In building the temple, only blocks dressed at the quarry were used, and no hammer, chisel or any other iron tool was heard at the temple site while it was being built. – 1 Kings 6:7

Today’s Scripture Reading (May 4, 2013): 1 Kings 6

When I was a child the sanctuary of the church was always a hushed place. I remember coming into the sanctuary just before the church service with the sound of the solemn chording of the organ playing softly in the background. The church of my youth had been a fairly large place – at least for a child – and even when I had the opportunity to be in the room alone it still seemed like a hushed place – it was like the noises just evaporated into the air and disappeared.

But those days are gone. Now to enter a sanctuary of worship is to enter into a place of activity. It is a place of laughter and children playing, all of the noises that had been previously absent from the place of worship. And it is a source of anxiety that is felt in the modern church between those who still remember the reverence of days gone by and those who feel the need of the activity of the modern church. And our reality is that for the younger members of our congregations entering the church now, the hushed reverence of the sanctuary in the past is simply boring – and it seems to have become an expectation that belongs lost in the history of the church.

So the question that is raised is how do we understand passages like this one in the modern church? The note found here in this passage is that all of the noise, even in the time of the building of the temple, was minimized. The noisy work of cutting and shaping the stone was all done away from the temple site, so that all that was needed to accomplish at the temple area was the work of the placing of the stone.

But maybe one of the significant effects of limiting the noise at the temple site was a reduction in the stress at the site. The temple, even in the time of its construction and now in both the church and the synagogue in the temple’s absence, was never intended to be a place of stress and conflict.

The contemporary church may be noisier than its predecessor, but that model should still be the reality. Conflict always removes our focus away from the things of God – and it leads us away from any possible path to peace. The importance of our holy buildings is to remind us that there is something at work in this world that is beyond us and above us, a reality that it is possible for us to be involved in and with – but conflict steals away that reality and leaves us in a place of self filled importance and – despair.         

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 1 Kings 7