meets them, for Jesus to come charging through this holy place, the (second) temple with a whip, bashing down the merchants stalls and sending feathers and dung flying? When he roared that they’d turned what was meant to be a house of prayer for all nations, God’s dwelling place, into a den of robbers, and he desecrated their desecration, how much more did he break down that day than the tables of vendors?

And then, in a stunning moment of eternal clarity, when the onlooker sees what the whole cast misses completely, Jesus calls himself the temple. The place where God promises to meet us. The person of God come near for us not in stone and morter but in the very person of this raging man standing before us. 

Because God is forever breaking out of the boxes we build up and coming nearer, and nearer still.  And the word became flesh and pitched his tent right among us, full of grace and truth… (John 1)

God is greater than buildings can contain, greater than our ideas of God, greater than our prayers and our liturgies, beyond our best efforts to be relevant or real.  God extends beyond all definitions and boundaries, and is not limited in the least by our language or our polity or our structures.

God is everywhere. God can meet us anywhere. But God knows we are human. And we need touchstones. So there are some places God promises to meet us.

When I was 18 years old, I backpacked around Europe for a month with two girlfriends.  We were on our way back from 5 ½ months in West Africa and the Canary Islands.  As fun and life-changing as this adventure had all been, I was feeling a bit homesick and road weary.  We had settled in for a couple of days at a youth hostel in the middle of Amsterdam, right outside the red light district.  We were about two weeks from coming home; it was Good Friday, and I was craving, of all things, church.

My friends were content hanging out at the hostel, but I desperately wanted to find a church to worship in that night.  I asked at the front desk about churches in the area, and assuming I meant to sightsee, they gave me a map with a couple cathedrals circled and I set out.  I followed my way to one large church-building and found it abandoned, with spray-painted words on the bricks and the doors chained and padlocked.  I wandered from there through twisting streets as the sun was setting, frantically searching for another church, gazing up at the horizon for steeples and seeking out their buildings beneath, only to find them empty, locked and dark, and getting more and more frightened at being out alone at night and on the verge of lost.  Finally, not wanting to be caught alone in the Red Light District at night, I gave up.

When I arrived frazzled and despondent back in the brightly lit hostel, I heard the laughter and conversation from the community room, and did not feel like being with people just yet.  I was deeply disappointed, lonely, and pining for something I couldn’t put my finger on.  I shuffled back to the dorm room and climbed up onto my top bunk. 

All the other beds were empty at the moment, their occupants down in the raucous lounge or out on the town. I reached in my backpack for a roll I had left over from lunch.  And an orange.  And I sat in the middle of my bed, peeling the orange and laying the segments in a little pile.  Then I dug out my pocket bible from the bottom of my bag and spent a while trying to find the part where Jesus broke bread with his disciples. I finally found it and read it. 

Then I took the roll and I prayed.  I prayed that it could be communion. That somehow, even though I was alone, even though I was far away from the people I loved, even though I couldn’t find any community to share communion with, even though I had a dinner roll and an orange, instead of bread and wine, that somehow this moment would be communion. 

Then I closed my eyes and ripped a chunk off the roll and put it in my mouth.  When I had finished chewing and swallowing it, I picked up an orange slice, held it in my hand for a moment, closed my eyes again and then placed that too in my mouth.

And next to the loneliness I felt a grace and warmth. I felt like I was part of something bigger going on all over world, this eve of Easter Vigil.  I felt like I wasn’t alone.  I felt like I had gone from being tossed on the breeze like a loose kite to being firmly planted on the ground. Oddly and momentarily secure. I might still be swaying a bit, but Somebody had anchored my tail with their foot.

It was a sacrament -  Jesus Christ came close and united me with the Body of Christ – even though I was apart from them in the moment.  I hadn’t wanted to go see churches; I had needed CHURCH.

We worship, we gather here and do these things because now we are the Body of Christ. Christ is present in and with us in a real way.  God’s promise to be near to the world is given form in us. We can’t begin to understand what this means, except to accept that somehow, when we come together, God meets us here.  Or wherever we would gather, wherever here may be. We are the place. This is the touchstone.  All of us.  All of the us’s all over the world. Gathering together in worship.

Our symbols and practices, our polity and denominations, our worship music and hymns and everything else that we do cannot contain God, or even, on their own, reveal God.  At worst they become like the vendors in the temple, they obscure God and warp God’s message.  At worst, they become what we worship instead of what helps us worship God.  But at best they speak of God and remind us who God is and why we are here and invite God to come and be with us.  And then, whether we’ve done it well or poorly, whether we feel or believe it or not, because God is God with us, and we are the Body of Christ, God does.

I spent this last week between Kansas City, where I met my newest nephew and lots of new foster nieces and nephews, and then at ARC retreat center in Cambridge, where I wandered trails in the woods and sat in a quiet cabin under the still, quiet, star-filled sky, (when I wasn’t co-wrangling five children). 

And God was there, in both places.  I met God.  In the tears of a struggling sister and the laughter of an oblivious nephew, and the warmth and astounding beauty of a tiny sleeping infant on my chest, and the sacredness of a godson writing a prayer for snow and tucking it between some rocks stuffed with other people’s rolled up prayers.  In the friendship between young boys that don’t know their moms are listening to them help each other, and the late night conversations between otherwise long-distance friends when the pain and the joy find words with wine and whispers not to wake the baby. 

In difficult conversations with a friend and support that is beyond ours to give and somehow we give it anyway, we are church, God is present. 

But how to make sense of these experiences? How to recognize God in them? How to share the things I am afraid or sad about, or the things that bring wonder and joy?  Where do these things become faith for me, cohesive, revealing, instead of scattered, individual moments?

In this worship.  In these people. In this gathering. In the community eating broken bread and drinking spilled wine, and pouring dribbled water over a dry head.  These actions are our sacraments, our thin places, the places God promises to meet us. God is present everywhere, but God has promised to meet us in this place, in our worship. The Holy Spirit makes us into the temple of God, the Body of Christ, the place in which the God who is already everywhere in the world, nevertheless promises to meet the world. 

So as Solomon prayed when he dedicated the temple, in hope and longing, and trust for it to be the place where God meets us, Let us also pray in dedication:

Holy God who cannot be contained, who will always be greater than any attempt we could ever make to know or see or reach, or speak for you, we ask you today,

 Be here in this space, this space we have made for you. Make your home among us, between us, within us in our worship.  Make us a thin place, a sacred place, a place you promise to meet the world.

When people come here with grief and sadness and they cry out to you, give them comfort.

When they come here in anger, seeking the strength to forgive, forgive them and give them the power to do likewise.

When people come here because they are lost, overwhelmed or confused, meet them in solace and give them strength.

When people come here divided, torn apart by tensions that seem insurmountable, hear them, and meet them with reconciliation and hope, with healing and unity. 

When people come here alone, give them belonging. 

When they come weary, give them refreshment.

When people wander in from nearby or come from far away, because they need a place of sanctuary, a place of prayer, because they long to be in a place where they can meet you, meet them here, O God, answer their prayer. 

Dwell here among us. Sojourn here with us as we gather.

 May this place be your place.  May we be your people.  Make us your temple.

Amen.