Building
Temples for God
So we’ve arrived in our journey
through Samuel at the point where David has finally settled down. His times as
a fugitive from Saul, as a paid mercenary for the Philistines, and campaigning
for the kingship were all over. David had gone out to battle against the
Philistines and was victorious. He had finally arrived. He has a big palace in
an impregnable city, he has great status and the respect of nations. No more groveling
before the king of Gath like a madman to keep himself alive.
And
when he looks around, he realizes that the God who has brought him through all
this, the God whose spirit rested upon him and tormented his enemies, has not
achieved the status that David has. David is settled in his house, but God
still lives in a tent. That won’t do. It doesn’t work for God’s reputation, and
it doesn’t work for David’s reputation. Other nations have temples for their
gods, big buildings that impress and intimidate people by their greatness.
David will build God a temple. He tells Nathan his plan. It seems like a good
idea to Nathan. “God’s Spirit has been with you in everything you’ve done, go
for it,” he tells David.
It
is interesting that this is Nathan’s first appearance in the Bible. The moment
David has acquired power and establishment is the first moment in which another
voice is interposed between him and God. It is as if the text is trying to
remind us that God’s interests rarely align with those of the powers that be.
That the powers must be challenged, and pushed to do the right thing, because
it is often so much more appealing to do wrong. Over the rest of David’s life
this will come up again and again.
It
is only that night that the conflict comes out. God reaches out to Nathan in a dream, and puts David in his
place. We can see this in the tone of God’s speech to Nathan, and in the fact
that David is referred to as “the king” in the beginning of this story, God
repeatedly refers to him as “my servant David.” God calls David out for his
egotism and his naivete, “You think you
are going to build me a house?
It
brings to mind a passage in Isaiah found in chapter 66, “Heaven is my throne
and the earth is my footstool. What is the house that you would build for me, and what is my resting place? All these things my
hand has made, and so all these things are mine.” David wanted to build a
temple, to put God in God’s place, but it’s God who puts David in his place.
What
David has done is something that nearly all of us try to do at some point or
other. He’s tried to decide what
God wants and where God belongs. He’s tried to set up a place that is God’s,
which then of course turns around and defines all other places as not-God’s. He
has sought to institutionalize God.
That’s a funny word,
institutionalize. It has two meanings: to make into an institution, and to put
into an institution. When we make something into an institution, we preserve
its current form, we let it crystallize. We want it to be something that will
remain the same for years to come. We say this kind of thing about restaurants,
or local legends “Kerbey Lane is an Austin institution, it hasn’t changed in
thirty years.”
And When we put someone into an
institution, we silence them. We pull them out of society and place them
somewhere where they don’t interfere in our lives so much. David seems to want to do both. He
wants God to stay the same forever, his God. He wants to put God in a temple, where God will be
contained, the wild and dangerous deity put away, to be visited only during
visiting hours, 11:00 am – noon on Sunday mornings.
We
try to do the same thing David did all the time. We build up temples of our own
creation for God, and then try to fit God inside our temples. We do this in a
lot of ways, but I’ve got three in particular that I think are particularly
easy to fall into, and particularly dangerous for churches seeking to remain
faithful reflections of God in our world.
So
how do we build a temple for God?
We start to worry more about looking like a church, than actually doing
the things that Christ calls his church to do. A few years ago there was a
church plant in a growing neighborhood on the outskirts of a big city. They met
in an elementary school, but they hoped one day to have a building of their
own.
One day one of the members found them a great little spot
that they could go and worship. It was a movie set, built out to look like a
small town, complete with a little white church building that looked just right
for their size. It was perfect. They loved it. They thought, after all that
hard work, “We’ve finally made it!” But then they realized that looking like a
church wasn’t what it meant to be a church. This building wasn’t any different
from the elementary school for having pews instead of folding chairs. What made
them a church was the community that came together every week to praise God and
to love each other. It was their ministry that made them the church, not what
they sat on on Sunday mornings.
The
other way in which we build a temple for God is that we try to preserve the
institution rather than letting our mission dictate our form and structure.
There are a couple of phrases that always seem to come up in churches, said as
if they should have some bearing on the way the church behaves, even though
they really don’t. I’m sure you’ve heard them before. They are, “We’ve always
done it that way,” and “We’ve never done that before.”
There are plenty of examples in
Scripture of the church doing something completely different. When Moses came
down from Mount Sinai with ten commandments, nobody looked at him and said,
“We’ve never followed those before.”
When Joshua led the people into the Holy Land across the river Jordan no
one stood on its banks and said, “But in the past we’ve always wandered in the
wilderness, why shouldn’t we keep doing that?” They recognized that God calls us into new forms and new
structures to accomplish God’s mission in a new era.
This is why I’m so excited about
the PCUSA’s 1,001 Worshipping Communities commitment. In an era where so much
is changing, our church is seeking ways to change with it, and to respond to
the Spirit moving in the here and now. On the other hand, seeking to preserve
the institution at all costs can not only be counterproductive, but dangerous.
Child sexual abuse scandals at Penn State University and within the Catholic
church have shown us that choosing to protect the institution at the expense of
doing what is right can be disastrous.
The
final way in which we fall into the trap of trying to build a temple for God or
is that we seek to capture the Holy Spirit, rather than letting the Holy Spirit
capture us. I think back to the story of the transfiguration, when Jesus led
Peter, James, and John up a mountain, and his face was transfigured, and they
saw Moses and Elijah with him, talking. They truly had a “mountaintop
experience” in every sense of the phrase. And Peter gets excited and he wants
to grab a hold of this experience, he says we need to build tents up here, for
you and for Elijah. He has this mountaintop experience and he wants to stay on
top of the mountain. It’s tempting. And there are Christians who just go out
and find themselves the perfect feel-good experience, and just try to get that
over and over and over. They want to capture the Holy Spirit, package it up and
have it anytime and anywhere they want. They’re like Peter. They want to stay
on top of the mountain. That the whole point of a mountaintop experience is so
that you can go back down into the valley and do something about it.
Imagine
hiking up the Grand Canyon, and you get up there and you’re just struck by awe
at God’s creation. So you decide that you’re going to stay right there. And you
build a house, four walls and a roof, and you sit inside it, no longer able to
see the view, but confident that you are in the presence of God. The Holy
Spirit isn’t something that we can control, it isn’t something that we can
capture or take a hold of. It’s something that captures us. That moves through
us, alighting on us to inspire and instigate among us, pushing and pulling us
into new ways of relating with one another and with God.
It doesn’t matter how we try to
build a temple to put God in, we can’t put God into a box. God doesn’t fit.
It’s like that old J.B. Philips book that came out fifty years ago or so, “Your
God is Too Small.” We can’t build a box big enough for God to fit in. Our plans
for God aren’t nearly as big as God’s plans for us.
David
says he wants to build God a house. God says he will turn David’s house into a
dynasty. Eugene Peterson puts it this way, “God showed Nathan that David's
building plans for God would interfere with God's building plans for David.”
This is what happens when you open yourself to the Holy Spirit, you find that
God will take you far beyond your wildest dreams. You say you want to build God a temple, God says God will
build you a ministry.
The
message that our text has for us today is this: God is building plans for us.
God is building plans for us as individuals, and God is building plans for us
as a community. We just have to realize that we are not kings of our own
destiny, but servants of a someone much greater than ourselves. We’re not in
the driver’s seat, but passengers on an adventure far greater than we imagined.
We have to stop trying so hard to look like we’re a church that we forget to
act like a church. We have to stop letting our structure determine our mission,
and begin letting our mission determine our structure. And we have to stop trying
so hard to capture the Holy Spirit, let go of the reins and let the Spirit
capture us. Then and only then can we begin to experience the incredible plans
that God has for us.
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