Sermon:  “The House That God Built”

You all know that children’s rhyme?  “Here is the church; here is the steeple; open up the doors, and here are all the people!”  Every Sunday morning, all around the world, people get up and go to church.  People attend church.  Church is “the house the Lord built.”  Our Church House Committee has been doing a lot of hard work around here lately, fixing up our snowy, leaking church building.  So even a small child knows church is a place, a place where people worship God – whether it’s here today in Brookfield or back there in ancient Corinth.  And yet, there are churches – like our own ministry partner, Danbury Chinese Alliance Church, which meets here on Sunday afternoons – that don’t have a church building of their own.  But that doesn’t make them any less a church.

The truth is, God has always called people – flawed human beings just like us – to be the church, to be the place where the Holy Spirit lives.  “You are God’s temple,” Paul writes in his First Letter to the Corinthians.  “God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple,” Paul says.  “God’s Spirit dwells in you.” This verse has always made a good Sunday school lesson – because it has such clear and concrete images for church, and for our relationship with our pastors (like Paul and Apollos) and with God.  As ordained ministers, Paul says, “We are God’s servants, working together.”  He says this because people in Corinth were fighting over who was the best pastor – Paul, who started the church, or Apollos, who came after him, who evidently (at least to some people) was a much better preacher.  Some things never change, right?  What is it, Rich?  That old church joke: What do most Christians like best for Sunday dinner?  “Roast preacher.”

I had a church history professor who said, “There’s good news and bad news about the church today.  The good news is, churches today are as good as the churches that Paul himself served.  The bad news? Churches today are as bad as the churches that Paul himself served.”  Just as the power of the Holy Spirit has always been the mortar binding us together in Christian love, church gossip and quarreling has always been the chisel that threatens to break us apart.  And yet, we, the people of the church, Paul says, “are God’s building.”  These walls and a roof don’t make a church, this pulpit and this Bible don’t make a church, but people do.  We are “the house the Lord built,” Paul says, the house the Lord is still building, laid upon the foundation of Jesus Christ.  This year’s confirmation class that my daughter Lela is a part of (that our reader today, Cory, is a part of) is the next layer of “living stones” laid upon that foundation. 

So if we are the church, what we do with our bodies, how we behave inside or outside the church building, really does matter.  “¹⁶Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” John and I have a good friend in California who tells a funny story about this verse. His church once had two pastors, a husband and a wife.  And the wife was not known to be the best preacher.  (Yes, the people compared them, because she had a tendency to go on a little too long.)  So on this one Sunday, our friend was up in the choir but his son was on the far opposite side of the chancel listening to one of her children’s sermons.  She was telling them that our bodies are God’s Temple, where the Holy Spirit lives.  And she told them all about the Apostle Paul and the church at Corinth and all the places Paul had traveled and… she began to run a little over time. 

So our friend could see his kid start to squirm, and he got worried.  Finally, she got to her closing prayer.  Yay!  But that started to run long too, and his son – it’s hard to believe, but he swears it’s true – his son started to (Z-Z-Z-Z!) pretend snore out loud!  And of course, the other kids around him thought that was just great, high comedy, and they started to laugh.  Well our friend was beside himself, because his wife was teaching Sunday School and he was the only parent nearby.  So as soon as the poor pastor said “Amen,” our friend climbs over the entire the bass row of the choir and marches across to grab his son by the arm and give him a piece of his mind.  But wouldn’t you know, his son says, “Wait! Wait, Dad!  Stop!  God’s Temple! God’s Temple! You have to be nice. I’m God’s Temple.  The Holy Spirit is in me.” God is still speaking,

You see, worshipping God is one thing.  Putting our faith into practice is still the big challenge.  Even among the nomads of ancient Israel, before there was a Temple to be “the house of the Lord” in Jerusalem – in the days when the law of the Torah (like today’s text from Leviticus) was developing, the Hebrew people understood themselves as called by God to be holy – set apart from the rest of the world.  They heard God calling them, as chosen people, to carry with them the spirit of God, serving as “a light to the nations.” They hoped to be a people who would study God’s law and try to set for the world an example of righteous living.  Together, they struggled to create a holy community that shared resources as a family of faith, all for the common good.

Well, that was the theory at least.  Reality was far from the ideal, as you can tell by how irritable the authors of both of these texts sound.  In his letter, Paul is basically scolding the Corinthian church for their pettiness and fighting – he more or less calls them all a bunch of babies.  “I could not speak to you as spiritual people,” he says, “but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. ²I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready… as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you…” And God’s voice in Leviticus sounds equally annoyed.  I love the “Dad” way God punctuates his speech with that one line, “I am the Lord!”  “¹¹You shall not steal… you shall not lie to one another…. (Go to your room!) I am the Lord! ¹³You shall not defraud your neighbor; [let me say it again] you shall not steal; … I am the Lord. … ¹⁷You shall not hate … or bear a grudge …but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”  When you hear that tone, “love your neighbor,” it should remove all doubt that God is a parent – parent of this whole, violent world, wondering why oh why can’t my headstrong children just get along? 

You’d think that God must be just about fed up by now, as Paul was with that church in Corinth, since we usually do such a poor job of actually loving one another.  And yet God just keeps on working with us, helping us to grow to spiritual maturity, building us up in love.  When you think of all the really corrupt and even evil things that have been done by the church over the years, in God’s name, it really is a miracle that the Lord still calls us to be a part of His Body.  How is it that Christ keeps believing in us, working to build us into a temple fit to house the Holy Spirit?

Our dear friends from California, Shin and Lisa Kao, have had to learn patience as they’ve been on our prayer list for some time – first trying to conceive a child and then waiting years to finalize an adoption.  We are so happy for them that they finally brought their new daughter Shu-Fang (Amanda) home from Taiwan last week, but what I especially enjoyed were Shin’s e-mails.  Here’s the latest: “I don't even know what today is.  Yesterday, I slept in 2-hour increments.  I also got peed on at 2 am.  It’s not a pretty life…”  To which one of their other friends, whose kids are now college-age, wrote back, “Here’s my advice: You will come to understand sleep as the bourgeois luxury it is.  Your life is consumed by your child’s life.  Get used to it.”

This is why “Heavenly Father” is such a perfect image for God, why the self-sacrificial love of Jesus Christ, the one who gives his life for us, is the “perfect love that casts out all fear.”  In the care of a loving parent, we know we are safe. Our parent, who loves us, does everything possible to see that we grow up healthy and strong.  We can rest our whole weight in those loving arms and let God, the master builder, shape us into our best selves.  We are called to give our whole selves to God and to claim our part as a building block of sacred community.  In other words, we should do more than go in and out of church buildings; we should see ourselves as a part of the structure itself, carefully shaped and fit together by God’s own hand upon the foundation of Christ.  As God’s Temple, we are “works in progress,” and the Holy Spirit comes inside and lives in us. 

This is a great honor, you know, to be, as Paul says, “servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.” I love that: “stewards of God’s mysteries.” But what a big responsibility! That may call us to give more of ourselves than just a prayer and a song and a small offering on Sunday.  That may call us to give more sacrificially of ourselves, not just of our time and talent, but also of our treasure.  Because we are more than churchgoers, we are building blocks of Christ’s beloved church and shareholders in its destiny. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

---

 

Leviticus 19:11-18

¹¹You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. ¹²And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord. ¹³You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. ¹⁴You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord. ¹⁵You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. ¹⁶You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord. ¹⁷You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. ¹⁸You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

 

1 Corinthians 3:1-11, 16-17; 4:1-2

3And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. ²I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, ³for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations? ⁴For when one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not merely human? ⁵What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. ⁶I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. ⁷So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. ⁸The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. ⁹For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.¹⁰According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it. ¹¹For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ. …

¹⁶Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? ¹⁷If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple. …

4Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries. ²Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.