Proper 16b, St. Alfred's

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Proper 16b 

2024-08-02

St. Alfred's Church

Opening

One of the most important books of my college years was titled Either / Or: a fragment of life. It was a foundational text for the emergence of what came to be known as existentialism. It was an important tool f or me to finding a path toward spiritual growth and faith. Ultimately it was important in my decision to embrace the Christian path to -- as I put it -- to follow it as far as its mystical riches could be mined.

Maybe a decade later, I was challenged by a different sort of phrase. I encountered theologians who wanted to de-emphasize either / or and argued that Jesus proclaimed something more like both / and. I first heard about the phrase in the context of Jesus's proclamation that the Kingdom of God was at hand. Was the coming Kingdom that Jesus preached already accomplished before or with the resurrection? Or was it still in the future? The New Testament seems to argue both positions. So these teachers made the case that Jesus was proclaiming a gospel where one needed to live as if the final accomplishment was already here. It is already but not yet.

I encountered the significance of this kind of thinking in conversations about who should be allowed to receive communion at the Eucharist. The official Roman Catholic position was that we ought not to share communion until we have accomplished significant unity. I was myself persuaded by the argument that it is by sharing a sacred meal that we grow into significant unity - becoming a family. But I want to talk about today, what I think is present in the scriptures before us, is already but not yet - paradox at the heart of God's work in our world.

The Temple

Solomon has become the king of Israel. He and his father, David, reigned over a United Kingdom, but with Solomon's death that Kingdom splintered into parts. But in our first reading today we're at the beginning of Solomon's reign. We skipped over between last week and this week the building of the Temple. God had denied that privilege to David because of David's sin. The reading last week emphasized Solomon's request for wisdom which was granted him.

Solomon cut down the forests of cedars of Lebanon -- an ecological disaster that is still felt up to the present day. He enlisted an army -- 30,000 the text says -- of slaves to build it.

^5:15"Solomon also had 70,000 common laborers, 80,000 quarry workers in the hill country, ¹⁶ and 3,600 foremen to supervise the work. ¹⁷ At the king’s command, they quarried large blocks of high-quality stone and shaped them to make the foundation of the Temple."

This week we hear a kind of dedication of that Temple with the bringing of the ark. As we listen today we hear that even with all of this grand construction, there is a recognition that "God cannot be contained". … That's important. If it's true it's important.

This Ark had been with the people for many years. It had held the tablets given to Moses. Its construction had been described in the opening books of the Bible, Exodus and Deuteronomy among others. It had immeasurable significance to the people of Israel. It was the most sacred object of all. Solomon constructed a new sacred object, the temple, to house the most sacred Ark. A sacred space to contain a sacred object. That ark from the time of Solomon is symbolized today in a Jewish synagogue. The cabinet or enclosure that holds the Torah scrolls is called an "ark".

The site of Solomon's temple has for thousands of years been a sacred place. Pilgrims have flocked to it. People go there to pray and to be healed. And people have died there and killed others there. The sacred can be polarizing as well as healing.

The Sacred

I first began to think seriously about the ark in my religion class at Winthrop University. In the opening days of this particular class I coached the students to develop a tentative definition of what sacred means. What does it mean for something to be sacred? It's something that we in the church seem to take for granted, but it's not so easy to say exactly what it is. The basic definition we arrived at:

1. Something that is set apart in some way from ordinary things
2. Something that has an effect on the well-being of the people who recognize it as sacred
3. It is something that human beings have some control over and in some ways have no control

It was the 3^rd point that caused me to pay attention to the ark of the covenant. It was precisely the behavior of the ancient Israelites with regard to the ark of the covenant that was the chief example of what was meant by being partly in control and partly out of control. You see the armies between Israel and the Philistines fought over control of the ark. When one of the armie had possession of the ark, they invariably had victory. If they lost control of the ark they would experience defeat.

The sacred can appear to be something that we humans have some control over. That is literally what is at stake at the Temple Mount and the Wailing Wall. Who has control?

When we imagine that we have some control over the sacred, we can easily think of it as a kind of magic. As if we could control God. Solomon says, “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!"

God cannot be contained.

Paradox

It turns out that the sacred is at heart paradoxical. It is made out of ordinary things that are somehow set apart from ordinary things. The sacred becomes available to us through the ordinary things of our life. We can see it, feel it, and touch it. What makes it sacred, however, we have very little control over at all. God is in charge of that. God cannot be contained.

How might things be different if we learned to live more comfortably in a world of "Already/but not yet"? It is so often among us black and white, either/or. What if we lived as if God cannot be contained by "us and them"?

Sacred on a mountain

I learned a lot about the sacred when I lived in Hawai'i. I developed a kind of "holy" habit of climbing a volcano near where I lived. It is called Koko Crater – "Blood Crater" – named for the red soil on it. I started the habit when my son, Julian, visited me and climbed it, carrying his skateboard with him so he could skate back to my house. I decided that if Julian could do it I was going to do it. It took me a couple of tries before I got to the top, but once I did I felt exhilerated. I developed the practice of climbing 3-4 times a week.

In time I turned my climbing into a meditation. It was 3-4 times a week, about 30 minutes of prayer up and down the mountain.

Then one day I approached the crater only to see several helicopters flying over it and many emergency vehicles parking in my usual parking spot. I decided, "I'm not going to climb today." I then heard on the radio that there was a man on the top of Koko Crater stabbing people. He was captured the next morning as he huddled in a tree, naked, and quite obviously not sane.

What I felt most intensely was that my sacred mountain had been desecrated. I determined to climb it early the next morning and to pray all the way up so as to re-consecrate it. I wasn't the first. Maybe the 3rd or 4th person up that morning. The dew was still on the scrub along the path.

We do have some control over the sacred. But most of all God is in charge. God cannot be contained.

Song: Sacrifice of praise

In our prayer last week, Mary Pat and I read a little piece about liturgy that resonated with both of us. It was in Common Prayer; a liturgy for ordinary radicals. The writer observed that frequently when we gather together, there are people who experience the sacred in one way while others experience it another way. "But when we worship with folks of various traditions, there are times when we may hear a prayer that uses language we might not naturally use or sing a song that isn’t really our style."

Remember though, God cannot be contained.

The writer suggested that when we experience a prayer or a song that doesn't work for us, that we give thanks to God, because the prayer or song is in fact working for someone else.

Back in the 90's I discovered an interesting thing about hymns and the hymnal. The church had done a survey on people's favorite and least favorite hymns. It turned out that in a number of instances, they were one and the same hymn. The hymns that some people reported as their favorite hymns were the same hymns that other people reported were their least favorite. In the typical division of many congregations, there are those who like music and those who don't.

It takes all kinds to make up the Body of Christ. Lots of different kinds of people. God cannot be contained.

I am the bread of life

During the month of August we hear the passage in John's Gospel where Jesus proclaims himself "The Bread of Life." Some of the people who heard him were scandalized. They asked, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” We have those same kind of conversations today. There is a contemporary hymn in our hymnal, #335 I am the bread of life. It was written back in the 70's by a nun and is really just a midrash on the 6th chapter of John. There are those for whom that is a powerful hymn. And there are those for whom it is not.

Some of the people who heard Jesus make the claim about being the Bread of life were scandalized. They couldn't stand it. But Jesus knew that God cannot be contained. He said it for those who could hear it. These others would have to be reached in another way. John's gospel is filled with different metaphors and comparisons that Jesus used to reach as many as possible.

The sacred in the ordinary

One of my teachers in seminary observed that none of us eat bread that looks like what we use at the Eucharist. The "hosts" we use look and taste like pieces of white cardboard. [As an aside, the few of you who eat gluten free hosts are onto something. They actually taste like some kind of food or cracker.] My teacher observed that for the metaphor to really work – "I am the bread of life" – the bread should actually look and taste like bread.

The sacred is found in the ordinary things of life, things that are somehow set apart from the ordinary.

Most of my adult life I have experienced the "bread of life" in the Eucharist with real bread, bread that was made by members of the congregation. A group of folks would gather in the church kitchen from time to time and make a batch of loaves. Ordinary bread. Ordinary bread made sacred in the sharing of a sacred meal.

What if we really believed that God cannot be contained and can be experienced precisely in the set apart things of our ordinary life? What if every time we turn around we might bump into the sacred?

Emily Dickinson put it this way a century and a half ago in a poem.

And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware.

God cannot be contained. If that's true it's important.