high above earth his temple stands, all earthly temples
excelling.
Yet he whom heavens cannot contain chose in his people’s
hearts to reign,
built in our bodies his temple.
---Nicolai F.S. Grundtvig, 1837
When my kiddos were small, I was astounded at how awful
their jokes were. Anybody else? Show of hands? I mean, I was hilarious. I just kind of assumed they would at least be able to string together a
few one-liners. But, yeah. Nothing. In
the years since, two things have happened. One, thank heaven, they’ve gotten a lot funnier. And two, I’ve realized that successful
joke-telling is a higher order thinking skill—babies aren’t just born with the
perfect punch line (not just my babies, either—nobody’s kids are any good at jokes for at least a couple of
years!).
One of the simplest-sounding jokes, and the hardest to catch
the mechanics of, is the knock-knock joke. One of my kids’ favorite
‘knock-knock jokes’ went something like this: “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?”
“Hahahaha, got you! It’s nobody!” See? It
was hard to be me for a while there.
Just like in my kids’ non-joke, the ‘temple made with
hands’ of this week’s hymn text would have
its knock go unanswered. As majestic, as monumental, as awe-inspiring as some
of these temples are, God has not chosen to take any of them for a
dwelling-place. So expansive the heavens cannot contain God, the Creator of the
cosmos has chosen instead the hearts of God’s people for a place of abiding.
So, truly, God is in the world, in the hearts of the
beloved. God is in our busy-ness and in our leisure, in our serving and in our
growing. And, when two or three are met together, in temples made of hands, God
is in the temple, in the midst of the people as they worship.
Knock knock…
