"An Uncontainable, Yet Accessible God"
Dr. Will Willimon
1 Kings 8:1, 6, 10-11, 22-30, 41-43

"Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven, and the highest heaven cannot contain thee, how much less this house which I have built."

By the time I got to him he had spent his entire summer visiting churches. Every Sunday, in a different church. Having grown up in a nominally Moslem home outside of Chicago, he became attracted to the Christian faith while a student at Duke. He became curious about what Christians were up to. So he had determined to visit a different Christian church every Sunday in the summer in order to observe, to get clear about what Christians did and believed.

When I got to him, at the end of the summer, he was a sadly disoriented and confused young man. "It's too confusing," he said. "I've been to black Pentecostal churches, and downtown Roman Catholic churches, and Episcopal and Baptist churches and there's no connection between any of them! They are all so confusingly different. I can't find common themes, or similar patterns."

I had some sympathy with his plight. (To make matters worse, he was majoring in Engineering!). I said to him, "Yes, yes, it's a mess but, with a little effort, you will learn to love it."

I have read some of the Koran, the holy book of Moslems and I know why there are Moslem fundamentalists. The literature encourages straightforward propositions, and six principles, and lists of do's and don'ts, and definitive assertions. But, for the life of me, I can't figure out, reading the Bible, how we got Christian fundamentalists. The literature of Christians, scripture, is just too complicated, diverse, thick to be amenable to that sort of treatment.

It's a mess, but there are those of us who love it.

Now, King Solomon was never known for his humility. After all, he was King David's son. Solomon was known as the wisest man who had ever lived in Israel. Solomon's reign was the apogee of Israel's prosperity and prominence as an empire.

And on this grand day Solomon stands before the whole nation and dedicates the new temple at Jerusalem, a grand new house of God that has been built during his reign. The king declares that this will be a place of prayer, of national unity, of comfort for the sorrowful and divine presence, conventional words one expects at such moments of national self-congratulation and royal pride. But then King Solomon says something that surprises. Solomon asks, "Will God indeed dwell on earth? Behold, heaven, and the highest heaven cannot contain thee, how much less this house which I have built."

Our temples, even so grand a temple as this one, cannot contain God. Heaven, even the very highest heaven, cannot contain God. How much less this house which I have built. There is wisdom in that insight.

We call our church a "house of God." We do not believe that God literally lives here. We are pointing to our experience of this place, our experience that, when we have come seeking a word from the Lord, when we in pain have come searching for comfort, we have found it here. Time again, like ancestor Jacob, we have been able to exclaim, as with Jacob before the ladder in the desert, "Surely the Lord was in this place!"

When Jacob awoke, after his night with a stone for a pillow, he named that place "Bethel," meaning "house of God." On many a Sunday, this place has been our Bethel.

And yet, even so grand and beautiful a church as this is not, says Solomon the wise, a container for God. Heaven, even highest heaven, cannot contain God. With God, after we have traversed the width, the depth and breadth of heaven, there is still not enough room to hold God.

We humans are caught between the necessary human inclination to build walls, shrines, places for the holy and yet God is more. Years ago, J. B. Phillips published a book entitled, Your God Is Too Small in which he mildly mocked the ways we make God into a policeman, or errand boy, or daddy, or mommy. A little God is not match for the great joys or the great sadness of life, said Phillips.

Do you find interesting that we have not one but four gospels. One might have thought that, at some point early in Christianity, someone might have said, "Matthew mostly gets Jesus right. Let's all agree to go with Matthew as the gospel."

No. We have four gospels; four at times differing, unique perspectives on Jesus. Are our four gospels testimony to how hard it is for Christians to agree on anything? Or are they evidence that Jesus is large, wonderfully uncontainable?

This week, the university will welcome an invasion of new students. Some will arrive here with some understanding of and commitment to Christ. Some of these will worry that a religion course, or time amid the Department of Philosophy will "shake my faith." They will therefore seek out ways to preserve their faith, "hold on to my faith."

But others may not see the university as a threat to faith, but rather a challenge, as one more episode in their journey with God. They may come to see that faith is not something to which we need to hold, but rather something by which we are held. They will move from conservation to exploration and find, to their delight, that God is large, that God is present, even here, especially here where minds are tested and stretched.

And yet, around here there is another side of the coin. In our academic willingness to keep an open mind, to avoid premature closure, to be fair to all points of view, there is a great danger that we build no house for God. All lazy religion ends in pantheism in which everything is god, and nothing is God. With god in every rock, and blade of grass, pantheism usually fades into atheism. God everywhere and in everyone becomes god of nowhere and nothing.

I'm talking about that pathology by which we flit like honeybees from flower to flower, never alighting anywhere. Paul spoke of that shallow thought which is victim of every wind, captive to no one in particular, therefore slave to every latest fad. God as another "lifestyle option."

There is that doubt which comes from honest struggle with the faith. And there is that doubt which comes from intellectual sloth, from the unwillingness to take the time to investigate, to hammer out anything more substantial than a passing spiritual mood.

Historically, the Catholic says, "The Church teaches." The older Protestants asserted, "The Bible teaches." We say, "It seems to me."

Our much-heralded openness may just be an exaggerated fear of commitment, of risk, a failure to make a wager, to settle down somewhere and take the consequences. Anselm called reason "faith seeking understanding." When we, with the popular song, complain, "I just haven't found what I'm looking for," how earnestly have we sought?

No place, no building, not even this one, can contain God. Wise Solomon, we know that. But we must have a place, some Bethel where promised meeting is possible and there is presence. How many modern people who feel that God is absent, deus absconditus , more accurately ought to say that they are absent from God, have neglected those times and places, those practices and habits whereby God is able to apprehend us?

I saw her, with a young man in tow, in the Duke Gardens, last April, amid the green, the flowers. "Have you fallen in love?" I asked her.

"Me? No," she answered.

"Well, then what were you doing in the Gardens, in April, and with a young man?" I persisted.

"I was there because I want to fall in love," she responded with a wisdom beyond her years.

Show me a marriage, where a couple says, "We are so deeply in love that we no longer have need of those little rituals, and habits of love. We no longer need to set aside a time to be together, a place to share one another's company, we are so in love." And I will show you a marriage that wakes up one day and has no love.

We are animals. God may be infinite, immense, and unbounded, but we are not. We need time, and place, and opportunity. We live, not by grand and noble ideas and ideals but by touch, and taste. How wonderful then that God condescends to deal with us in ways that bend to our need, in bread and wine, in the water of baptism, in a building called church. Thus God stoops to us.

I know a man, a marriage counselor, who says that when a couple comes to him saying that there is trouble in their marriage, he says to them, "Take next weekend off. Get a babysitter for the kids. Check into a nice hotel. Go out for a good dinner each night. Sleep in late. If you still have marital problems on Monday, call me."

We are animals. We have our limits. We need time, and place, the rituals that keep relationship. Is this too modest an analogy for why we need to be here on Sunday? I don't think so because we are modest in our ability and our need.

"I don't know anything much about art," the student said, "I never go to art museums, I've never studied the subject. Still, I know what I like."

The professor responded, "You're right. You don't know anything about art."

We have our limits. We need to build some house of God, needing, as we do, time and place, opportunity for growth -- this building, these stones, this mortar, some Bethel of a place whereby we can say, "Surely, the Lord is in this place."

And God is. Solomon not only prayed, "Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven, and the highest heaven cannot contain thee, how much less this house which I have built." God the large, the uncontainable, inexpressible.

Solomon even more wisely prayed, "Yet, O God, have regard to our prayers,night and day, open thine eyes toward this house, the place of which thou hast said, 'My name shall be there.'" Though God is not contained by this place which we have built, the name of God is here, the presence. God promises to come out to meet us. God is love. God, the God of Israel and the church, is never content to remain aloof, distant. This God, out of love, stoops, seeks, searches (remember the stories which Jesus told?), surrounds, speaks. Therein is the promise that we test and prove every time we enter this place.

"Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven, and the highest heaven cannot contain thee, how much less this house which I have built. Yet, O God, have regard to our prayers,night and day, open thine eyes toward this house, the place of which thou hast said, 'My name shall be there.'"