Proper 16 Year B

When the sacred merges with the sacred. . .

1 Kings 8:[1, 6, 10-11], 22-30, 41-43

When, early in the week, I began looking at our readings for this Sunday, I was literally sandbagged by the reading from the First Book of Kings, and I was moved to reflect on that Old Testament reading for this week – something that doesn’t happen too often here on Sunday GospelTalk.

King Solomon is standing in the midst of the newly built House of God.  If we rely on biblical estimates, it took approximately as many people to build that First Temple in Jerusalem as attended all seven games of last year’s World Series. The Bible also tells us that it took seven years to complete.  

Now the number seven is always suspect in Biblical literature because it is considered to be such a godly number.  I think it is sufficient to say it took a long time and an astonishing number of people to complete such a wondrous and great edifice.

I have had the privilege of being part of a dedication of a new church building exactly one time in my career as a priest in the church.  I’ll never forget the sound of the Bishop knocking ceremoniously three times on the front of the doors of the church with his crozier. It is a special moment in the life of both priest and people.  

In our story this week, it wasn’t a Bishop who presided, it was Solomon, the King of Israel. The Ark of the Covenant, God’s temporary mobile home if you will, was placed by the priests in the Holy of Holies.  The sanctuary filled with a cloud that was the very presence of the Living God taking up residence there. 

I know the word is over-used these days, but this was truly an awesome moment in time. As Solomon stood before the high altar in the Temple, with his arms raised in prayer, the first thing he does is give praise and thanksgiving to God, but the very next thing he does is to worry about those people who have not yet signed the guest book in the narthex so to speak.

King Solomon prays to the Lord God of Israel:

When a foreigner, who is not of your people Israel, comes from a distant land because of your name, then hear in heaven your dwelling place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name.

Right there in the cloud that is God’s very presence, in the middle of all that majestic wonder, right there in the middle of all that dazzling and ineffable astonishment, King Solomon worries about visitors.

Even though there are many centuries between them, it seems that good King Solomon would have no trouble agreeing with Archbishop William Temple who said, Church is the only society on earth that exists for the benefit of non-members.

That quote is probably among the most used by preachers world-wide and now we know why.  The love and care for the stranger in our midst runs so very deep into our Judeo-Christian heritage.

Somehow, many thousands of years ago, Solomon got the message that the House of God isn’t a club where members come to recite their secret passwords. 

It turns out that what you believe doesn’t matter nearly as much as how you behave! Can we manage to see the stranger, not as a bother, not even really as a stranger, but as an opportunity to share the audacious grace of the God of Jesus Christ?

When a visitor enters through our church’s doors, it’s not a matter of the secular stepping into the sacred.  It’s the sacred merging with the sacred, and each has a gift for the other.   

God didn’t just fill that first Temple with the Cloud of Presence because God appreciates superb masonry and fine gold. God came to hang out with the people.

Contemplating this reading this week caused me to get out a little booklet on the history of one of the churches where I served. It’s a marvelous history, but If we want to be able to put To be continued on that history, and each of churches’ histories, and if rather than The end, we want to put To be continued . . .then we need to stand with Solomon in the beauty and the holiness of our churches and pray for those strangers who might come to our churches looking for just a little bit of that Resurrection and Life we have been sharing, especially on those Bread of Life Sundays.

We need to be poised and ready at every gathering to accept the stranger as a sacred seeker and as one of us. 

I guarantee you that there are a lot of people in our communities where we live who don’t necessarily look like us, who have different musical tastes and might even be younger than us. People who are still nonetheless spiritually hungry, and who can nevertheless benefit from what we have to offer them.

Perhaps as we share in King Solomon’s prayer this week, we might want to take the opportunity to consider what’s actually happening in our churches.

• Sometimes it’s tough to break into the various groups in our churches that have been around for as long as anyone can remember.
• When we pair off for fellowship in the Parish Hall after services, sometimes it’s not so easy for the stranger to become a welcomed third party.

• When we do occasionally have a little brood of children attending church on a Sunday, the older and wiser members don’t always go out of their way to ensure that the younger ones are heard as well as seen.  
• Sometimes we aren’t willing to let the newcomer who is ready and eager to take on leadership to try their hand at it.

As a general rule, a visitor should never have to sign the guest book more than once. There’s a lot of ways to squelch enthusiasm and all the while smiling and telling a person how glad we are they came. 

We all still have our work cut out for us, but if we keep at it, we’ll be able to prove all the church growth doomsdayers wrong.  I have been witness to the miracle of acceptance and love so many times I’ve lost count.  The key to success is to just keep reminding ourselves that the stranger is sacred.

Bishop Gene Robinson tells the story about a young seminarian who worked with an old priest at a homeless shelter which had a feeding program at noontime.  On this particular day, there just seemed to be an unusual amount of people who came through.  

Both of them were completely exhausted, and when it was finally closing time, the old priest asked the young seminarian to close up the front door and shut down for the day. Just as the young man got to the front door, he saw yet one more homeless man making his way up the front walk.  In his exhausted state, the seminarian said without thinking, Jesus Christ. 

The old priest yelled over to him, It just might be.