When they stopped in a place, a large tent, known as the Tabernacle, was set up. It had a specific design, once again specified by God, and access to the Tabernacle was limited. In the central room of the Tabernacle, the Ark of the Covenant was placed. And, it was said, that this is where God spoke to the people of Israel, their leader Moses, and their high priests.
Over the next few centuries, as the Israelites conquered Palestine and settled, the Tabernacle remained the center of worship for Israel.
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26;Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38
Finally, several hundred years after Moses, David established a secure kingdom based on the city of Jerusalem. He fought and defeated armies to the southeast, to the southwest, to the northeast and to the north. The people of Israel were united under David’s leadership. And finally, David built himself a palace in Jerusalem.
It was then that our first reading, the reading from 2 Samuel 7 is set:
After the king was settled in his palace and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies around him, he said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a house of cedar, while the ark of God remains in a tent.”
David was feeling guilty. He had a nice home – but in David’s mind, God’s home was simply a tent. He wanted to build a permanent temple to God in Jerusalem out of his guilt and gratitude.
Nathan replied to the king, “Whatever you have in mind, go ahead and do it, for the Lord is with you.”
But that night the word of the Lord came to Nathan, saying:
“Go and tell my servant David, ‘This is what the Lord says: Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving from place to place with a tent as my dwelling.Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their rulers whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?”’
God points out that He had never asked any of the leaders of Israel to build Him a temple of fine wood. God continues:
“Now then, tell my servant David, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty says: I took you from the pasture, from tending the flock, and appointed you ruler over my people Israel. I have been with you wherever you have gone, and I have cut off all your enemies from before you.
God says that God has always been with David, wherever he has gone, just as God has always been with us, wherever we have gone. God continues to speak:
Now I will make your name great, like the names of the greatest men on earth. And I will provide a place for my people Israel and will plant them so that they can have a home of their own and no longer be disturbed. Wicked people will not oppress them anymore, as they did at the beginning and have done ever since the time I appointed leaders over my people Israel. I will also give you rest from all your enemies.
“‘The Lord declares to you that the Lord himself will establish a house for you:
Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.’”
Rather than have David build a house for God, God will build a house for David.
Isn’t this the way we often worship? We want to do things for God, so we reach down in our wallets and donate something of brass or silver or gold or stone to the church. We think that this is the way to honor our God and the sentiment is right. It is only the execution that is going wrong.
Our God, you see, never asked to be located in a single place, even though God allowed David’s son Solomon to build the First Temple of God in Jerusalem, a Temple that was rebuilt and expanded about the time of Jesus’ birth as the Second Temple by King Herod. But God did not ask for His worship to be located in a single building or even in a single town like the little-g gods that men and women worshipped in ancient times in countless towns and cities.
Our God is not located up here at the altar – our God is not just in this sanctuary, for a sanctuary is not a place where God is protected by the people, but is instead a place where the people are protected by God. Our God does not even desire to be found only in churches.
Instead of a beautiful church to stay in, observed by the faithful, our God is present in the world around us, doing great works, making art work in the snow, in the clouds, in the slowly, ever so slowly changing shape of the mountains and valleys. Our God is even now looking over each of our shoulders, peeking into our lives, looking at what you are drawing on the bulletin, sitting with your relative at the nursing home, and knitting together wounds in the emergency rooms around the world.
Our God is on the high seas, listening to the prayers of sailors and fishermen. Our God is in Pakistan where a church is rebuilding from an attack a week ago. Our God is in the nearly empty cathedrals of Europe, comforting those few people who have chosen to go there in prayer.
It has always been this way and it is this way today. Our God is everywhere, watching and changing the world.
About the year 4 BC, a young teenaged girl was going about her business in the small town of Nazareth near the Sea of Galilee. Miriam was her name, the same famous name as Mose’s sister. Miriam – whom the Romans would call Maria and the English would call Mary.
Miriam was pledged to be married to a carpenter from Bethlehem, a man name Yusef, or Joseph. She had only seen him a couple of times, for he lived about 90 miles away, which was quite a walk in that time before automobiles – at least three days for a man in a desperate hurry, but more commonly a week’s journey.
As Miriam was doing her chores, an angel came to see her. “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Yeshua”
Yeshua – Joshua – a name the Romans would twist to be Jesus.
"He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.”
Her cousin Elizabeth was an older woman, known for not having any children, but now Mary was learning that Elizabeth was well along in her pregnancy. And Mary was going to have a son – the son of God! How would she respond? She had been well-trained and was respectful in her answer.
“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.
God was working in the world again. God was rebuilding the house of David, the ruling family of Jerusalem. And Mary was to be the new king’s mother.
If Mary had journeyed to Jerusalem, she would have found a great Temple under construction, a beautiful Temple, the Second Temple, glistening in the sunlight. King Herod began that construction which took forty years. Almost anyone would have pointed to that Temple as the most important location for the God of Israel in the world.
Yet, as usual, God had a different opinion. In God’s view, the most important location in the world was the womb of this young teenaged girl, filled with a new life growing. For God loved the world. He would not speak through the dead stones and gold of the great Temple – although His Son would later respond that even those dead stones would praise His Son if the people were silenced.
No, God would speak through the child that Mary would give birth to nine months later. God would speak through the man that child would become. God Himself would speak to the people of the world – because the child was begun by God and was God Himself walking upon the earth.
God would not be imprisoned in a Temple that well-meaning people fashioned. He would walk among His people as the God-man Jesus Christ. He would experience what it meant to be human – and then He would teach us in love what God expected of us.
To most people in this world, God is seen in one of several ways:
Many people see God as an idea, a vague personality-force-thing which is, to them, an idea about which we can each have an opinion, an idea, a claim. “I think God must be like this and that, while you think God must be like that and this. And since no one can truly know, your opinion and my opinion are equally good or bad. For nobody has met God.” My family and I have watched the Star Wars movies. God or the Force – who knows? That is what these people say. Whose opinion is right?
Other people think that God is a kindly grandfather, the person who listens to our wants and complaints and then either gives us what we ask for or doesn’t – and, just like Santa Claus, it depends upon whether we’ve been naughty or nice. This god probably even has a bushy full white beard!
Still, like Jim Carrey in the movie Bruce Almighty who runs into God, portrayed as Morgan Freeman, other people look at God as someone or something we may meet one day, but who hangs around churches and those people known as ministers, priests, or monks or nuns, or stays up in Heaven. This god is supposed to have a private relationship between a few people and himself – but most people can safely ignore him – unless you are one of the very few that God chooses to speak to, like in Bruce Almighty or in the earlier movies where John Denver’s character runs into God in the form of George Burns.
And then, there are those people who recognize the full force of Christian teaching, which is that God is not an idea or a force or a kindly grandfather, and God does not limit contacts to a handful of people, nor stay in Heaven, but each baptized Christian receives the Holy Spirit at baptism, that that Holy Spirit is a personality of the Three-Part God, that Jesus Christ was a second Personality of God who walked among us on earth, and that God the Father is the third Personality, and that that Holy Spirit directly connects all of us to God who is ready and willing to speak to each of us if we would just listen with confidence and faith.
Christian teaching is that the Holy Spirit now is connected to each of us, like a wireless phone is connected to the Internet through the data, and if we practice listening to that still small voice, that voice will become easier and easier to hear and understand, that we might always know the reality and the will of the God who is there, the God who is here with us today.
And it is the love of God that makes this possible in the first place. For God actually walked on earth and God talked to real men and women and God was born one night in a stable in Bethlehem to a young girl. That Personality of God became known as Jesus, the Christ, the Savior, the Messiah of the world, and He is every bit as much God as God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.
And so the question is this: Where shall your God live?
Will you pretend to keep Him in this building of wood and bricks? Will you pretend to keep Him at a long distance from you, up somewhere in Heaven? Or will you accept that God wants to live with you, connecting with you through the Holy Spirit, put there by your encounter with Jesus Christ and the people who act under His orders on this earth? God is, even now, right beside you.
Today is Christmas Eve.
In our churches, we keep God at a distance by sitting towards the back, away from the altar. It is something we do without even thinking about it, for we are like the ancient Israelites, afraid to approach God. We would prefer to lock up God in a building, in a sanctuary, at an altar where we cannot get too close to Him.
Yet God came to us at Christmas. He physically touched some, spoke to many more, and wherever He walked, He healed people in the person of Jesus Christ. He can, even now, heal you if you will allow Him to get close to you. Will you symbolically walk toward Him today, telling God, your friends and family, your self that you want to be close to God the Father, to Christ, to the Holy Spirit?
What a wonderful day to let go and follow Christ, to walk to the altar and ask Him for guidance, to come up front and tell Him of your fears and needs and desires, to listen to the Holy Spirit’s response when you come close to God at the front of the church instead of keeping your distance, because God does not want you to keep your distance but instead wants you to come close, ever closer to His wonderful love, as God did not keep His distance, but came to us on a cold night in the form of a tiny baby. Come forward to be healed, or bow down where you are.
Finally, several hundred years after Moses, David established a secure kingdom based on the city of Jerusalem. He fought and defeated armies to the southeast, to the southwest, to the northeast and to the north. The people of Israel were united under David’s leadership. And finally, David built himself a palace in Jerusalem.
It was then that our first reading, the reading from 2 Samuel 7 is set:
After the king was settled in his palace and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies around him, he said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a house of cedar, while the ark of God remains in a tent.”
David was feeling guilty. He had a nice home – but in David’s mind, God’s home was simply a tent. He wanted to build a permanent temple to God in Jerusalem out of his guilt and gratitude.
Nathan replied to the king, “Whatever you have in mind, go ahead and do it, for the Lord is with you.”
But that night the word of the Lord came to Nathan, saying:
“Go and tell my servant David, ‘This is what the Lord says: Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving from place to place with a tent as my dwelling.Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their rulers whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?”’
God points out that He had never asked any of the leaders of Israel to build Him a temple of fine wood. God continues:
“Now then, tell my servant David, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty says: I took you from the pasture, from tending the flock, and appointed you ruler over my people Israel. I have been with you wherever you have gone, and I have cut off all your enemies from before you.
God says that God has always been with David, wherever he has gone, just as God has always been with us, wherever we have gone. God continues to speak:
Now I will make your name great, like the names of the greatest men on earth. And I will provide a place for my people Israel and will plant them so that they can have a home of their own and no longer be disturbed. Wicked people will not oppress them anymore, as they did at the beginning and have done ever since the time I appointed leaders over my people Israel. I will also give you rest from all your enemies.
“‘The Lord declares to you that the Lord himself will establish a house for you:
Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.’”
Rather than have David build a house for God, God will build a house for David.
Isn’t this the way we often worship? We want to do things for God, so we reach down in our wallets and donate something of brass or silver or gold or stone to the church. We think that this is the way to honor our God and the sentiment is right. It is only the execution that is going wrong.
Our God, you see, never asked to be located in a single place, even though God allowed David’s son Solomon to build the First Temple of God in Jerusalem, a Temple that was rebuilt and expanded about the time of Jesus’ birth as the Second Temple by King Herod. But God did not ask for His worship to be located in a single building or even in a single town like the little-g gods that men and women worshipped in ancient times in countless towns and cities.
Our God is not located up here at the altar – our God is not just in this sanctuary, for a sanctuary is not a place where God is protected by the people, but is instead a place where the people are protected by God. Our God does not even desire to be found only in churches.
Instead of a beautiful church to stay in, observed by the faithful, our God is present in the world around us, doing great works, making art work in the snow, in the clouds, in the slowly, ever so slowly changing shape of the mountains and valleys. Our God is even now looking over each of our shoulders, peeking into our lives, looking at what you are drawing on the bulletin, sitting with your relative at the nursing home, and knitting together wounds in the emergency rooms around the world.
Our God is on the high seas, listening to the prayers of sailors and fishermen. Our God is in Pakistan where a church is rebuilding from an attack a week ago. Our God is in the nearly empty cathedrals of Europe, comforting those few people who have chosen to go there in prayer.
It has always been this way and it is this way today. Our God is everywhere, watching and changing the world.
About the year 4 BC, a young teenaged girl was going about her business in the small town of Nazareth near the Sea of Galilee. Miriam was her name, the same famous name as Mose’s sister. Miriam – whom the Romans would call Maria and the English would call Mary.
Miriam was pledged to be married to a carpenter from Bethlehem, a man name Yusef, or Joseph. She had only seen him a couple of times, for he lived about 90 miles away, which was quite a walk in that time before automobiles – at least three days for a man in a desperate hurry, but more commonly a week’s journey.
As Miriam was doing her chores, an angel came to see her. “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Yeshua”
Yeshua – Joshua – a name the Romans would twist to be Jesus.
"He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.”
Her cousin Elizabeth was an older woman, known for not having any children, but now Mary was learning that Elizabeth was well along in her pregnancy. And Mary was going to have a son – the son of God! How would she respond? She had been well-trained and was respectful in her answer.
“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.
God was working in the world again. God was rebuilding the house of David, the ruling family of Jerusalem. And Mary was to be the new king’s mother.
If Mary had journeyed to Jerusalem, she would have found a great Temple under construction, a beautiful Temple, the Second Temple, glistening in the sunlight. King Herod began that construction which took forty years. Almost anyone would have pointed to that Temple as the most important location for the God of Israel in the world.
Yet, as usual, God had a different opinion. In God’s view, the most important location in the world was the womb of this young teenaged girl, filled with a new life growing. For God loved the world. He would not speak through the dead stones and gold of the great Temple – although His Son would later respond that even those dead stones would praise His Son if the people were silenced.
No, God would speak through the child that Mary would give birth to nine months later. God would speak through the man that child would become. God Himself would speak to the people of the world – because the child was begun by God and was God Himself walking upon the earth.
God would not be imprisoned in a Temple that well-meaning people fashioned. He would walk among His people as the God-man Jesus Christ. He would experience what it meant to be human – and then He would teach us in love what God expected of us.
To most people in this world, God is seen in one of several ways:
Many people see God as an idea, a vague personality-force-thing which is, to them, an idea about which we can each have an opinion, an idea, a claim. “I think God must be like this and that, while you think God must be like that and this. And since no one can truly know, your opinion and my opinion are equally good or bad. For nobody has met God.” My family and I have watched the Star Wars movies. God or the Force – who knows? That is what these people say. Whose opinion is right?
Other people think that God is a kindly grandfather, the person who listens to our wants and complaints and then either gives us what we ask for or doesn’t – and, just like Santa Claus, it depends upon whether we’ve been naughty or nice. This god probably even has a bushy full white beard!
Still, like Jim Carrey in the movie Bruce Almighty who runs into God, portrayed as Morgan Freeman, other people look at God as someone or something we may meet one day, but who hangs around churches and those people known as ministers, priests, or monks or nuns, or stays up in Heaven. This god is supposed to have a private relationship between a few people and himself – but most people can safely ignore him – unless you are one of the very few that God chooses to speak to, like in Bruce Almighty or in the earlier movies where John Denver’s character runs into God in the form of George Burns.
And then, there are those people who recognize the full force of Christian teaching, which is that God is not an idea or a force or a kindly grandfather, and God does not limit contacts to a handful of people, nor stay in Heaven, but each baptized Christian receives the Holy Spirit at baptism, that that Holy Spirit is a personality of the Three-Part God, that Jesus Christ was a second Personality of God who walked among us on earth, and that God the Father is the third Personality, and that that Holy Spirit directly connects all of us to God who is ready and willing to speak to each of us if we would just listen with confidence and faith.
Christian teaching is that the Holy Spirit now is connected to each of us, like a wireless phone is connected to the Internet through the data, and if we practice listening to that still small voice, that voice will become easier and easier to hear and understand, that we might always know the reality and the will of the God who is there, the God who is here with us today.
And it is the love of God that makes this possible in the first place. For God actually walked on earth and God talked to real men and women and God was born one night in a stable in Bethlehem to a young girl. That Personality of God became known as Jesus, the Christ, the Savior, the Messiah of the world, and He is every bit as much God as God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.
And so the question is this: Where shall your God live?
Will you pretend to keep Him in this building of wood and bricks? Will you pretend to keep Him at a long distance from you, up somewhere in Heaven? Or will you accept that God wants to live with you, connecting with you through the Holy Spirit, put there by your encounter with Jesus Christ and the people who act under His orders on this earth? God is, even now, right beside you.
Today is Christmas Eve.
In our churches, we keep God at a distance by sitting towards the back, away from the altar. It is something we do without even thinking about it, for we are like the ancient Israelites, afraid to approach God. We would prefer to lock up God in a building, in a sanctuary, at an altar where we cannot get too close to Him.
Yet God came to us at Christmas. He physically touched some, spoke to many more, and wherever He walked, He healed people in the person of Jesus Christ. He can, even now, heal you if you will allow Him to get close to you. Will you symbolically walk toward Him today, telling God, your friends and family, your self that you want to be close to God the Father, to Christ, to the Holy Spirit?
What a wonderful day to let go and follow Christ, to walk to the altar and ask Him for guidance, to come up front and tell Him of your fears and needs and desires, to listen to the Holy Spirit’s response when you come close to God at the front of the church instead of keeping your distance, because God does not want you to keep your distance but instead wants you to come close, ever closer to His wonderful love, as God did not keep His distance, but came to us on a cold night in the form of a tiny baby. Come forward to be healed, or bow down where you are.
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