CONTAINERS
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Text: 2 Samuel 7:1-14a; Ephesians 2:11-22
Last Sunday in our book study on Christianity for the Rest of Us, we came to diversity as one of the “10 Signposts of Renewal” lifted up by author Diana Butler Bass. As an illustration of the difficulties of dealing with diversity, I confessed that I had walked out of the opening worship at the Biennial meeting of the American Baptist Churches in Pasadena. It wasn’t that I was angry or left in disdain or disgust. In fact, I returned later to hear a very fine sermon. But the music of the evening simply did not speak to me. It wasn’t just that it did not speak to me; I have sat through services and concerts and other events that did not move me. It was that I needed the worship to speak to me and it did not. The music was largely praise music, led by a team of singers with guitars, electronic keyboards and drum traps. The musical style alone was tolerable. I really do like all sorts of music, but the texts seemed simplistic and sexist and I needed something different that night.
The point of real conflict for me came when I realized how many people in the auditorium were enthusiastically caught up in the worship. You see the American Baptist Churches in the USA is the most diverse denomination in the country. We no longer have a racial/ethnic majority. The room was filled with people of many colors and many ethnic backgrounds. There were 5 or 6 rows of youth right down in front. There was real joy in being part of such a diverse gathering of the Body of Christ and I did not want to walk away from that. I wanted to embrace it as a fulfillment of the dreams of some of my denominational mentors and heroes, people who had worked long and hard to make such a gathering a reality. The challenge of living, working and worshiping in this exciting postmodern mix is to find words and ways, songs and prayers that speak to all of us – sometimes simultaneously, sometimes sequentially.
In that worship experience it seemed that an attempt was being made to hold God in a container that was both familiar and unfamiliar; it was uncomfortable for me and clearly inadequate. But then any container in which I place God, though it might feel familiar and comfortable, would also be inadequate. In reality, God will not be contained; God is the eternal More, always beckoning us on; God is manifest in the wild movements of the Sprit and gentle peace of Christ and a million other ways I couldn’t even begin to name.
David discovered that truth. He’d come to a resting place. The battles behind him, he looked around and said, “What next?” In his reflection it dawned on him that he was living in a fine palace and the Ark of God was still housed in a tent. The box that supposedly held God did not have as nice a house as he did. Was he truly embarrassed by the realization or is this just a further evidence of the consolidation of Davidic power with its claim for the right of the Davidic line to rule? One could make either case, depending on one’s level of cynicism. As we noted last week, David was a passionate and an ambitious man. Scripture lifts up again and again his special relationship to God, but he was also building a kingdom, perhaps a dynasty. A temple would be a shrewd political move and reflect well on him. There is an intertwining of the sacred and the secular in this story that will not be disentangled this side of heaven.
Whatever his motivation, David determined it was time for him to build a magnificent house for God. The interaction among David, Nathan and God in this passage is fascinating. David is wants to build a house for God, but the response from God challenges David’s arrogance that assumes he can contain God in a temple made of stone, that he can use God as a seal of approval on his rule. “Are you the one to build me a house to live in?” God asks. Later we will hear that David is not allowed to build the temple because his hands are too bloody, but here the question can be heard as “Who are you, mortal, to assume you can build a house worthy of the great God of the universe.”
“Besides,” God goes on, “I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle.” He goes on, “Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel…saying, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’ No, David, I will not be contained by you or any other human.” God’s spirit moves where it wills and when and how; it is free of human constraint. It comes near to humankind in the lure of divine love and in acts of grace.
Bayit, the word for house is well-punned in this passage. David has a fine house, a palace; he wants to build a fine house, or temple, for God; but in the end it is God who will make of David and his heirs a great house, or dynasty. But David, his heirs and his people will only be blessed because God wills it so. It is very clear who is in charge. God says, “I took you from the pasture…I have been with you wherever you went…I will make for you a great name…I will appoint a place for my people…I will give you rest from all your enemies…I will raise up your offspring after you…I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.” Toward the end of the passage, God summarizes God’s relationship to David’s heir this way, “I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. When he commits iniquity, I will punish him…But I will not take my steadfast love from him” (2 Samuel 7:14-15.) A new approach is taken to the covenant between God and God’s people, an approach in which God will be with them in steadfast love, never abandoning that love, even when they get lost or stray in wickedness.
In his letter to the church in Ephesus, Paul makes similar arguments about God in a different context. Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles, again shows how God will not be contained. The human, religious and cultural categories are clear – Jews near to God, Gentiles far from God. Oh, life is so much neater, so much easier to control when we can divide people into categories and keep them in their places. More containers. Remember that Paul was a Jew and there was no such thing as Christianity at the point he writes this letter. What Paul is doing is claiming for Judaism a fulfillment in Christ of that covenant modification God made with David so long ago. No religious group has an exclusive claim on God. The Jews were called to be God’s people as a light to the nations, not as an act of exclusivity and privilege but as a redeeming act of grace. It is through their faith and practice that God is to be known fully to the whole world. God is not to be contained in a temple made by human hands nor by a set of rules and regulations shaped by human minds.
The good news is this, “…in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near...For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” Here is the new manifestation of God’s steadfast love in the very flesh of Jesus, the Christ, the anointed one, the heir to the throne of David, but even more so, God’s child. As child of God, Jesus does not need the temple or its practices, he does not need the binding rules and regulations of his religion as it had come to be practiced. Paul argues that “He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.” The law is fulfilled in love.
Where do we find walls of hostility? Whom have we tried to control through categorization? What sort of containers have we created for God and for others? If I put my American Baptist sisters and brothers into boxes, where else am I likely to engage in that practice? Robert Frost reminds us that “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” “‘Good fences make good neighbors’”, we might argue with poet. But he comes back,
'Why do they make good neighbors?...
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
/And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.
Our walls promise to keep life neat and tidy, at least it seems so until we encounter the holy, the One who will not be contained, until we meet Jesus who creates in himself one new humanity, one Body of Christ and the walls come tumbling down. Though it is true that in that body all the various parts are needed, we don’t have to look alike or think alike or work alike or worship alike in order to claim common life in Christ, common kinship in the family of God.
The challenge for those of us who claim to be inclusive is to be truly inclusive, to reach out to those with whom we have the most difficulty, the ones whom we want to store away in an airtight container in the basement or the attic or a remote storage shed. Friday night, Daniel Chetti shared with some of us his work with Islamic people in the Middle East. He lives and works and witnesses in an area of the world shaped by ancient religious and cultural enmity. Categories and containers are commonplace, walls and weapons create seemingly insurmountable barriers between people. How can this steadfast love of God, this healing, uniting peace of Christ be known in such region? In a delicately balanced corner of the world like Beirut, it is important not to be strident and demanding in sharing one’s Christian faith. Dan says they have discovered that the church, the Body of Christ can be made up of what they call “lovers of Jesus.” It is not necessary to demand doctrinal orthodoxy or even baptism to say to a “lover of Jesus” that “there is room at the welcome table for you.” The good news is that Jesus “came and proclaimed peace to [those] who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both…have access in one Spirit to the Father.” In a war-torn region, where cluster bombs line the landscape and poor people are blockaded from humanitarian aid and terror too often reigns on all sides, this good news indeed. We must help spread this news and make it so.
God will not be contained. Those who worship God must worship in spirit and in truth, there is no other way. We must find ways to share our stories, our experiences, our understandings of the holy that are respectful of difference and open to fresh seeing and hearing. In the words of an old folk song, “Sing with me, I’ll sing with you, and so we will sing together as we march along” - songs of the open road, anthems for the journey with God to God, tunes we hum while traveling with our brother Jesus, melodies and harmonies shared with sisters and brothers along the way. God needs no temple. God needs only to dwell deeply in us.