ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

EPIPHANY 4, 2010 EVENSONG
Sermon preached by the Vicar

1 Chronicles 29:6-19, Acts 7:44-50

The readings tonight present us with a tension, a paradox about sacred time and space which both Israel and the Church have had to live with. We have David blessing God for the preparations being made for the building of the Temple in Jerusalem. We have Stephen saying, "The Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands."

The two books of Chronicles are among the poor relations of the Old Testament; relegated to the lumber room and not often brought out. They do not feature at all in the lectionary for the Sunday Eucharist. They have been rather neglected by both Jew and Christian. In the Hebrew version of the Old Testament, they form a single scroll, and come last of all. In the Greek translation, they are placed after the Books of Samuel and Kings; where we find them in Christian Bibles too.

Chronicles reworks the story of David and Solomon which we find in Samuel and Kings; with a rather sanitised version of David and an emphasis on the place of the Temple and its worship. Why read Chronicles when you have already read Samuel and Kings ?, seems to have been a popular reaction. Even one great medieval rabbinic commentator admitted that he had never read it until he was asked to write a commentary on Samuel. To the protestant-minded, it all seems rather high church.

The Chronicler does not do himself any favours by beginning with 9 chapters of genealogy tracing the kings of Israel and Judah back to Adam; hardly a page turner! If you get past that, you find another long stretch of David's arrangements for the Temple, its personnel and music. Just as in the earlier books, David knows he is not to be allowed to build the Temple, perhaps because he has too much blood on his hands, but the Chronicler shows him laying all the necessary groundwork so that his son Solomon can bring the project to a speedy and successful conclusion.

The Chronicler writes in the period after the return from exile in Babylon. Jerusalem and the Temple have been restored but things are difficult. The Temple he and his audience knew had little of the magnificence of either Solomon's or that of Herod the Great which Jesus' country boy disciples up in the big city were to marvel at. There was clearly a problem with funding the restoration of the Temple and the maintenance of its worship: a problem which the dean of any cathedral, or indeed the Vicar and church council of All Saints can sympathise.

So the Chronicler looks back to their forebears in support of a restoration and endowment appeal. He recalls the generosity of King David and the notables of his time. He cites sums which must have seemed astronomic to these hard-up returned exiles. All this is clearly intended to stimulate generosity on their part, even if it cannot be on such a grand scale; anymore than we can expect to match the great sums which were given by those who funded the building of this church as we restore it.

In David's prayer of thanksgiving for the generosity which would enable the building of the Temple by his Son, the Chronicler gives us a theology of giving to the service of God. He reminds us that what we have to give comes in the first instance from God: "For all things come from you and of your own have we given you". We are not the owners of our wealth and possessions, merely their stewards. This prayer is in fact incorporated in some Anglican liturgies for use at the offertory.

The Chronicler writes to show the Israelites that the worship of the Temple, was something which needed to be taken seriously because it draw them back to their relationship with God. This is just as true of Christian churches and their worship. These are things which we need to invest time and effort and resources in; not just take for granted. They re-connect us with the heart of our faith. The Chronicler believed that was the lesson which the people should have learned from their exile. It is the lesson we need to learn in that internal exile, that marginalisation, which is the lot of the church in our age and culture and place.

Stephen, the first Christian martyr, is on trial before the Jewish Council. He defends his proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah by drawing on the traditions of his people in a long speech. In our extract tonight he comes to the building of the temple by Solomon . 'Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands; as the prophet says, "Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord, or what is the place of my rest? Did not my hand make all these things?"'

Stephen cites Isaiah (66.1-2) who echoes the theology found on the lips of Solomon at the Dedication of the Temple (1 Kings 8.27). Stephen is not a proto-Protestant. His point is not that God cannot be found in the Temple - clearly Luke shows that he can in Acts 2-4 - but God's presence cannot be confined there , nor can God be controlled or manipulated by the building of a temple and by its rituals and the power moves of the temple hierarchy. What is being opposed is a "God-in-the-box" theology that has magical overtones, suggesting that if God can be located and confined, God can be magically manipulated and used to human ends. Such is idolatry - the attempt to fashion and control God with human hands and according to human devices.

This was true in a special sense of pagan "holy places" such as the temple of the great goddess Artemis at Ephesus. God, as Paul would repeat in Athens, "does not live in shrines made by man". These were the only places where access to that deity was to be had. Authentic worship in Acts could be offered to the true God anytime and anywhere - on a housetop in Joppa or a beach at Tyre; implying that space and time become sacred spaces and times because of prayer rather than vice versa.

In contrast to such a view, Stephen stresses that God does not dwell or reside in the temple, God dwells in heaven, and furthermore not only is God and God's true dwelling not handmade, instead all the world and all that is in it is God-made. Nothing is wrong with the temple nor with building it, but it is wrong to believe that it, and perhaps it alone, is the habitation of God. Allegiance to a temple made with hands could place Israel in danger of repeating its earlier wilderness sin, for the golden calf had also been made by "their hands."

Stephen stands in the long line of prophetic critique of a temple theology that neglects or negates the transcendence, the otherness, the independence of God.

Our two readings show us the tension, the paradox which is present in scripture, not least in Acts where Peter and John go up the to the temple at the hour of pray, a tension we must live with; a paradoxical attitude towards the idea of sacred space - the temple - and sacred time - the hour of prayer. This has continued to characterise the belief and practice of the church ever since. Those of us who worship in a building like this, with its glorious music and liturgy, need perhaps to listen most to that prophetic voice, even as we seek to practice and commend to others the vital role of liturgy in connecting us with the heart of faith.

In his recent book, Fr. George Guiver CR quotes that staunchly evangelical liturgist Bishop Colin Buchanan speculating on the question of holy places and things:

what John the Evangelist, Stephen, or Paul, or the writer to the Hebrews or Peter would have said if asked to write a discourse on Christian use of space. I think in each case they would have said something like 'we have no temples (bar being ourselves the dwelling-place of God): we need to meet weekly so a place which is accessible and will accommodate us will be very helpful; but under persecution we will meet as we can, not necessarily always in the same place, often in people's ho9mes; and if we can employ art or symbol it will have to be such as can be left behind of can travel with us; in any one place we have no continui9ng city.' If this is right, then no New Testament theology of physical space separated or circumscribed for worship is possible - we are either discussing what is convenient, or we have strayed into Old Testament thought-forms."

"We can", says Guiver, agree on that sense of ultimately sitting light to all symbols, but his picture of convenience rather than expressive power is culturally impossible to imagine in people of the ancient Mediterranean world. It is a modern fantasy. We have to beware of imposing post-Renaissance mindsets and paradigms of people who pre-date them. Even we today would say "we have no temples", but only in the sense that a pagan understanding of the holy place has been replaced not by nothing, but by something else of a different order but comparable significance - we have churches and a rich treasury of further symbols."

What I wanted to say in tonight's sermon was confirmed for me by a rather sad encounter with a distressed churchwarden at the church gate after mass this morning; not one of ours. He came from another church built by Butterfield; one with a small and struggling congregation. Almost in tears, he told me that it was to be taken over by that powerhouse of charismatic Christianity Holy Trinity Brompton.

My heart went out to him, but the stark reality is that far too few of us who have inherited buildings like this one with their traditions have been willing to match either the generosity celebrated by David or the rigorous self-criticism of Stephen. And unless we are willing to place both at the heart of our faith, then we are unlikely to be able commend the traditions which we value to others. They will see us as either unwilling either to put our money where our mouth is or to submit to the Lord who searches the hearts of all.