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Hespeler, 18 July 2021 © Scott McAndless
2 Samuel 7:1-14, Psalm 89:20-37, Ephesians 2:11-22, Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

It just seemed obvious that that was what needed to happen. It was the necessary next step. For so much of their history, the people of Israel had lived an unsettled life. They had been displaced from here to there, first living as nomadic shepherds in the Levant, then taken away and made to live as slaves in a foreign land of Egypt, and then, even when they were released from Egypt, they ended up wandering around in the wilderness for forty years. So it only seemed right and sensible that, if they had a God who had chosen them and whom they had chosen, that such a God would not be tied down to one place either.

The Ark of the Covenant

And so the God that they encountered and came to know during those years was with them in many different locations. Being human, they still needed some way to focus their worship of such a God, and so, on God’s instructions, they created something. They created a box, a beautiful box covered in gold. And on the top of that box they built a seat.

Oh, it was a very fancy seat. It was constructed out of golden cherubim, unearthly winged creatures, but that did not change what it was. It was a chair, a throne, and they believed that their God would sit upon that throne. They couldn’t see God sitting there. God was invisible, and so insistent on not being seen that it was forbidden to make any image of God. But even if they couldn’t see it, that throne was the sign and symbol of the presence of their God with them.

But actually, the most important feature of the golden box, which, for some reason, we have come to call an ark, was on its sides. On its sides were fixed golden rings. And those rings were there so that you could pass long poles through them in order to carry God’s portable chair from place to place. Everything was designed for mobility. And whenever the box was put down in one place for a while, they would just pitch a tent to keep it in.

David Brings Stability

And that was how they knew their God. And that made sense to them. They were people without roots, so why did their God need any? And this continued to work for them even after they had entered into the Promised Land and began a more settled existence because, even then, leadership kept on shifting and changing and there always seemed to be some group or another coming along and invading or pillaging.

But when David established his kingdom and there was finally a period of relative peace and security, it seemed clear that it was time to make a change. So once David had established an administration and built a palace, the obvious next thing to do was to build a permanent residence for the God of Israel. In fact, this was so obvious that Nathan, the prophet and the man who never hesitated to question or challenge the king’s ideas, didn’t even have to think about it. He just said, “Go, do all that you have in mind; for the Lord is with you.”

Our Need for Buildings

And I think we can all understand that. When the Christian Church first emerged in the years following the death and resurrection of Jesus, it did not meet in what we would recognize as church buildings. They met in the homes of members, on factory floors and sometimes in open spaces on the edges of cities. The Letter to the Ephesians that we read from this morning was written to a group of churches that met in such places. They were an unsettled people – a people who lived mostly on the edges of society, so it kind of made sense that they would meet with their God in the many and varied places where they lived out their lives.

But something odd did happen to the church at some point. It didn’t happen everywhere all at once, but as the decades and then the centuries went by, in various parts of the empire, the church did find a certain measure of stability. There were local officials who tolerated them, even liked to have them around, and they offered to the church a certain amount of protection. And no sooner did that sense of being settled come, than churches began to construct buildings as special houses where they could experience the presence of God. They felt exactly the same impulse that David had felt, and, like Nathan, they never really even questioned whether it was the right thing to do.

Suddenly Churches Everywhere!

And then in 313 AD, Emperor Constantine finally made Christianity legal everywhere and there was no turning back. All of a sudden, such worship houses were being constructed everywhere and each one made more beautiful and elaborate than the next. And so it went from there with every church of every kind deciding that, if they wanted to encounter God in the midst of their settled life, what they needed was a special house built for that purpose. And that story culminates, for us, with the arrival of Scottish settlers in this place and their decision to build this beautiful house to encounter God right here in Hespeler.

But should we Just Assume?

But all that time, like I said, everyone just assumed, like David and Nathan, that it was the right thing to do. We enjoyed living a somewhat settled life in a house, so surely God would appreciate that as well. But David and Nathan forgot something, something that I think we often forget too. They forgot to ask what God actually wanted.

But God told Nathan anyways. The message came that very night. It doesn’t say whether Nathan was awake or asleep, but I’ve always imagined that it came in the form of a very troubling dream. But however it comes, God’s opinion is made very clear. “I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’”

God neither desires nor requires a house. This could not be made clearer. It doesn’t matter that the situation of God’s people has changed. It doesn’t matter how settled and secured they may feel, God does not require permanent housing in order to relate to those people wherever they may be.

So that is the first part of God’s answer. But I would note that it is not the whole answer. In fact, by the end of Nathan’s vision, we learned that God will allow for the construction of a temple. This is because God recognizes that, while God doesn’t need a temple, the people who are now living a more settled existence, just might.

Something Else Needed first

But there is something that must come first, and this is the stunning surprise that comes with Nathan’s vision. You see, David has just said that he wants to make a house for God, but God turns that around and says instead that God wants to make a house for David. “Moreover, the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom.” David is interested in making a house of cedar, but God requires a house made of people, that is to say a dynasty, first.

What does that tell me? That tells me that God is much more interested in building up people than architecture. That tells me that God is much more likely to place God’s glory in people than in a building made of wood or stone.

Picked up in the New Testament

And to show you that this is not just a one-time thing but rather an ongoing priority for God, let’s make a quick visit over to our New Testament reading this morning. The Letter to the Ephesians was actually written to a group of churches in a large region, but it was a region that had a long and highly esteemed religious tradition. The temples in and around Ephesus were world famous for their beauty and the glory they brought to their gods. And so I can well imagine that the churches that received this letter felt rather self-conscious about their lack of a beautiful building in which they could meet with their God.

At that point in Christian history, having a church building was really just a pipe dream, but they must still have talked about it and longed to be able to make a house for God. But, in this letter, God writes back through the apostle to say there is something much more important than that they build a house. “You are… members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God.”

It is lovely that you want to make me a house, God says to them, but first let me build you into a house. It is the same answer that David got through Nathan.

God is not into Buildings

So, what can we take from all of this? One thing seems quite clear. The God that we worship, the God that David knew and the God that we have come to know through Jesus, is not as much into churches and temples as we probably assumed that God was. God never much felt the need for such things, at least from God’s own point of view.

Nevertheless, God does give in to David’s suggestion of a temple, at least after a certain delay. There seems to be a recognition in this that, while God doesn’t need buildings, sometimes we do. It seems to be helpful for us as human beings to have this place where we can gather and where God seems more present, even though, of course, there is no place where God is any less present. There’s also no question that buildings do sometimes create possibilities for ministry and outreach that would not be possible without them. So, God does recognize that they are useful to us.

God would Rather Make us a House

But, while God may accept our need for such buildings, there is a higher priority from God’s point of view that we need to take into account. God would much rather make us a house than that we should make God a house. God is wildly enthusiastic about building us up as a community together, about creating us as a people who go out and have a positive impact on the community around us, about creating unity among us despite whatever differences we may have. God is much more interested in building that than in houses of cedar or of bricks and mortar. God is so insistent on that, that God would rather make us a house before we get around to making God a house.

Getting Christians Back in Buildings

There is a lot of focus right now on getting Christians back into church buildings. Of course, I can understand why that is. Many of us have been worshiping outside of them for a very long time now. I suspect there may even be some fear that if we don’t get them all back soon, they may never want to come back. So I do understand the desire, but I am not sure that God is as desperate to get us back into buildings as we might be.

God Wants to Make Us a House

God never actually asked us to make God a house, though God did understand our desire to do so. But wherever we may be worshiping over the next while, do not forget what God’s priority actually is. God wants to make us a house. And I do believe that God has been doing that even as we have been away from our buildings.

We have certainly learned some new ways to connect with each other in our worship during these times. I don’t know about you, for example, but I found that some of the ways we’ve been able to connect through prayer during this season have been extraordinarily nourishing to me. I love that I am able to pray for the things that are on your hearts as we share requests in the zoom chat. This is one of the ways in which God has been building us in unity, making us a house. I certainly hope we don’t lose what we have learned as we begin to transition to ways of worshiping that are more closely connected to a building.

We have also been able to connect with people who simply cannot come to a building, or at least cannot come so often. I pray that we don’t lose that way in which God has been building us into a house either.

God’s commitments are clear. They are commitments to us as a people. My prayer, especially over the next season, is that we don’t become so obsessed with making a house where we meet with God, that we lose sight of God’s commitment to us. God wants to make us a house.

Day 5, hope you enjoyed your week!

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We are open, still in a modified way, from 11:00 am - 2:00 pm.

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Hespeler, 11 July 2021 © Scott McAndless
Amos 7:7-15, Psalm 85:8-13, Ephesians 1:3-14, Mark 6:14-29 (Click to read)

I am sure that you all heard the story of the terrible tragedy that took place in Surfside Florida at the end of last month. A condominium tower in that city just collapsed in the middle of the night. So far it has been confirmed that 32 people died and the remaining missing, 124 in all, are now presumed dead. The whole event is just horrible and frightening to consider and, of course, we feel for all those who grieve and mourn.

But what was horrible was made somewhat worse when the news came out days later of an engineering report that was made on the condo tower and brought before the management board in November of 2018. This report noted that there had been major structural damage in the building that had been caused by a leaky pool over top of a parking garage. Nevertheless, a building inspector came in and told the board meeting that he had reviewed the engineering report and assured everyone that the building was in good shape.

Now, I realize that all of those events that I just referred to are contested and are being litigated. I’m hardly in a position to say for sure who is actually to blame. But it does seem to me that, if any of that is true, it points to serious problems, and I’m not just talking about the problems with one particular building. There seem to be some significant problems with how these kinds of things work in general.

Amos and the Plumb Line

My mind turned to those recent events when I first read our passage from the Book of Amos as I prepared for this week’s service. Amos starts out talking about an odd vision that he had. “The Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb-line, with a plumb-line in his hand. And the Lord said to me, ‘Amos, what do you see?’ And I said, ‘A plumb-line.’”

This is actually how a lot of Amos’ prophetic oracles go. He starts out by saying that God showed him a pretty ordinary and everyday thing – a small swarm of locusts, a basket of fruit – and then tells us that God had a message to bring through that ordinary thing. I suspect that this may be Amos’ way of telling us that he would often just meditate on ordinary objects until he was struck by some connection to some of the issues of the day. That was how he discovered that God had a message for him, something that he needed to say to the people.

Why a Plumb Line?

But I find it interesting that this oracle begins with Amos seeing a plumb line. A plumb line is, of course, one of the most ancient of all engineering tools. It is the simplest thing in the world. It is just a weight tied to the end of a string. But since it has this wonderful ability to always create a perfectly straight line that is perpendicular to the surface of the earth, it has so many uses in building.

Before the invention of laser levels or even of bubble levels, plumb lines were an absolutely essential tool for building walls and houses that would actually remain standing. And, of course, if they were useful for building, then they were also useful for checking on any ongoing stability and security of a structure. If you held a plumb line up against the wall that was built to be plumb and you discovered that the string and the wall no longer followed the same line, well, that was a pretty good indication that that structure might not remain standing too much longer.

What the Vision Meant

And that is what Amos saw in his vision. He saw God holding a plumb line up against a wall that was no longer plumb. To put it in modern terms, you might say that Amos saw the 2018 engineering report on Champlain Towers South Condo in Surfside Florida and he saw God’s name signed at the bottom.

And Amos understood what that vision meant. He was smart enough to see that the structure in question was not a particular wall or house, it was the structure of the entire Kingdom of Israel. And that put him in a very difficult position.

Imagine that you are that engineer who made that report on the building in Florida. You know what you have discovered in your study, and you know the very real danger for the people who live in that building. Clearly you have a moral and ethical duty to tell people what you have seen.

What if People won’t Listen?

But what do you do when you have very powerful and connected people who, as seems to be the case in that story, have a vested interest in making your report go away? Who don’t want, for example, to spend millions of dollars to make the necessary repairs. What if they are people who can cause problems for you or your family, who can disrupt your career or who can just make your report disappear on a whim? What do you do then?

You might reply, and rightly so, that that does not change your ethical duty, but there is no denying that it certainly makes your next steps a whole lot more difficult and complicated.

The Cost of Speaking Up

Well, when Amos saw the structural problems that were there in the Kingdom of Israel, problems that were leading it towards a terrible disaster, he quickly decided that he knew what his duty was. He spoke up loudly and often. He went to the City of Bethel, one of the key worship centres for the entire kingdom. There Amos spent his days preaching at all of the people who came to sacrifice at the sanctuary and warning them that the condominium was about to collapse. And, yes, Amos only did this at enormous cost. In particular, Amaziah, one of the most powerful officials in the entire kingdom threatened him saying, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”

And there is something kind of typical in Amaziah’s threat. Did you notice the assumptions that he makes about Amos? He assumes that he is a seer and says that he is just hanging around the sanctuary at Bethel in order to earn his bread. He is accusing him of being little more than a fortune teller who is making money selling prophecies about people’s futures to those who come to worship there.

This is very telling. Those people who use whatever power or influence they have in order to exploit people and enrich themselves often just assume that that is what everyone else is doing as well. The only reason Amaziah can imagine for why Amos is doing what he’s doing and causing such disruption is because he must have some angle, some way in which Amos is enriching himself. It would never occur to somebody like Amaziah that Amos might be doing what he is doing because he feels dutybound to try and save the whole nation from itself.

Amos’ Reply

And that is what makes Amos’ reply so important. “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son,” he says. He is saying that he is not a professional, not someone who does this for a living. “But I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycomore trees, and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’”

Wow, what a statement. He is saying that he does not need all of this aggravation. He is certainly not interested in making any money by it. He could be living very comfortably, thank you very much, looking after his herds and dressing the odd sycamore tree. But something happened. He saw the plumb line. He saw that the structure was in bad shape and a danger to the people. He spoke up because he knew that the people needed to know. That is what he means when he says, “the Lord took me.”

And I believe that what Amos says there has many applications to the challenges of living in the world today. Back then, it was the expectation that only certain people, prophets and the sons of prophets, were allowed to speak up on national issues – and it is very clear from what Amaziah says that they were expected to tow the party line and support whatever the king wanted. But Amos says something very different. He says that those who have seen the plumb line, who see how the structures are out of alignment, simply have the duty, given by God, to speak up. That is a challenge for all of us.

Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce

It makes me think of a story that I heard recently. In 1904, Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce was named as the chief medical officer for what was called then the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs. Bryce was not an indigenous person; he was just a doctor with a great deal of experience and many honours in the area of public health.

One of the first jobs that he was given was to investigate an issue that had that had arisen in the country’s Indian residential schools. Apparently, it seemed that a lot of the children who were being placed in these schools were dying. We are talking of a death rate among students that averaged at that time about 50%. Yes, you heard that right. About half of the children being sent to those schools were not surviving. In some schools, the death rate was as high as 69%.

So, Bryce went to work to try and get to the bottom of this mystery. He came back a few years later with a well researched report in which he laid the blame for the unconscionable death toll of the residential schools primarily on the federal government for its failure to enforce even a minimal level of health standards in the schools. Bryce had held a plumb line up against the entire system and revealed that the wall was completely off-kilter. And he apparently thought that he had finished his work. He had identified the problem and fully documented it. Now that the government knew what the problem was, surely they would just fix it.

Duncan Campbell Scott

But any guesses what happened when Bryce submitted his report? He was confronted by his own Amaziah in the form of Duncan Campbell Scott, the head of Indian Affairs, a man who declared that it was his job to “get rid of the Indian problem,” and was apparently quite comfortable with doing that by killing about half of the indigenous children who came into the government’s care. When Scott saw the report and conclusions that Bryce had come to, he quickly sprang into action. He dismissed the report and immediately cut all of Bryce’s funding. From there, Scott and the government set about destroying Dr. Bryce’s career, preventing him from speaking at conferences and eventually pushing him out of the public service altogether.

Bryce’s Response

But what was Bryce to do? This had become a political hot potato and he was no politician nor a politician’s son. He was just a doctor and a man of faith (a Presbyterian, in fact) and he had seen the plumb line. He knew that he could not remain silent. When all political action was closed off to him, he chose to speak in a different way. He wrote a book, “The Story of a National Crime: An Appeal for Justice to the Indians of Canada.” He got it published and began distributing it himself, particularly handing out many copies of the book throughout Ottawa. He knew what he had seen, and he was committed to get the word out about what he had seen no matter what the cost to himself.

That – that kind of courage and commitment to speaking the truth – is, I believe, what our passage in the Book of Amos this morning is about. I think Amos makes it clear that prophets – true prophets of the – are not special people with unique gifts or insights. They are ordinary people – herders, sycomore tree dressers, doctors and engineers. They are any one of us, whatever we may do, but they are people who have seen the plumb line and know the danger that the system is in. They are, above all, people who have the courage to speak up and say what they have seen. That, my friends, can and should be any one of us.