Homily for the Feast of the Dedication of the Abbey Church, 2004
Twenty-five years ago Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas
combined creative forces on a film entitled "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
The premise of the film is that the Ark of the Covenant
was hidden at the time of the destruction of the Temple in Israel
and is buried in the sands of the Egyptian desert.
The evil Nazis are after it because they believe
that if the Ark marches before their armies,
they will dominate the world in the Third Reich.
In a climactic scene, the Ark is opened
and there are no tablets of commandments,
but rather what appears to be sand.
The evil Nazis heap ridicule and scorn on this whole adventure
but as Spielberg then portrays it,
all of those who tried to capture and use the ark are destroyed,
they are consumed in fire.
Spielberg, who is Jewish,
accurately represents the Jewish belief
that God can never be controlled or used for human purposes,
that the holiness of God is not to be mocked.
It is this sense of reverence for God
who is beyond all our imagining
that underlies Solomon's prayer.
"Lord God of Israel,
there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth below;...
Can it indeed be that God dwells among people on earth?
If the highest heavens cannot contain you,
how much less this temple which we have built!
Look kindly on the prayer and petition of your servants
and listen to the prayers we bring to you this day.
May your eyes watch night and day over this temple
the place where you wish to be honored."
This is the prayer that Solomon prays
at the completion and dedication of the temple in Jerusalem,
about the year 1000 BC.
The prayer reflects the religious learning of a people
who had come to know God through the Exodus,
through a time of wandering in the desert.
Always God walked with them on the journey,
uncontained, uncontrolled.
This God who could not even be named,
could not be manipulated or boxed in.
"You shall have no other gods before you,
you shall not worship the gods of the Canaanites, the Hittites,
the Philistines, or any other tribe."
God says to Israel,
if you ever get this idea of making an idol in your head,
sit down until it goes away.
The prayer that Solomon utters
holds in tension the knowledge that God
will not, cannot be contained by any structure
with the desire to have a place for the Ark of the Covenant,
and to have a place for Israel to come together in worship.
Again and again in its history,
Israel lost sight of this tension
sometimes building a shrine under every spreading tree,
making little gods out of wood, stone or bronze.
At other times,
they put all of their faith in the temple,
thinking that the temple was god,
that the temple would protect them from all danger.
We have the same human tendencies,
making gods of the market, or of our Church structures, or of sexuality,
or of money, or success, or being in love, or a sculpted body, or human knowledge.
Always we learn the hard way
that God is our rock, our stronghold, our shepherd.
In sending his Son Jesus Christ,
God did the unthinkable.
Exactly what could not be done,
God did.
The God who created the heavens and the earth,
who gave the ten commandments to Moses and Israel
and raised up Miriam and Deborah,
David and Solomon,
Samuel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah,
now sends the Son to redeem humankind.
That is why the words that Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman
are so filled with meaning for us.
The day shall come, Jesus says,
when you will worship God neither here nor in Jerusalem.
An hour is coming and is already here
when authentic worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth.
True worship is when we bend not only our knees to God
but our very lives,
when we orient our lives to God.
God is not a mountain, a place or a sanctuary.
God is spirit, an all-encompassing presence to believers like ourselves.
The hour is already here when the only acceptable worship of God
is the complete gift of ourselves and our lives to God and to each other in service.
Does this seem demanding?
Impossible? Surely.
It is only God who can make possible this gift of self.
Through the astonishing gift of Jesus Christ
we come together as a chosen race,
a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation,
a people God claims for his own.
We have been born into Jesus through baptism and the Spirit.
We come together as the Body of Christ to give praise and thanks to God.
We are grateful for the call to be Christian,
for the gift of redemption and forgiveness that we have received in Christ,
for the words of scripture that put some light into our lives,
for being able to be in communion with Christ
through the sharing of a holy meal.
We give thanks for the Church and for the lives of holy men and women
who lift us up with their witness to love.
We bless God for the earth and all its creatures,
and the gift of our life for this short span of years.
We give thanks for this place of worship,
built by skilled human hands,
to give glory and praise to God.
If we don't return again and again to this sense of berakah,
it is all to easy to become an Israelite in the desert:
"Were there no good places to die in Egypt,
that you had to lead us out here in the desert to die?"
Sometimes our praise is loud and raucous,
sometimes more measured.
But we don't ever want to be in the position of being unsure
that God is worthy of our praise and thanksgiving.
Abbot John Klassen, OSB
October 24, 2004
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