Sermon Title: Within the Holy
This past Sunday, in the late afternoon, and well after the going away
party you all threw for Pastor Shields was over with, and we had
worshipped at Pilgrim UCC in St. Joseph, I made my way to the office with
a few things. The pastor’s study had been left open and Charlie had
graciously left the keys on the desk, alongside a few pamphlets, and
everything was nice and neat. Well, since then, in the past week, the
pastor’s office is no longer so-neat—there are a bunch of plastic bins full
of boxes and files, and miscellaneous stuff. I’ve got books on the
shelves, but they’re a mess—unorganized and little disheveled, but at
least they are out of the bin. Nonetheless, late last Sunday, after all the
festivities, I entered my office, sat in the chair, looked through a few
doors in and around the office, and then I just started roaming around
the church, entering into the rooms, looking around, making a little
pilgrimage into a space that has been your spiritual home for many,
many decades, but, of course, is completely new to me. I ran my hands
down the top of the pews, went up to the pulpit and preached a three
sentence sermon to a congregation that existed only in my mind. I went
up to the choir loft for the first time, and looked down and got to see the
vantage point of the choir members—lucky you, you get to see a lot of
balding spots, including my own—and then I went up and down the set of
stairs that run and down the sides of the narthex—I had yet to actually
try them out, so to speak. This is a beautiful space, something that a lot
of the congregation members in Houston remarked to me when they first
saw a picture of this building in the Houston church’s bulletin a few weeks
ago. “It’s like something out of New England!” they said And they are
right: this space has obviously been a source of great pride for this
congregation—you’ve taken good care of it over the years, and I know
you recently re-modeled it a few years ago.
To be honest, I don’t know if I would have appreciated this space a
decade ago as much as I do now. Life and the Spirit, if we pay attention
to both, have a tendency to teach us a few things in our spiritual
journeys, and an appreciation of sacred space is one of those of lessons
that the Spirit taught me in the last ten years. When I was seminary, I
was a member of a wonderful small congregation who also used their
Sunday morning worship space as a homeless shelter—literally, every
single night of the year, the worship space was home to at least 36
homeless Atlanta men, and every Sunday, the bedrolls would be rolled
up and folding chairs would be put out and some fifty of us would worship
God together, sometimes even with the homeless men who sometimes
lived in the space. Believe or not, when I began seminary I had a lot of
anger and skepticism about the institutional church, though, somehow, I
also knew I had been called to be in ministry to that same church, one
way or another. This particular congregation was a God-send—it was an
incredibly open community that was also living out the gospel in an
extraordinary way, working with homeless men, and I was always say that
God used that particular church to give me back my faith in the church
back. I remember one day I was having lunch with the pastor of my
congregation, and somehow the topic of how churches use their building
came up, and I, in my own smug, self-righteous way declared that
everyone should use their church building like we do—because clearly
we were doing God’s will and everyone else wasn’t, so to speak—now,
put that down to youthful arrogance and general know-it-allness. And
my pastor, a wonderfully generous and VERY wise man, gently corrected
me and just reminded me that there all sorts of ways of being faithful with
what God has given to each congregation—all he knew was that Clifton
was being faithful with the mission God had given them.
For me, that gentle correction my pastor gave me was the beginning of
really seeing the value of sacred space in a way I had never experienced
before and certainly hadn’t experienced as young adult. In the first
congregation I pastored, we rented space, a small chapel that we had
general use of, but it never felt like our own, and what we found was that
oftentimes people didn’t take us seriously—if you don’t own the space,
you’re not really a church, some of them thought. Now, I think that’s
ridiculous, but it happened again in the new church start I pastored in
Oklahoma City—we rented a beautiful New England looking Unitarian
Universalist space on Sunday evenings, and though we did grow in
attendance and size, some people sort of still didn’t take us seriously—it
was almost as if some folks said “look, like you all, and enjoy the worship
here, but give me a call when you guys buy your own property and
become a real church!” Now, again, I think that’s absurd—we, the
people, are the church, and buildings come and go, but the church, the
people, remain—we, the people God is working within, are the point of
church, not a building of any sort.
Still, out of that experience, I think I got it—I think I got the fact that there
is something about sacred space that is special, that is unique, and that
people—me included—need a space that is different than any other
space, a space that somehow at the least hints of the presence of God
in this world. We humans have a deep need for sacramental space—
that is why there is a church on every block, a mosque in every major
city, a temple of different sort of brands in town. There is something to
our human efforts to concretize our sacred moments, an experience of
awe, the ache and wonder we find in the midst of being in God’s
presence, that finds its purest expression in our attempt to carve out a
sacred space for us to gather and be in the presence of God and each
other—and for those of us in the Christian tradition, those two things,
God and each other, are not too far apart, since we believe each other
to be the body of Christ in this world.
Solomon is expressing that experience in the passage that we heard
today. The great temple, the dream of David that would be brought into
being by his son Solomon, the text we heard is the liturgy of that great
moment, the sacred dance of consecration when mud and brick become
more than a place, it becomes a sacred sanctuary for the living God of
Israel. Keep in mind that the completion of this temple is Israel at its
greatest social, military and economic might. For Israel, it would never
get better than this moment, with the ark of the covenant, which was a
box that was believed to contain the original 10 commandments given to
Moses the ark of covenant was to be permanently placed inside the wall
of this new temple. Putting the ark inside the temple sealed the deal, so
to speak, and the ark, which had essentially been the center of a
traveling temple for generations of Israelites, now had a permanent
home. A cloud, one of the traditional sign of God’s presence in a
particular place, it engulfs the priests as they exit the holiest of holies,
where they had placed the Moses precious tablets.
Awe and wonder, the ache of human desire for something more than
itself, the need to put that sense of awe into stone and to solidify that
which can never really be captured—it is all here for the people, as they
witness the consecration of Solomon’s temple, and that awe and wonder,
it is familiar for a lot of us, at least it for me. It was sort of the same
experience I had when I was here by myself last Sunday, running my
hands of over the pews, or walking through the building—maybe this is
no Solomon’s temple, but it is a beautiful temple nonetheless, and I
suspect the hands and people who built, our forbearers in this
congregation, had no less a sense of wonder at what they were doing in
building it. It is our personal effort to do what Solomon did for the people
of Israel—remind us that the holy is within these walls, that the people
who enter here are within all that is holy in this world, at least on this side
of eternity.
But not only these walls—and I say that because what struck the most of
out of this text that Mary shared with us earlier was not so much the
sense of awe in building a place for people to enter into and worship the
living God of Israel, but the expansiveness of the vision that Solomon
gives his people. Keep in mind that the people of Israel for generations
were like a lot of nations around them, at least religiously—each of those
nations had their particular god or God, and the gods or the god of
those nations were often seen to be competing with and against each
other. Yes, Israel was also different, in the sense that they were
monotheists—rather than having many gods, they worshipped only one
God—but they also recognized that other nations had other gods, and
they often talked as if Israel’s God was competing with the Philistines’
gods, or the Egyptian’s gods, etc, etc. Yahweh, Israel’s God, was not yet
the only God; Yahweh was just another deity, perhaps the greatest deity,
in a world infused with spiritual powers. But something new is happening
in the text we heard today—the writer has Solomon begin the process of
tearing down the walls of the very temple that was meant to house the
presence of God. Solomon builds a place for the holy and then, in some
odd way, he demolishes the very meaning of the place by offering a
vision of God that is bigger than anything that walls any human being
could ever build.
Now, where am I getting all this, you may be asking? Good question. I
think what is startling in this text for me is the moment when Solomon
prays for the foreigner, when he asks God to hear the prayer of the non-
Israelite, to hear the prayer for one of those that is “not one of us,” so to
speak, when he or she comes to pray towards this house. Something
new is going on here, something universal is happening here. This is
not only Israel’s temple, but the world’s temple, a place for all to look
towards as a space where the holy is found, where the ache of awe and
wonder is opened up for all people. All are to look at the temple,
perhaps from a distance, and they are to be in awe of the God who has
so inspired a people to build a house of such beauty. For me, this is one
of those moments that reminds me of why we build holy places, why we
humans build temples and churches, and we take care of these
buildings, and why we grieve when we lose them to fire or hurricanes or
even the ravages of time: these sacred spaces do more than reflect our
awe and wonder of who God is—they inspire us to create more sacred
spaces in this world and I am not talking about more buildings—instead,
if our sacred buildings are built right, they propel towards to doing
sacred work in this world, they challenge us to widen the reach of God’s
justice and God’s love in this world. Solomon includes the foreigner, the
one who visits from afar, in his prayer of consecration of the first great
temple of Israel. When Solomon prays for the foreigner, he does
something amazing for the context he is living in—he includes the other,
he includes the “not one of us” and he begins to see the temple not as a
way of containing God’s presence in this world, of just localizing Israel’s
God within four walls, but of expanding the reach of God’s justice and
goodness into the world all around Israel.
That’s why I think church buildings matter, not only because they attempt
capture a sense of the Holy for the worshippers inside their walls, but
because the buildings themselves are meant to be part of the work
expanding the presence of the holy in this world. And I think that is the
work of the church in this world—to create more and more holy places
around us, to do what Solomon was doing in that moment—to make the
world more and more a place where the presence of God is clearly seen,
where God’s work of love and hope, justice and goodness is done.
I get it now, in a way that I didn’t years ago in seminary, though I
understand my youthful concerns about church buildings and how they
often consume congregations, both spiritually and financially. Friends of
mine who are not church goers often talk about entering into the holy
themselves on Sunday morning—on their porches with a fresh copy of
the Sunday New York Times, or going to a local state park for a hike in
the mountains. I know they think we are probably far apart on what we
believe is actually holy in this world…but I don’t think we are, because if
the church is doing what it is supposed to be doing—that is, expanding
the presence of the holy in this world, expanding the realm of God out
into world—then it includes my friend’s back porch and the state park
nearby. Solomon’s God is bigger than the temple he built, and he knows
this—Solomon knows that it includes the foreigner—and we know this as
well, right? We know that this place, this church building, is where we go
to be reminded that we are in the midst of working with God in expanding
the presence of the holy out into this beautiful and yet fragile world.
We are also within the holy when we cross out of the threshold of this
beautiful space, and I hope we’re all about gently pushing that sense of
the holy out into the world, so that it pours out of these four walls and
engulfs the world in all that is good and grace filled. The kingdom of
God is within us, so says Jesus, but it isn’t meant to stay only within us—
it is meant to expand into those places where the kingdom does not yet
exist or where it is not yet recognized for what it really is. So, I ask you
this day to do what I did last week when I first entered in this building as
your new pastor: as you exit, pay attention to where you are—this holy
place made of wood and plaster—run your hands along the pews, the
doors, whatever, and then later this afternoon, tomorrow, pay attention
to the places where you will be going, wherever that is, and make room
for the holy in that place as well. We not only stand on holy ground in
this place, but in every place we choose to live out the realm of God—all
is holy when we choose to let God make it holy through us, when we
allow God to make it sacred through our human hands. Amen.
