On the last Sunday in Advent the
lectionary, somewhat surprisingly, provides a rather long Old Testament passage
from II Samuel. This is 1000 years
before the time of Jesus. King David is
embarrassed, he says, because while he is living in comfort in a house of cedar,
the sacred Ark of the Covenant, which houses the stone tablets recording the
Ten Commandments, is still kept in a tent, just as it was during the 40 years
of their wandering in the desert. It is
time, says David, when he should build a great temple in Jerusalem. Nathan the prophet at first thinks that is a
smart idea, but then God tells him otherwise…
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, whom I commanded to
shepherd my people Israel, saying, “Why have you not built me a house of
cedar?”[1] The
answer to God’s rhetorical question is No… God is happy in a tent[2]
-- as Nathan informs David the next day.
In any case, he says, if a magnificent temple is to be built, it will be
done not by David but by David’s son, in years to come.
And so it was. Solomon built the temple in about 957 BC. The Queen of Sheba showed up for the opening
with great panoply, later celebrated by George Frederick Handel. In the
innermost part of the temple, the Holy of Holies, was kept the Ark of the
Covenant with the tables of the Law. It
was surmounted by two gold angels whose wings formed a sheltering loop above
the Ark – it was said that the Shekinah, God’s Presence, dwelt there at
the heart of Israel. This temple was
destroyed in 586 BC at the time of the Exile in Babylon, rebuilt in the time of
Ezra and Nehemiah. This one, the Second
Temple, was desecrated by the Hellenic king Antiochus Epiphanes, and later by
the Romans. Herod built a Third Temple, and that was destroyed by the Roman army
in 70 AD and has never been rebuilt. By this
time the Jews had long understood that God is present wherever they are, in the
desert, in exile, diaspora, scattered around the world in synagogues or in
ghettos, in Auschwitz or Ravensbrück – the God who is perfectly at home in a
tent.
Then, in John’s Gospel, Christian
scripture, we find this statement: The
Word (Logos) was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14). The Greek word dwelt is literally pitched
his tent[3]
among us. John sees in the child in the
manger at Bethlehem, God as it were in a tent among us, freedom camping, you
might even say… sharing our trials, our wanderings, our destiny. Here is the shekinah, the light of
God’s presence, not in a house of cedar, but pitched where people are, in our
anxieties and danger, in all our regrets and unresolved issues…
I think I understand our
attachment to fine buildings, great liturgy and music. But the future of faith is, as it always was,
with those who find him dwelling first in our hearts, in the deserts of our
life and history, in our fears and disasters… and in our stillness and silence
and awed wonder.
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