I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the LORD!” (Psalms 122:1 - 2 (NRSVA)

When they first gathered for worship as the Presbyterian Church of Cedar Rapids, Iowa on July 9, 1847, Iowa had only been a state – a member of the union – for six months.  With nine original members and no permanent minster, they met in a school house that had only recently been constructed at 2nd Avenue and 5th St.   The first church on 2nd Avenue and 3rd Street was built in a few years; originally planned to be a brick structure, the first subscription of funds was raised from the small membership only to be stolen by the contractor who asked to be paid in advance so as to procure the materials, and instead absconded with the funds in order to join the gold rush to California.  That’s why, when finally completed, the church was built of stucco or as it was then called, grout and immediately was given the name, “Little Muddy.”  This stone building at the present location was begun some time later and although enlarged several times since, the structure which was finished in 1869 is the one in which we are sitting this morning.
What does the church building represent to you? Is it your home, or God's home, or both? What does it mean to gather in prayer, as the assembly of Israel did so long ago, and petition and praise the God who cannot be contained even in the whole universe itself?  Why do we do that?1 
We all know that God does not live in this house yet we call it God’s house.  We all know that ours is not the only unique house of worship – when it was first built there were soon two more on the same block – St. Paul’s and First Christian, as well as a YWCA.  Yet it is our home in many ways – over time our children grow up here and we grow old in the company of good friends and fellow church members….at least that is the way it used to be when folks were not as mobile as they are today. 
Originally, as you will remember, worship was not so organized – there were no priests or liturgy – whenever Abraham had what he thought was a significantly holy experience, he would build a pile of stones much like we did in the Gathering Space last Lenten Season, and offer a sacrifice of some kind.  These stone alters retained their holy connection and were visited by those who wished to worship in subsequent generations.  When the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness, the Tent of the Tabernacles travelled with them.  That was the place set up to shelter the Ark of the Covenant – the big box in which the stone tablets of the law were carried with the people in their wandering since their receiving them on Mount Sinai.
The idea of a “House of God” did not come up until David the King succeeded in uniting the tribes of Israel into a nation and established Jerusalem as its capital city.  To get a fix on history, that would have been as many years after Abraham first wandered into the Land of Cannon as have passed between King David and us – around three or four thousand years. 
David did not get to build the temple, but his son Solomon did get that honor and that is the narrative from 1 Kings which we read this morning.  This is the moment of the dedication of the first temple – and it is a unique, therefore in many ways.
Solomon makes clear, does he not, that although the Temple is called the Dwelling Place of the Lord – God is not contained within that building, no matter how glorious it was.  But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built! 28Regard your servant’s prayer and his plea, O LORD my God, heeding the cry and the prayer that your servant prays to you today; 29that your eyes may be open night and day toward this house, the place of which you said, ‘My name shall be there,’ that you may heed the prayer that your servant prays toward this place.  The temple (or church) may be "only an access point to the reality of God," as Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann says, but God is always and everywhere with us. 
The trouble with human beings is that we have a hard time carrying subtleties down through the generations – what was consecrated by Solomon as a place of symbolic focus for prayer and worship, a place on which any person, even the sojourner in the land – the foreigner – could pray, became the center of a cultic practice.  A hierarchy of temple leadership came into being, the Sanhedrin which assumed increasing power over the nation of Israel as the power of the King waned in times of foreign conquest, until in Jesus time, the Priestly class was corrupt and powerful and the object of scorn among many different factions of Jews.
“Jesus was generally put off by religious people…”  That is one of the things we often forget unless we are in the habit of re-reading the Gospels beginning to end fairly frequently.  Jesus did not much care for Pharisees (in Matthew he calls them a brood of vipers) and he did not much care for the temple establishment in particular, that is quite clear when each one of the Gospels have a story about him over-turning the tables of the merchants and money changers in the Temple. 
Religious people are, for my purposes here, the folks who make a big point of abiding by the rules – so much so that one could almost say they “worship” rules and the notion that the “good guys” get rewarded and the “bad guys” get what is coming to them. 
What did you make of the recent release of the only person convicted for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 which blew up over Lockerby Scotland?  It made a lot of people angry…I sympathize with the families of those who were killed in the bombing – I happen to have known one of the students who died in the flight and know that her family is still dealing with horrible emotional turmoil in their lives.  I am not sure what I think about letting the guy go because he is terminally ill.  What would Jesus do?   That’s just it….Jesus would probably have made a decision based on human compassion not some notion of justice or “right and wrong.”  I don’t think I would have let the bomber go if I were in charge.  I also have no doubt at all that Jesus would have.
I digress – a little – Jesus did not much cotton to religious folks and I don’t think he would have been one of those prepared to create conflict over doing things the way they were always done.   Dramatically, he would associate with the outsider even when the establishment favored otherwise.  Samaritans were shunned as heretics in Jesus day.  They were the remnant people left behind after the Assyerian conquests centuries before and were considered to have polluted themselves through intermarriage and other transgressions of the law.  They did not hold to the centrality of the Jerusalem Temple in their worship practices, having lost the connection with the cultic practices through long years of exile.
In his book What Jesus Meant, Garry Wills writes that Jesus is always "more outrageous, [and] more egregious" than we ever expect.   He tells a parable story to illustrate “who is my neighbor” and ends up making a Samaritan the hero.  He travels to Jerusalem for the Passover but makes a point to travel through Samaria and linger there with a woman at the well at midday – Samaritan, outcast by her own people as evidenced by her need to draw her household water during the heat of the day, and someone even the disciples saw as being scandalous.   Even if scholars found the "true and original" Jesus "behind" the Bible texts, says Gary Wills, he would appear more rather than less incomprehensible to us.  He did not tow the orthodox line – never did.
As we were doing a short study of the current book, The Shack, this past month, many were surprised when the character of Jesus, portrayed by a short, Middle Eastern man in work shirt and jeans, makes it clear that “he was never a Christian.”   In our heads we know Jesus was a Jew, but in our emotional center, we just assume that he was one of us – right?   Just as some in the 1st Century focused their entire understanding of God on the temple and its cultic practices, throughout the history of Christianity since we have created an orthodoxy which emphasizes the uniqueness of our Christian practices and discounts the roots from which they sprang – and the ground in which Jesus walked as he preached about his Kingdom Vision.  
The great preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, was a contemporary of the founding preachers of our congregation – a leader in the Abolitionist2 movement; he was also exemplary of the New Light faction of Calvinism which was also the position of those who founded our church.  The New Lights were those who emphasized the power of the Holy Spirit to change a person – and understood that no amount of pietistic observance could bring on salvation, but only the conversion of the inner person through the power of the Holy Spirit. 
At the center of New Light belief was the notion that God is seeking us out – that it is God’s choice to transform our lives, not our choice to be saved that makes us truly disciples.  Also significant in the tradition of this brand of American Calvinism was the notion that the person whose inner nature is transformed by God’s grace, cannot help but live out their new frame of reference through a compulsion to be involved in the transformation of society as well.  These are the founders of the Abolitionist movement, the temperance movement, the Sunday School movement and even the genesis of women’s suffrage.   
In essence, theirs was an understanding consistent with the words of Jesus from John which remind us that Jesus did not come to take us out of the world, but to put us into the world in a new way.  John 17:18, 19: As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 19And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth. 
Solomon in his wisdom warned people not to think of God lodged in the temple, Jesus in his final discourse to his disciples, reminds them not to lodge their faith in him  - don’t ask “What would Jesus do?”  Ask, rather, “what is Jesus doing now through me?”  Let him through the Holy Spirit engage and transform our lives – in our time and place in our circumstances – in our world.
In one of Beecher’s sermons at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, he says,
“There are many persons who are moral, and think that they are Christians. There are many persons that are intensely churchly; that love the Sabbath more than they do God; that love the Church more than they do Christ; that love the services of the Church and the circumstances of worship far more than they do the spiritual commands of the Lord Jesus Christ.  There is reason to fear that there are many persons who call themselves Christians that have never had the vital change, and do not live in true, spiritual, personal unity with God. Yet no man is a Christian until Christ's Spirit dwells in him. No man is truly a Christian who is not vitalized every day by the mind of God….
Open now your heart; for, although you cannot, without the Spirit of God, be a Christian, yet you cannot turn your heart toward God with even the sigh of a wish but instantly the Spirit of God is with you.
"The bruised reed will he not break, and the smoking flax will he not quench, until he brings forth judgment unto victory." What if you were sick, and were to send for a physician without whose ministrations you could never recover, but when he came there stood in the gateway a fierce dog that would not let him enter? What if, in going around your boundaries, he should find armed men here and there that turned him away? What if, peradventure working his way to your door, he should find the door fast, the shutters and windows tightly barred, and no entrance permitted? You might sicken and die needlessly, because, though he has the means of your recovery, you would not give him access.
God's Spirit comes to many and many a man who will not give it admission. Around stand men, with clubs like Hercules, defending the sentry-house of the soul. God's Spirit strives with many and many a man, saying," I have stood knocking at the door of your soul until my locks are wet with the morning dew; open that I may come in unto you, and abide with you."
Many of you have grieved the Spirit of God through many long years, but it yet comes to you bringing hope, purity, and reconciliation; offering you an entrance into this new life, without which you shall never see the kingdom of heaven. It came with precious, priceless blessings; you have turned away; you have soiled your heart so that it could not dwell there; you have refused it obedience and entrance. Again God's Spirit comes to you, to-day—I know it by the stillness of the house. I know it by your upturned faces and your close attention. There are many among you with whom God's Spirit is even now striving. Grieve not the Spirit of God by which yon are to be saved. At last, change—change —and say, Enter, blessed Spirit! enter, and transform my soul into the likeness of God!  Amen.