The Temple

Temple of the Gods, by Nele-Diel

Midweek Worship

The Thirteenth Week after Pentecost 

Semicontinuous Reading: 1 Kings 8:1,6,10-11, 22-30, 41-43

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

There is a tension in the Scriptures, from the very beginning, between the universal and the particular, between the hidden and the manifest. What does it mean that God is the God of all, of everything and everyone, yet also the God of Israel? Israel is a particular people in a particular place, who have a particular relationship with the Creator of all that is, seen and unseen, of all that ever was or will be.

This is reflected in the very first chapters of Genesis. Genesis 1 presents a cosmic Creator, who speaks reality in being: sun and moon and stars and earth and sea and sky with but a Word, with but a breath. “Let there be light!”—and there is light. This is God in His transcendence, God in His infinity beyond space, beyond time, unspeakable in majesty.

Whereas Genesis 2 is much more intimate. Here is God a gardener. Here He takes long walks in the cool of the evening breeze. He gets His hands dirty, talks face-to-face with Adam and Eve. This is the immanent God, closer to you than your jugular. He is, as it were, humanized; parochial, even. So which of these is it? Is God big or small? Is He transcendent or personal? Is He near or is He far?

And the answer of course is yes. The answer of course is both. That’s why we’ve maintained Genesis 1 and 2 together, in tension, in paradox, just as our Jewish forebears have done for millennia. Scale is only a problem for the finite mind. If God is truly infinite, beyond space and time, beyond big and small, then He is equally present at all levels of existence, whether we’re talking about galaxies or quarks or your living room.

I often think back to an old Buddhist anecdote about the hawk and the sparrow. The hawk soars high aloft, able to see for miles all around. But the sparrow hides beneath a bush and she knows the whorls of every leaf. Which then sees better, sees more? God, of course, is both the hawk and the sparrow; the God of Genesis 1 and of Genesis 2. He is transcendent and immanent, infinite and personal, hidden and manifest. He is the particular God of Israel, and the universal God of all possible worlds.

This is why the Scriptures can speak of God’s Wisdom and Word and Spirit as being both God and yet from God: because to manifest in the particular does not make Him any less God. And this is important especially for Christians. Because we believe that God became truly human in Jesus Christ our Lord, while still remaining truly, eternally, God. Other religions have this same divine paradox. We simply know it—know Him—in the flesh, in the particular Man Jesus.

This is what Solomon is trying to wrap his head around in our reading from the Book of Kings this evening. His ancestors have worshipped God, worshipped Yahweh, for centuries as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Israel, the God of our forebears. And surely some of them misunderstood Yahweh as just another tribal desert deity: as a god, but not as the God.

This is an important distinction. A god as limits: has a beginning, likely an end; a god has a body of some sort, even if only a mental one, because a god is finite. A god is like Zeus or Thor, like angels or demons, bigger, stronger, smarter than us, but ultimately creatures like us, different in degree but not so much in kind.

The God, however, is of a different order entirely. The God does not exist; for He is subsistent existence itself. The God is not a being, for He is Being itself, in whom we all live and move and have our being. The God is not a creature but the Creator, of everything and everyone in every moment. What can it mean, then, to build a temple to this God, the One God, the True God? What does it mean to say that Yahweh has a house?

“Will God indeed dwell on earth?” ponders Solomon. “Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!” God is everywhere, and nowhere, so why here? God is in everything, and nothing, so why this? Perhaps because here, at least, in this Temple that Solomon has built, we can remember that no building can contain God, no limits can be imposed upon Him.

That’s why the Temple in Jerusalem is unique among Ancient Near Eastern temples in that it does not possess a statue of the god within. No Olympian Zeus, no Artemis at Ephesus, no Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple is empty. There is no image at its heart. Rather, the whole Temple is an image—not of God but of Creation, the universe in microcosm. Here is one building in one city on one land, pointing to the universality of God for all cities, all peoples, all lands. Solomon has built, in a sense, a temple turned inside-out.

And so his Temple is a reminder of the divine paradox: that God is everywhere and nowhere and right here all at once; that God is for everyone, yet also just for you, specifically. It is a sublime meditation, one we would do well to remember today. Periodically I hear, “If God is everywhere, why do I need to go to a building to worship? If God is with me, why do I need to hear His Word from a pastor or a priest?”

And sure, you can worship God at home, at work, in the woods, in a boat. I really hope you do; I wish more people would. But here is where Jesus promises to meet us. Here is where He promises us His forgiveness in the community of His Church. Here Jesus gives to us His Body, His Blood, His Spirit, His Word, so that we may then go out and be Jesus for the world! We become the Incarnation here! We become the universal God made Man, the hidden God made manifest, for all people, in us.

Jesus is the true Temple, the House of God on earth, the finite containing the infinite. And here we are made that Temple too, the Body of Christ, the dwellings of His Spirit. And then we are sent out—so that the Temple goes out to bring God to all. And everywhere we go, in everyone we meet, God is always already there, waiting, welcoming, receiving us as His own. He is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. He gathers us in and sends us out and meets us on the Way.

“But will God indeed dwell upon this earth?” Can any house contain the majesty of God? Of course it can! —when that Temple, that House, is Jesus Christ our Lord. Here He calls us in, and here He sends us out, and here in Him is pleased to dwell the fullness of divinity. For Jesus is our Lord and the Temple of the Lord.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.