|
Foundry United Rev. |
|
|
Where Yesterday and Tomorrow Meet: Working on a Building Sunday, August 20,
2006 |
|
|
I Kings 6: 1-2, 11-13;
Rev. |
When
they did build a temple, it really wasn’t much of a temple – only 20 cubits
by 60 cubits by 30 cubits high. When
Solomon dedicated the temple that he had built, he acknowledged this. He
said: “God fills the heavens. God cannot live in a house made by human
hands.” The
prophets, on the other hand, emphasized not the availability and the
accessibility of God, but the sovereignty and justice of God. The prophets
emphasized God’s expectations and requirements. God is not a God of cheap
grace. God is a God who expects us to live justly and to practice mercy with
one another. The God of the prophets called upon the people to repent and to
live according to God’s statutes and commandments. I
always liked the story about Abraham Lincoln in which a visitor to the White
House during the Civil War said to President Lincoln: “Don’t worry. God is on
our side.” To which This
was the prophetic thrust within For the
prophetic side of So the
dedication of the temple included a prophetic litany in which the people of The
temple is a reminder of our call by God to live justly. It is not cheap
grace. So, for
these reasons, So,
given In his
dedication of the temple, Solomon gives two reasons for building the temple. The
first is evangelistic. Solomon built the temple so that foreigners, those who
were not Israelites, when they came and saw it, might have an occasion to pray
to God, have their prayers answered and come to believe in and trust in the
God of Israel. One of the primary purposes of our churches and synagogues and
mosques – all of these holy spaces – is evangelistic, to give witness to
people who well may never walk through the doors of the church, to proclaim
in the midst of a secular society that there is also the sacred. In the
midst of a society where most of us spend our time on busy-ness getting from
today to tomorrow, they remind a secular society that there is also the realm
of meaning and purpose in life to which we are invited to pay attention. Our
steeples, our church buildings are an invitation to all who pass by to
consider, in the midst of ordinary life, the divine and the holy. What
could be a more fulfilling purpose of this church building than for somebody
who is not religious, or who does not think of themselves as religious, to
pass by this building one day and be moved to pause to think about the divine
and the holy, to say a prayer, and to have a sense that there is one who has
heard their prayer? A
couple of weeks ago, one my way home one evening, I stopped by the front of
the church to look inside the fence where there is an opening where you can
see the ground being dug and the ramp being built. I was standing there
examining it. On the church steps there was a man walking his dog who had
stopped to rest on our steps. As I
stood there watching the ramp, the man said to me: “They are building a ramp
so that handicapped people can come in the front of the church.” I said
to him: “Oh? What do you think about that?” “I live
across the street and it’s wonderful to watch the ramp being built. I stop
and see it every day. It is a wonderful thing that this church is doing.” he
said. I suspect
that he has not worshipped here often, at least, not when I have been around.
But he is connected to God through the witness of this congregation building
a ramp so that we might truly be accessible to more people. The
function of a synagogue or a church building or a mosque is to witness to
those who may never walk through our doors that part of life has to do with
God and holiness and something that transcends our own existence and a
reality that was here before we got here and will be here after we are gone. One of
the functions of the temple was evangelistic. But
there was a second function that Solomon talked about. This one is, in some
ways, harder to get a hold of. When Solomon dedicated the temple, one of the
things he said in his dedication and his prayer to God was that the temple
might be a place to which Solomon
prays this at the dedication: “Hear the plea of your servant and of your
people The
temple was built as a sign and a sacrament and a symbol of forgiveness, as a
means of forgiveness, so that people might know that there is a God who forgives
and that forgiveness is available to them. Forgiveness
is a very powerful but a very difficult thing. We tend to make forgiveness
trivial. Forgiveness is sort of saying: “It’s O.K. or “That’s O.K.” or “I’ll
just pass that over. I’ll just let that go.” But
true forgiveness is a very powerful thing of experiencing the pain that you
have known and deciding to let it go and to treat another person as a sister
or a brother in spite of the fact that they have truly hurt you. Forgiveness
is a powerful thing individually and it’s also a powerful thing in terms of
community. Forgiveness is the crux of history. Forgiveness is where yesterday
and tomorrow meet in our lives and we let go of yesterday on behalf of a new
tomorrow so that new life becomes possible. This is
why it is worth building a temple, for Solomon: so that all might see it and
recognize the reality and possibility of forgiveness. Isn’t
it true that we are all caught up in the pain of our past? We just keep
living out of the pain of our past, rehearsing it, reproducing it, and
putting ourselves into situations where we will experience the same pain that
we are used to. Hugh
Missildine, decades ago, in his little book called, “Your Inner Child of the
Past,” said that we all try to place ourselves in situations in life where we
will feel comfortable with our at home feelings. Whatever we grew up with in
our family of origin, no matter how painful it might have been, we will try
to reproduce it the rest of our lives because it is what feels natural and
“at home” to us. Only if
we can forgive and let go of the pain of those at home feelings do we have
the possibility of new life, of new possibilities. It is true for us as
individuals and it is also true for us as communities and nations and as the
world. How
much of the violence and war in our world is a playing out of the pain of the
past that has never been forgiven and let go of? We just keep hurting one
another. I have
a friend who is a Methodist minister from the former “Then,
suddenly,” he said, “it fell apart. People started remembering pains and
atrocities that had happened 500 years earlier between ethnic groups in Soon, a
nation was destroyed and fragmented. People were hurting and killing one
another. He believes that 500 years from now people will be remembering the
pain that they did to one another in his lifetime. We keep
rehearsing the pains of the past and inflicting the pain upon one another
again. The only way to break the cycle, the repetitive cycle of hurting one
another is the possibility of forgiveness in which we let go of the pain that
was done to us, let go of the guilt that we experience for the pain that we
have done to one another, and search for reconciliation and a new possibility
of living together in new ways. There
is nothing more important to the future of our individual lives and the
future of our nation and the future of our globe than that we believe in the
possibility of forgiveness, let go of the pain of the past and believe in the
future, the tomorrow that draws us. Human
beings are pulled in two different directions. We are in the grip of the pain
of the past, but we are also pulled by the possibilities of tomorrow, the
eschaton, the heaven that God has promised us and that humanity has always
dreamt of. The
only way to be pulled into tomorrow, into the eschaton, into heaven is if we
are willing to let go of the pain of yesterday. That’s what forgiveness means.
Forgiveness is personal and forgiveness is political. Forgiveness is our only
hope of salvation as individuals and as a world. Solomon
built a temple so that in the midst of the nation there might be a sign and a
sacrament and symbol of the possibility of forgiveness. This is, I think,
finally, what it means to believe in God, to believe that we can be healed of
yesterday and that we can walk into tomorrow with newness of life. This is
what it means to believe in the divine, in the holy, in something larger than
ourselves: that we can let go of yesterday. We can face yesterday square on
and, in the knowledge of forgiveness, let it go and claim a new tomorrow. This is
what every mosque, every synagogue, every temple, and every church in our
world proclaims. May we receive the word. www.foundryumc.org |
|
|
|
|
|
|
