July 21, 2024
Pentecost 9
May only the truth be spoken and only the truth heard and received.
Last week, James reflected that the story of the beheading of John the Baptist is worthy of a Netflix special, which it is. Equally, one could argue that the story we are following in the Hebrew scriptures over 12 weeks during these summer months is definitely the stuff of a blockbuster miniseries.
We follow the story which began with Hannah praying for a child. It’s the story of Samuel, dedicated to God as a baby by a grateful mother, called as a boy to be a prophet, and later of the prophet Nathan. It’s the story of two kings, Saul and David. It’s the story of two people who did not seek to be king, Saul was simply looking for his father’s lost donkeys, David was tending sheep. Yet they accepted the role, lived into it and was shaped by it, for good and for ill. It’s the story of a great friendship, that between David and Jonathan. It’s the story of human greatness and human frailty.
In the portion of the story that we hear today, David has settled into his house, he has successfully repelled the Philistines and as it says “the LORD had given him rest”. He decides he wants to build a house for the Ark of the Covenant.
And you kind of get it. He’s successful, he has brought back the ark, he is settled in his house and there is, for the moment, peace. Great, he says to himself, God is with me. But wait, the ark of God is still in a tent. That’s not right. I know, I’ll build a house for God, a great temple where God will dwell. Hey Nathan, what do you think? Sure, says Nathan, sounds like a good plan to me.
Until Nathan hears from God. God has other ideas.
David has slipped into a way of thinking that is all too human – and all too common. Our human tendency to assume that God is like us – in this case, the victories of David and his house serve to emphasize his greatness. So he wishes to do the same for God, he sees this as a way of honouring God.
Sadly, such tendencies only serve to contain God – to bring God to our own level so instead of us conforming to the image of God, which is love, we make God fit our own image.
That all too human tendency is not restricted to David. We have constructed our own temples for God over the centuries – we’ve done it through dogma and doctrine, through our institutions and constitutions. The result is that we have decided the limits of God’s love and in so doing have excluded many. A prime example of this is how we denied the rights and humanity of Indigenous peoples through the Doctrine of Discovery and the concept of Terra Nullius – that a land was empty if it was not occupied by Christians.
In 2023, the Roman Catholic Church gathered for a Synod on Synodality. Normally, their Synod consists only of bishops but this one included priests, five women and five men in religious orders and lay men and women.
One of those who attended was Sister Elizabeth Davis, from St. John’s NL, a member of the Sisters of Mercy. Sr. Elizabeth has taught and has been a major figure in the province’s Health Care system and has taught at Queen’s College in St. John’s.
She was interviewed on the local CBC station before going. At one point in the interview, Anthony Germain was asked her about the place of LGBTQ2S+ people in the Church. His question was “is it your hope that some kind of opening will occur as as a result of this meeting you’re going to in Rome?”
Her answer in part was “Absolutely, it is my hope that we become much more gender sensitive.” Then she went on to say “We humans tend to create these dualisms all the time, don’t we? Good, bad, black, white, Catholic, non-Catholic. We always create dualisms and we did it with sexuality and gender. Male, female. And we’re beginning to realize that’s not the reality of lived experience.
In the reading from Ephesians, we read about Jesus breaking down the dividing wall, the hostility between us.
The wall which we, as flawed human beings, work to construct as our way of containing and thus controlling God. Jesus, in the gospel today and throughout his life, had compassion on those often seen as unimportant, even as nobodies, embodying and enlarging God’s love to include everyone.
To go back to our story of David and Nathan, we can see this played out in God’s response.
What Nathan heard God say to David is simple, I will not be contained in a structure of your making, my temple will be in your descendants. Later on Paul would expand that to include everyone as he says in the letter to the Corinthians “For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.” Paul Gibson, in his series Briefly Stated puts it this way, “The principle established in this primitive story is with us still: people not places are where God dwells.”
1 Corinthians 3:9. As God’s people, as God’s dwelling places, we are part of a community which also becomes, as we hear in Ephesians today, “a holy temple in the Lord” as we are “built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.”
So we are each the dwelling place for God and God dwells within us and together we form a community which is a dwelling place for God. Which is a lovely message really.
But we cannot leave it there. It’s one thing for us to recognize that we are a dwelling place for God but we are also obligated to consider how we ourselves build that temple within us, the building blocks we use to make this temple a place of glory.
We know the basic tenets of what it means to follow God, love God and love our neighbour. But that is much simpler to say than to do.
It is much easier to speak of the love of neighbour than to do the hard work of forgiving someone who has hurt you, or worse, hurt someone you love.
Or the hard work of being patient and kind when everything inside you wants to be judgemental, ‘why would she say that?’ ‘why would he do that?’ rather than trying to see the world from another’s perspective.
Or the hard work of bringing out the best in yourself when the easiest way is to be hurtful or self-centred.
The fruit of the Spirit may be love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control but we know that before a plant bears fruit it has to be planted, cultivated, watered, fertilized and nurtured.
Our planting, nurturing and cultivating happens through prayer, in the support of a community, as we allow God, who dwells within us to direct us and lead us, to reshape ourselves into God’s image.
Cynthia Haines Turner (The Rev.)
Priest in the parish of St. Mary the Virgin,
Corner Brook,
Newfoundland and Labrador