Reaching up, Reaching out

1 Kings 8:10-30; 1 Peter 2:1-6

October 21, 2007

by Dr. Charles Parker

I. Introduction

It is a great joy to celebrate today the installation of our new spire, and since one of the things that shapes who we are as a Metropolitan community is the beauty of our church, I thought that it might be appropriate to reflect a little bit on the role that “sacred space” plays in our faith life and how the Temple in Jerusalem shaped the religious life of Israel.

Looking at the Scriptures, it’s clear that our forebears in the faith had a sense that whenever God was present, the space where that occurred became sacred. Throughout the stories of the Patriarchs, whenever they had a particularly profound experience of God, they would set up an altar in that place to remember how God touched their lives at that spot and that would become a place of worship.

II. Sacred Space

You’ll remember that when God called to Moses from the burning bush, the first thing that God says is “take off your sandals, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” And when Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai, the entire community – even the animals – were forbidden from touching the mountain.

Now we all know that God does not reside in our places of worship. But we also know that space that has been bathed in prayer, where worship has occurred over a prolonged period, where God’s Word is read and proclaimed and the sacraments are celebrated, starts to take on the sacredness of those holy acts. The space begins to echo with the voices of the saints who have gone before.

We have all entered spaces that carry that “sacred weight.” And the gift that they bring us is that when we are in them, we become more open and sensitive to God’s presence. Not that God is more present in here than “out there”; but that the space can make us more aware of God’s presence, more susceptible to being shaped by God’s word. An early Anglican priest by the name of William Hardwick wrote, “When we set our feet on these sacred pavements, do not these stones we tread on put us in mind of our duty … of holy thoughts, holy gestures? It were a happiness not to be expressed, could we at all times and in all places have holy thoughts of our God; [but] because … we cannot, Almighty God hath appointed set times and set places for performing these holy duties.” That’s the gift of sacred space.

And the purpose of sacred space is to shape us and teach us, so that we can carry that sense of openness to God’s presence wherever we are. Many of the writers of Scripture, including the apostle Peter in our reading this morning -- whose name, of course, means “Rock” – picks up on the image of our being rocks for the building of God’s temple. “Let yourselves be built” into a spiritual house.

III. The History of the Temple

This understanding of sacred space shaping the community is at the heart of the Temple’s role in the life of ancient Israel; and since the language of Scripture is so permeated with the imagery of the Temple and temple worship, I thought I would give you a quick overview of the history of the Temple

God had given King David the directions for building a resting place for the Ark of the Covenant. But then He told David that he was not the man to build the Temple, because there was too much blood on his hands from his many wars; his son Solomon was to build the Temple.

Solomon began this grand undertaking in the forth year of his reign, about 957 B.C.E. It took him seven years to build the Temple, and then another 13 years building the complex of buildings that surrounded it. And from that point, the Temple became the heart of the worship life of Israel for the next thousand years.

Solomon’s temple was 70 cubits long – about 122 feet (roughly half the length of our sanctuary) – with 10 cubits out front for a portico (much like our narthex), 40 cubits as the main room or nave, and 20 cubits being the inner sanctum, the “holy of holies” where the Ark of the Covenant dwelt. So the journey into the Temple was a movement into increasingly sacred space. It was oriented with the nave on an east-west axis and the Holy of Holies at the eastern end, towards the rising sun.

But unlike our sanctuary, the people did not go into the Temple to worship. Like Mt. Sinai , the space itself was too sacred. The priests – the descendants of Aaron – would go into the main room to offer sacrifices and prayers; and once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the high priest would enter the Holy of Holies to offer sacrifice for the sins of the people. Outside the building were the courts of the temple where the lay people would offer their prayers. It’s these courts that the Psalmist is referring to when he says in Psalm 84:

For a day in your courts is better

than a thousand elsewhere.

I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God

than live in the tents of wickedness.

Likewise, in our Scripture passage from Kings this morning, we heard Solomon talk about people praying “towards the temple.” The folks are on the outside praying towards the temple and the Holy of Holies.

Well, Solomon’s temple was the center of Jewish worship for four hundred years, until it was destroyed with much of the rest of the city when the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E. and deported much of the Jewish community to Babylon. It was probably at this point that the Ark of the Covenant disappeared, as you all know from your studies in “Raiders of the Lost Ark 101.”

What made the Babylonian captivity so traumatic was that it was not merely a political and military defeat, but the center of their religious life was destroyed. It’s from this period we have that poignant Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept … how can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” In other words, “With the temple gone, we don’t even know how to worship.”

Fifty years later, in 539, the Jews were freed from captivity when the Persians defeated the Babylonians and sent the people back to Israel; and under the authority of Zerubbabel they began rebuilding the Temple. This reconstructed temple was not what Solomon’s had been, and when it was completed, those who were still alive who remembered the original wept at what a poor substitute they now had. But in spite of its modest size, this Second Temple again became the center of Jewish life for another five hundred years, until just before the time of Jesus. Scholars refer to this as the “Second Temple.”

King Herod the Great, who was King of Judea when Jesus was born, was a tremendous builder and built extensively throughout Israel. He was unhappy that the temple of Zerubbabel had fallen so short of Solomon’s original and began a massive renovation that ended up many times the size of Solomon’s. This vast complex, covering roughly 35 acres, was the Temple that Jesus knew and worshipped at. It lasted about 100 years, before the Romans destroyed it in the Jewish revolt of 70 C.E. A portion of the Western wall of Herod’s temple still stands in Jerusalem and is called the Wailing Wall, still the most sacred site in Judaism.

IV. The Meaning of the Temple

So, that’s a brief overview of the history of the Temple; now what does that mean for us here at Metropolitan today, and particularly on the occasion of the installation of a new spire?

Some of you probably noticed that our passage from 1 Kings today picks up from the point that we left the story two weeks ago when we were talking about worship. In that context, we talked about the fact that Solomon and the Israelites had engaged in this elaborate preparation for worship, and then the cloud of God’s presence – the Shekinah – descends on the sanctuary and takes over the worship, so that the priests have to stop ministering. That’s where we left off.

Today we have this odd couple of verses 12 and 13. Turn to them in your pew Bibles for a moment with me. After the Shekinah has filled the sanctuary, Solomon turns to the people and reminds them that “the Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.” In other words, God wants to be clear that we can never know God in God’s totality, and that being a people of faith means having a healthy appreciation for – and comfort with -- mystery. Then Solomon says to God, “I have built you an exalted house, a place for you to dwell in forever.” Which is kind of an odd juxtaposition with the previous verse: is Solomon asking that God leave the cloud of mystery and dwell in the temple?

I think that the key to understanding these verses – and therefore, the key to understanding the nature of the temple – is the term “dwell.” Our NRSV Bibles use the term “dwell” in both verses: God “dwells in thick darkness” and the temple is “a place for you to dwell in.” But in the Hebrew text, these are two different verbs. In the first verse, the verb sakan literally means to inhabit or abide in. In the second verse, the verb is yasab, which is translated in other place as “to cause [one] to sit.”

So I think what’s going on here is that Solomon is affirming the mystery of God’s nature, but then is saying that he has created some space for God’s mysterious presence to be “enthroned,” a visible, tangible reminder of the presence of the Holy One among us. So that people would see his building and know that God is on God’s throne, ready to hear and answer prayers.

That’s a wonderful image to reflect on as it pertains to our new church spire. We have always had a magnificent church structure, but our new spire is a visual reminder that can be seen from all over this northwest area and into Maryland and Virginia, that God is on God’s throne and ready to hear and answer prayers. It is a visible reminder to lift our eyes to the heavens and to celebrate the majesty and mystery of God. So that our spire “reaches up” at the same time that it “reaches out,” touching the hearts of those that look towards this house of worship, reminding them of the greatness of our God, and hopefully drawing them to this place.

V. Conclusion.

This past Monday, we hosted a fundraising concert for the Dali Lama’s monastery orphanage, and a number of the folks that spoke to me afterwards commented on the fact that our space felt sacred to them. We are blessed with a place to worship that carries the weight of sacred space. I pray that we allow that space to shape us and strengthen us as we go forth from here to heal a wounded world.

Amen.