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Sermon 7.21.24 Legacy Building




Sermon begins at 9:14



Good Morning St. Andrew’s,

I was only gone for one week, and I have been back at Summer Reading Camp this week, but somehow it still feels like it’s been a long time since I was here.

A lot has happened over the past couple of weeks.

Last week, even though I was away, I hope you were able to hear the clear word that our Presiding sent out to the church in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on the former president,

Where he unequivocally condemned the use of any violence in our politics.

I was in the Chicago airport coming home from my yearly pilgrimage to the Navajo Reservation, when the news started coming in from Pennsylvania.

We had the passing yesterday of one of the longest serving congresswomen from the Congressional Black Caucus, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee from Houston.

She only recently announced that she was battling pancreatic cancer.

Representative Lee was the clarion voice of so many important pieces of legislation in her time on Capitol Hill.

She will especially be remembered for getting Juneteenth recognized as a national holiday, for the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, and for the many other ways she advanced civil rights, healthcare reform, and led in a prominent role on the national stage.

In our own church, we lost longtime parishioner Carol Jean Dickerson Whitehead.

She was Tyrone Yates’ maternal aunt and their family legacy in this church goes back 111 years.

We will celebrate her life and transfer her divine light to her creator with a funeral service at Spring Grove next Saturday morning, the 27th of July.

On a more hopeful note, I was able to spend the week before last spending time in Bluff Utah and seeing many old friends on the Navajo Reservation.

We did some work to continue the transformation of St. Christopher’s Mission into a retreat center, a mission that was founded and built in 1944 by Fr. H. Baxter Liebler when there were no paved roads and two cars within 100 miles of the four corners.

We got to help restore a traditional mud Hogan, and hear stories from our Navajo friend Walter about the founding of the mission and receive a traditional Navajo blessing.

We got to hear news of some of the kids who used to come to our Vacation Bible School over the past 30 years and see some of them.

Some of the news was sad, deaths, drugs, prison sentences. Some of the news was happy, babies and marriages.

We also had an amazing week of Summer Camp Reading; some new faces, some kids that we had last year.

We’ve got some great kids this year and they are putting in the work and having fun.

On totally separate, and really exciting news, I was able to send in an architectural brief to Chaatrik architecture to start getting some plans in the works for our St. Andrew’s building project,

And the end of this week will see the closing for our purchase with the diocese of a property right behind the church that will expand our current holdings in Evanston.

As you can see, there has been a lot happening this week and that’s not even to mention what has been going on in the lives of everyone of you.

What I noticed in all of these things that are happening, and maybe this is true in your personal life as well, is that there seems to be a lot of transition;

a lot of change either happening currently, or on the cusp of happening.

And that can be beautiful, but it can also be unsettling, disquieting.

As I read through the Scriptures for our worship this week and reflected on all of these things, all these harbingers of change and transition, it became pretty clear to me that the Holy Spirit was leading me toward a place of thinking about what it means to have a house built for or by God, and about legacy.

Our passage from 2 Samuel has interested interpreters of the Bible for almost 3000 years.

How can it be that the quintessential king of Israel was first given the go ahead to build a temple for God, only to immediately be shut down and told it won’t be him, but his son who will build God’s house?

Isn’t it nice to know that we’re not the only ones that have had to deal with housing crises?

In her excellent book called The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks tells the part of David’s story that we skipped in our lectionary readings.

Did you notice that we went from 1 Samuel to 2 Samuel at the end of June, from the anointing of David to the eventual defeat of Saul as if it all happened like that (snap)?

We missed David’s marriages, Saul’s hatred and attempted murder of David, his exile, and his guerilla war against Saul to take power and kingship over Israel.

This all happens between 1 Samuel 17 and 2 Samuel 1, which we read the last week of June.

In her interpretation and retelling, Geraldine Brooks takes the common interpretation that David had somehow been tainted by the life that he lived and that it made him ineligible to build the House of God for Israel.

It is a compelling argument and it leads to a powerful sense of tragic pathos in the telling, the unavoidable consequences of a revolutionary life; as one of my wife’s favorite sweaters says, “half hood, half holy.”

The only problem with that interpretation is that Solomon, David’s son wasn’t any more holy or less problematic of a leader than his father.

He was known as the wisest of all of Israel’s kings, yes.

But, he was second the child of David and Bathsheba, whose story began with David having her husband killed so he could steal her away.

Solomon brought Israel to the world stage, by making marriage alliances with some of the most powerful kingdoms of the ancient world.

But, he was also swayed by his wife Jezebel, THE Jezebel - the one whose name is still shorthand for the woman who will lead you astray in old timey speak – to allow worship of other gods into Israel.

This Solomon is the one who was allowed to build God a house.

Question: To your ears, does it sound like Solomon is any more righteous or worthy of building God’s house than David?

Now, of course, this may be because as modern readers we are hearing things differently than our ancient brothers and sisters would have heard it.

Maybe Solomon’s sins are less than David’s by ancient standards.

The prophet Elijah doesn’t seem to think so, when he has to battle Jezebel and the prophets of her god, Ba’al in 1 Kings 18.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think it is based on the righteousness of either David or Solomon that the permission to build God a house is based.

Rather, I think that it is based on the fact that God wants to ensure that God’s house, the legacy that will last uncountable generations will be built up before we are allowed to move on to build in brick and mortar.

God wants to make sure that we are a people in heart and mind, that we attend to our real legacies and the building up of the kingdom, before we turn to building buildings.

Now, this is a bold thing to claim for a leader who is working on a new building project.

But, I think it stands to reason that God wants us to do the grounding work, before we work the ground.

In the letter to the Ephesians, we see this building up of the house of God as one of the central metaphors.

With the foundation of the apostles and prophets, the early church was keen to attach itself to the house that God had built through King David and bring more members into the family.

Ephesus was a city in the Roman Empire that was a melting pot of both Jewish people and culturally Greek peoples in what is now the nation of Turkiye.

The Apostle Paul spent a lot of time in Ephesus and his goal was to break down the fierce divide between the Jewish world and the pagan world through Christ’s message of redemption and belonging.

He set into motion the building of this new house, and one of his legacies is the bringing together of Jewish and Gentile peoples into one apostolic church.

God laid the groundwork in small house communities through Paul, way before any Christians built a house of worship for God.

We also have that famous phrase that Jesus says, “foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Matthew 8:20

In our Gospel, Jesus is roaming around the countryside, entering villages and towns, healing people as the whole region hears about him and the power that God has given him to restore the people to health.

Jesus was going around building the house, before there was a building for the house.

They both built the heart and the spirit, before they put it in a building.

At the risk of bringing up a sore subject, I think it’s important to notice that this church had a plan ten years ago to do a building project that never came to fruition.

In retrospect, it turned out, I think, that we didn’t have enough stability at that time to do the building.

We still needed God to work on us a little bit before we could try again.

In the mean time, we have survived a pandemic, we have done deferred maintenance, we have grown the church slowly, but steadily, we have come to a place of more financial stability, and we have built partnerships in our community,

All the while attending to and strengthening our spiritual connection to God and the house and legacy that God has built for us at St. Andrew’s;

A 130 year old house of God that is carried in human hearts and families as much as it has been housed in its two historical buildings.

Now, not only are we planning with God’s help to build a new worship space, a new house for God, but also to build a house for people experiencing struggle in a marketplace where trying to put a roof over their children’s heads is cost prohibitive.

We’re making room at the Inn.

While we are laying this groundwork for St. Andrew’s third house, our new worship space and for affordable housing,

I want to remind us to keep working on God’s real building project in this community; the love and the peace of Christ that has been passed down to you through this church family and that legacy that you will continue to pass on.

We all are the house that is being built, we are the ones who have been brought into the family of God that began with Abraham and moved through David until it reached the throne of the cornerstone; the kingship of Jesus.

We have become the household of God, and in every generation, we are called to continue to build the inner dwelling places of God’s family, the holy of holies that resides within our hearts.

Sometimes, we are allowed to build houses of worship for God and that is great blessing, if we are able to make it happen.

But always, God is more interested in us building God’s familial household, bringing more people into the promise and prosperity, than fancy buildings.

We are constantly reminded in Scripture that without a sure foundation, nothing can stand.

As that old hymn says, “the church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord.”

We don’t know what will be the result of all of the changes and transitions that lie before us in our national life, in the life of our church, in our own personal lives.

What we do know is that when we build our house on the will of God, and make God the foundation of our family life together, God can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.

Our ancestors have set us up in a household that cannot be shaken, we have stabilized this house standing on the solid rock of our savior.

Let’s plan and pray and hope that when this reading comes up again in three years that God will leading us to the completion of building our new house.

But no matter what happens, how life changes, let’s remember to do the real work of building up the kingdom and leaving a legacy worthy of our calling in Christ.

Amen.

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