Is God on Earth?
1 Kings 8

August 27, 2006


I had the good fortune earlier this summer to attend a conference at the University of Durham in northeast England. Barely 50 meters outside the room where we held all our meetings was the majestic towering Durham Cathedral. After the conference concluded one of the other attendees and I decided to go through the Cathedral slowly to examine all the nooks and crannies of this church they began to build in 1093 and completed in 1135 and all that. At one end is the shrine of St. Cuthbert and at the other end the Venerable Bede. The high arching ceiling gathered under it nooks and crannies that were full of history and piety. Bill Bryson says that this is the greatest cathedral on the planet Earth.

I’ve been in other huge cathedrals as well. The National Cathedral in Washington, DC, an Episcopalian/Anglican edifice upon on Massachusetts Avenue is where I was ordained as a deacon in the United Methodist Church in 1971. Across the city on the campus of Catholic University of America is the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, bigger than almost any other cathedral. There is one thing that connects all of them from my perspective - lousy acoustics, though, the lot of them.

But you know what? While these are wonderful pieces of architecture and incomprehensible the decades and even centuries it took to build these churches, they do nothing for me. I am not inspired by a magnificent building; I need one just like here that you can still justifiably call a room, a place where we gather together as a congregation enveloped by the presence of God. I am not interested in a magnificent God; I need someplace where I am close enough to be touched by that same presence.

Therefore, I cannot get too excited about the description of the consecration of the Temple in Jerusalem conducted by King Solomon. It had to be an incredibly monumental event, unprecedented in the ancient world, but like a lot of huge projects it was fueled by powerful egos and exploitation of those who had to do the building. Should we celebrate or mourn such events?

Now that that’s over with, let’s understand that in the narrative of such things in the Old Testament, there is always implanted, subliminally perhaps, something that speaks to and against the characters involved, something theological that undermines the comfortable power of even the biggest temples. No matter what Solomon was trying to say, he said some surprising and radical things.

He started by acknowledging that “O GOD, God of Israel, there is no God like you in the skies above or on the earth below who unswervingly keeps covenant with his servants and relentlessly loves them as they sincerely live in obedience to your way.” In a way that sounds like our God is the best god, but there are other gods to choose from, other choices of divinity.

Solomon, puffed up in his moment of glory that even his father was unable to achieve, insists that God keep his promises, keep up his end of the bargain. He thought that after all he had done for God, he had the power to insist that God do his bidding. I believe his God did exactly that. “His God,” Solomon’s God did reward him for all he had accomplished and people would come far and wide to see Solomon’s Temple as it would usually be called. His God conformed to his wishes, but that doesn’t mean His God was the God of Israel or the God of the Universe.

It is subtle, but you and I are very good at creating our own version of God and fooling ourselves into believing that this is the One and Only God. Solomon apparently believed that His God was not quite the Only God, simply the best. Other gods are very good at horning in on the action of our minds and souls.Paul Tillich, the German theologian deported from Germany by Hitler, was known for his ways of describing God. God is the Ultimate Concern - of which there are no concerns more important. Yet, Tillich observed, we are usually occupied by many “ultimate concerns” (small letters) about which we are convinced that they are “ultimate.” The usual: money, power, fame, comfort, et al.

Yet while Solomon has tamed His God, he still was found declaring something basic, “Can it be that God will actually move into our neighborhood? Why, the cosmos itself isn’t large enough to give you breathing room, let alone this Temple I’ve built.” Will God indeed dwell on earth? God doesn’t need to do so. God is really too big to fit into an earth-sized container. God, however, has a habit of doing just that, living on “our” earth, moving into our neighbourhood, and usually becoming an annoying incarnation.

Solomon thinks he has it all worked out, so he continues in his prayer to enlighten God about how the Temple is now going to work. Individuals are going to argue and fall into conflict and then they will come to the Temple, pray and sacrifice and lay out all the issues, and God will mete out the rewards and judgments. God, I am sure, was glad to have that straightened out for him.

Solomon doesn’t stop there and goes on to describe a series of scenarios of sticky wickets, all of which are resolved by proper prayer in the Temple and God’s merciful and insightful judgments. The Lectionary Guys have lifted out one of these for our reading today (vv. 41-43) about what happens when a foreigner, clearly not an Israelite, comes to town.

Doesn’t Solomon know, don’t we know, that foreigners are dangerous people? Foreigners are people who don’t belong to us, who don’t look like us, speak like us, think or act like us. Foreigners, get this, even believe some other parts of life are more important, more important at least than things we are convinced are the most important. That’s what it means to live in a different culture.

It must be granted that Israel and Solomon were remarkably liberal for that era in history: they would permit foreigners to enter the Promised Land, to mount up to Zion, to step inside the sacred boundaries of King Solomon’s Temple. Most nations then saw the foreigner as an immediate threat, automatically considered to be supportive of a hostile and aggressive government. They were legitimate, Solomon assumed, because they recognized the greatness of Yahweh who was the creator and ruler of the universe and of all nations and peoples. It is a lot easier to accept a foreigner if they accept your values first. We still seem to apply those rules.

Solomon asks God to commit to answering the prayers of such a God-fearing foreigner “so that all the peoples on earth may know your name.” Not for exactly the same reasons we need foreigners and we need them, like Solomon, in church.

When foreigners show up to worship, they have thought about that infinite God Solomon referred to in quite different and often enlightening ways. The cosmos isn’t large enough to give God breathing room: one person, one nation, one culture can’t think enough to put all of God into one book. One of the beauties of the Christian way of faith is that from the beginning, the whole world was given the Gospel and everybody was expected to contribute. The Bible was immediately translated into different languages so that people could think about God in the manner they think about the most important things. I don’t believe - and there are many who heartily agree - that we would be sitting here, that there would be either no Christianity or a puny insignificant sect if all those foreigners did not come to worship and think and create and show all those Galileans how to be Christ-like in an infinite variety of ways.

Do I need to tell you about the debt this congregation owes to foreigners? When you get right down to it, all Christians are foreigners, for there no longer is a central home base and culture for our faith. It’s not Galilee or Rome or Constantinople or Paris or Moscow or Boston or Toronto. Christianity is more of a world religion than it has ever been, but the critical mass is no longer in Western Europe or North America, but in Africa, Asia, South America. It’s a foreign way of doing Christianity, and once we come to grips with the fact that we are now the foreigners, maybe then we’ll have something unique and different to contribute to God’s realm in this cosmos.

God is so big we can’t get under him, can’t get over him, can’t get between him, but God has moved into the neighbourhood. A neighbourhood filled with foreigners, yes, but look at what was even happening with Solomon. If a foreigner came to worship at the Temple, he or she had already figured out that Yahweh is The God. And if God answered this foreigner and encouraged her, then she was thinking and acting more like an Israelite. In other words, she was becoming acculturated, she was less and less foreign. What else do you think happens to this diverse gathering of saints in this room? Paul said it (Ephesians 2:19-22), “You are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are equally citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus alone being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.” Eat your heart out, Solomon.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan