Just last week, my son Reed created a background on our home computer from a snapshot of us standing on top of Mt. Flume, a prominent peak in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. On that sunny-but-brisk Memorial Day weekend, Reed, Tracy, and I had decided to take the day to spend time together in the light of our eldest son’s recent departure from home into the workforce. The picture captures a typical summit shot: scraggly summit-snarled spruce trees; a worn, cracked-granite summit cap; and snow-blanketed peaks of the Pemi wilderness beyond, but what I find to be most salient about the snapshot is my 49-year old hefty paunch snugging the confines of my Boston Red Sox t-shirt. It’s the thing that is most noticeable to me as I stand amid the bucolic grandeur. Egocentric, I realize, but it’s what stands out—literally and figuratively. Hm—a profile of 50-years-svelte-gone-bad.
This week’s Sunday school text seemed a rather random portion taken from 1 Kings 8 (care of the denominational lectionary) wherein Solomon is dedicating the new temple to the presence and ministrations of God among men. The lectionary text begins in verse 22, wherein Solomon begins a lofty and long prayer that outlines his hopes for the ginormous and gold-gilded edifice designed to be a meeting place ‘tween God and man.
It’s the type of prayer known to me as a kid, who waited impatiently for the after-church potluck to begin: as Pastor Haglund “asked God to bless the food,” he also put in a few addendums to his morning’s sermon—full of patriarchs, and analogies, and bulleted doctrinal lessons (and because we were “evangelicals,” a quick outline of salvation, too). All I wanted to do was get to the rice crispy bars, but Haglund wanted to make sure his flock remembered that morning’s exegesis and took the pre-gastronomic opportunity to review.
Anyway, tucked into Solomon’s dedication is a lot of stuff that we in the twenty-first century can hypothesize about the way that God works: are human calamities behavioral outcomes? the exclusivity of Israel, and the prescience of the Holy Spirit. Thankfully, our Sunday school class yesterday didn’t pursue these unknowables, but instead, Greg spent a bit of time going over the historical context of the temple, and gave the class a backdrop with which to discuss the in’s and out’s and possible takeaways from the section.
The part that I caught was that the presence of God, hitherto ensconced in a gold-leaf box of shittim wood, hauled around by some dudes in fancy clothes, needed a place to be properly housed. I admit that I have been forever-influenced by the Indiana Jones scene of a lethal power of God, seething from an unholy encounter with officials of the Nazi party who get theirs after tampering with Something Best Left Alone. All the evil Aryans melt in The Presence—not historically accurate, but it’s a picture that I get. Here is The Presence, and Solomon has been busily setting up a place worthy of that Presence. Solomon admits that the whole earth cannot house such grandeur, much less a building, but he has done what all the political power and good credit rating of the day could muster.
So one of the questions we discussed had to do with the conditions of God’s presence at the temple among his “select group” of people. There, in verse 25, is the statement if only your descendants are careful in all they do to walk before me faithfully as you have done… Solomon, in the midst of his pre-pot luck sermonizing, was recalling to the people gathered there the conditions that God had laid down to his father, David. If you walk carefully, then I will be on your side. It’s a cause-effect relationship that sets up what is heard today in a lot of conservative circles: The relative blessings or curses of a particular group can largely be explained by their proximity to the current will of God. Therefore, we need to look over our actions and habits—usually through the lens of an Old Testament Judiaism or First Century Church, and from that, extrapolate our next steps.
Well, I guess I disagree. The whole conditional-blessing deal smacks a lot of religion, and that is something that I am busily attempting to deconstruct in my own habits and understanding of who God is. It’s an attitude that pervades the Church—and an attitude that all of the students in my public high school English class have about “…church and God, and all that religion-stuff.” And, in an interesting side note, such a conditional interactions is what I long to get away from in my own relationships as husband and father. This might take some explanation later, but the kernel of the idea is uncovered in Jeremiah 31.
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,”
declares the Lord.
33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”
I really like this bit—it’s oft-marked in my Bible and a lens through which I look anew at who God might be, rather than who others always told me He was. Jeremiah records God as Someone who desires to depart from a formal interaction full of fancy-go-to-meeting clothes and hard shoes, and much more One who wants to be half of a conversation in the garden or in the wood lot. He wants to be part of a pot-luck that is a lot less waiting through an obligatory, sermonized blessing, and much more a dig in and pass the crispy bars.
I almost get the (somewhat blasphemous) feeling that God is tired of being hauled around in a box and set into a deep and mysterious inner sanctum where tribal bean-counters dressed in bejeweled robes walk around doing ritualized ministrations—okay, that sentence was a little harsh. But, I think there’s definitely a disconnect between the way it should have been back then, and the way that things should be today —as Bob from our Sunday school is always quick to point out.
I think the relationship has taken a huge shift, from the distant and religious “if you do thus-and-such, then I will do hence-and-furthermore” to grace-ridden New Testament message, more of a “look, I’ll just take care of everything so that we can be together.” Of course this fits the Gospel-by-grace message that we evangelicals are so fond of, but, in my experience, a message that we have such a difficult time of letting alone. We’re snotty kids on a theological playground. Let me digress.
The image that I see is we think the salvation-four square ball ours, that we make all the rules, and you can go to hell (theologically of course) if you don’t play by our rules. I’m looking for ways to bounce you out of the game if you don’t play “holdies and bubblies,” “double-hits,” and “corner shots” or whatever exegetical justifications I can yank from my version of an ancient Hebrew history (whew—I guess I’m venting here).
Instead of rules and regulations and a reference text full of procedural protocol of whether lobster is kosher or that we can wear mixed-fiber clothing, God wants to have it real. It’s the same that a father hopes for in the relationships with his kids—a relaxed, experience-laden, story-swapping campfire in the woods rather than a stiff-spined, posture-ridden, rule-oriented dialogue in the study.
I think that God yearns to meet us wherever we are and then work on the relationship from there, rather than holding a standard that is impossibly high and holy, just to get angry when we cannot muster the cut. Another image I have is a father kneeling on the kitchen floor, urging his staggering toddler forward in the first few uncertain steps toward Daddy’s open arms, rather than an almost indifferent progenitor busily ensconsed in teleological and eschatological matters beyond human ken.
Where am I going with all these rabbit trails? I think to see what Solomon and company had to deal with is really much more to see what we don’t have to mess with due to Christ. (And this is pretty basic stuff)—no more are we to bean count our way into the presence and blessing of an Omnipotence-Unknowable. The pathway from the kitchen cabinet to Daddy’s kneeling figure by the refrigerator is uncluttered by religiosity and stipulation. What matters is my brightening toddler’s face as I close in on my beckoning Daddy’s embrace, an embrace that says, “I’ve done it all, Tommy.”
The other personal takeaway from last week’s lesson (prompted by Greg’s final question) was the realization that the opulence of that First Temple, constructed to house I AM was replaced by a new temple, a temple made of living stones—an edifice not made by hands of men.
The second body of text we covered spoke of Solomon’s wish that the traveling foreigner would know of the relationship of Israel to her God, would look in on that relationship in a wistful manner and want to be a part of that blessing. It’s a curious departure from the outsourced material and painstaking craftsmanship of that first temple. Do the “foreigners,” sitting in my classrooms. Standing in our workplaces, look in on the meeting place that we are and desire to pursue a relationship akin to ours? I think it’s part of the role we have as priests, like Jesus, after the holy order of Mechilsedek.
For the past few years, I have been involved with a church comprised of inmates serving out their sentences in the NH State Prison in Concord. One Sunday night a month, I have gone down to Concord and participated in that church’s two-hour long service of praise and Bible study. It is a most powerful experience to worship and teach amid this incarcerated body of around fifty men—one that has forever changed the way that I look at church.
Anyway, last year, I was mingling with these men during a break in the service, and a newcomer to the service had attracted my attention. He was a big guy—really big guy—who kinda strode around in a nervous but confident way. Concord is a medium-to-maximum security prison, quite a step from a County Home that houses repeat DUI’s or single-time offenders. There are some double- and triple-homiciders walking around in that room—not that you go around and ask—but some of the guys really fit the picture: tattoos, scars, and broken nose bridges can augment a hulking frame that make a timid English-teacher type stay kinda quiet.
But, this was a church, so I felt emboldened to go chat with this inmate—especially because I had a starting point for conversation. The guy was wearing a yamaka. Here, one of the biggest and baddest dudes you could ever imagine sitting on the Group W bench, who had on one of those dinky little hats. Well, it seemed a little strange.
Anyway, I swallowed hard, concentrated to take the wobble out of my step, and even though we volunteers are supposed to keep physical touch to a minimum, I stuck out my hand and offered an introduction. He shook my hand (along with the rest of me). During the initial awkward pause, I squeaked out a, “Tell me about the hat.” It wasn’t a great start, but it’s what I managed.
The service is ecumenical, but most of the guys there claim Jesus Christ, so I was a little surprised to see someone who at least looked Jewish among the worshippers. Well, it turned out that he wasn’t Jewish—actually he just kinda liked the hat—but what he told me surprised me. Back in the quad, where the inmates spend most of their days, months, and years, he told me that guys would come up to him to ask him about the hat and it would start up conversations about God and religion. This man—though a bit hazy about some theological connections himself, considered himself a connector for some of the more religiously recalcitrant of his fellow inmates along their individual pathways to God. He actually called himself a priest, and this hat was what he wore in that capacity.
I thought this to be a little strange—especially because Bruno (or whatever his name was) really didn’t have a specific belief about God that I could sift out of our rambling ten-minute conversation. What is this guy doing, claiming to be a conduit between some of the nastiest people a culture can muster and a holy, immutable God? It seemed heretical at best, blasphemous at worst. Of course, I didn’t express this skepticism, in case he felt like twisting up a folding chair with his bare hands and shanking me with it. I kept a contemplative (and quiet) air about myself as I ostensibly mulled over his claims about his doctrinal function, and, of course, his hat.
The very next week—and I remember this because I shared the following in church that next Sunday—a student of mine, Katey, knew that I was “religious,” and quietly approached me to ask that I would pray for her aunt who was going through some early chemo therapies. When a student approaches me with a request, I have a tendency to try to pray right then and there for whatever it is that they want to pray about. It’s way low-key.
“Okay Katey, I’ll pray about this. Do you want to pray right now?”
“Uh, Cov—we’re in school.”
“Yeah, well God can hear us at school.”
“Yeah, but what about everybody else? Isn’t it illegal to pray in school?”
“Actually, I can pray any time and anywhere I want to, but, this is what we’ll do….”
I told Katey to just look at me as if we were in conversation, and that I would look at her, but pray out loud to God. No one—unless they were listening to our “conversation”—would even know what we were about. And, of course, I encouraged her to “talk back to me” if she wanted to say something to God.
So, we began to pray. I started out by addressing God, and thanking Him that we could talk to Him here in my classroom. Then it happened: I was looking around as I spoke, and I glanced down at the floor near my feet. As I did, just for a nanosecond, I saw that I was wearing a strange off-white brocaded smock-like shirt with all of these shiny jewels studded down the front. I blinked and it was gone. I verbally paused because it was so startling. Katey kept looking at me with a little apprehension that some classmate might approach us. But when I looked down again, it was gone.
You’re probably picking up what I’m putting down. For a flash, I saw that I was wearing one of those ephod-thingy’s with all the gold-and-jewel breastplates like all the glossy pictures of Jewish priests in the back of my children’s Bible that I had as a kid. Now, I know what you’re thinking—that I’m one of those loopy English teachers who imagines all kinds of weird things most of the time. (I’ve even admitted to Greg that I was born in Southern California.) But I am confident that it was a little bit of a wake-up to my earlier skepticism of the yamaka-clad Bruno, there in the chapel area of New Hampshire State Prison.
In retrospect, I think I was given a little picture of my appropriate role as a priest—someone who stands between God and man under the authority of The Holy Order of Mechilsedek. Here is Katey, a timid 17-year old girl who has heard rumors about a God who is approachable regarding her and her family’s anxieties; Tom, a religiously-biased evangelical, boxed in by years of an exclusive and somewhat skeptical dogmatic perspective; and Bruno, a man who has messed up in his life, and who does not have a clue about much in the way of a standard theology. Then there is God, standing in the kitchen by the refrigerator, beckoning us all forward in our toddling steps, moving closer and closer—almost in spite of ourselves, into his welcoming embrace.
Bob, in our Sunday school, is right—there is so much that we don’t know. The grand mystery of the Unmoved Mover, living in us—us, rather ungainly temples made without hands, carried to all kinds of places to stand in the gap for all kinds of people. We are priests of The Most Powerful, a strange and peculiar people indeed. He is willing—wanting—to dwell in the likes of me, adorned in a sweaty Boston Red Sox shirt, amid White Mountain grandeur, and in need of a mid-life diet.
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