Christ is Building

2 Samuel 7:1-13; Ephesians 2:11-22

“Go ahead and do whatever you are thinking, because the Lord is with you.” That was Nathan’s initial counsel to King David. These are dangerous words. He’s essentially telling him, “Just go with your gut because God probably agrees with you.” Whether building a temple, or writing a law, or leading a people…giving such carte blanche to any leader is probably a bad move.

So God directs Nathan in a dream to amend his comments to David, “David is not the one to build the temple for me to live in…tell him, ‘I will raise up your descendant—one of your very own children—to succeed you, and I will establish his kingdom. He will build a temple for my name, and I will establish his royal throne forever.’” In verse 17 we read that “Nathan reported all of these words and this entire vision to David.”

David hears this, and in 1 Chronicles 22 we see him telling his son, Solomon, “You are the one who is to build a temple for the Lord.” In his speech in Chronicles, David reveals an explanation for why God didn’t want him to build the temple, “The Lord told me: You won’t build a temple for my name because you have spilled too much blood on the ground before me. But your son, Solomon, will be a man of peace. He will be the one to build a temple for my name.” God’s temple is to be built by one who brings peace. Making a long story really short—Solomon builds a temple, that temple is destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II and the Babylonian army, then the temple is rebuilt by Zerubabel. Jump forward a few hundred years to the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. He stands in the temple and tells the perplexed authorities, “Destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days.” The Jews respond incredulously, “It’s taken over 46 years to build this temple, and you say you can raise it up in three days?” John adds an aside to us, the reader, “the temple he spoke of was his body.” Paul elaborates on this theme in 1 Corinthians 6 when he asks the members of the church, “Don’t you know that your body is also a temple of the Holy Spirit that is within you.” And then goes on to tell them in chapter 12, “You are the body of Christ and parts of each other.”

To summarize: God doesn’t want a temple built by human hands on a foundation of blood-soaked soil. The temple of God is to be built by one who brings peace. Jesus refers to the resurrection of his body as the raising of a temple, and then Paul refers to the church as the body of Christ, comprised of members who are each temples of the Holy Spirit and united to one another. Now listen to how these themes reemerge in the letter to the Ephesians: “Christ is our peace…when he came he announced the good news of peace to you who were far away from God and to those who were near…Christ broke down the barrier of hatred that divided us…[and now] Christ is building you into a place where God lives through the Spirit.”

We are a the body of Christ; we are a temple of the Holy Spirit; we are being built by Christ into a place where God lives through the Spirit. And this brings peace…a twofold peace which is both a reconciliation with God, and a reconciliation with our neighbor. So the temple being built for God is not a temple made of walls and bricks and mortar, but a temple made of people and relationships and the bond of the Holy Spirit. The “temple dedicated to the Lord” is a metaphor for a community of love, compassion, and worship.

The Gospels are ripe with examples of Jesus breaking down barriers that thwart the establishment of this community: giving water to the woman at the well, dining with Zacchaeus, the tax collector, fellowshipping with sinners, touching lepers and the ritually unclean. There were so many laws governing “appropriate” behavior for remaining ritually clean, many of which required avoiding those who were deemed to be “unclean.” These were laws that built barriers between people. “But Jesus cancelled these detailed rules of Law.” Ephesians suggests that this breakdown of barriers and hatred and unjust laws serves as compost for the growth of the garden of God. But fertilizer also falls dangerously close to what the world might write off as being “B.S.” And for many devout Jews, says Bible scholar Ralph Martin, “the overthrow of the Torah’s authority marked the first step on a slippery road to antinomianism which rejected all moral restraints.”[1] I had to look up that word:

Antinomian- one who thinks that the gift of grace renders the moral law of no use or obligation because faith alone is necessary to salvation. 2 : one who rejects a socially established morality.

There is a danger here, the same danger David faced in being told by Nathan, “Go ahead and do whatever you are thinking, because the Lord is with you.” This is the danger of equating our will with that of God. This is the danger of being freed from overwhelming expectations and oppressive powers and unjust laws, but also being lured to abandon God’s established morality, too. A morality which Jesus summed up: “Love God…and love your neighbor.” To write off the importance of these commands to love will lead to division, and unrest, and hatred, and fear--essentially building back up the very barriers that Jesus broke down to make way for God’s peaceful community.

Today’s text from Ephesians features two sections: the first which describes all that Christ has done to break down barriers to lay the foundation of God’s kingdom written in past tense; the second section pivots on the phrase “so now” and shifts to present tense to describe our responsibility upon that foundation as blocks of the “temple”, members of the community that Christ is now building. Our participation in this community must therefore involve a practice by which we: 1) remember what God has done for us; 2) recall the morality required of us; and 3) allow ourselves to be called into accountability for what God is currently doing in our midst. That practice is prayer. As Marjorie Suchocki describes it, when Christ teaches us to pray “God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven,” he is teaching us that “prayer is a channel of union between the reign of God that is in God, and the reign as it is reflected in history.”[2]

The Kingdom of God on earth is possible because it is built through us and based on that which God knows us to be capable of. God is not calling us to be a part of something impossible, or something we will inevitably fail at. “God works with what is to bring about what can be.”[3] Through prayer, when we quiet ourselves and screen out the distractions of our external surroundings we are able to find our center and direct our consciousness inward to that place where God touches us.[4] “As we allow ourselves to become more open to God’s aim in the quietness of prayer, that specific guidance from God will become more apparent to us,” and our hope in the possibility of God’s Kingdom will increase.[5]

Adding to our hope and confidence is the guidance of scripture which affirms our work as a part of a larger community. Through prayer, we also participate in each other’s work and allow ourselves to be called to participate in God’s aims for others through acts of compassion and care. “Through prayer,” says Suchocki, “we risk being open to the coming reign of God. The conformity with the purposes of God that is sought in prayer brings upon us the startling possibility of revaluing our ability to work in a significant way for God’s reign.”[6] In other words, we can do this because “we have access to the Father through Christ and by the one Spirit.” A temple is being built, God’s Kingdom is being built, upon a firm foundation. We bring about the Kingdom of God when we realize that we aren’t the ones who are building the temple, we are the temple that “Christ is building.” And now we must live like it. Amen.

[1] Martin, Ralph. "Ephesians" from Interpretation. 36.

[2] Suchocki. 218.

[3] Ibid. 223

[4] Ibid. 118

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid. 224