Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 19, 2009

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.

Well, we did it. Or at least, we’re doing it. The new roof on this sanctuary building is finished. Or at least the contractor told us that it would be finished yesterday. We are doing what we need to do to maintain and preserve this great old building, this beautiful place where we come each week to worship God, where people have come each week for over one hundred years to worship God, save for an occasional freak snow storm. The generosity that you demonstrated in response to the call for contributions for the new roof points, I think, to something important about us. It points in general to the commitment that you as a congregation have to this church. And I think that it points in particular to something more specific than that. It points in particular to the commitment that we have to this building. This building, the building that we call the church, is important to us. We care about it. We give our money, and many of us from time to time give our labor, to preserve it.

So I was struck this past week by the way that our two readings from this week’s lectionary selections address the issue of church buildings. They raise a number of questions. Does a church need a building? Is a church a building? Does God need a particular building to be God’s house? As we complete major work on our own building, these are questions worth considering; and our readings this morning help us do that considering.

The reading from 2 Samuel is about the Temple in Jerusalem. In particular, it is about why the great King David, who had built himself a magnificent house constructed from the cedars of Lebanon, didn’t build a house for God. You see, David never build a Temple in his new capital city Jerusalem. His son Solomon build the first Temple there years after David’s death, but the great King David did not build a Temple for God. The answer that this story gives to the question of why David didn’t build a Temple is: God told him not to. That sounds to me like a story made up after the fact to divert blame from David for building himself a house but not building one for his God, but never mind. David didn’t build God a temple.

The important point for us is not whether or not David build a temple, however. The important point for us is the understanding of God that lies behind this story. The assumption behind this story is, basically, that God lives in a box. The ancient Hebrews called the box that God lived in “the ark of the covenant.” It was literally a box. An elaborately decorated box perhaps, but a box nonetheless. And to them their God, Yahweh, lived in the box. They carried the box with them as they lived a nomadic life in the desert after they fled Egypt. When they encamped they build a tent for the box to sit in. Later, after they entered the promised land of Canaan, they carried the box into battle with them; and when they won a fight, they attributed the victory to Yahweh, who had been with them because the box had been with them. Many of you have probably seen the movie “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.” That movie is about the box that the ancient Hebrews thought God lived in. The movie seems to assume that God actually did, but keep in mind that the issue in our reading from 2 Samuel isn’t whether God was in the box. That was taken for granted. The issue is whether the box needed a permanent temple or whether it could stay in the tent that it had been in for a couple hundred years by the time of King David. Either way, God was in the box, and the people needed some place to put the box, that is, they needed someplace for their God to live.

I may have made this idea that God resides in a particular place, in a particular box, sound kind of silly. At least, I meant to make it sound kind of silly. But it is still with us. How many of you have heard a church referred to as the house of God or the house of the Lord? I know I have. It is very, very common for church people to treat the sanctuary part of their church buildings as a place where God is present in a special and particularly immediate way. To treat it, that is, as the house of God.

So is that why this building is special to us? Do we care about it because we think it is God’s house in some more or less literal sense? Maybe, but I believe that there is a major theological problem with that understanding. We believe that God is present everywhere, not in a particular building. So let me suggest that there is another way of thinking about where God resides, a way that is grounded in Christian scripture but that is a very different view of where God lives than the God in a box theory that we see in 2 Samuel. We see that view in our reading from Ephesians. We see it in particular in the last two lines of that reading. There the author of the letter says that in Christ Jesus “the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are build together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.” The phrase “the whole structure” refers not to a building but to the structure of the community of believers. The believers, this author says, as they grow together into community, become themselves, in a spiritual sense, a dwelling place for God. In this understanding, God doesn’t live in a box or in a house. God lives among the people. In this understanding the church isn’t a building, the church is the people. God dwells in and among the believers as they join together in community. That, to me, is the truth of the matter. God doesn’t live in this building any more than God lives in any other building. Instead, God lives in and among us, in and among you, as you live your lives of faith and particularly as you gather together into a community of believers.

So if this building isn’t God’s house, if God doesn’t live here any more than God lives anywhere else, are we wrong to care about this building as much as we do? Some Christians today are answering that question yes. Some Christians today are saying that churches don’t need buildings at all. They say too many churches have an “edifice complex,” a fixation on buildings at the expense of the things churches are supposed to be about, things like mission and service. I think that there is a way in which they are correct, or at least partially correct. It certainly is possible for a congregation to be too concerned about its buildings, to put preserving the buildings above all else and neglecting things like mission and service. That, of course, is not a Christian way of viewing the matter. To that extent those who say churches don’t need buildings have a point.

Finally, however, I think that the people who say that churches don’t need building are wrong. There are, I’m sure, ways of being church without a building. But I am also convinced that the traditional way of being church—with a church building—still has value. Our passage from Ephesians says that the community of the believers grows into a dwelling place for God, and I am convinced that our church buildings have a role to play in our growing together into a dwelling place for God. God doesn’t live in them particularly, but we do. We do as a community. Our buildings are where we gather. They are where we worship. They are where we and our children learn. They are where we serve. In short, our buildings facilitate the creation of community. In doing that they facilitate our building a dwelling place for God, a dwelling place not of wood and concrete but of flesh and blood and spirit. Not a fixed, static dwelling place but one that is found wherever the members of the community are found.

So let us cherish this building and the fellowship hall behind us. Let us preserve them. Let us protect them. But let us never forget what their proper role is. They are not sacred in themselves. They are not sacred because God lives in them. They are sacred because of the community that uses them and has used them for so many generations. They are sacred because they facilitate the creation, maintenance, and strengthening of that community. One Sunday soon, after the work on the fellowship hall work is finished, we will dedicate our new roofs. It is appropriate that we do so. Not because they are a house for God, but because we are. Amen.