...taken from 'a room called remember' uncollected pieces, #12
115 psalm 74. 1-16 O God, why dost Thou cast us off forever? why does Thy anger smoke against the sheep of Thy pasture? remember Thy congregation, which Thou hast gotten of old,...direct Thy steps to the perpetual ruins; the enemy has destroyed everything in the sanctuary! Thy foes have roared in the midst of Thjy holy place; ...at the upper entrance they hacked the wooden trellis with axes. and then all its carved wood they broke down with hatchets and hammers. thy set Thy sanctuary on fire; to the ground they desecrated the dwelling p0lace of Thy name. we do not see our signs; there is no longer any prophet, and there is none among us who knows how long...yet God my King is from of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth...Thine is the day, Thine also is the night.
john 16.7-8 nevertheless I tell you the truth; it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. and when He comes, He will convince the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment.
according to the book of Kings, it was 'in the 5th month, on the 7th day of the month-which was the 19th year of king nebuchadnezzar, king of babylon' that the babylonian forces entered jerusalem and, among other things, destroyed the great temple of solomon in
116 all its glory. 't the upper entranced they hacked the wooden trellis with axes, says the 74th psalm, 'all its carved wood they broke down with hatchets and hammers. they set Thy sanctuary on fire'. you can all but hear the chaos and din of it - the falling masonry and splintering wood, the massive cedar beams overlaid with gold thundering to the floor, the crackle and hiss of flames as they swept up the walls all carved with pomegranates, palm trees, lilies, as they feathered with fire the great olivewood cherubim with their outstretched wings who can ever forget it - the burning embers floating through the sky and the terrible heat of it as the priests scattered before it like dead leaves before the wind?
'to the ground they desecrated the dwelling place of Thy name, says this horror-struck psalm. 'the enemy has destroyed everything in the sanctuary! Thy foes have roared in the midst of Thy holy place'. and that of course was close to the worst of it: that the place which was destroyed was not just the pride and glory of jerusalem but was also God's place. thy didn't exactly say it was the place where God dwelled because at its wisest israel alwayhs stopped just short to saying that God dwelled anywhere is space, but it was the place where God tabernacled at least, where He pitched His tent, camped, to hear prayer and accept sacrificed, the place where his secret name was spoken and heard, where his glory was at least glimpsed as isaiah had glimpsed it in the year when king uzziah died. so of all the places anywhere, the Temple was the holiest place. if God made Himself known anyplace, that was where He did it. and now that place was a shambles, a smouldering ruin, an unholy mess.
there are many things you could say about it and one
117 of them is simply that king nebuchadnezzar put king Yahweh to rout and took His temple the way Grant took Richmond. you could say that when it came to a direct confrontation, not even God in His holiness was a match for babylonians in their might with their hatchets and axes and flaming torches. you could say, if you dared to say it, that God is only a dream, a shadow, a word, whereas hatchets are solid and real the way babylonians and bombs are real; and that on the day when this whole planet is finally chopped down, burned up, the dream of god will vanish with it as surely as the Temple did on the 5th day of the 6th month with king nebuchadnezzar standing by at the hotline to get the good news. that is one thing you could say and my only guess is that there were probably more than a few in jerusalem who were saying it in 586 BC just as there are more than a few who are saying it today. Neb routed God because God is of no substance and reality in Himself, and thus eminently routable. Neb was able to dispose of God and His temple, both, with comparative ease because God, if He had ever existed at all, was dead and gone before Neb got there.
but needless to say, that was not what the prophets were saying. what the prophets were saying was that the reason Neb was able to destroy the temple of god in all its holiness was that God had long since left the Temple to its fate in anger and despair and taken His holiness with Him. the prophet Jeremiah went and stood right in the court of the temple itself on the eve of its destruction and said it - in the terrible candor of his calling blurted it out with such force that his eyes bulged in their sockets: 'do not trust in these deceptive words: 'This is
118 the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord'. he shouted it three times in a row so nobody would miss it. and then he spoke what he believed was the word of God himself: 'will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, ...go after other gods...and then come before Me in this house, which is called by My name and say, 'we are delivered'? for Jeremiah, in other words, the Temple fell to the babylonians like a house of cards not because God was a pushover but because a house of cards was what God's people had made of it.
'we are delivered, they said in their temple while it was still in business. they had been delivered at the Exodus and many a time since. they had left behind them in egypt the worst bondage of all which was bondage to themselves. they had been shown the way to get the hell out, but they were still in hell because by letting their faith become mainly a matter of ritual and busyness inside the Temple and by living their lives outside the Temple as though there was no God at all to give a hang how they lived them and thus was really no God at all, hell was what they had made for themselves and within themselves. it was they themselves who had desecrated the temple, Jer said, and the babylonians had only delivered the coup de grace. now they were on their own. God was no longer to be found where for centuries they had expected to find Him. and the 74th psalm begins like a dog howling at the moon: 'O God, why dost Thou cast us off for ever?...remember Thy congregation, which Thou hast gotten of old'. but as far as the psalmist can tell, God did not remember them. 'we do not see our signs', he says. 'there is no longer any prophet and there is none
119 among us who knows how long'. that was the worst of it all, the people of the exodus, the people who had been delivered, were lost, and their cry is a cry of dereliction that even after two and a half thousand years has still such a ring of reality to it that it is hard to hear it and remain unmoved, hard to think of it as having mere historical interest. 'O God, why dost Thou cast us off?' is there anyone who has not only heard that cry but at times also cried it?
there is a restaurant in a city somewhere, a sort of quick lunch place with no tablecloths on the tables, just the ketchup and mustard jars on the bare wood. it seems to be raining outside. an elderly man with a raincoat and umbrella has turned at the door. another man glances up as he sits there smoking a cigar over a newspaper and the remains of his coffee. tow teenagers sit at a table, one of them with a cigarette in his mouth. they are all looking at the same thing, which is an old woman and a small boy who are sharing a table with the teenagers. their heads are bowed. they are saying grace. the people watching them watch with dazed fascination. the small boy's ears stick out from his head like the handles of a jug. the old woman's eyes are closed, her hair untidy under a hat that has seen better days. the people are watching something that you feel they may have been part of once but are p0art of no longer. through the plate-glass window and the rain, the city looks dim, monotonous, industrial. the old woman and the boy are saying grace there, and for a moment the silence in the place is fathomless. the watchers are watching something that they've all but forgotten and will probably forget again as soon as the moment passes. they could be watching creatures from another
120 planet. the old woman and the boy in their old fashioned clothes, praying their old fashioned prayer, are leftovers from a day that has long since ceased to be.
it is not fashionable to praise Norman Rockwell overmuch, that old master of nostalgia and american corn, but we have to praise praise him at least for this most haunting and maybe most enduring of all his Saturday Evening Post covers which touches on something that i think touches us all. it was some 30 years ago that he painted it, but the likeness remains fresh and true to this day and or course it is a likeness of us and of a world not unlike the one the 74th psalm describes.
for us the Temple still stands, to be sure. the great cathedrals still stand. the churches still stand, big ones and little ones, some that are almost full every sunday and others that are almost empty. the Church is till in business, in other words, but the question is, what is that business, what goes on in these strange buildings scattered thick over the surface of the earth? why do people continue to go there? what do they find when they get there? what do they fail to find? why do people go to them no longer? fundamentalists, liverals, evangelicals, humanists, charismatics, Roman Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses - are all of them doing the same thing or are they doing different things? are some of them doing it right and others doing it wrong? is there any sense in which you can say that God is present in any of them or all of them? these are not rhetorical questions, questions whose answers i plan to pull out of the hat at the end of my sermon. it's because i don't know the answers that i'[m asking them both of you and of myself. and it's because some of you may share my confusion and uncertainty that it seems crucial
121 to ask them also of God. maybe at least part of our business in a church is to ask what is going on in it. is there anything more or less important, real, holy, going on there than anyplace else?
as a church we have not been demolished with hatchets and axes and torches and the foes of God have not roared in our sanctuary except insofar as from time to time you and i are His foes. the church is intact. the plumbing and furnace work, at least most of the time. the sunday school rooms are clean and adequately lit. the bills are paid. the ministers by and large earn their keep. sermons are preached, the young are baptized and married, the old buried. the sick and lonely are visited and the poor remembered and the congregation more or less does its share too. the wine is poured and the bread eaten over and over again. 'drink this, eat this, in remembrance of Me', and He is remembered here and we come to remember and be remembered. we pray. we worship. sometimes we even open our hearts a little to the one who promises to lead us out, to deliver us and who has delivered us at least as far as this place itself where with such faith as wee have, we sometimes yearn above all things for full deliverance and sometimes, i suspect, would turn it down cold if the chance came because with part of ourselves we cling to things as they are even when they are killing us and we are far from eager to find out what full deliverance might mean.
the church is intact in many ways and at their best most of the things the church does serve their purpose - sometimes, we pray, serve even Christ's purpose - and at their worst are probably at least harmless. but is it possible that something crucial is missing the way something
122 crucial was missing in the Temple at Jerusalem in 586 BC, which is why it fell like a ton of bricks? 'you are the body of Christ, paul said, and if you stop to think of it at all, that is a most fateful and devastating word. Christ on this earth was the healer of the sick, the feeder of the hungry, the hope of the hopeless, the sinners' friend and thank God for that because that means He is also our hope, our friend. thank God for every time the church remembers that and acts out of that.
but Christ was also a tiger, the denouncer of a narrow and loveless piety, the scourge of the merely moral, the enemy of every religious tradition of his day, no matter how sacred, that did not serve the Kingdom as He saw it and embodied it in all its wildness and beauty. where he was, passion was, life was. to be near Him was to catch life from Him the way sails catch the wind. He was the prince of peace and when he said, 'I have not come to bring peace, but a sword', what He presumably meant was that it was not peacefulness and passivity that He came to bring but that high and life-breathing peace that burns at the hearts only of those who are willing to do battle, as He did battle, to bring to pass God's loving, healing, forgiving will for the world and all its people.
in these ways too the church is called, you and i are called, to be Christ's body, to be life-givers and when i think of that, i think of a new england college where i preach from time to time in a vast Gothic chapel that is used only once or twice a year and the rest of the time stands empty. and i remember how the last time i was there and looked out into all that great vaulted space which month after month is full of nothing but shadows, it struck me as saying such what the Rockwell cover is saying. the other people in the restaurant look with dazed
123 astonishment at the old woman and the small boy at their prayers because something seems to be alive and real inside them in that unlikely place, something that in many a place where you would expect to find it seems scarcely alive at all. even when churches are full to overflowing, it is often hard not to sense an inner emptiness as great as the emptiness of that college chapel - the sense that though the great feast is still in progress and many of the guests still in their seats, the heart has somehow gone out of it, the passion, the adventure have been replaced by shadows, and the host himself no longer there.
is that the truth of it - the church as museum, as echo? many would say so. in the part of the world where i come from, the people who say so are apt to be some of the wisest, most concerned people there are. they have little or nothing to do with the church because for them the church speaks a dead language, is for them a dead-end street. and if we are honest, you and i - we who are the church and try to hold on to whatever there is to hold on to in it - i think we have to admit that often they are right. often, i'm afraid, the church is a place where preachers preach not out of their depths but out of their shallows, and who, when they try to show forth the great transforming truths of the faith that once set the world on its ear, speak not out of the experience of those truths in their own lives but speak instead like american tourists abroad who believe that if only they say the hallowed old words often enough and forcibly enough, everybody will be bound to understand whether they know the language or not. often, i'm afraid, the church is a place where bread and wine and prayers and hymns and worship have little more significance than the secret rites of a Greek-letter fraternity. sadder still, the church often seems to be a gathering124
of men and women who, whatever they find there, take so little of it out into the world with them that if one of them were to sit down at McDonald's and say grace, or say or do anything to suggest he or she is a christian, the golden arches would sake with astonishment-and so, i suspect, would we. i think of an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous, which has no building, no budget, no priesthood, but only people who come together wherever they are to seek help in their helplessness from each other and from God and who are ready at any ungodly moment of day of night -which is to say, of course, at any godly moment-to go to each other's rescue, whereas you and i, who are called above all things to be Christs to each other, tend to pass like ships in the night. in our own genteel and unobtrusive ways will we 'steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, go after other gods, and then come before (Him) into this house which is called by (His) name and say, 'we are delivered'? the one who asks that question is Jeremiah, and there can be no great mystery as to whom he asks it of.
125 there is nothing the world can't destroy if it puts its mind to it, including the world itself. the temple of solomon was destroyed as much by the jews within as by the babylonians without. and the church as the body of Christ is destroyed not just from without by a world that sees it as a dead end street but by people like you and me who destroy it from with9in by our deadness and staleness, our failure to be brave, to be human, to take chances; by the sterility and irrelevance and sup0erficiality and faddishness of so much of our churchly business and by our tragic-comic failure to move around in the world as though being a christian makes not just a nominal difference but all the difference in the world. but if the Temple can be destroyed
126 and maybe deserves to be destroyed, God is not destroyed, Jeremiah says. even if the temple lies in ruins, God will find a new place to pitch His tent and that place is the human heart: the law to be put within us, the Counselor to come, the breath of life.
which hearts and where then? in whose hearts does something of "God well up, something of new life start to live...
sisters and brothers, we must love one another or die. surer than the law of gravity is sure, that is the law. and in those hearts where that law is written and kept, there the Counselor has come and God dwells and the world itself begins to become the Temple. 'O God, direct Thy steps to the perpetual ruins' that can never ruin Thee. direct Thy steps to us to to Thy church in its emptiness and darkness. Thi9ne is the day, but Thine also is the night. Thine also is the night.
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