When I was in Pittsburgh working on my Doctor of Ministry program I noticed dozens of huge, impressive, mostly brick churches - which are if not exactly empty, certainly not filled to bursting. It’s worse in Europe, of course. How many of you have been to places like Notre Dame in Paris or Westminster Abbey in London? They’re often full, but usually with tourists, not worshipers. England is actually in much better shape, religiously speaking, than most of continental Europe. There’s one 12th century church in the City of London, just across the street from Lloyds of London, which has standing room only lunch time services. And of course there’s St. Peter’s in Rome, which attracts thousands of the faithful all year ‘round. But it’s interesting to note that when I was in Rome, a little more than 15 years ago, two of the women in my tour group wouldn’t attend worship there. They were really offended that so much had been spent on the art and architecture that could have gone to the poor. And that begs a question: Would Presbyterians - and Methodists - and Catholics - and Baptists - and Pentecostals - make a more profound impact on our world if we don’t spend so much time and effort on those wonderful buildings?
There seems to be something almost irresistable about building churches.
We see that in today’s passage from the life of King David. Let me remind you a little of the history of Israel up to this point. After being begged and badgered by the tribes to have a king like the other nations, God told the prophet Samuel to anoint the Benjamite Saul to be Israel’s first king. Saul was just the kind of person everyone thought should be king. He was a famous soldier, tall and handsome and impressive. And he had some victories. But they went to his head, and he stopped listening to Samuel when his orders from God conflicted with his ambition, and actually let the Ark of the Covenant slip into the hands of the Philistines. During this time, as you probably recall, David defeated the Philistine giant Goliath, and soon became more popular than King Saul, and Saul went mad with jealousy, and started chasing David around the country trying to kill him. Well, eventually Saul is killed and David inherits the kingdom. He unites the tribes, consolidates the kingdom militarily, gets the Ark back and conquers the Jebusite capital Jerusalem and makes it his own capital.
So there he is, flush with victory, and sitting pretty in his brand new palace, made of the finest cedar from Lebanon, and it occurs to him that there’s one more thing he has to do. He needs to build an even bigger and better house for God. So he goes to his court prophet Nathan and says, "See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent." Nathan finds this perfectly reasonable, why, it’s what any obedient servant of God would want to do, after all God had done for him. So he says, "Go, do all that you have in mind; for the LORD is with you."
But Nathan spoke too soon. That very night, God came to Nathan and said, “Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the LORD: Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, "Why have you not built me a house of cedar?"
The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has never been tied down to one place. All the other gods of ancient Mesopotamia were local deities, belonging to this mountain or that river or this line of kings. But this astonishing desert God claimed authority over all those local godlets, and furthermore could not be anchored to a single place.
Instead, God has an alternate plan. But before he lays it out for David, he rehearses a little more history. God reminds David that his presence among the Israelites has never depended on staying put. The whole point of having a tent instead of a temple is that they could take it down and move it when God told them to get up and go. Furthermore, everything that David has came from God in the first place. Didn’t God pluck David out from an obscure family in Judea, and promote him from shepherd to king? Hadn’t God always been with David, even when the Ark of the Covenant was captured by the Philistines? God does not NEED a place. If he did, God would take care of it. The Psalmist reminds us that God doesn’t depend on our gifts: "If I were hungry,” says God to the people, “I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine. [Ps 50:12] And besides, He has something better in mind.
God starts out with a pun. Now you may think that God is above this sort of thing, especially when dealing with something as important as making a new covenant with his servant David, but he does it all the time. The only problem is, most of the time the puns only work in Hebrew. But this time we can follow it. Instead of having David build God a house out of wood and stone and metal, God is going to build a house for David! But it will be a house of people, a line of royal descendants, a permanent name for David, an inheritance which will not wear out.
“When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors," says God, “I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. When he commits iniquity, I will punish him with a rod such as mortals use, with blows inflicted by human beings. But I will not take my steadfast love from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever.”
Well, to make a long story short, it’s David’s son Solomon who actually builds the temple that David had envisioned. But the important thing to remember is that God is not the one who needs the building. The people of Israel needed it, in order to have a central focus, an anchor for their allegiance, a place to gather, to store sacred objects and memories, and to help them believe that the God they cannot see is as real as the temple they can see. The problem is, it doesn’t work. Or at least, it only partially works. Because after Solomon dies, his son Rehoboam alienated all the tribes north of Judah - David’s tribe - and they seceded from the union and built two temples of their own, one in Bethel just across the border and one way up north in Dan. So within two generations after God’s promise to David, we can already see that the temple isn’t holding the people together.
But God’s promise of a human house, a line of descendants, is fulfilled. The northern kingdom, Israel, suffers assassination after assassination and dynasties change almost as fast as fashions. But for the entire 400 years from the beginning of David’s reign until their final defeat by Babylon, David’s line remains intact. David’s descendants remain on the throne as long as the temple itself stands.
Again, though, we have a problem. Some of David’s descendants are faithful, and some are not. And by the time Jeremiah comes along, the temple has become sort of a guarantee to the people that no matter how badly they behave, God wasn’t going to desert them. Jeremiah tried to get their attention:
“Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, 'We are safe!'- only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight? You know, I too am watching, says the LORD." [Je 7:9-11]
But the people didn’t take him seriously. After all, hadn’t God forgiven them for Menasseh - who had Isaiah executed - and for all the other kings who had made treaties with their pagan neighbors and let Ba’al worship continue? During the reigns of the wicked kings they always got attacked by their neighbors, and bits and pieces of the kingdom were slowly whittled away, until by Jeremiah’s time there really wasn’t much left but Jerusalem and its suburbs. But the prophets kept telling them there was nothing to worry about.
And then came the seventy years of exile, and the kingdom never quite recovered. One of David’s descendants, Zerubbabel, became governor of the province under the Persians. They rebuilt the temple, but it was a shabby thing compared to Solomon’s. For the next 400 years the Judeans were under constant siege from the surrounding countries, Egypt and Syria and Greece and Rome, and it seemed as though God wasn’t with them at all. Where was the promise? Why wasn’t God with the House of David, the descendants of David, as he had promised so long ago?
We’ve been listening to prophesies and promises for the last few weeks, as we’ve remembered the season of advent and the long years of waiting for the Messiah. And we know that God’s promise would be fulfilled in a Messiah unlike anything that the people had expected, in a baby born in an obscure town to a family of no particular merit except for being part of the house and line of David. They were still fixated on the temple, of course, because they couldn’t imagine worshiping God apart from a particular place, just as they couldn’t imagine a kingdom which didn’t include palaces and tribute.
But God’s promise to build David a house was fulfilled in the same way as his promise to give the Judah a king. He changed the definitions on them. David wanted to build a house for God. Instead God built a house for David. But not only did God give David a line of descendants, he also gave to David’s line a temple for God to live in.
When asked for a sign that he was the Messiah, Jesus answered the Pharisees, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The Jews then said, "This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?" But he was speaking of the temple of his body. [Jn 2:19-21] Of course we know that Jesus was talking about the resurrection. But after the Spirit was given, after Pentecost, something else began to happen. The people who responded to the Gospel message began to be formed into the body of Christ, the new temple of the Holy Spirit Paul asked the Corinthians, “Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?” [1 Cor 3:16] In the Greek, that’s plural. Yes, the Holy Spirit indwells believers. But the temple is the "ekkles," the gathered people of God. Paul writes again to the Ephesians: “you are . . . members of the household of God. . . with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple. [Eph 2:19-21] Peter echoes the same idea: “like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.” [1 Pe 2:5]
When things are going well, when God has blessed us, it seems that we always want to build a house for God - just like David. This is not bad. We can see by the way God blessed the first temple that he understood the people’s need to have a physical place to gather and remember. And beauty helps us draw close to God.
But the real temple is the one that God gives us. The real temple is the one God builds out of us acting in community. It is not a solitary activity. Theologian Thomas Oden, in his masterpiece Life in the Spirit, says “The church is the providential means and sphere through which persons are enabled to receive eternal life. The genesis of the church is the regenerating Spirit.” He goes on to say that the Church is not “merely a secondary product of individual faith. . . One believes only within a community of belief. The Spirit is the life of the community . . . uniting God with humanity and the faithful with each other.”
The personal relationship with Jesus which gives each one of us access to God is an integral part of our Christian life. But in our modern world, the autonomous self is king - or queen. We value our independence so highly that we start to think that following Christ is something we can do apart from the gathered people of God. But that was never God’s intention. The place God is making for himself, where he can live among us even more closely than he did in the tabernacle as the Israelites wandered in the wilderness, is built out of you and me, out of people we would never have chosen ourselves, people that we may not agree with or even particularly like. It’s a whole lot easier to mount a building campaign than it is to let ourselves be formed into what God wants us to be. But it’s how God has chosen to be present in the world, to us and with us and for us. King Saul fudged his responsibilities, when he disagreed with God. David, on the other hand, figured God knew what he was doing. His request was that God would do it right, so that God would get good press. Well, we still want God to get good press. Our part is to say simply, with Mary, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." [Lk 1:38] and let the church - the place where God lives with us - be born again each day in and through us.
