What a clattering cacophony, that day in Jerusalem! What an assault on the ears! You could hardly hear yourself think. I don’t suppose they had rock concerts three thousand years ago, but it must have been a little like a rock concert. With noise, noise, noise! Loud, boisterous, uncontrollable!
The clank of cartwheels as a team of oxen made its way up the stony streets. The lowing of oxen and the bleating of hundreds of sheep, all of them jammed into a makeshift corral; and, every few minutes, pitiful moaning from these animals, doomed for the altar of sacrifice. Noise! Too much noise!
The people themselves were noisy too. The whole nation had gathered in the city, and the sounds of street vendors mingled with the gossipy laughter of the women, the raucous joshing of the men, and the impromptu games of the children. Everywhere there was noise.
Even where you might have thought there might have been a little dignity, there was noise. Among the priests, God’s chosen, you might have thought that the priests would at least be quiet and dignified. But, you know, if Israelite priests were anything like today’s Baptist preachers, they filled the corridors with loud chatter. “Hey, Isaac, guess how many people came to our shrine last Sabbath?” “Jacob, I hear that the pulpit is open over at Mount Moriah. Could I get you to recommend me?” Loud, busy, ambitious chatter even among the priests.
And then there were the Levites, the musicians. Talk about noise! Look at all the equipment these people had for high-powered noise-making! Trumpets, cymbals, harps, and lyres. I’m looking at the text to see if electric guitars were there, too! Noise?! Well, have you ever been to a National Symphony concert, and before the concert begins, every member of the orchestra is fiddling, blowing, banging, tuning, practicing. It’s an awful noisy mess!
The elders of the nation were there too. You know, the upper crust. Wouldn’t you expect some dignity from the upper classes? Well, Mr. Justice Rehnquist instructed our senators that they must be silent during the impeachment trial. But most of the senators look as though they are about to burst. I imagine the elders of Israel were the same. And then it says that all of the people were there; hey, I have a tough time on Friday afternoons just getting fifteen kids to be quiet long enough to hear Bible study, and so I can just imagine what it must be like when a whole nation gets together. Noise, sound and fury, signifying ... well, I’m not sure what it signified, but it sure was sound and fury.
Now right in the middle of all that confusion, a worship service was scheduled to begin. A procession carried the ancient ark of the covenant up into the newly built Temple, and the singers, the trumpet players burst forth with yet more sound, the king prayed and the people shouted ... and suddenly, there was a presence. A powerful presence. A cloud. A brooding light. They called it glory. Something came over the people. I can imagine them falling silent. I can sense the last notes of the trumpets dying away in the twilight. I can feel the singers closing their lips. I can see the priests, appointed to stand at God’s altar, sinking to their knees, awed, beyond comprehension. I can see everyone lost in wonder, love, and praise.
“Holy, holy, holy. Lord God of hosts. Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory. This house is full of Thy glory.” How does God’s house get glory? How can it be that when God’s people worship, God Himself stops by? Was it the noise, the shouting and the singing, that produced God’s glory? Did the Presence come because the singers practiced hard and the trumpeters played well? Did the cloud of God’s glory enter the Temple because the priests were eloquent and their sermons full of snappy stories for simpering saints? Does God come into this house because you and I orchestrate it? Does God come by here because we pump up feelings and manufacture emotions? Sometimes when we are here, and you all hide behind your hymnals, and you won’t respond during the prayers, I sit here and think, “Wow, when I get up to preach, I am really going to have to ratchet up the energy level.” Is that what causes worship? Not at all. Not at all.
The glory of God is felt in His house not because any of us make joyful noises, not because we pump things up. The glory of God is felt in His house because of two other things. Two conditions must be fulfilled if we are to feel God’s presence. These conditions have to do with history and holiness, with history and holiness. If we understand our history and if we cultivate holiness, then the glory of God will come into this house. We must understand history and holiness in this house.
I
Notice, first, that when God’s people understand their time in history, and complete the work God has given them to do, then the glory of God comes. When we discern where we are in God’s redemptive history, and seize the moment and accomplish all that God has commissioned us to do, then we will know His presence.
Think of the history that led up to this moment when the new Temple was dedicated in Jerusalem. They brought in the ark of the covenant. This old box was a reminder of what God had done in their history. It was a reminder that fundamentally they had been a nation of slaves and nobodies, but God had brought them up, out of Egypt, and God had established them in the land of promise. The ark of the covenant was there to remind them of their history: that they had come a long, long way, under the mighty hand of God.
And then there was the tabernacle. The tent of meeting, they called it. For two hundred or so years the central place of worship for Israel had been not a building, but a tent, something temporary. The tabernacle had been created by Moses out in the desert; it had moved along with the people as they had made their way up the Jordan River valley. It had crossed over into campground with Joshua. It had followed the people as under the judges they had taken the land of Canaan. And it had served under their first kings, Saul and David. But it was just a tent. It was temporary.
But now, this was a new day. God had brought them to a new occasion in their history. God had taken them from a wandering tribe of nobodies and had given them a beautiful land, a great capital city, and many blessings. God had brought them to a new moment in their history, and had told them that in this new moment there was a new task: to build a Temple. This Temple would complete the history that had begun long ago with an ark and a tabernacle. They were called to understand their history and to rise to this new occasion, and then complete the work.
Did you hear the key word in the first verse of this chapter? The key word is “finished.” “Thus all the work that Solomon did for the house of the Lord was finished.” They knew where they had come from; they rose to the occasion in this new day, and finished what they had set out to do. They took no short cuts, they fell back on no half-way measures, they allowed no corners to be cut. They finished the work of Temple-building.
Takoma Park Baptist Church began some eighty years ago in somebody’s living room, meeting for prayer and Bible study. A little band of folks were convinced that God had called them to the Takoma community. Oh, in those days it was a long way out from the real city to Takoma, where people from distant downtown Washington came for cooling breezes and fresh air! But people were living out here, and somebody believed that God had called them to plant something new in Takoma. So they started something; they began a history.
A scant four years later, they built this very room, believing that God had called them to create a place for His name. A number of years after that, when they had grown more numerous, they built another building, behind us, a large and sturdy place, one that they thought would serve for generations. But the times changed; circumstances changed. New people came into the community. Others left. The folks involved in this church saw that they were at a new moment in their history. They made a serious, careful decision. They decided that God had called them to settle here, and to serve everyone who would live here, no matter their skin color, their nationality, or anything else. They would keep on doing with the task that God had called them to do.
Now we are on the eve of a new century, a new millennium, and we must ask ourselves what that history means, and whether we are to finish it. We must ask ourselves as a church what we value, where we are going, what we intend to do. The choice is ours. But if we expect to see the glory of God in this house, I believe we must finish it all we have started.
We have a habit, you see, of doing things halfway. We have a habit of listening to God and then second-guessing Him. We start things and then figure out how to do them on the cheap, half-heartedly. Yet I believe, with all my heart, that God calls us to excellence. Not to be a pretty good church, but to be an excellent church. Not just to do okay, but to accomplish. God calls us to know our history and then to finish it out.
Each year we take on a part of our vision statement. You read it a moment ago. And each year we work at some aspect of it. But something happens to us along the way. We forget where we’ve come from and we break down before we finish.
We have said that we were called to serious Bible study. But many of us avoid all but casual contact with the Scriptures. We need to finish that. We have said that our neighborhood holds many people with significant needs. But we have not yet created many of the ministries that would address those needs. We need to finish that. We have agreed that outside these walls there are people who need the gospel, and we have made some brave beginnings. But we need to go on and finish what God has called us to do. And we have said that we are open to all people, that we will be sensitive to every culture, every personality, every style of life, and every need. A tall order, I admit. Not an easy assignment. But if we believe that God has called us to all and not just some, then we need to go on and embrace all people. If we understand our own history and we believe that it is God’s will that we share compassion on the down and out as well as the up and out, then we need to do it. And do it well. Complete the task. Jesus on the cross cried out, “It is finished.” He didn’t say, “That’s enough for now. I’m tired”
Our history is clear. Our motives are sound. We want to feel God’s presence. I tell you, it is when we move on to finish what we have begun that the power and the presence of God will be felt. It is when we get past half-hearted and partial commitment and move on to finish our task that the glory of God will be seen.
II
But there’s something else in this text that tells me how we can expect the glory of God in this house. There is another condition that we have to meet if we truly expect to worship. Not only must we, like the people of Israel, understand our history and finish the work to which God has called us; but also we must learn to grow the gifts of all the people. We must learn how to appreciate and develop the gifts each one of you has to bring. If we expect to see the glory of God overcoming this church, every one of us will need to work very hard at sharing our gifts.
Look at who got involved in the building of the Temple there in Jerusalem. It’s quite an impressive list. Naturally there were the upscale folks: the elders, the heads of the tribes, the king himself. All the people whose names you would find in the society pages. And that’s good. We need folks like that. This church has some folks like that. But then there were the working stiffs too, because it says that all the people of Israel assembled, all the congregation assembled before King Solomon. Everybody participated in this great work. It engaged the gifts of all the people.
And do you know what the most impressive part is? The most impressive part is that even the people with so-called spiritual credentials set aside their titles and their privileges and got busy on the Lord’s work. Even the priests and the Levites got their sleeves rolled up and went to work. Look at this sentence: “... all the priests had sanctified themselves without regard to their divisions ...”. What does that mean? “[They had] sanctified themselves without regard to their divisions.” That means that the pastors got busy working on real stuff rather than on preening and posing. I’d better not tell you all I could tell you about the high-and-mightiness of some of my reverend colleagues! But these priests in Israel got busy on real stuff rather than on looking for position. “[They] sanctified themselves without regard to their divisions.”
This means that the spiritual leaders got more interested in being true and honest persons than in using power. It means that the officers and leaders became more invested in spiritual life than in ruling over the rest of God’s people. It means that if we want to see God at work in power in this place, we will no longer think about divisions and status .. we will no longer worry about who’s white and who’s black, who’s conservative and who’s liberal, who’s been here for twenty years and who’s new, who’s young or who’s seasoned, who’s this or who’s that. It means that we will worry only about whether we are building people up in holiness. We will be concerned only about whether we are moving men and women out of status seeking and into spirit seeking. “Sanctified without regard to .. divisions.”
We had a good year this past year. We accomplished a great deal. We even set some records in finances, attendance, training. We are a growing church; moderately, yes, but growing nonetheless. I submit to you that the only thing that has kept us from becoming a truly successful church is that we have let some divisions sidetrack us for at least a little while. Misunderstandings turned up here and there. And whenever we allowed them to take us over, there we dropped back a step or two. Whenever we failed to work on growing each other’s gifts, there we lost ground. Whenever any one of us allowed disagreement to compromise us, there we pushed away the glory of God.
But the Bible says that the priests and the trumpet players, and the singers and everybody else saw that it “was their duty ... to [speak] in unison in praise and thanksgiving to the Lord.” In unison. Friends, all I can say is that the ground is level at the foot of the cross. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. All are equally needy. But also all have access to grace; all have an appeal to forgiveness. The ground is level at the foot of the cross. And so the glory of God will come only when all of us, in humility, value the gifts that others bring to the Kingdom, and grow them.
III
Now, when it all came together; when the work they set out to do was finished, and when all the divisions and ranks melted away in unity, then “the house of the Lord was filled with a cloud, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.”
Takoma Park Baptist Church, when we move on and do all the work to which our God has called us, and when we do it growing each one’s gift and honoring each one’s pride, then the presence will come. And we will be so filled up we will not be able to do anything but sink to our knees in humble adoration. We will be so filled we cannot stand.
For the end result of obedience is not self-congratulation, but worship. We know we’ve come a long, long way, but it was not our own efforts that did it. It was God. It was God all the way. The end result of obedience is not self-congratulation, but sinking to our knees in thanksgiving. So filled we cannot stand.
For the product of faithfulness and hard work is not only a great church with a good program and a beautiful building. These things are good; but if there is holiness in this house, then I for one will sink to my knees in satisfaction, so filled I cannot stand.
I pray today that the outcome of all our labor, our giving, our sacrifice, our dreaming, and our planning will not be a people who stand tall as the richest, largest, busiest, or most prominent church in the city. I do not pray that we will not stand tall; but I do pray that the Presence, the glory, will be so here that, filled, we cannot stand, but we go to our knees and praise Him as Israel did, “He is good; his steadfast love endures forever.”
It is not our noise that gives us the glory. It is history and holiness in this house that means we are so filled we cannot stand.
