God Uncontained

1 Kings 8:22-30, 41-43 (NRSV)
Then Solomon stood before the altar of the LORD in the presence of all the assembly of Israel, and spread out his hands to heaven. He said, "O LORD, God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth beneath, keeping covenant and steadfast love for your servants who walk before you with all their heart, the covenant that you kept for your servant my father David as you declared to him; you promised with your mouth and have this day fulfilled with your hand. Therefore, O LORD, God of Israel, keep for your servant my father David that which you promised him, saying, 'There shall never fail you a successor before me to sit on the throne of Israel, if only your children look to their way, to walk before me as you have walked before me.' Therefore, O God of Israel, let your word be confirmed, which you promised to your servant my father David.
"But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built! Regard your servant's prayer and his plea, O LORD my God, heeding the cry and the prayer that your servant prays to you today; that your eyes may be open night and day toward this house, the place of which you said, 'My name shall be there,' that you may heed the prayer that your servant prays toward this place. Hear the plea of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray toward this place; O hear in heaven your dwelling place; heed and forgive…so that they may fear you all the days that they live in the land that you gave to our ancestors.
"Likewise when a foreigner, who is not of your people Israel, comes from a distant land because of your name -- for they shall hear of your great name, your mighty hand, and your outstretched arm -- when a foreigner comes and prays toward this house, then hear in heaven your dwelling place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel, and so that they may know that your name has been invoked on this house that I have built.”

How do we live with a God who refuses to be contained? Did you hear that passage from the Hebrew Scriptures this morning? I mean did you hear it? Solomon the Wise, who ruled over a greater territory than any other king of Israel, was struggling with just this question. How do you live with a God who refuses to be contained? And for people who come to this place this morning hoping, expecting to meet God here it is the most relevant question we can ask. It is the most challenging question we can ask. It is the most basic question we can ask, because if the universe really is filled with God’s presence…if our lives really are to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ who is God…if what we are about as human beings is offering our whole selves back to God in praise and worship and then following that God in discipleship…if we are called to serve the world (and we are called to serve the world) if we are called to serve in the Spirit of a wild and holy God who has a habit of tearing down walls and uniting us with people we would otherwise not be with then it is a basic question of how we, who like walls and like to keep God within comfortable boundaries, can live with a God who refuses to be contained.

Solomon got this question. He got it. He was wise enough to know that the God who called his predecessor Saul was not content to just let Saul do his own thing once he became king of Israel. God was not content to let Saul speak for God. Saul did not have a blank check to rule with no regard for what God wanted and desired for the people. He had to continually seek out God and to listen for God’s voice, and when the relationship between Saul and God got strained, the Spirit moved on to David, Solomon’s father.

David struggled just as hard, though, to be the king he should have been. We remember the boy who went out to slay Goliath, but we also remember the man who gave into his basest instincts in his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah, her husband. When Nathan, the prophet, finally confronted him about what he had done, David understood that he had moved away from God. He had to seek God out again.

When David volunteered to build a house for God, a house as glorious as the palace he had built for himself, God told him to wait. That job would fall to his son. The real house building was going to be what God was going to do with David. Despite what he had done…despite his failures and his king-size flaws…God was going to make a covenant with David and his descendents. It was a crazy thing to do. What was God thinking in making this covenant?

Then again God had done it before. God took a childless geriatric couple, Abram and Sarai, and promised to make a nation out of them. God took a boy, Jacob, who swindled a blessing from his father and a birthright from his brother, and promised to be with him and his children. God took a people who were slaves in the greatest empire of the day – the Hebrews of Egypt --- and promised them that they would be a chosen people. And God stuck with the promise and stuck with them even when they proved themselves to be a pretty poor choice for God’s mercy. God has a habit of doing the unexpected thing.

So it fell to Solomon to build a house for God. The long journey of the people from slavery had finally reached an end with the establishment of the nation of Israel. There was relative peace in the land. The tribes were united. Enemies subdued. But the symbol of God’s presence was still an Ark with poles ready for easy movement from place to place. It was a good instrument for a traveling people, but for a people who felt they had found their place in the world it wasn’t enough.

So Solomon built a grand temple. With cedars from Lebanon and gold from the mountains he made a magnificent house for God. It was built high on the hill in Jerusalem, a symbol for all visitors to the city to see that God of the pilgrim people was now at the center of their city and the center of their lives. Solomon spared no expense to make the grandest house that he could fashion.

When the time came for the Ark of the Covenant to be moved into the new Temple, there was a great procession. All the elders and leaders of the tribes were gathered together. The priests carried the ark in before them. There were great sacrifices of sheep and oxen, so many, the Bible says, that they could not even be numbered. Inside the Ark were the tablets containing the Law of Moses, the 10 Commandments that the people had received when they were wandering in the wilderness. When Moses received those tablets of stone he was on a mountain talking with God and it seemed to the people that a cloud descended on the mountain. Now it happened again. A cloud filled the newly constructed temple and it was the glory of God, the presence of God made visible before them.

The symbolism seemed clear. God was coming to stay in this house. Solomon began to speak to the people and he said, “This should be God’s home forever and ever. Everyone should know that when they come into this Temple they are entering the presence of God. God dwells here.”

Yet even as he said those words Solomon was wise enough to know the problem. And he says it out loud. Standing there at that ceremony marking the completion of the people’s journey and the pinnacle of his engineering accomplishment, Solomon begins to wonder if it’s even possible to achieve what he set out to achieve. He set out to build a house for God, but he wonders, “Can God be contained in a house? Can God be contained on earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, God, much less this house which I have built.”

Then Solomon goes on to talk about how his prayer is that the Temple might be a symbol of God’s presence that the people will look toward when they need to know that God is there. When they pray for forgiveness in this place or when they face toward that place, Solomon hopes that God will hear their prayers and forgive them. And not only the prayers of the people of Israel. Solomon is also wise enough to know that God can’t be contained in a people either and so he prays that God will hear the prayers of foreigners who will seek out God’s presence and power in this Temple. All the nations will come to this place, he says.

Many of you know that I have been away for the last two weeks on a trip to Scotland. If you didn’t know that I was away, then that’s a little disappointing, but maybe it means that you were being the church and realized you could do more than you thought you could. But I was away on this journey with Joel across Scotland and we ended the trip on the small island of Iona off the western coast. It is a remote place and traveling there feels like you are going to the end of the earth, and in the days of the ancient peoples of the land, it really was considered the end of the earth because many of them didn’t know of anything that might lie beyond the western sea.

Iona has been described as a “thin place” because many people who go there feel as if the boundary between earth and heaven is very thin there. It has been a place of Christian pilgrimage for over 1400 years, ever since a strange little Irish monk named Columba came there in 563 to escape trouble at home and ended up establishing a missionary order that converted Scotland and northern England to Christianity. But walking around this island with its coves and caves and worshipping in the restored Benedictine Abbey twice a day, it is easy to see why people have continued to go there. They sense that God is there. That’s why I went back. That’s why I wanted to take Joel there. I can’t be on that island without feeling that God is there in a special way.

But it is a funny time to be a Christian in Europe. All around the land there are relics of a Christian past. On our short trip we visited the great Gothic cathedral of York and elaborate small parish churches that tell of a time when the church was at the center of the culture and lives of the people. But the churches of Europe are sparsely populated. In Britain only about 4% of the population is in a church on Sunday. That compares with about 40% of Americans.
Sitting in the abbey church on Iona one night I looked around at the people who had gathered there. It’s a motley crew. There were folks who were attracted by the music. Others who resonated with the Iona Community’s commitment to social justice and change. Young people who liked the energy and life of the place. Older folks who felt grounded by the tradition and the beauty. But all of us were there because we sensed that God was not through with us yet and that God was not through with the Church. Despite what we knew was happening to churches in Europe and in other parts of the world, we sensed that there was more and that we needed thin places like Iona to catch hold of a new vision.

It just so happened that one of the nights we were there, the worship leader was John Bell, who is a Church of Scotland minister and a really fine musician and preacher who wrote several songs that have made it into our Faith We Sing hymnal. I knew him from previous correspondence when I had encouraged Drew Willson from our church to spend some time with him. As it happened, Drew went to live with John for several months last year. So here was John Bell leading worship in this place, and none of these connections are really important except that they show you the kinds of things that happen on Iona.

In his brief sermon that night, Bell said that he had been meeting with a group of struggling churches in Canada recently and had heard them ask some significant questions. They sat down to look to the future and they didn’t say, “What can we do to fix this?” The question they asked was “What is God doing in the world?” Where are we seeing God at work? What does God want to see happen? How are we experiencing God at work in the world?

Do you see the difference in asking the question this way? They did not assume that because the churches they were in were struggling that God had stopped working in the world. They didn’t even assume that even if their churches had been thriving that it would mean that God was only there. Their assumption was that God was present in the world. God had not abandoned them. God had not abandoned the people and the needs they saw around them. God was there. And the next question they asked was “What are we going to do to be partners with God in what God is doing?”

In that service, looking out the Abbey window at the ferry landing where so many people wash up on the shores of Iona every day, hoping to find hope and faith again in a world that seems to have lost both, I was tempted to think, “Could it be that all this could disappear?” What if the churches of Europe all became museums or restaurants or coffee shops? What if all the symbols of the church as an institution were lost? Would it mean that God had gone?

No, what we dare to say when we come to this place each week is that God is still at work doing miraculous, miraculous things. God doesn’t need a temple or a steeple to be present, but we need places like this to remind ourselves of God’s presence. And we give of ourselves and our gifts to make this church building a place where we don’t forget. We want our building to be excellent. We want our programs to be excellent. We want our mission work to be excellent. We want our fellowship and caring for one another to be excellent. We want our financial stewardship to be excellent. Because we want to give voice to what God is doing in us and in the world and we want to get on God’s side.

Solomon was very wise. He built a great temple but he knew that the work of human hands would never be sufficient to contain God. God is out there doing what God has always done – announcing the good news that the kingdom is coming, to the poor, to the hungry, to the last and the least. And God was wise enough not to leave the fate of the world to our hands. The only time when the future really is in our hands is when we hold the bread of communion. What God desires is partners of the work who will not be contained by the expectations of the past, but who will walk boldly into the future that God is already creating.

There are people who need to hear that this week. You’re going to meet some of them when you walk out those doors. They need to know that there are thin places like this sanctuary where they can know God’s presence. They need to know that God is not only here but also out there. And we need to be listening for what God is leading us to do next. Thanks be to God.