Homily for Evening Prayer, 7th Sunday after Trinity, 26 July 2020

Lectionary Readings for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity at Evening Prayer

I Kings 6:11-14, 23-38

Now the word of the Lord came to Solomon, “Concerning this house that you are building, if you will walk in my statutes, obey my ordinances, and keep all my commandments by walking in them, then I will establish my promise with you, which I made to your father David. I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will not forsake my people Israel.”

So Solomon built the house, and finished it.

In the inner sanctuary he made two cherubim of olivewood, each ten cubits high. Five cubits was the length of one wing of the cherub, and five cubits the length of the other wing of the cherub; it was ten cubits from the tip of one wing to the tip of the other. The other cherub also measured ten cubits; both cherubim had the same measure and the same form. The height of one cherub was ten cubits, and so was that of the other cherub. He put the cherubim in the innermost part of the house; the wings of the cherubim were spread out so that a wing of one was touching the one wall, and a wing of the other cherub was touching the other wall; their other wings toward the center of the house were touching wing to wing. He also overlaid the cherubim with gold. He carved the walls of the house all around about with carved engravings of cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers, in the inner and outer rooms. The floor of the house he overlaid with gold, in the inner and outer rooms. For the entrance to the inner sanctuary he made doors of olivewood; the lintel and the doorposts were fivesided. He covered the two doors of olivewood with carvings of cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers; he overlaid them with gold, and spread gold on the cherubim and on the palm trees. So also he made for the entrance to the nave doorposts of olivewood, four-sided each, and two doors of cypress wood; the two leaves of the one door were folding, and the two leaves of the other door were folding. He carved cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers, overlaying them with gold evenly applied upon the carved work. He built the inner court with three courses of dressed stone to one course of cedar beams. In the fourth year the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid, in the month of Ziv. In the eleventh year, in the month of Bul, which is the eighth month, the house was finished in all its parts, and according to all its specifications. He was seven years in building it.

Acts 12: 1-17

About that time King Herod laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church. He had James, the brother of John, killed with the sword. After he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also. (This was during the festival of Unleavened Bread.) When he had seized him, he put him in prison and handed him over to four squads of soldiers to guard him, intending to bring him out to the people after the Passover. While Peter was kept in prison, the church prayed fervently to God for him. The very night before Herod was going to bring him out, Peter, bound with two chains, was sleeping between two soldiers, while guards in front of the door were keeping watch over the prison. Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He tapped Peter on the side and woke him, saying, “Get up quickly.” And the chains fell off his wrists. The angel said to him, “Fasten your belt and put on your sandals.” He did so. Then he said to him, “Wrap your cloak around you and follow me.” Peter went out and followed him; he did not realize that what was happening with the angel’s help was real; he thought he was seeing a vision. After they had passed the first and the second guard, they came before the iron gate leading into the city. It opened for them of its own accord, and they went outside and walked along a lane, when suddenly the angel left him. Then Peter came to himself and said, “Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hands of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were expecting.” As soon as he realized this, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John whose other name was Mark, where many had gathered and were praying. When he knocked at the outer gate, a maid named Rhoda came to answer. On recognizing Peter’s voice, she was so overjoyed that, instead of opening the gate, she ran in and announced that Peter was standing at the gate. They said to her, “You are out of your mind!” But she insisted that it was so. They said, “It is his angel.” Meanwhile Peter continued knocking; and when they opened the gate, they saw him and were amazed. He motioned to them with his hand to be silent, and described for them how the Lord had brought him out of the prison. And he added, “Tell this to James and to the believers.” Then he left and went to another place.

Homily for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity

This past Wednesday a group of us from St. George’s and St. John’s finished our study of the book of Exodus. We began this year, in January, with Genesis. So, from January to July, we have been occupied in going deeper into the faith, and the world, of the Hebrew people some three thousand or so years ago. It has been a challenge, I think, to all of us, to try to understand these sacred texts: to try to imagine what meaning these words held for the people of Israel who lived so long ago, in a world so vastly different from our world today.

Why were these words written down in the way that they were? These ancient stories, so full of actions, sometimes violent actions, and customs that that seem unspeakably strange to us?

These origin stories: attempts to explain not only why places were given their names, but also why human beings are the way they are. Why do we turn away from God, like the figures of Adam and Eve? Why do we do what is not good for us? Why is there violence in the world, as when Cain kills Abel? What might God ask of us, as in the sacrifice of Isaac, when God also provides for that which he asks…..How can God choose a cunning and deceiving character like Jacob, when there were probably so many other more worthy and upright men and women He could have chosen? God is God; God’s choosing is God’s choosing.

There are also stories of Genesis and Exodus that are full of great beauty, and beautiful symbols, such as the meeting of young men and women at the well of the town. A place of the sustaining and renewal of life, of drawing deep in order to give water to the flocks, but also to provide an opportunity for acquaintance and courtship and marriage. A gathering place of laughter and love. The scene of Joseph’s emotion as he reveals himself to the brothers who had sold him into slavery so many years earlier still brings tears to my eyes. These are great stories, stories worth knowing —- they have shaped our understanding of ourselves in the world we live in today.

But a passage such as we just read this evening from the Book of Kings, this rather long and detailed—-this rather excruciatingly and exactingly detailed description, I must say, of (only!) the inner sanctuary of the Temple—-why are we reading this tonight? What is the enduring significance of these measurements?

It is passages such as this one, I think, that make even enthusiastic readers of the Bible falter.

I’d like to go back to Exodus, and Wednesday’s discussion, and a thought that has stayed with me from that discussion. Among the resources we drew from to try to understand these ancient texts was a marvellous book by James L. Kugel, a Harvard scholar, who carefully compiled interpretations of this ancient material throughout the ages since. It’s called The Bible As It Was. From apocryphal books such as Enoch and Jubilees and the The Testament of Levi to Philo and Josephus, the puzzlement of later readers—-the questions they asked and the answers they offered—-are set out by theme. Some of the more whimsical and far-fetched explanations of obscure parts of texts made us laugh.

But here is what I’ve been leading up to. In chapter 25 of Exodus begins a very long and extremely detailed description, given by God to Moses, of the building of the tabernacle, a place for God to dwell in the midst of His people while they are still in the wilderness. They are on the move, still wandering, not yet arrived in the land that He has promised them. So it is not a proper House for God, like the Temple that God will later instruct Solomon to make—-this is a prototype, a forerunner. It is a movable shrine in the midst of the camp, and it will go wherever the people of God go, because God dwells in their very midst. And so for all of chapter 25, and 26, and 27, and 28, and 29, and 30, and even 31—-all these chapters set out in precise detail how this tabernacle is to be constructed, and furnished, and decorated, and how the people’s worship there is to be conducted, in every aspect.

It is a very long description. Many in our Bible study class said they rather skimmed it! But in Kugel’s book there is a very beautiful comment on the why? of such long, and detailed, and, yes, perhaps boring description.

In making this tabernacle, the Israelites were re-creating heaven on earth. They were trying to create in a decorated wooden box the place for God Most High to dwell. It was a sacred place. It would serve as the meeting-place for God and His people.

And it could not be magnificent enough.

It could only attempt to contain all the glory of the Heavenly One who was their guide, their shelter, their ruler and their King.

They had to get it exactly right.

This is the kind of vision they had, of what it ought to be like:

I am reading to you his vision of heaven, from the book of Enoch:

And in everything, it so excelled in glory and splendour and size that I am unable to describe to you its glory and its size. And its floor was fire, and above were lightning and the path of the stars, and its roof also was a burning fire. And I looked and I saw in it a high throne, and its appearance was like ice and its surroundings like the shining sun.

I Enoch 14: 16-18

And those men lifted me up from there, and they carried me up to the seventh heaven. And I saw there an exceptionally great light, and all the fiery armies of the archangels, and the incorporeal forces and the …cherubim and the seraphim and the many-eyed thrones…And then they went to their places in joy and merriment and in immeasurable light, singing songs with soft and gentle voices, while presenting the liturgy to Him gloriously.

II Enoch (J) 20: 1-4

This heavenly splendour was what the tabernacle was supposed to mirror.

Solomon was known for two things: for his wisdom, and for the building of the great Temple, the house of God, in Jerusalem.

The tabernacle was only a small, temporary imagining of the splendour of the Solomonic Temple that was the glory of the nation Israel in its most glorious period, the United Monarchy, when Saul, David, and Solomon ruled over a proud and independent nation-state.

But it, too, vanished from the face of the earth, destroyed first by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, and then by the Romans under the future emperor Titus.

God’s glory, and God’s own heaven, can, ultimately, only be approximated, reflected, and that even barely, scarcely, in a box or in a building. All our attempts to build a house for God can only be a gesture of love and devotion.

It is a good thing to adorn the house of God. It is fitting to honour God by the beauty of a physical place. Our prayer and praise, our wonder and our adoration are deepened by our encounter with the Holy in these spaces that try to mirror the glory of heaven.

But it is the heart that God sees and knows, and it is the heart that God cares about. In the passage we read tonight God said to Solomon that it was not the execution of the building of the Temple that would please Him; it was to walk in my statutes, obey my ordinances, and keep all my commandments by walking in them, for then I will establish my promise with you…then I will dwell among the children of Israel.

God allowed Solomon to build the Temple because he had already set his heart on God.

What matters, in the end, is that we allow the mirrored glory of tabernacle, Temple, and church to create in us a receptiveness to the Divine, to God. That we allow the stillness, the liturgy, the music, the paintings, the hangings and glass to help us toward a deeper sense of God in our midst.

God is all around us, and can be found in every place. But I think that God honours all our attempts to create places where His presence can be especially sensed, felt, experienced, known. Such is St George’s, such is St John’s.

We hope that not only for us, but for all who come through their doors, the reflected glory of God’s heaven shines. Amen.

The Rev’d Dana English The United Benefice of Holland Park, London July 26, 2020