Dwelling Place
Three Scriptures jump to mind when we think about God’s dwelling place.
“…treasures in jars of clay…” 2 Corinthians 4:17
“…your bodies are a living sacrifice…” Romans 12:1
“…do you not know that your body is a temple of the spirit?” I Corinthians 6:19
These scriptures put the body and soul in one container.
A fourth joins them and takes the conversation in a much more material direction. The Pauline material links body and soul as though they were two sides of the same coin. In 1 Kings 8:22, 23:41–43 and Luke 7:1–10, we get a little more preoccupation with the material. Even the bible has a deep confusion about matters physical. Why wouldn’t we?
When it comes to God’s dwelling place, most of us lead with ourselves and our involvement with the matter of God’s house. We lead materially. Like Solomon, we are almost always building a temple and getting the work done on time and with great zest. We LOVE buildings. I can say as a Martha Stewart kind of woman that I even love houses. I can fiddle with the proper arrangement of the candles or the flowers for what seems like eternity. Why does it seem like eternity? Because it is so much fun to touch and see and improve and gaze and enjoy the material. I am not alone. When it comes to a dwelling place for God, we are minimalists. We know we can’t house God but we’d love to try to make God feel more comfortable in the places where we live. We’d love to approach eternity while knowing we can’t make it all the way there.
Solomon built a great temple for a great God, hoping to allow the emergence of a great people. My neighbor, Will Critzman at First Presbyterian in Manhattan, says, “David had wanted to build the temple himself, but God’s answer then was a little bit like a contractor’s answer now when asked how long this will take, “eh, hard to say, really, not today, but soon.” God had given the plans to David, but God had awarded the construction bid to Solomon.” Just imagine the toting of all that Lebanese cedar, those heavy stones, that Jordanian bronze. Or even all those union contracts. Seven years later, the people gathered to show God what they had done for God. They partied for seven days and for good reason. They had done something fine and beautiful. They had made a dwelling place for God.
Jesus, as God’s representative in material form, comes along and says he can tear the temple down and build it up in three days. Of course, he came along long after the temple had been destroyed. What are we to make of all these mixed messages? Or Jesus’ the incarnate one having an antipathy to temples made with hands? How do we understand the mystery of the Incarnation of God in Flesh? We seem to have a need to demonize either the flesh or the spirit or one or the other. It is very hard to hold the mystery of the biblical doubleness close to our vests and hearts.
The treasure in Earthen vessels? The living Sacrifice? Yes, I am writing in The Living Pulpit. The body as a temple? And Solomon and I fussing and fiddling and making and hauling as much beauty as we can drag to earth from heaven?
Eco-feminism and embodied theology are apologetic enough to bring us back to earth. They defend against the spiritualization of the material and do so beautifully. Bodies aren’t not sacred, as we have been told. Watch the apology. Bodies are sacred, as St. Paul said. Church buildings aren’t sacred, we’re told. Watch the apology. It’s the spirit within them that sacralizes them. Beware the Edifice complex. Don’t spend money on the building. Spend money on mission. Do you begin to hear the confusions piling up? If our bodies are worthy and beautiful, why not buy some great lotion for them? Or bronze?
As one building after another faces squarely into its deferred maintenance or the impossibility of paying its energy bills, we are plummeted into temple tantrums. We are also magnificently available to new versions of what some call queering theology. No binaries. The binary is the problem in the first place. There is no need to put down the material or the spiritual or the spiritual or the material. There is no need to put them into rivalry with each other. They are friends. We can tend and befriend rather than fight or flee.
For God to dwell in a place, the place has to understand itself as holy. An earthen vessel. The place also can’t rival God, as some of Solomon’s temples do. The temple is not God. It holds God. And God holds it. God likes a house. “Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, look inside and see all the people.” You know the rhyme. It has a deep incarnational meaning. It means things are connected. They are linked. We are body/spirits. We are spirits/body. We are unified.
Likewise temples are spirit/bodies. Body/Spirits.
Leah Schade has written a groundbreaking book, Creation-Crisis Preaching, Chalice, 2015. In it she advises that we start preaching from the point of view of nature. Preach from the whale. Preach from the garden’s perspective. Or the stone’s perspective. Or the field’s perspective. I wonder what would happen if we started preaching about dwelling places from the bronze’s perspective or the vessel’s perspective or the stone’s perspective. Perhaps that would increase the perennial confusion and rivalry of body with soul? Or at least give us a new angle on the matter. (You can find my review of the book on the National Catholic Reporter’s Eco-Blog).
