(1 Kings 8)

There are a few things in the verses we just read that I’d like you to be aware of as we move through this chapter.  One is timing, and I want to explain this by borrowing a distinction from the Greek of the New Testament between two kinds of time.  One is chronos, which means time in the quantitative sense—an hour, a week, a day, how old I am, how long I’m going to preach, and so on.  The other is kairos, which is time in the qualitative sense:  the opportune time, the time God has appointed for a given purpose.

Chronos time is absent from this passage—we aren’t told how much time has passed since the structure of the temple was finished in 1 Kings 6—and that’s striking.  The author or authors of the books of Samuel and Kings structured them deliberately with careful attention to detail, including how much time has passed . . . but not here.  I think it’s safe to say the omission is deliberate; we’re meant to notice it and ask why.  It makes me wonder if Solomon lost track of finishing the temple interior because he was so busy building his own house.  I can’t say for sure, but put a pin in this and we’ll come back to it.

While chronos time is absent from this chapter, kairos time is highlighted.  For context, the covenant God made with Israel through Moses at Mt. Sinai was established at the time of Pentecost, which is a firstfruits festival—a feast to thank God that the work of plowing and planting is just beginning to yield a return.  The dedication of the temple, 1 Kings tells us, took place during the Feast of Booths—which is to say, Harvest.

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(2 Samuel 6)

Our main text this morning is a sequel—and not the blockbuster kind, but the kind that comes out a decade or two later because the first one wasn’t all that popular.  In this case, we’re going back to 1 Samuel 4-6 to complete what some scholars refer to as the Ark Narrative.  If you were here at the beginning of June, you remember that in 1 Samuel 3 God gave Samuel a word of bleak judgment for his mentor Eli.  In chapter 4, that judgment hits like a sledgehammer—and it happens because Eli and his sons have not discipled the elders of Israel well.

Israel is going into battle against the Philistines, because of course they are, and the leaders of the nation decide to bring the ark of God (which is referred to elsewhere in scripture as the ark of the covenant) from the sanctuary at Shiloh to the battlefield.  This is classic magical thinking, which is to say it’s pagan thinking:  the ark is a divine object which has powers which they can use to help them win.  It’s terrible theology, and it shows a lack of respect for—or even awareness of—God’s holiness.  They are treating God as someone they can use to accomplish their own purposes.  The result is utter disaster:  the army of Israel is routed, the sons of Eli are killed . . . and the ark is taken by the Philistines.  When Eli hears, he falls backward, breaks his neck, and dies.  His pregnant daughter-in-law hears the news, goes into labor early, and dies in childbirth; she lives just long enough to name her son Ichabod—i-kavod, which means “no glory”—saying, “The glory has departed from Israel.”

Now, the capture of the ark is a loss for Israel, but no win for the Philistines, for a similar reason.  Where the Israelites’ pagan thinking led to a lack of respect for God’s holiness, that of the Philistines produces a lack of respect for his power.  They have captured the sacred thing of Israel’s god; by their understanding, that must mean their victory on earth was the result of a victory in heaven by their gods over Israel’s god.  The thing to do with the ark, then, is to represent and honor that victory in heaven by taking it into one of their temples and setting it before the image of the god.  So they do, taking the ark to Ashdod (one of their five main cities) and placing it in the temple of Dagon.

Again, the result of pagan thinking is disaster.  The next morning, the Philistines find the statue of Dagon flat on its face before the ark.  They set the statue back on its feet—and then the next morning, they find the statue has fallen on its face again before the ark, except this time the head and hands have broken off and are lying in the doorway.  What’s more, the Philistines are hit by bubonic plague and overrun by rats, first in Ashdod and then everywhere else they try moving the ark, until the people beg their rulers to send the ark back to Israel before they all die.

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(1 John 5:1-6)

[“Abou Ben Adhem,” by Leigh Hunt]

I first encountered that poem when I was younger than Iain is now, I think, and it’s stayed with me ever since—not because it’s poetically great, but because it’s a fascinating scene.  I could easily start analyzing it as I would an Old Testament narrative—if the angel was there, God must have sent the angel, and obviously God knew what would happen, so . . . —and I’d be off to the races.  That would be piling far too much weight on it, of course, but the poem is making a theological point:  we can only love other people because of the love of God, and so to the extent that we do love others, it’s a sign of the love of God at work in our hearts.

Which is true, and one of those truths which sounds very noble and high-minded, especially if one wants—as it seems Leigh Hunt, who wrote “Abou Ben Adhem,” did—to argue the position that all religions are fundamentally the same, all lead to God, etc.  At first blush, it seems freeing; you don’t have to worry about anything specific the Bible teaches, or any other religion, because as long as you love other people, you’re good.  But here’s the kicker:  that’s a move away from a divinely-revealed faith toward human religion, and as I’ve noted recently, that means legalism.  What does it mean to love other people, and how do we know if we’re doing it right, or if we’re doing it enough?  All well and good if you have an angel show up in your bedroom to tell you, but what about the rest of us?

I get teased a little for my insistence that we have to define our terms—which makes me smile, because it makes me feel seen—but no word ever actually goes undefined; it’s just that if we don’t get the definitions out into the open at the beginning, we don’t know what definitions everyone is using or who’s determining them, and so we’re playing by someone else’s rules without knowing it.  That’s especially true when we’re using a big, loaded word like “love.”  “All you need is love” sounds great when you have John, Paul, and George on guitar with Ringo on the drums, but what happens when you get down to brass tacks?

Well, what happens is what always happens:  the law of love yields to the love of law, and the people who get to decide what it means to be loving make all the rules and judge you for breaking them.  Read more→

(1 John 2:28-3:10)

As you may know, we’re going to be spending the next several months reflecting on the concept of integrity in light of the Scriptures, and vice versa—a concept which eludes easy definition.  We don’t want to abandon the effort, like Justice Potter Stewart, and say, “OK, I can’t completely define it, but I know it when I see it”; but moving from “I know it when I see it” to being able to articulate what exactly it is that we know is a challenge because integrity can’t be defined with a checklist.  As Emily highlighted last week, it is an attribute of God, and like all such, it is too large a thing for us to pin down and dissect.  We have to watch it fly, so to speak, to understand it.

Fortunately, for those of us who were here before the service last week for the Opening, Frank Benyousky gave us a little help when he started a parallel conversation about the nature of truth.  Like integrity, truth is an attribute of God, and thus when we ask, “What is truth?” we are diving into a sea of which we will never see the bottom in this life; but for all that, I believe there is an answer that can guide us in that dive.  It dates back over 2300 years to the Greek philosopher Aristotle:  if I say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, I speak the truth.  If I say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, I do not speak the truth.

It’s a simple enough definition, and can play out just that simply with regard to matters of scientific or historical fact; but of course, when you start dealing with the human heart, figuring out “what is” gets much, much harder.  All the same, if we understand that each person is an objective reality—each of you exists, and each of you are who you are, whether I perceive and understand you accurately or not—and ultimately God are an objective reality who determine himselves who he are, not a concept we can define however it suits us, then I think there’s a principle here we can use.  If we can say truth is alignment with what is real, I believe we can understand integrity in the same way.

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