1 Kings 5:13‑6:1
Some of you may remember when the first George Bush was running for election to be president of the US (that was in 1988). In one of the debates, Bush was asked by one of the moderators to state why he wanted to be president – what was his vision for the US? Bush replied: “I’m not very good at the vision thing.” Bush was able to make an admission like that and still be elected president – I’m not sure that would be possible today.
I was reminded of that episode at our AGM last year. In one of the discussions we had last year, a member commented that we couldn’t expect this board to come up with a vision for the issue under consideration. The implication was that we could be relied on to keep the lights on but not to come up with a vision. Since I had just agreed to be on the board, I had to bite my tongue. It’s a serious point, one that corporations out there in the secular world know is crucial to their survival. On the one hand, it’s vital to have good management; at the same time, without a visionary to set the goals that managers can work towards, corporations are in trouble. There are very few individuals like Steve Jobs who can do both.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about this vision thing. I don’t think of myself as a visionary – that member a year ago was right about me, at least, in my opinion. And yet at work I am regularly assigned to be part of the visioning team. I hope, therefore, that I am at least able to recognize the need for vision. Good leadership – good group leadership in the case of TUMC ‑ will find a balance between a goal and the capacity of an organization to achieve a goal. That’s different from managing to keep doing the same thing better and better. In other words, we need to find the balance between our calling to follow Jesus and build the kingdom of God, on the one hand, and the very real concrete need to maintain this building, pay our pastors decent salaries, find ways to make it easier for people with mobility issues to use the washroom, make sure that our kitchen meets minimal health and safety standards, and so on.
That’s a preamble. In order to think about this issue, I decided to skim through the Bible to look at the texts on building, specifically building a house of God – tabernacle, tent of meeting, temple. When I looked at my notes on all of the many stories and allusions, there were things that surprised and intrigued me. I want share some of that by reflecting on the scripture from 1 Kings we heard earlier.
First, I got the sense from reading between the lines of the books of Samuel and Kings that the author didn’t think the Temple was a completely good thing. Before there was a temple, Yahweh had been present to Israel in a tent or tabernacle. The tent was portable, it could travel with the people or the army, and it wasn’t bound to a particular tribe or group within the federation that Israel was at the time. The tent had been built with the freewill offerings. It was independent of political interference or control.
The temple was an innovation, a pretty radical innovation. It was built with conscripted labour, lots of conscripted labour. It was built with materials that had to be obtained from a foreign ruler, under arrangements that are no longer clear. There is no doubt that temple was a beautiful building. It takes Solomon seven years to build it. But it is now permanently fixed to one spot, in a city that had only recently been conquered from non-Israelites. The city is the king’s own possession, it had not been part of the tribal confederacy. And the temple may not have been as important to Solomon as a quick reading of 1 Kings might lead us to believe. The temple takes seven years to build; in chapter seven of 1 Kings we learn, however, that it takes Solomon thirteen years to build his own palace. It takes so much longer, not because Solomon has fewer labourers available to work on his own palace, but because Solomon’s palace is bigger than the temple, a lot bigger. And later in the book of 1 Kings we learn that Solomon also builds palaces for several of his foreign wives, very large palaces. The temple, I think it’s safe to say, is part of the transition that the prophets had resisted. Israel had started out as a federation of tribes, led by a prophet. The people had demanded a king, and God had accepted their desire to be like other nations. The prophets had warned the people that their king would end up behaving like the kings of all of the other nations. One of things that kings do is to control the place of worship. Solomon followed his father David as king, but not without resistance. One of the ways he consolidates his power over Israel is to ensure that he, Solomon, controls the place of worship and the priesthood. The temple, some scholars note, begins as the king’s royal chapel. King Solomon has taken control of the religious system; he has taken control of much of the economic activity in Israel for his own plans and ambitions.
One might say that Solomon is a visionary: he dreams up something radically new; he has a clear, defined, measurable goal, and he was able to create a management team to buy into his vision and implement his plan. He was indeed a wise king.
In other words, the temple was born in sin, its origins are quite worldly. And yet. This is not the whole story. A much bigger part of the story is how the temple is transformed from the royal chapel under the thumb of the king to become a potent symbol of the presence of God among God’s people. Ben Ollenberger, professor of Old Testament at our seminary, has shown how the psalmists especially transformed the symbol of Zion. Jerusalem, Zion, had been the personal possession of the house of David; the Psalmists turned into the place from which God’s just law would flow to the whole world. In earlier texts of the Bible, God comes from Sinai to save or judge the people, but relatively few of these hymns survive: Judges 5, Deuteronomy 33, Psalm 68. There are many more hymns in the Psalms and prophets proclaiming that it is out of Zion that just decisions will come. Look at Psalm 50, for example, or much of Isaiah 40 to 66. Jesus brings about a further transformation of both symbols, king and temple. Jesus is now the paradigmatic son of David – the true king is now a suffering servant. The temple symbol has been transformed from a building to a gathering of people, built on the foundation of Peter, the first disciple to confess that Jesus is Lord.
The point I want to remind us of is that symbols matter, and they can be transformed. The flawed, worldly products of human hands can become symbols of God with us. Our building, our church, can seem pretty mundane. It requires a lot of work to maintain. Spring and fall cleanup days can feel like conscript labour. Even the task of managing programs within the building can seen pretty mundane. We don’t have 30,000 workers to conscript, but there are 150 different positions to be filled every year with volunteers. Most of us are willing, but some of us are perhaps reluctantly willing. It may not be the most aesthetically pleasing building: like Solomon, many of us invest more time and effort into our own homes than we do in this building.
And yet it can become a special place. For many of us, it already is. A place where we meet God and form bonds with fellow followers; a place where we celebrate important events in our lives. The place of baptism, child dedication, marriage, funeral, Good Friday fellowship meals, carols sings, potlucks. One of my favo
urite memories is the week I spent helping Nicholas Dyck wire the lobby and offices. I’m relieved that all of the switches and plugs still work – and that we haven’t had a fire. At lunch about 20 of us would gather there on the west side closer to the back of the sanctuary to eat and talk and laugh together.
Buildings, physical objects, can also take on take on negative associations – and once they do, those associations are almost impossible to remove. Residential schools, Mt Cashel orphanage – buildings like these can rarely be rehabilitated, even if they are attractive, functional buildings. The safe church policy we are developing is important both practically and as a symbol of what we want this space to be.
In the year to come, it may seem to us that a lot of our energy is being devoted to painting, the parking lot, the sound system, the carpet, and so on. Let us remember that we do this in service of our vision. I think our vision is this: that this space, and this community, will be a safe place physically. And that it will be a safe space spiritually, a place where we can grow together, week by week, to become the temple that Jesus promised to build. Even when we have difficult conversations, may we be able to remember them as times of God’s presence with us. May this be a place and a community that our children and youth will remember as foundational for the path that they choose to follow. May this be a place of inspiration and hospitality for those of us whose jobs take us to Toronto for a few years. May this be a place where students can safely explore their gifts and calling. And may this be a place where those of us ready to rest can find the peace to do so.