2 Samuel 7:1-14a Ephesians 2:11-22, Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
We have some interesting readings today. The first reading has to do with King David’s
image for a house of the Lord. David
moves from being a shepherd to becoming a warrior and a king of Judah. When he finally rests from his warrior ways
and decides not to return into that nomadic tent-living existence and settles into
fine living in the city of Jerusalem. He
has conquered not only the Philistines and Goliath but has gone on to invade
the stable agrarian communities around him.
He is now living in a fine home, no longer living at a substance level. It is nice.
He can smell the rich, sweet smell of the pine wood of his home rather
than the dust of tent-living. And he
thinks of God who is still “living in a tent.”
Since the time of Moses, the God of Israel was worshipped in
a tent. And like religious institutions
the world over, the priests lagged behind because of tradition. I am sure that the sons of Aaron had been
just as unwilling to change things as many vestries I have had. But David had a vision of providing for God a
house—a temple. As we all know, it was
not David who built God a temple; it was his son Solomon who built the 9th
century BCE First Temple. But we hear
David’s vision here in this passage from 2nd Samuel.
The building of religious buildings is an amazing
endeavor. Some of your founding members
may be sitting here. I remember when
Christ the King was moved from out in the country to its present place. It implies permanency. It implies strength of purpose. And yet…and yet… We know that no church building says anything
about faith, the honoring of God, or the proper living of God’s commandments. Buildings
do not last or stand forever. But it is
faith that lasts. Gradually the Temple
that was built by Solomon was to be a worship place for all the nations. But
over the years the Temple was restricted to only certain select persons, those
who were circumcised, those who followed specific cultic strictures, those who ‘fit
in’ were allowed to enter into the Temple.
By Jesus’ day, the Temple began to be restricted to those who were
circumcised.
In the Epistle, Paul is writing to the people in Ephesus to
remind them of whose they are. He is
trying to bridge a major division in the synagogue between the circumcised
members of the community and those who were called ‘God Fearers.’ In the couple of centuries before Jesus,
Judaism had become a proselyting faith.
People who were not ethnically Jewish came to Judaism because of its
monotheism and its clear ethical precepts.
In those communities farther away from large ethnically Jewish locals,
the synagogues were often as much as half-Greek speakers as they were Hebrew or
Aramaic speakers. Most Greeks saw the
body as beauty and found the whole idea of circumcision as repugnant. So there was a division between those who had
been circumcised and those who followed the Law of Moses but were not
circumcised. Paul is writing to the
church in Ephesus to say that circumcision is not what is important. Peace is what is important.
Now this is an important concept because in Roman Imperial
talk, it was Caesar who brought peace. The Imperial propaganda was always full
of how Caesar was the god who brought
peace. Paul is saying that is the love
of God that brings peace in terms that were not only fresh but slightly
treasonous. The ones who were ‘once far
off’, those who were not ethnically part of the Chosen People, were brought
near through baptism. It is the love of God that has brought these once foreigners
are now part of the body of God’s chosen.
This is language that was really only reserved for the head of the
Empire. But Paul makes the case that Jesus is who makes them one. It isn’t Caesar who makes them citizens. It is God who makes us one body, one nation,
one people with access to the Temple.
Paul’s theology about circumcision is the first theological argument
of the Church. It is found in Acts of
the Apostles how Paul and Peter argue about the place of the ‘God fearers’. But Paul argued that God is universal—that access
to the faith was to remain always mixed and varied. And that it is the power of
the relationship with the Holy One was what made it possible to know that
humanity could know peace without having to be alike. Baptism became for the church the sign of our
unity in God.
In our Gospel today, we find Jesus being hounded by those who
wanted to sit at his feet or have them heal them. Jesus understood the need for personal
prayer, the need for solitude or quiet to rejuvenate his ability to share God’s
love. We often think that the pastoral
life of Jesus’ day was not as hectic as it is today. In between these two pieces of scripture is
the feeding of the 5,000. So it is not
surprising that people would follow him just to sit at his feet. Jesus was a super-star, but more than
that. Jesus had a message of peace that
rang authentically, something that was unfamiliar in the religious practice of
his day.
I hear a real message
to build the Church in our own day. I
hear a call from these passages a charge from God to provide a house for God
that may not be made of the cedars of Lebanon but made to serve a world that is
more conversant with computers than they are with their neighbors. I hear a message of peace that says that we
as the Episcopal Church is unwilling to exclude the ‘different’ just to make us
comfortable. I find in them the call to self-reflection
to claim what is authentic in the words of Jesus and to live them out. I drink deeply of the scenes of each of these
passages and find myself trying to figure out just how I am to assist in the
visioning of a new Church for an era that we can’t even understand.
I sat in a Diocesan meeting yesterday listening to those who
are just as confused about how we are to plan for the next 3 years as you
are. Are we going to have a house for
God? Or are we going to spend yet another year praying out of our box? Are we going to be able to be at peace if we
get our church back or not? Are we going
to have money to do this or that? What are we to do when our priest is ill? Are we going to be able to find a place of
relationship with the Holy One of Israel?
And most of all, where can we find a bit of solitude to know Jesus a bit
better?
These lessons speak loudly for us today. They call us to drink deeply of the peace
that God holds out to us in the word, in the Sacrament, in the community of
faith and in those moments alone. We
want to make this ‘house of God’ we are building to last—maybe it won’t be of
bricks and mortar but of the substance that allows all to find Christ in it. We are building a new church just like David—it
is a vision needs to be spoken. It is a
vision that needs to be shared so that when it comes time for our children to
rebuild—or our children’s’ children to rebuild, the peace that Christ calls us
to will be found. It will come from our
steadfast holding on to the relationship with Jesus to direct us. And most of all, are we willing to be that
Church?
Will we ever be as strong as we once were? Will the Episcopal Church still be the
bastion of a certain social-class? Will
the Episcopal Church once again have the influence it had in the 1970’s? I hope not.
But hopefully we will have found a way to live the authenticity of faith
as followers of an itinerant rabbi in Galilee who had the audacity to teach
love, peace and community to the Roman Empire.
May we become the kind of followers of Jesus whose message is that it
isn’t the building that makes us Church.
It isn’t the doctrine that makes us Church. It is the love of God that is shown to the
world by us that makes us Church. AMEN
1 comment:
Amen, indeed!
Post a Comment