This is a place of Prayer and Praise Sermon for August 26th

August 26, 2006 “This is a Place of Prayer and Praise” 1 Kings 1,6,10-11,22-30, 41-43 Year B Introduction Connection to the drama- Sanctuary – a place of refuge, a place of resort, a place renewal. A place to come to know that you are safe and the God loves you. That is what God has promised throughout the ages. We have all heard about the story, that by now has made national headlines – of the woman who is being threatened to be sent back to Mexico. Her son is an American citizen, but she is not. Yet she has sought sanctuary inside of Aldaberto UMC in Chicago. As long as she in inside of the church – she knows that she will be protected and that God will answer her prayers. I know that pastor William Coleman fairly well. Many of his members are immigrants, some like this woman even illegal immigrants. That church feels that it is its mission to reach out to be a sanctuary for those immigrants – seeking refuge, resort and renewal a holy place. I think that all of us need a holy place – a place where we can step away from all of the chaos of the world. A place where we feel special, where we can feel accepted, where we are free to bring our prayers and to know that they are heard. That is what God promised us, those who are faithful and believe that if we only seek God, that we will be okay. Our scripture is a celebration of the fulfillment of that promise. That the isrealites would have a sanctuary. That this would be the place where the people could come with their prayers and to know that they would be heard. Solomon has called all of the people together into one place to witness this wonderful event. Many of the middle eastern cultures had temples where they believed God presided. For instance, I have taken the confirmation class to the hindu temple in Bartlett, where the hindu gods live. There is an attendant at the temple which wakes the gods up in the morning and put them to bed at night. The dress them in the morning, with appropriate clothes for the activities for the day. At other temples the people bring raisins and other things for the gods to eat. I explained to the confirmation class that the gods at the barlett temple don’t seem to have much interest in raisins to eat, but they seem to really appreciate dollar bills in the offering plate. But I say that to say that the ancient isrealites believed that the ark of the covenant contained the actually presence of God. It was a gaseus presence, which if you got too close to it, it would destroy you. The dedication of the temple was a very sacred time, a time of bringing the actual presence of God into the temple and making it a sacred, holy place, just like the cultures that they saw around them. It was a time of sacred worship, of reliving the promises that god had made to the isrealites. It was a time of prayer, time to earnestly come into the presence of God with sacred petitions. It was a time of unity. The isrealites, like any large nation was a nation of different people, with different allegiances. The disagreed with one anther and formed factions. And yet the temple was the place to draw them all together. They might not agree with one another, but they all agreed with God. God was the thing that drew them all together. God made a promise that this was the place that god would come to be with the people. Where is the place is your life where you know that you can come to meet God? Where is the place where you know that you are always safe, where you are loved and accepted and even healed? Where your prayers are always healed. When Jesus renewed the promises of God, Jesus made the church that safe space, that sanctuary. Jesus calls us to not only come into that space, but to be intentional about creating that space, that sanctuary where all are welcome. All our united through the love of Jesus. Psalm 84 was our call to worship for today. It is a psalm related to worship on the temple. How lovely is our dwelling place o lord. Happy are those who live in your house, ever singing your praise. Happy are those whose strength are in you. My favorite line is “ I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the lord then dwell in the tent of the wicked. But let me ask you – was our drama really relevant. Do we look forward on Sundays (or Saturdays ) to coming to church? It is something the look forward to, to get excited about? To cheer and to talk about in the stands? One of the first sermon illustrations that I ever gaveWhen my son was in kindergarten or first grade, I was asked to be a chaperone for one of my sons field trips. I think it fits today also. The teacher told the chaperones that they needed to fix a brown bag lunch just like all of the kids. I was so excited at being able to bring my lunch. I went to the store the night before and I bought a loaf of wonder bread, process ham, imitation American cheese, some hard vanilla sandwich cookies with the cream in the middle, a store brand grape pop that have never been refrigerated, I even think I bought an apple for good measure. During the field trip I gathered my little crew and prepared them for our lunch. But as I opened my bag and looked in, and realized that there was not one thing there that I would dare put in my mouth to eat. Don’t eat cold food or processed food. I have to pretty hard pressed to eat anything that didn’t just come out of the oven. I knew that I was not going to eat any of the junk when I bought it in the first place. Yet for some reason, I really believed that by putting it in little plastic bags, putting in a brown paper bag, and carrying the bag to the zoo, that somehow the whole experience was going to make me enjoy things that I normally hate to eat. I had not lunch that day- I threw the whole bag in the garbage. And I don’t know about you, but sometime I have that same attitude about coming to church. I put all of my angers, frustrations, unmet expecatations, jealousies, criticism, and other negative feelings, and I put them in my brown paper bag and bring them to church with me. Those negative feelings are really not helpful to me in any other situations, but for some reason I bring them to church, expecting things to be different. I hold onto those feelings and after church I say, you know I wasn’t touched by anything in the service. And yet, what did I put in my bag to feast on while I was at worship? Now don’t get me wrong – its not a bad thing to bring our negative emotions to church. And there are times when we are not happy- with our lives or with God. as a matter of fact, psalm 84 and even 1 Kings are not about a happy time at all. It is not about being filled with the presence of the holy spirit, or even about unity. These words were written out of one of the deepest depressions that the isrealite nation had ever experienced. I kings was actually written 500 years after it happened. At a time when that glorious temple had been bought to the ground. That alter that Solomon stood before destroyed, the whole idea of kings became a nightmare, that land that God had promised would always be their taken away, and the people scattered all throughtout the world. Everything that they had thought of as sacred and holy had been taken away. Everything in their lives that represented god was gone. Where was God now? What kind of God would do this kind of thing? If God would allow this to happen, was God even there? If I am not happy, do I even need to worship. The priest wrote 1 Kings as a reminded to a broken people – that the God of Isreal is like no other god in the heavens of on the earth. Because the God that they worship was a covenant God. And a convenant is a give and take promise. Both parties are equal and both parties have a part in maintaining the agreement. I kings and many other parts of the old testament are a reminder that God did not break God’s promise with the people, that they broke their promise to God. they were not faithful. It was this realization that helped these people form a new religion – this is the moments that they moved from being isrealites to being jews. They decided that no longer would they try to rebuild the one temple and continue the old ways. They would worship now in community synagogues. A synagogues is a place of remembrance- of renewal of sanctuary. A place to gather and for a people who lost everything that they thought was God to realize that God is still with them and still loves them, and still wants to be in community with them. It is a reminder that God’s presence is every where. That God is present in our feeling and our unfeeling, in our negative emotions and in our happiness, God is in worship that touches us and in worship that confuses us. The illustration that I told about bringing my lunch to the zoo was an illustration that I told at my first church. I did not grow up in a united Methodist church. So I had never heard that conversation about dying churches and boring worship services. African American worship is a little different and structured on different principles. My natural question when I hear those concerns is – how can worship be boring when you were there? One principle that is very present in African American worship is that the joy and happiness of worship in not in my words, in not in those stupid screens, it not even in the hymns that we sing. The joy and happiness of the presence of God exist only within your heart. Recently, when I attended a Amfrican Methodist Episcopal church in Aurora. There were always two ladies who at a certain time in the sermon would always get the holy ghost and start shouting thank you Jesus. You know that they had a particularly stressful week when they would get the holy ghost even before the scripture was read. The celebration of the presence of the holy spirit is what the people bring. Sanctuary – is the safe, peaceful, sacred space where we are free to express what we hold inside – our joys and our concerns, our happiness and our griefs, our questions and answers that we can share with others. Jesus Christ is our reminder that even through the turmoils of history – that God has been faithful. Jesus Christ formed a church that could surpasses the glory of Solomon’s temple. The unity of the holy spirit brings us together in a way that coming to one temple could never do. The God that we worship is a very special God. a god that not even the highest heavens can contain – much less this small and insignifant church. And yet God’s presence is contained in this small and insignificant church. Why? Because we are here and we come here in faith, and through our songs, our prayers, our listening we are worshipping. Worship is the presence of God expressed in human terms. And anything human is imperfect and incompetent. Each one of is different, each one of us has our own set of expecations of what should happen today. Each one of us has our brown paper bag of negative emotions that we have bought here today with a prayer that God will make them disappear. The holy spirit is everywhere – but it expresses itself only in a community of people. When we share our experiences, when we realize what we have in common, when we are challenged by attitudes that we are uncomfortable with and grow- that is when we are the body of christ. Worship is not something that you are I can do alone – worship is what we create when we come together to share our lives in the presence of the eternal joy of the holy spirit. Jesus often spoke us the temples of God – God became small enough to be expressed fully in our hearts. But the work of christ is not entrusted to just one of us - but all of us. We are the body of christ. The work of the temple has been given to us. That gives new meaning to the sentence _ I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the lord them to dwell in the tent of the wicked. The hearts of Gods people are the house of the lord, all of us gathered here together in our difference and in our commonalities – that is something to truly celebrate. This is the sanctuary of God – a place of refuge, or rest and renewal. Now that you are here, God has taken up residence in you- What are you doing to welcome God?