To Contain a Favorable Result
As an uncle, I am slowly learning the art of just barely losing. Losing in the most dramatic, agonizing way possible—which is to say, for my nephews, the most gratifying way possible. It’s the last kick of the game. Uncle Jonny is losing by a single goal. Will he score and rescue a tie? Oh, so close. He hits the post, and the ball bounces wide of the goal.
My nephew Nathan loves playing soccer. But he hates losing. The contrasting emotions of enjoyment and fear practically do battle on his face as a tight game nears its conclusion. Giddy, uncontrollable laughter mixes jarringly with moans and groans of “Oh no, oh no!” In an effort to control the outcome, to contain a favorable result, he suddenly becomes referee and the rules start changing. Boundaries become more narrow. The goal becomes smaller and smaller. He can use his hands. And so on.
Built on a Lie?
When Solomon takes the throne from his father David, one of the first items on his order of business is to build a temple for God. Solomon justifies his building of the temple by claiming that God has given him a time of peace that his father David never enjoyed: “My father David could not build a house for the name of the Lord his God because of the warfare with which his enemies surrounded him…. But now the Lord my God has given me rest on every side” (1 Kgs 5:3-4).
But here’s the thing. Solomon’s temple seems to be built on a lie. The Lord God had given David rest from his enemies too. In our scripture last week, the storyteller told us this fact in the plainest terms: “The Lord had given him [David] rest from all his enemies around him” (2 Sam 7:1). In fact, it was this very rest and freedom that had prompted David to plan building God a temple. God’s response was an unmistakable, “No, thank you!” “Did I ever ask for a house?” God asks. “I prefer to be on the move with my people” (cf. 2 Sam 7:6-7).
The most charitable interpretation would be that Solomon is not purposefully lying but rather simply has a confused history of events. But even if this is the case, his claim that he now enjoys a peace his father never had, smacks of justification. It seems to me like he’s looking for a rationale to do what he wants to do. There is no prompting from God to build a temple, no divine nudge-nudge to say, “Okay, Solomon, now it’s time.” This is Solomon’s idea, Solomon’s plan. This is Solomon’s temple.
Doing What God Never Asked For
And it’s going to be built in Solomon’s way. They say the devil is in the details, and that seems to be the case in Solomon’s story. On the face of things, a glorious temple in honor of God seems like a good thing. But look more closely, and we begin to catch glimpses of a king who seeks not God’s honor but his own. To begin, Solomon builds God’s temple through the very means of oppression from which God had first liberated the Israelites. He conscripts thousands of Israelites to “forced labor,” the same word to describe the work that the Israelites do in Egypt (1 Kgs 5:13; cf. Ex 1:11). It is no coincidence that, later when Solomon dies, “all of the assembly of Israel” complain to his son, “Your father made our yoke heavy” (1 Kgs 12:4). When God becomes angry with Solomon for turning from the Lord and following after the gods of his many wives, the prophetic messenger who delivers God’s judgment to Solomon ends up fleeing to Egypt for refuge (1 Kgs 11). The suggestion is remarkable. Solomon has become like Pharaoh, and his empire has become like Egypt. The tables have turned to such an extent that now people are fleeing the other direction.
If we zoom out, the picture we get is incredibly ironic. As I touched on last week, the temple is no more a part of God’s plan than are kings or sacrifices. Sacrifices, kings, and the temple are all initiated by humanity, and God ultimately lets us have what we want. So to summarize what we see in today’s scripture: a king, which God did not want, builds a temple, which God did request, where people will offer sacrifices, which God did not ask for (until it became clear this was how people wanted to worship God). In other words, we see in today’s scripture layer upon layer of God’s people doing all these things that God never asked for, doing things their own way. And lest we wash our hands too quickly of this waywardness, saying that was Israel and we’re the church, I would suggest that is the very attitude that leads us into this mess. What we see played out among Israel and King Solomon is humanity, and we are humans. If this is what a man who is reputed to be among the wisest in the Bible ends up doing, then we are all of us susceptible to doubling down on things that God never asked for or wanted, even and perhaps especially in our best laid plans.
Containing the Uncontainable
As Solomon is dedicating the temple amid much pomp and excess—the storyteller even throws his hands in the air and says, so many sheep and oxen were sacrificed at the dedication, that they could not even be counted!—Solomon cannot avoid the absurdity at the heart of his endeavor. “Will God indeed dwell on earth? Even…the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!” (1 Kgs 8:27). But he continues in his prayer and asks that, even so, “[May] your eyes…be open day and night toward this house” (1 Kgs 8:29). On the one hand, Solomon knows that God cannot be contained. But on the other hand, he cannot help but want to contain God, to point to a place and say, “Here God is!”, or to proclaim to others, “This is God’s name! Use it!” Indeed, Solomon repeatedly refers to God’s “name” throughout his dedication, in a manner that suggests he sees it as he sees the temple, that is, as another container for God.
I think back to my nephew Nathan playing soccer. On the one hand, there is an uncontainable joy, a smile nearly plastered on his face as he kicks and runs and dives. Yet on the other hand, there is a fear of losing, a desperate desire to contain the experience, to control what happens next. It seems an apt metaphor for what is going on in the temple. What is going on in God’s name. What is going on in religion. In each case, we are trying to contain the uncontainable.
If we’re honest, the uncontainable is what puts a smile on our face in the first place. The uncontainable is what gives us joy and life. The uncontainable is the source of all gifts, all good surprises, all the things that we could not see coming that we look back upon and say, “Thank you!” For my nephew Nathan, the uncontainable is doing something with the soccer ball that he has never done before, or accomplishing a thing that he never thought possible, or a turn of events that he could not have predicted but which he will always remember and say, “What a game!”
And yet it is only human to try to bottle up this goodness, to contain the uncontainable, to control it. For my nephew Nathan, this means adjusting the boundaries and tweaking the rules and blowing the whistle on everything that does not go according to plan. For the people of God, this might mean confining God to a name or a creed or a building, or refereeing in God’s name and declaring that God favors this nation over that nation, this party over that party, this kind of person over that kind of person, and so on.
The Risk of Faith
I do not mean to say that all our containers for God (like buildings or names or rituals) are bad. On the contrary, I think God is looking for containers, which is to say, God’s Spirit is looking for flesh, the uncontainable is looking for the containers of names and rituals and behavior that can give it full expression. To put this trivially, the uncontainable God is like the uncontainable joy of sports that needs the containers of a field and some rules and a ball and so on. These containers are what make possible an experience of the uncontainable; they are what allow people like my nephew Nathan to experience the uncontainable joy of the game, which brings a smile to their face. But to put it a little more seriously, the uncontainable God is looking for containers that allow for authentic experiences and expressions of God’s love, like songs and stories and habits of service to one’s neighbor and care for the earth, deeds done not because they are mandated, but because in doing them we experience an uncontainable joy. These things are how love, which is uncontainable, gets expressed in little, contained ways.
Containers are not bad. It is only when we try to contain excessively, to use the same old wineskins, to insist on only one set of containers, that we risk draining life of love, or this world of its original, God-given goodness.
This is the risk of faith—it is the risk of letting go and allowing the uncontainable to find new containers, lest the old containers contain it too well and keep it from spreading and being renewed.
And this risk originates with God. God is always taking a risk. God is always giving of Godself to humanity, putting the divine in human hands, the uncontainable in human containers. This can go horribly wrong. I’ve mentioned the dubious motivations and deeds of Solomon, but I have in mind now Constantine, who I think gave God a regrettable container; he gave God an incredibly bad name with a long and lasting legacy. Constantine turned the cross, where Christ proclaimed forgiveness on his enemies, into a standard to carry while killing one’s enemies. Constantine turned the peace that Christ proclaimed, into a constant war. Constantine turned the freedom of faith into the obligation of a national religion. Constantine stuffed Christ into a container where Christ couldn’t even breathe, much less express the good news of God’s love that he’d come to express.
And yet God takes the risk. Because on the other side of Constantine is Jesus himself, who does not try to contain God for his own selfish ends but rather gives flesh to the uncontainable, which is to say, allows the uncontainable to exceed the limits we keep putting down. Isn’t this what we see in things like loving the enemy (i.e., loving the unlovable), forgiving the unforgivable, giving without expectation of return, hoping for what you cannot possibly foresee? And it doesn’t stop with Jesus. His followers like him do not so much insist on one set of containers as they do on letting go and letting God’s Spirit continually exceed expectations, as we see in the early church’s inclusion of non-Jews among God’s people and their recognition of women as equals of men (Gal 3:28).
I’ve veered into the abstract, so allow me to close with a concrete image that recalls my nephew Nathan. God is the love of the game, not the obsession with winning or losing.
Prayer
Uncontainable God,
Whose love outlasts and exceeds
Every altar we have built:
When we like Solomon
Seek to contain results,
To control outcomes,
Remind us
Of where our joy and vitality really come from.
Teach us in Christ the letting go
By which your uncontainable love, forgiveness, and generosity
Find flesh.
In Christ, our Lord and our savior: Amen.
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