When I was 19 I went backpacking with a friend around Europe. This of course was back in the day before cell phones and social media, so my poor parents had no idea where I was most of the time.
My friend and I met other travelers and we all went to the island of Crete for a week. By this time it was October and not so warm, even in Greece. One day we rented scooters and rode all over the island. It was a cool, windy day, and I got so cold I thought I would fall off the scooter. We found a tiny little church on the side of the road, so I went in to warm up.
I still remember sitting in the little church, out of the wind, all alone. You can imagine that traveling around Europe with a group of young people, I wasn't going to church or even praying much. But in that tiny sanctuary, I felt a sense of peace, I could feel the presence of God around me and within me. I felt it more strongly than I had in any of the great cathedrals we had visited earlier on our trip. For me that little church was truly a dwelling place of God.
You don't have to have hold a degree in theology or have taken courses on Biblical exegesis to tell that the theme of both the readings for today is around the word “house” or dwelling place. The word “house” is found 15 times in 2 Samuel! There are three different meanings: twice referring to David’s palace, four times to God’s temple, and nine times to David’s dynasty.
Then in Ephesians, we find the terms household, holy temple and dwelling place, three versions of “house” in four verses, all of them clearly about God's dwelling place.
In the centuries between those two readings we see significant development in the people of God's understanding of God's dwelling place. In 2 Samuel it's clear that David believes God needs a specific place to live in order to dwell among God's people. Since the Israelites left Egypt approximately 250 years before, God has dwelt in a tent. David feels it's time to give God a proper house.
Interestingly, God doesn't agree, God says David is not the one to build a temple. According to Biblical scholar Ralph Klein (NOT the former premier of Alberta!) this may have come from a combination of opposing political and religious views. He says “To some in Israel building a temple may have been seen to be an attempt to control God or to limit God’s freedom.”
Which makes sense when you think about it. God in a tent is much freer to move about than God in a house of wood or stone. Some people were already struggling with the concept of having a king because that seemed to limit God's role in their lives and their nation. For them, putting God in a temple might have appeared to be attempting to limit God even more.
Whatever the reasons David didn't build a temple, a very fancy one was built by his son, King Solomon. It lasted several hundred years, then was destroyed when the Babylonians conquered Israel and the people were exiled. Several generations later the exiles returned and eventually built a new temple, the one we hear of in the gospels. It too was seen as God's dwelling place, the center of the Jewish faith.
But in Ephesians we see a new concept. The early Christians didn't worship at the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, they didn't even have local synagogues like the Jews did. They just met wherever they could, by the river, in people's homes. They had no formal dwelling place for God.
We don't know if this was a worry because really, we know very little about how early communities of faith operated. But we can imagine it was of some concern because every other religion had temples or sacred gathering places of some type.
The writer of Ephesians comes up with the wonderful concept that the people of God are the dwelling place of God. First the author says, “you are members of household of God,” then that is developed by saying, “in Christ the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord.”
It ends with that evocative image, “you are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.” The physical building is no longer needed in same way because in Christ the people of God are the dwelling place of God.
As United Church writer Ed Searcy puts it, the passage “turns at its conclusion to re-imagine the church not as a place for parishioners to come into, but instead as the household where God chooses to live.”
I know none of this is new to you, we all know church isn't a building, it's people. We all know God doesn't live in the church. We all know and probably agree with the theme of the book from our Learning Together time, “Where does God Live,” that God is within us and within all of creation.
But I think Ephesian's image of us being God's dwelling place takes that sense of God within us further. It's a very intimate image, it's hard to think of anything more intimate than God dwelling within us. It means God is truly part of all that we do, as individual and as congregations. It's also a very constant image. God dwells within us, not just visiting, not just stopping by. No matter what may come our way, God is within us, trying to give us the love, wisdom and strength we need.
I think we're in particular need of that dwelling place image right now. We are at a place where we're feeling very overwhelmed as a society. This summer alone, we're dealing with coming out of Covid, we just finished a heat wave, there are fires all over our province, and of course there was the discovery of the bodies at residential schools in several provinces.
That's a lot to deal with, especially as people of faith because we feel like we need to respond somehow. Often in times like these we turn to the image of God as parent, which is an important one, but the image of God dwelling in us goes further, reminds us that God is more than a parent.
God gives us the guidance a parent would offer, but where a parent then has to take that step back -- a parent is separate from who we are, God as our dwelling place reminds us that God is a part of us. God is like our heart, like our bloodstream, pumping through us, giving us the strength and inspiration, as well as the comfort and nurturing that we need.
As I was thinking about all this, I was reminded of when I was in Sunday School in grade 4. It was a United Church, but it was exceptionally evangelical for a United church. My Sunday School teacher encouraged all of us to accept Jesus into our hearts.
That image was and still is very meaningful to me. I could clearly imagine Jesus stepping into my heart and living there. I still remember kneeling at the back of the church, praying for Jesus to come into my heart, and having a sense of something very special happening, a sense that Jesus truly was living within me from then on.
In the United Church we shy away from that kind of imagery, as it has become loaded with all sorts of other beliefs and values. But I think we may have lost something valuable that goes with it.
This reminds me of a movie I saw years ago where one character says to another, do you know Jesus as your personal saviour? And the second character says, I don't know him personally, but I really admire his work.
In the United Church I think we have a tendency to admire Jesus' work, which is God's work, without actually having a relationship with God, without being God's dwelling place. As if God is separate from us. And that can make it hard to tap into God's love and strength when we need it most. Because unconsciously we see God as out there, rather than within us.
So I would encourage you to think about what it means to you to be God's dwelling place. How do you understand God? Where and how do you feel the presence of God within you? What gets in the way of you expressing and living out your faith? Take time to think about what it means to you to have God living and working within you and through you.
It's also important to think about what it means for us as community of faith to be dwelling place of God. How are we letting God work in and through us? Are we putting up any barriers to God's presence? The story of David reminds us how easy it is to get focused on our own goals rather than taking time to reflect on what God may be calling us to do.
I'd like to share a quote from spiritual writer Richard Rohr with you, it's about the vision of Christian community we see in Paul's letters, but I think it is also a wonderful description of what it means to be God's dwelling place as a church.
It is a way of cooperating rather than competing, a way of giving rather than getting, a way of sharing rather than hoarding, a way of sacrifice rather than comfort, a way of faith rather than knowledge, a way of relationship rather than anonymity, a way of love rather than animosity.
May we have the courage to explore what it means to be God's dwelling place, each of us as individuals, in our own church communities, and all of us together as the people of God in the world.