Sermon

The Temple And Useless Flesh

August 23, 2015
I Kings 8:(1,6,) 22-30, 41-43; John 6:56-69
Speaker:

I must start by thanking Gene Miller for pointing out the sermon for me today. Last week after the service, Gene came to me, bible open, pointing to the passage from John. “Here is your text, I can’t wait to hear what you do with this next week.” I looked down and saw where Gene’s finger pointed. “…the spirit … gives life; the flesh is useless.” I thanked him but in my head there was something else going on. But now I thank you Gene; what a great text to wrestle with. If any of the rest of you, when you see the scriptures listed in the bulletin, want to read ahead and point out interesting texts, just let me know.

These two lectionary texts, from I Kings and John, may seem unrelated and perhaps even contradictory but this morning I see them as good complements to each other.

Solomon (and his father David before him,) spent many years imagining the temple, planning for it. The writer notes In the four hundred eightieth year after the Israelites came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomons reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the Lord. (I Kings 6:1)  The people have been 480 years out of slavery in Egypt. And how does Solomon get this magnificent temple built to God?  

King Solomon conscripted forced labor out of all Israel; the levy numbered thirty thousand men. He sent them to the Lebanon, ten thousand a month in shifts; they would be a month in the Lebanon and two months at home; Adoniram was in charge of the forced labor. Solomon also had seventy thousand laborers and eighty thousand stonecutters in the hill country, besides Solomons three thousand three hundred supervisors who were over the work, having charge of the people who did the work. (I Kings 5: 13-16)

Slave labor, 183,300 men working in shifts. We are left to wonder with the writer about this irony: God’s chosen people are freed from slavery by a great God, only to build a temple to that same God – with slave labor.

It takes a lot of flesh and blood, literally, to build a temple like this, – incalculable time, energy and resources – though the writer does try to calculate it all. The dimensions of the temple as well as the contents are fairly overwhelming when you read about it in I Kings and 2 Chronicles. It is nothing like the small little rebuild we did here in ten months. It took the slave labor seven years to finish the temple. And they took great care and reverence in the building of it. The stone was cut to the precise dimensions in the quarries so that neither hammer nor ax nor any tool of iron was heard in the temple while it was being built. (I Kings 6:7)

Solomon, known for being wise, admits that God has previously appeared to the people in a cloud, as mystery, as unknowable and not something to be captured. And yet, now that the Israelites are no longer nomadic, have settled in the land, Solomon envisions and creates this glorious temple of stone, cypress, cedar, and olivewood, with bronze, silver, and gold furnishings. This is now the place for God to dwell, for the people to meet the God that is not containable.

What a contrast to Jesus, a descendant of Solomon. After a long speech about himself as the bread and how they are to eat his flesh, Jesus tells his disciples that the flesh is useless. It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. A cryptic teaching indeed and not all are ready to accept it. In fact, some of Jesus’ followers leave and he practically invites the rest to leave. Jesus asks the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?

Their confusion is understandable. Jesus says that his flesh gives life if they eat it; now he says that the flesh is useless and his words give spirit and life.

To more fully understand what Jesus is saying here, or rather what the writer is saying, we have to remember the context in which this was written. Of the four gospels in the canon, John was the last one written. And while precise dating is impossible, there is general agreement that John was written after the temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, perhaps as much as 25-40 years later. The first hearers of John’s gospel are living in a time when the Jewish tradition is being torn apart not only by the Roman Empire but internally by the sect they themselves are a part of, a group of Jews that believes the messiah has come, was killed and rose again to new life.

It is a precarious world in which they live. The temple is gone, the tradition is in turmoil, they are shut out of the synagogues for trying to reform and redefine the religion. They are persecuted not only by the Roman government but hated by the religious authorities. Jesus is offering a new word about his own flesh, that it can bring life out of this mess. And further reassuring them that flesh is not all there is, not where true life lies.This word from Jesus about the uselessness of flesh might ring true for the first hearers of John’s gospel.

But it might also be disturbing since they are Jewish, and the Jewish law is very much about the flesh. The Jewish tradition acknowledges in very concrete ways the truth that we meet God in our bodies, and how we care for our bodies.  We meet God as we interact with the world – through food, clothing, sex, the ways we treat family, friend and foreigner.

So while on the one hand it might be a comfort to hear Jesus say that the world of the spirit is where real life is found, it is also a big stretch for a people who have, for thousands of years, experienced the abstractness of God through concrete laws. John acknowledges this difficulty when he says that many of Jesus’ followers leave him when they hear this teaching.

This teaching about the useless flesh may have been sort of a corrective, as well as a comfort, in Jesus’ day. For a people who put all of their energy into monitoring the body – as well as the physical space where God dwells – a teaching about the spirit, the unknown and unseen, may be needed. Even now, in a simple tradition without gold, silver and bronze, without dress codes and food laws, we may need to hear that the flesh is not the sum total of what is important in the world.

How much more important then is this teaching for those who live in dangerous times of war, slavery, poverty, landlessness, despair and depression. The message that there is an unseen realm where the spirit can never be stolen, maimed or killed is a hopeful message of empowerment. The flesh is useless. The spirit gives life.

This struggle between the magnificent temple, where the ineffability of God is encountered, and the uselessness of mortal flesh, is still part of our lives today. It remains a challenge finding a balance between the beauty and pain of the world and the comfort of the spirit. Certainly some Jesus followers err on the side of putting too much emphasis on cedar and cypress, gold and silver, not necessarily for the sake of God’s temple but for the pleasure of our own flesh.

And there are many Jesus followers who are determined to live life only in the spirit, even if it kills us. We have not understood that prizing and prioritizing the spirit, which was an important survival tool for Jesus’ followers at the turn of the first century, may be the death of us today. In the twenty-first century we must find value and purpose in the body, not just individual bodies but the body of mother earth.

Too often religion teaches that life here on this planet is an illusion; our existence is merely a temporary passage until we reach the real world yet to come. This kind of teaching allows us to deny climate change and the destruction of our beautiful home while we focus our eyes upward to heaven. We need to look more closely at the cedar and cypress, olivewood and stone, not to mine it for ways to add to our wealth but so we can appreciate the part it plays in the magnificent temple that is the body of the earth.

While Jesus’ followers may have needed a new understanding of the flesh and spirit, the corrective we need now is the understanding that we see in I Kings: there is a purpose for the temple, a purpose for the flesh, a purpose for the earth. We need the temple of the earth, we need our beautiful flesh, in order to encounter the beauty of God.

As Solomon notes in his dedicatory speech at the temple, this is not just a place for those who believe themselves chosen; it is a place for all people: Likewise the foreigners as well, those who do not belong to your people Israel Solomon is saying that even those whose flesh has been considered inferior, will be welcome in the temple of God. All are welcome, in the flesh they have been given. They are not required to adjust their body or culture, they do not need to change their language or orientation or identity. Like the temple built by Solomon, the temple of the earth is a place for all to encounter God.

We might dare go a bit further than Solomon and say that this magnificent earth temple is not only for humans, chosen and foreigners, it is for all creatures. Even the plants and minerals, used so extravagantly in Solomon’s temple, are needed, are part of the flesh in which we chance to meet the beauty of God. All of us – humans and creatures, plants and minerals, water and stars, we are all part of the flesh created by God, needed by God. We are part of the temple of God.

Some times and places call for more spirit, some call for more flesh. In this time and place, we need both, the flesh and the spirit and for good measure add in the mind – mind, body, spirit. It is when these three work together that we have the best chance of being the “good” creatures that God made us. And when mind, body and spirit work together, we have a much better chance of working well together in a variety of bodies, for our own good and for the good of the planet.

God has given us this good flesh, the beauty of the earth and the spirit to direct our ways. Let us not squander these great gifts of flesh and spirit. Let us celebrate them – in ourselves, in the church and in the temple of the world.