And all the people gave a great shout of praise to the LORD, because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid. But many of the older priests and Levites and family heads, who had seen the former temple, wept aloud when they saw the foundation of this temple being laid, while many others shouted for joy. No one could distinguish the sound of the shouts of joy from the sound of weeping
I am sitting reading David Sedaris today in the strange town of Wheaton, Illinois. I was, walking to a church, I thought I might drop in on and check out—you know, feel the place out, and as I say whenever I visit a church, “Walk in on people making out with Jesus,”—it’s just always odd. I often don’t know the language, songs or even dress code. I was looking like a homeless person while most of the people funneling to the church looked like they had just left a Land’s End photo shoot. So I asked a few people where I could find a local coffee shop—they said it was right next to the Starbuck, which for a visitor, wasn’t to helpful. I sat down and jumped into Me Talk Pretty One Day the collection of short stories by Sedaris. He describes, at one point, his experience of moving to Paris to learn French—the experience oddly reflected the goofy feeling I imagine many having when they talk to Christians. At one point the teacher used her French inflected English to tell David that she hated him, “Really, really.” Now, surely that is not what was being communicated on the surface as I walked along a group I felt on the outside of. But maybe, at the deepest levels this is the script—“you don’t fit, because your not wearing a collar, and so you probably don’t belong… we hate you.”
Now, I follow Jesus— I get the odd churchy thing, I grew up in Grand Rapids and was not Dutch or Reformed, and I even had blond hair. I know the odd impulse to just walk by the church and go to the coffee shop, another sacred center in culture—where you can get juice and bread too. At Starbucks they even have collars and serve you across an altar/counter. People are now finally getting to the coffee shop to connect with each other and talk openly about Jesus and read their bibles. It just all seems odd, I’m not trying to make sense of it—just wondering how a text like Ezra 3 has some voice in this context.
The temples go up, and people dress up and get into it—but the old sages know that the glitz of the new can’t replace the times when God was with them. God is not to be found it seems. Humans can’t seem to erect a steeple big enough to get God there, a left over impulse of Babel. God is with the old thing or still in exile it seems to those who have made the journey from temple to second-temple. The crying could not be distinguished. It seems that this impulse gets at the distance between coffee shop and a steeple. If God is there where is God not? And what does the worship of God look like—who’s your priest—might be the question? And when is God going to redeem the whole project of humans trying to glimpse God’s presence. Moses wants a peek even after the Exodus event and we are trying to build spaces and dress certain ways even after Jesus passed through and reclaimed this world as his own.
Seeing God, knowing God is a language we stumble into—often through pain and the times when we can’t imagine putting on a face to worship God. I’m convinced that it is a rugged language that doesn’t seek to resolve exile with a building project but sets itself in the rubble and asked the teary question, what now God, what now?
