Be the House

In the four hundred and eightieth year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the LORD… (1 Kings 6:1 ESV)

I’ve been musing on Solomon and his temple all week.

Huge stones cut from a quarry.

80,000 stone masons.

Cedar and timber from Tyre, floated south by sea.

30,000 forced workers laboring in 10,000 man shifts, one month on, two months off.

More gold than could be weighed.

70,000 burden bearers.

Elaborate carvings of cherubim and palm trees and open flowers.

Unnumbered Canaanite slaves (survivors of their own holocaust).

And a divine premiere that literally knocked everyone off their feet.

Having toured cathedrals in the UK, and remembering my upbringing in the Presbyterian Church – with vivid memories of special services at the Hollywood Presbyterian Church (the pipes of that organ seemed to reach to the heavens!) – it seems that we have never moved too far from Solomon’s day. Now don’t get me wrong, I like buildings – and those cathedrals were incredible! It’s just that musing about Solomon and his great buildings causes me to ponder our preoccupation and near obsession with buildings as a Christian culture. I remember years ago as a young teen in training for ministry being told that “without a building you have no identity in the community.” So we won’t reach people without a building. Then, added to that was another warning that without the building we internally lose our identity as well and nothing else will happen. And so we build.

But then I look back at Solomon and his building. And after all the animal entrails were mopped up and the confetti swept up, I see him going home, a gnawing discontent eating at him that he can’t even name. And then as he looks around at the house he inherited from his father, he sees a place to channel that swirling discontent. The next thirteen years are spent building a bigger and better building for himself, a palace unrivaled anywhere. But it’s not enough. More buildings, more projects. Fortress cities, stables, elaborate gardens, there seems no end to the possibilities. And he fills them with treasures from all over the world...apes and ivory and peacocks and women…and he forgets who he is, even as the gold of his glorious temple reflects from his face.

Then I look back at that temple and I see it sacked once, and then sacked again. Gold replaced with brass, cherubim covered with images of snakes and foreign gods as consecrated priests bow to the queen of heaven in its inner chambers, insensible to the unseen glory that was departing. But still they cling to it, “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord are these.” Identity lost, but still they cling to it, the life-preseverer building that will keep them afloat, that surely must stay afloat itself. And yet it must be torn away from them, torn down, rooted up. Seventy years pass. And though they will return and rebuild what until Herod’s day is only a pathetic shadow of Solomon’s glory, through their exile a deeper building takes place. Each surviving household becomes a miqdash me’at – a little sanctuary; families cluster together in groups of ten forming larger communities (synagogues), gathering to keep the Story burning in memory and in life. And so when the latest temple is again uprooted and torn down, the deeper building forged in exile goes on, reforging an even stronger identity that transcends all space and place.

Some observations:

Our identity as the people of God had better go deeper than our digs. God’s work among and through us had better never be irrevocably bound in our minds to anything that we can build. Build, yes. Build wisely, build inspirationally, build far and wide as the day is long, but hold all such building loosely. Today’s cathedrals are tomorrow’s tourist attractions. Or shopping malls. Or worse.

Also, we must remember the real building that God has always been up to. “You are God’s building.” “In him, the whole building is being joined together, and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.” In all human building projects, people are merely another resource that makes the building happen (Solomon had thousands of such personnel resources, willing or not) – and that keeps and maintains it. In God’s building people aren’t a resource, they are the Building itself. “In him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” “Everything is built by someone, but the one who built all things is God…whose House are we.” Anything we build only houses the House. We must remember that God loves the House and not the house; Jesus lives in the House, is glorified in and through the House; his pastors (fellow-builders) minister and serve the House, not the house. To forget that distinction is to convert the house we hallow from a Bethel to a brothel. So build as we may, build as we might – as such building supports his ongoing building of the House. (It strikes me that though Solomon built, we are being built.)

And if you could follow me through that, top it with this final thought. All of the eschatological hype of a new temple being built in Jerusalem notwithstanding, the reality is that the city that is above, our homeland, our mother, the one John saw coming down to earth, has no temple. God is its temple – and the Lamb. And that is the reality Solomon’s temple challenges us all to reflect and walk out in increasing measure. That reality forges an identity that the longest and most severe exile can never erase and that no house we build can augment; an identity as God’s House that, like a city on a hill, cannot be hidden – housed or not.

Be the House.