“Doers”

1 Kings 8:22-30, 41-43; James 1:17-27

August 30, 2009

It wasn’t really our problem. Our problem, our grief, was of much more weight. Still, it was a problem that would bear down on us when we didn’t need it. My sister had called and her 17-year-old step-son had collapsed and died during a physical education class at school, and she asked if I would come down to conduct the funeral.

When I arrived the controversy over his inexplicable death was on the front page of the newspaper for two days, and on the evening news. As one would expect there was profound grief and the range of emotional responses from the family. When the day of the funeral arrived it was apparent that there would be a very large attendance, especially from classmates, most of whom had never had to deal with the death of someone they knew.

The service was held at Hubbard’s Funeral Home, the chapel where many of our family funerals were held, including my father’s and mother’s and grandfather’s. The main chapel room was not all that large, maybe 150; there were 800 attendees. The staff quickly knew what to do: they set up chairs in the other rooms around the building, most with an occupied casket already there. Discretely, they closed all the other caskets and piped in the audio from the main room. It was, frankly, a rather bizarre scene fueled by high emotions. Nevertheless, we were able to complete the service and interment as well as was possible. How do you fit such an immense number into a small place? Not easily, perhaps not satisfactorily, for I imagine a few of the students were not happy attending their first funeral seated next to an occupied casket.

This is a parable of sorts for Solomon’s dilemma when he dedicated the Temple in Jerusalem, the House of God. Everybody wanted the Temple, but not everyone agreed with it. Israel had been different, now there was an element in Solomon’s thinking and in Israel’s popular thinking that wanted to be just the same as the other nations. Israel’s golden age was when it was lost - wandering in the wilderness for forty years. They were unwitting nomads, but their God went with them in their tents and from that basic experience came the notion that God was not a deity limited to a certain geography. God could live anywhere, God did live everywhere, and then it was logical that this was not just the God of that space called Israel, but the Creator of heaven and earth, the universal God.

God did not need a temple or shrine because God was always on the move in the Ark of the Covenant, a box in the shape of a throne where God sat. The Canaanite religions had the idea of worshipping on the High Places, up on a mountain closer to heaven. The Israelites tried to avoid going that high, but not very successfully. Solomon’s Temple is on Temple Mount, and most of our churches until recently built their sanctuaries on the second or higher floors, closer to God. All the newer churches are on ground level, but it isn’t because of theological sophistication, just that naturally the concern is for physical accessibility.

In the end, Solomon couldn’t help himself and a lot of other leaders obviously helped him build the Temple that David wanted. You have to notice also that Solomon and David wanted it to be in Jerusalem, the centre of the world. Prayers are directed geographically towards Jerusalem and the same idea was quickly adopted by Islam so that every house designates the spot where one prays in the direction of Mecca. Christians have never bothered; when you bow your head in prayer there is no concern about which direction you are facing. In Christ there is no east or west.

We have arrived in our reading at what should be the most boring occasion, Solomon’s speech at the dedication of the Temple. Surrounded by its glittering magnificence, it is a pious prayer to begin, yet Solomon ventures to say something quite daring.

After the usual praises, Solomon nudges God to keep his promise to his father that there will always be someone sitting on the throne of Israel, as long as they are obedient and walk in God’s way. You say those kinds of things when you are in power and you’ve built a magnificent temple, and that kind of pomposity still happens a lot. Of course, as the rest of 1 and 2 Kings relate to us, that did not happen, and Solomon’s reign was where the problem began for in many ways he overreached himself, lacking insight into his own behaviour.

Nevertheless, he says something quite insightful of the nature of this divine universe. “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and earth cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built?” God was supposed to reside in this Temple in the Ark of the Covenant - “supposed to” is the almost humourous key phrase. Eugene Peterson helps us get the point a little more bluntly. “Can it be that God will actually move into our neighbourhood? Why, the cosmos itself isn’t large enough to give you breathing room, let alone this Temple I’ve built.” Let’s just say that not only did Solomon hope so, but he was insisting upon it as far as he could get away with it.

However, that raises a lot of questions about any of our grand church buildings. Some of you have been to one or more of the great English and European cathedrals and there are a few in North America that are not small. I have been in Durham and I came to wonder in terms of the divine-human encounter in that vast and complex space whether God could not easily hide somewhere off in the corner. Vast emptiness is not necessarily the infinite fullness of God. Some will debate that with me.

Solomon asked rhetorically the right question, “Will God indeed dwell on the earth?” There came an answer about a millennium later, and that was in the birth and incarnation of Jesus Christ. Put aside the issues of stained glass and high ceilings and melodious organs and stately pews. The most effective and impossible way for God to dwell on earth, right in our neighbourhood, is in a human being. One can wax poetically quite a bit here, about how the God too big for the universe can be contained in the womb of a young girl Mary. That’s the stuff we sing about at Christmas, and it’s why at every Rotary Carol Festival I observe that these carols we are going to be singing are not just pleasant ditties, but the words are potent and can change the way you think and live.

The author of the Letter of James knows how dangerous these words are. But he also knows a lot of us tend to think that they are “just words.” “Be doers of the word, and not just hearers.” What word is more critical than the Word, Jesus himself? Jesus said a lot of important things and inimitable parables, but his most important message was the reality of himself that we are called continually to imitate. Jesus showed us what God is like in human dress, but he also demonstrated how to live godly lives as human beings, to become what God intended a human being to be. Doing the Word is another way of saying, the Word became flesh. We are not here simply to hear inspiring words that make us feel good. We are here to become human beings fully possessed and grasped by a God too big for us, yet what we’ve heard, we cannot do anything else but do it.

Preached by Robert Kitchen

Knox-Metropolitan United Church

Regina, Saskatchewan