Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 23, 2006

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

In the centuries that followed King David’s death, the supporters of monarchy in Israel had a problem. It may not sound like a big problem to us, but it was to them. You see, one of the several voices that we hear in the Old Testament’s historical books like 2 Samuel is the voice of a monarchist party intent on building up Israel’s first great king, David, into a giant figure towering over the nation’s history and legitimizing the monarchy for all time. There is, however, this one slight gap in David’s accomplishments as king. True, he unified the Hebrew kingdom and expanded it to its greatest extent ever. He made Israel a regional power, which it never had been before and really wasn’t again until our own time. He established a new capital city, Jerusalem, and he build a grand royal palace there--grand at least by Israel’s standards of the time. As we saw last week, he brought the Ark of the Covenant, the throne of God, to Jerusalem. He truly did accomplish a lot, at least from a worldly perspective.

There was, however, one thing he didn’t do. He didn’t build Yahweh, the Lord his God, a temple in the new capital city. Of course, Yahweh had never had a temple before, but somehow it didn’t look good that David had built himself what our text this morning calls "a house of cedar" but he didn’t build one for the Lord. It suggests misplaced priorities. Moreover, David’s son and successor Solomon did build Yahweh a temple; but the great, revered King David didn’t. That was a problem for the people who came after him who wanted to build him up as a model of the supposed virtues of monarchy. They must have pondered at some length how they could explain that one away. Then they came up with a brilliant solution. David didn’t build Yahweh a temple because--ta da!--Yahweh didn’t want him to! And so we have the story in our reading from 2 Samuel about God sending the prophet Nathan to David to tell him that David was not the one to build God a temple, a "house of cedar."

Now, the idea that God needs a house seems pretty strange to us; but I think that the ancient idea that we encounter here, that a god, any god, even Yahweh, needs a temple in which to reside raises an important issue for us. It raises the question: Where’s God? A lot of people spend their whole lives looking for God, and a lot of them never find God no matter how hard they look. There’s an old country song that goes: "I was lookin’ for love in all the wrong places." Well, I think one reason we have trouble finding God is that we’re lookin’ for God in all the wrong places. Let me suggest a couple of the wrong places where we look for God, places that are at least not right for everyone, then suggest where perhaps we can really find God.

Our reading from 2 Samuel is about one of the wrong places that people look for God. While the idea that God needs an earthly house in which to dwell strikes us as quite primitive, we moderns (or post-moderns, or whatever we are) still keep trying to put God into a place. We keep trying to put God into something our limited minds can grasp; and even more than that, we keep trying to put God into something that humans can control. Putting God someplace tangible makes God so much more manageable, indeed, so much less threatening. And so just like David may have wanted to do, and just like his son Solomon actually did, we keep trying to put God in a place, to close God in somehow, to restrict God to something we can control.

In our world today, in Christianity at least, we aren’t likely to build God a temple in the sense of the ancient Hebrews. We don’t think that God dwells in any physical house. That’s too primitive for us, so a great many Christian resort to one of two alternatives to a house for God, depending on which Christian tradition they profess. Many Christians, actually a substantial majority of Christians, lock God up in a church. Not a particular church building like Solomon’s Temple mind you, but in the institution of a church. This is the idolatry of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions. For them God is found only, or at least primarily, in the church--their church. Back when I was in seminary in the late 1990s, for example, the Roman Catholic Church reaffirmed in very strong and frankly quite offensive language the Catholic doctrine that the fullness of God’s grace is available to people only in the Roman Catholic Church. Saying that the fullness of God’s grace is available only in the church is the functional equivalent of saying that God in God’s fullness is present only in the church. This doctrine limits God; and since God is limitless, the doctrine is therefore necessarily and demonstrably false. It is nonetheless the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, and also of the Orthodox Churches, although of course them mean their church, not Rome’s

I do not mean to suggest that God cannot be found in those churches. Far from it. Countless Christians have found and do find God in those churches. The problem is the attempt those churches make to limit God’s presence, or at least the fullness of it, to their institutional structures. For many people those structures are the right place to look for God, but for many others they are not. When we try to limit God to a particular church, we make it difficult for some of God’s people to find God, because in fact God is not just in the church and, indeed, some of the things churches do are not of God at all. God wasn’t really shut up in the Ark of the Covenant or in Solomon’s Temple way back when. God isn’t really shut up in any church institution today either.

Now lest you think that I’m just picking on the Catholics and the Orthodox here today, let me hasten to add that we Protestants are hardly free of the sin of trying to lock God up in something made by humans. We don’t lock God up in a church so much. Instead, we tend to lock God up in a book. We Protestants most commonly try to shut God up in something we can control by saying that the complete word and will of God are found between the pages of our Protestant Bible. That book, we say, is God’s book, and that’s where we find God. If you want to go looking for God, most Protestants say, just read the book. That’s where you’ll find Him--and Protestants who talk this way always call God He, because that’s what the Book calls God. If it’s in the book, it’s from God, we say. If it’s not in the book, it’s not of God. Yes, most Protestants have a place to go to find God every bit as much as the Catholics and the Orthodox do; it’s just a different place. It’s not the church but the Bible. The mistake, however, is basically the same. it is the mistake of trying to shut God up in something that is less than God so that we can manage and manipulate the Divine.

The author of the Letter to the Ephesians has a better idea. He has a better answer to the question of where God is. He writes in the passage we heard this morning that in the Lord believers "are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God." Ephesians 2:22 In this conception, God dwells not in a church building or institutional structure, neither does God dwell in a book. God dwells with the people of the community of faith. In this way of thinking, God is where the people of God are. This may sound a bit like the Catholic and Orthodox notions that God is in the church, but I think it means something different. When Ephesians was written some time late in the first century CE, there was as yet no highly institutionalized church. So when the author told his audience that in the Lord they are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God, I don’t think he was thinking of the church in anything like the terms in which people would think of it later on. He was, I believe, thinking of his audience precisely as the people of faith, whether they were gathered in a church or not. God is where the people of God are, wherever that may be.

What does this mean? It means that God is in our community, that is, in our relationships with one another more than God is anywhere else. God is in our interactions with one another. God is in our caring for one another. God is in our love for one another. God is in our working together for the good of the church and for the good of the world. If you want to go looking for God, look no farther than your personal relationships, at least those relationships that are grounded in love. God dwells in those relationships. I know God dwells in our relationships here in this church because I’ve seen the care we have for one another, I’ve seen the way we love one another, I’ve seen the way we reach out to people in physical need and people who are spiritually lost. I have felt God’s presence in our gathering together, and I have felt God’s presence in my personal interactions with individual church people. God is here, not because this is a church building but because this is a church, a community of faithful people caring for one another and for God’s world.

That’s why this church is so important, or at least it’s one of the reasons. I would never suggest that God dwells only here. I have felt God too alone in prayer and alone in nature. God is indeed everywhere, but for us people of faith God dwells primarily with the community of faith, in the ties that bind us together, in our caring and in our striving together to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. The God of our relationships isn’t tied down by our relationships but dwells in them to create limitless possibility. Our relationships do not limit or seek to define God; they thrive on God’s presence and grow in God’s love. They do not restrict God, they create the possibility of God’s action in the world. So where is God? Look around you. Look at your friends and at the people you may not know, or may not know very well. God is there with you and between you. God is there drawing you together, holding you tight, and urging you forward. God is there loving you, and holding you in the everlasting arms of grace. That’s where God is. With us. Amen.