Will God Indeed Dwell on the Earth?
Sermon preached at The Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia
on Sunday August 23rd 2009
by The Reverend Diana Carroll
“Will God Indeed Dwell on the Earth?l”
“But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you.” In the name of God, the holy and undivided Trinity. Amen.
“Solomon stood before the altar of the Lord in the presence of all the assembly of Israel, and spread out his hands to heaven.” This summer, in our Old Testament readings, we have been following the story of David as it winds its way through the books of Samuel and Kings. We have heard about God’s rejection of Saul as king, David’s anointing and rise to power, his establishment first as king of Judah and then as king of both Judah and Israel, his somewhat checkered career as a ruler and his illicit liaison with Bathsheba, the succession of his son Solomon to the throne, and finally the building of the temple by Solomon.
Today, we reach the culmination of this long, complicated narrative with the dedication of the temple and the prayer of Solomon before the altar of God. This moment is truly the high point of the whole story. The land is at peace, David’s line has been established, a temple has finally been constructed in Jerusalem, and now, at last, the glory of God fills the temple as it once filled the tent that the Israelites carried through the wilderness.
This past week, Alan and I had a little debate about one of the phrases in this reading. Verse 11 says, “the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord.” When I read this, I thought it meant that the priests couldn’t stand being in the temple, as in, they could not endure it. Alan, on the other hand, has always thought it meant that the priests physically could not stand upright, but had to minister on their knees because of the thickness of the cloud.
Since neither of us is a Hebrew scholar, the debate hasn’t quite been settled yet, but whichever way is technically the right one, I think the same point is made: to experience the glory of God’s presence is an awesome and overwhelming thing. It can bring everything else in our lives to a standstill. It can even bring us to our knees.
This was the experience that Solomon and the priests had there in the temple. And yet they recognized that even this was just a small glimpse of the fullness of God’s being. As Solomon says in his prayer, “Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!”
About a month ago, I went to see the Galileo exhibit at the Franklin Institute. One of the big attractions is a telescope that was made and used by Galileo himself—one of only two such telescopes still existing today. I was really surprised by how excited I got about the telescope. It was in a case all by itself, and it was positioned in such a way that I could actually get down low and look through it. It was incredible to think that I was looking through one of the very telescopes that Galileo used to make his world-shattering discoveries so many centuries ago.
The more I looked around at the other scientific instruments, the more amazed I became at how much Galileo and others of his time were able to learn about the planets and the stars with such basic equipment. And then, I became even more amazed as I thought about how much more we know today, and how much more still there is to learn.
Even the highest heaven cannot hold God. When we hear these words, I think they carry even more meaning and weight for us than they did for Solomon, because we know so much more about how truly vast the universe is, and how small the earth is—how small we are—by comparison.
And yet, the vastness of God is not the end of the story. When Solomon asks, “Will God indeed dwell on the earth?” it’s pretty clear that he means it as a rhetorical question. The implied answer is, “No, of course God will not dwell on earth. Even the highest heaven cannot contain God.” But from our perspective as Christians, that question has a very different resonance to it. “Will God indeed dwell on the earth?” For us, the answer is “yes.” God has dwelt on the earth…in the person of Jesus. The same God who is too vast to be contained by the universe itself has drawn near to us and entered into our world as a human being. “Will God indeed dwell on the earth?” Yes, God has. Yes, God will. Yes, God does.
In today’s gospel reading, Jesus refers to himself as “the bread that came down from heaven.” “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood,” he says, “abide in me, and I in them.” By now these words probably sound pretty familiar. We’ve been working our way through the entire “bread of life” section of John for the past several weeks, and a lot of it is fairly repetitious. What is so unusual about this particular reading, I think, is how upset Jesus’ disciples get. Many of them are offended—so offended that they stop following him altogether.
What exactly was it that the disciples found so offensive? Did they really think that he was advocating some form cannibalism? Could be. I mean, it must have all seemed pretty confusing at the time. They didn’t have the benefit of centuries of eucharistic theology to help them make sense of the language of flesh and blood, bread and wine. But I think there is a deeper reason for the disciples’ reaction.
By calling himself the bread of heaven, and by inviting them to abide in him by partaking of that bread, Jesus is claiming for himself—and for us—an intimacy with God that most of Jesus’ followers simply didn’t believe was possible. They knew that God could not be contained in the highest heaven, much less in the human being standing before them. And they definitely knew that God could not dwell within each one of them, as Jesus’ words about abiding would imply. So they took offense at him and went their own way.
Let’s be honest. This teaching still offends people. It even offends people who are in the church! It may offend some of us who are seated here today. And yet, at the very center of our faith is the journey of coming to believe and know, as Peter declared, that Jesus is the Holy One of God. That God did indeed dwell on the earth, and continues to dwell on the earth with us, among us, and in us.
There is a picture in my office that my godparents gave to me when I was a child. The picture is a rough charcoal drawing of Jesus as a carpenter, framed in a simple wooden frame with a plain beige mat. It’s a very earthy image, almost rustic. There is no halo, no crown of glory. Only simple peasant clothing, work-worn hands, and an expression of patient weariness as Jesus labors over a piece of wood. It is a very human image of Jesus.
I’ve always found it striking because it is so different from many other depictions of Jesus that I’ve seen. The image in the window at the back of our church, for instance, shows Christ in glory, seated on a throne and crowned as king eternal. The Jesus in that window is unmistakably divine. Even the difference in materials speaks volumes: brightly colored, expensive stained glass, versus monochromatic, relatively cheap charcoal.
These two images seem to stand in such sharp opposition to one another, and yet both of them – the drawing and the window – say something profoundly true about who Jesus was and is. Our challenge is not to let one of these images dominate over the other, but to hold them together in tension: Jesus the human carpenter. Christ the divine king.
This is the “mystery of the gospel” that Paul sought to declare so boldly as an “ambassador in chains.” That in Jesus, who was and is utterly human, the fullness of God has become utterly accessible to each one of us. Not a watered-down version of God, but the God of heaven and earth. The God of all the universe, whom the universe itself cannot contain.
For this we say, thanks be to God. Amen.
