Two Truths and a Lie - Faith Horizons 2023 (October 13th)

 Readings: 2 Chronicles 6:12-21; Matthew 5:1-10 

Introduction

“Christianity has a very long history, and a lot of it is terrible. It’s tempting to deal with this history by disavowing it, by suggesting that real Christians would not do the kinds of things that actually-existing-Christians have done.” (Marika Rose, Theology for the End of the World, 13)

Have you ever played that ice-breaker game, “Two truths and a lie?” I thought that since I’m brand new as the Diocesan Discipleship Developer, I’d start off by sharing two truths and a lie about myself that you can come ask me about after the service. First, when I was a child, my family farmed ostriches for a few years. Second, I have a beautiful golden retriever named Duke. Third, my wife and I decided to sell our car back in 2020 and now enjoy the car-free life through a combination of cycling, transit, and a membership in the Peg-City Car Co-op. As I said, please come introduce yourself and let me know which of these you think is the lie after the service.

Admittedly, this is a very strange way to begin a sermon. However, in addition to the pragmatics of introducing myself, I think this little ice-breaker actually illustrates something important about our Old Testament lesson this evening. Solomon, in his prayer of dedication for the new temple, is telling some profound truths about God, but these are masking a deeper lie that we ignore at our peril.

The scholar, Kevin Bruyneel, has defined a concept he calls “Settler Memory” which I think is a helpful way of framing what’s going on in Solomon’s prayer of dedication. Bruyneel studies settler colonialism, and particularly he’s interested in how settler societies remember their own past in a way that disappears inconvenient parts of that past. The problem, according to Bruyneel, is not that we have forgotten our history, it’s that we intentionally never remembered certain stories at all. We do this, he says, through the construction of memorials, holidays, rituals, archives, and other cultural artifacts that tell a very specific (and usually positive and triumphant) story about our own past that simultaneously neglects to mention any evidence to the contrary. A good example of this in the case of the Anglican Church might be the way we occasionally see plaques in churches celebrating a grant of land or money from the Hudson’s Bay Company or Queen Anne’s Bounty, or some figure associated with the British Crown that doesn’t mention any details about how or whether that land or treasure was properly theirs to give. All that is remembered is the generous gift, and any troubled history that might underwrite it is not forgotten, it is never remembered at all.

Whose history? Which tradition? Kings, Chronicles, and the problem of tradition

“Christian tradition is a problem.” (Anne Carpenter, Nothing Gained is Eternal, xi)

With Bruyneel’s warning about how we can use the way we remember things to hide the dark parts of our past, let’s turn back to the text and take a closer look at what Solomon is up to.

Solomon said,

“‘O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you, in heaven or on earth, keeping covenant in steadfast love with your servants who walk before you with all their heart—you who have kept for your servant, my father David, what you promised to him. Indeed, you promised with your mouth and this day have fulfilled with your hand.”

So far, so good. There truly is no God like the God of Israel! And, praise be, this is indeed a God who keeps covenant and has steadfast love for all God’s servants. Also, fair enough, the temple is now complete, and, as it says in 2 Samuel, chapter 7, God had promised to David that a temple would one day be built by one of his sons and that God would establish that son’s kingdom to last forever.

But here’s where things get a bit sticky, Solomon goes on praying saying:

“Therefore, O Lord, God of Israel, keep for your servant, my father David, that which you promised him, saying, “There shall never fail you a successor before me to sit on the throne of Israel, if only your children keep to their way, to walk in my law as you have walked before me.”  Therefore, O Lord, God of Israel, let your word be confirmed, which you promised to your servant David.”

Well, wait just one minute Solomon, God promised to David that GOD would be the one establishing your kingdom and rule, but is that actually how things went down? Here we have an interesting canonical issue. Our reading this evening comes from 2 Chronicles, a history of Israel written quite late, and, in the Hebrew ordering of the canon, comes right at the end of the scriptures, culminating with Israel’s return from exile after their repentance from sin under the conditions of foreign domination. In this version of the story, the sins of Israel are acknowledged, but they tend to be diminished and always quickly turned toward redemption. But there is another version of Israel’s history, and that is found in what we call “the former prophets”, specifically, in the Book of the Kings. The Former Prophets have a much more negative assessment of monarchy, the temple, and Solomon in particular. In fact, if you go back to the book of Deuteronomy, the book whose theology shapes the Former Prophets, you’ll find the laws that govern how kings should rule, and all the things that it says Kings of Israel should not do are all the things that Solomon does in his reign. 

But it gets worse. For in the opening chapters of 1 Kings, we find the old king David is impotent, both sexually and politically. His sons vie for his replacement, but finally, Solomon manages to seize power. From his deathbed, David calls Solomon and gives him a litany of people who need to be assassinated or punished to settle all the old scores that David is now too weak to accomplish and to secure Solomon’s new regime. Solomon carries out every last murder on this royal hit-list, and in a wave of blood and foreign alliances, presents himself as the providential answer to God’s promise to establish a Davidic monarchy forever.

Solomon has made sure, “Oh Lord that your word would be confirmed” but God is silent. Yet Solomon isn’t done yet, for the God of Israel has long been resistant to the idea of having a fixed dwelling place on the earth - God has consistently preferred to be on the move, in a tent in the wilderness, in a cloud of fire, or in the midst of deep darkness, but not in a house of wood build by men. Solomon piously acknowledges this, saying: 

“‘But will God indeed reside with mortals on earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house that I have built!”

But then Solomon subverts this piety and implores God to turn God’s eyes towards this place to be the focal point of divine activity, and by extension, Solomon’s own kingly power. The rest of Solomon’s prayer is a litany of the ways in which people and their God will now relate to each other around this place and in the end, distressingly, God’s presence settles on the place in fire, cloud, and darkness so thick that nobody can enter it. 

Hope and the future

What are we to make of this conclusion? It would seem, with the settling of God’s presence in this house built by Solomon’s bloody hands, that God is endorsing everything that Solomon has done and said. But this is the thing about Hebrew narrative, it is not overly didactic. The text invites us to wrestle, to think, to question - it isn’t going to make the answers easy for us. God shows up, but there isn’t actually an explicit endorsement of Solomon on God’s part, that is something that is claimed by Solomon. God’s only comment comes in the form of a dream to Solomon in 1 Kings 7. God says, Yes Solomon, I will relate to the people through this place, just as you have asked, but when you sin, when you fail in all that you have pledged to do by covenant, I will pluck you and your people out of this land and judgment will come.

So, does God endorse Solomon’s edifice? God tolerates it. God accommodates to it. But God also pronounces his judgment on it up-front and spells out the doomed future that this compromise will bring. 

Conclusion

In her recent book, Theology for the End of the World, the British theologian, Marika Rose, asks this haunting question, “What if the cost of true worship was our own dispossession?” (Rose, 137). Solomon sought to guarantee God’s presence among the people and shore up his dynastic legacy for all time through the wisdom of this world - a wisdom that involved the ruthless application of state violence, the making of illicit alliances, and the hoarding up of truly unimaginable levels of wealth. But all this guaranteed nothing in the end. Shortly after his own death, his line lost control of most of the kingdom of Israel. God’s glory eventually would visibly depart from the temple and go off to Babylon ahead of Israel in exile. The temple would be razed and the people enslaved - a judgment foretold from the beginning. Yet the book of Chronicles does not end in the despair of exile. For right at the moment of Israel’s complete and utter dispossession, Israel was restored, brought back from exile, and the Temple was made new. 

The history of the church, of this church, has its problems, but God has accommodated Godself to us in spite of this and if the story of Israel is anything to go by - it is at the moment of complete dispossession and ruin that true worship of God becomes possible and a truly God-fearing future emerges.

Amen