One of the things that attracted me to Grace Church was the beauty of the building. It is both an enormous resource and an enormous challenge. It stands as a beacon on Capitol Square, the legacy of generations of those who have gone before us. The energy and money they expended to build it, beautify it, and preserve it over the decades is a legacy to us. As a landmark, it is immediately recognizable to everyone who works, lives, or visits downtown. Throughout the community and beyond, saying that I am involved at Grace is a way of giving those to whom I am speaking an immediate context within which to place me. That recognizability comes with a price, of course, but unlike many churches that have a lower profile in the community, people know Grace.

Of course, the building that surrounds us now often seems more like a burden than a resource. Some of us spend much of our time worrying about its upkeep and maintenance. This week alone, we had roofers working here; we replaced a boiler, and there was a sewage backup. All of that requires large sums of money and equally important, a great deal of energy, time, and expertise. The building often seems to come between us and our desire to do God’s work in the world.

Today’s reading from I Kings is an excerpt from one of the high points, perhaps the high point, of Solomon’s reign. It is part of the prayer he offered during the dedication of the Temple. As you probably recall, David wanted to build a temple in Jerusalem, but an oracle from God discouraged him and it was left to his son. The preceding chapters of this morning’s reading detail the design and construction of the temple, which is described in great detail as a beautiful and expensive building. Solomon brought builders from Lebanon, outside his realm, to do the construction, because no one in his kingdom had the expertise.

The Jerusalem temple is described by the authors as magnificent, full of gold and other precious metals, built of cedar and ivory. While most scholars see in the description provided in I Kings an edifice quite similar to temples of Israel’s neighbors discovered by archaeologists, there is one significant difference. Solomon’s temple did not contain an image of the deity. Instead, as the prayer we heard states, “Even heaven and the highest earth cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built.”

The Psalm expands on the theme of the temple. It is a pilgrimage psalm, sung by worshipers as they make their way to the temple for a festival. The psalm describes the temple as a place of sanctuary for all of creation and halfway through moves from presence the temple as God’s dwelling place, to praising God. I cannot hear those first two verses without thinking of Brahms’ setting of them in the German Requiem.

There are two deep tensions in biblical tradition about the temple. One is whether it is an adequate place to worship God, whether it is adequate to conceive of it as God’s dwelling place. The prayer of Solomon makes clear that the temple does not contain God, but rather that it symbolizes God’s presence on earth. One particularly powerful image of this absence of God in the temple is Isaiah’s famous vision found in Isaiah 6. The prophet writes, I saw the Lord, lofty and uplifted, the hem of his garment filled the temple.”  In this case God’s size dwarfs the magnificence and size of the temple.

God transcends the temple in another way, and this too is suggested in Solomon’s prayer. Solomon says that “when a foreigner comes and prays toward this house, then hear in heaven your dwelling place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you.” That trend toward universalism is most clear in the visions of exilic and post-exilic Judaism; as Isaiah 65 says, “My house shall be a house of prayer for all people.”

In the coming months, I will be working with the staff, lay leadership, and the whole congregation of Grace Church to begin thinking systematically about what it means to be the Body of Christ in this particular place, here in Grace Church on Capitol Square. I know that many of you have ideas about that. I know that many of you have come to Grace because of the building, because of its location and everything that it offers. But that’s not enough. We need to articulate a vision for the future, a vision of what it means to be Grace in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

The old models of being church don’t work any more. We have lost what I like to call the “given-ness” of religion. For most people, a spiritual journey, or a religious life, call it what you will, for most people, that’s an add-on, something one does in one’s spare time. For many people it’s a quest that can take place in a lot of different ways and a lot of different venues and churches are not necessarily the most obvious or natural.

But we are stuck. We have this building, this place, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t abandon it; we probably wouldn’t be allowed to, either by the city or by the diocese. The building limits us—we can’t offer the kind of worship experience that people get at mega-churches, what I call big-box churches. We don’t have the av system, we don’t have stadium seating, where would we put the screens or the praise band?

My house will be a house of prayer for all people. What will it mean for Grace to accept the challenge presented us by the future? We have been through a great deal as a congregation, we have faced considerable challenges, some of them unlike anything any other parish in the Episcopal Church has faced. Yet we have survived them. Thanks to hard work, prayer, and wise leadership by our vestry and Interim Rector, we have been given an opportunity to imagine and bring into being a vision for the future.

As I said, you will be hearing a great deal about this in the coming months. Right now, I am focused on several things. First, among the issues unresolved during the interim period was the full integration of the 12:00 congregation into the life, ministry, and structure of Grace Church. Corrie and I attended that service last week, even though neither of us have any facility in Spanish. What impressed most were the authenticity and vitality of the worship, and the deep faith and love of God expressed by those participating. I will be working hard with the leadership of that group, with staff and lay leadership to develop stronger bonds among us and to reach out into the wider community.

The second area of mission on which I am focused is Grace’s role in the community. The building is an enormous resource. Yes, it’s a burden, but it is also our greatest asset. How can we make our building more inviting, accessible, and appealing to our neighbors? How can we use it to reach others? I will give a single example. I think it’s a disgrace that more people are not able to enjoy the beauty of this space, of this sanctuary on a daily basis. We use it on Sunday morning, and at Wednesday noon, but the rest of the time it is locked up. How might we go about beginning to make this place a “house of prayer” for all those who walk by?

There is deep yearning in our culture for authenticity, for making spiritual connections. One way to do that is through the beauty of our space. But another way is to find ways of being accessible to those who are unlikely to attend church on Sunday morning. Are there ways of developing worship offerings that might attract passers-by on Friday or Saturday nights, for example?

Our ancestors built this building. They had a vision for a church on the square that would be a beacon to the community. Over the centuries we have taken care of that responsibility, sometimes more completely than at other times. Over the decades, people have put hard work into the preservation of this place, and donated considerable amounts of money to see to its survival.

In the gospel, we have finally come to the end of Jesus’ lengthy discourse on bread. It ends on a surprising note, with Jesus’ teaching that he is the bread of life and that whoever eats this bread will live forever being rejected not only by his opponents but also by some of his disciples. These words remind us that following Jesus is not necessarily an easy thing, a lesson we will hear repeatedly in the coming weeks as we return to the gospel of Mark. But like Peter, we need to be ready to confess that Jesus has the words of eternal life, that his message makes a difference. As we imagine together the future of Grace Church, our future in this community, let us always keep in mind that our most important task is to offer those words of life to the world.