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🎙️ 1 Kings 8 - People who pray for buildings
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🎙️ 1 Kings 8 - People who pray for buildings

The royal imagination and its shadow

[With apologies, the notes below are not tidy]


[1] What happened?

  • Kings as a tragic mixed bag, how to read the old testament -

  • ominous, inevitable - Kings context - sequence of kings, leading to Solomon

  • David/Abigail/Nabal - the Old Testament has so much to teach us about who God is and what the world is like. And, it's not so much that the text is difficult or opaque, which it sometimes is, but that there is particular challenge, even with exemplary characters, even with functional typologies of Christ who foreshadow him, in presuming to learn and apply precise wisdom principles from flawed characters cast within a narrative which ends badly.

  • The Old Testament is not a prequel spinoff, it is not just backstory, an accessory appendix to your Gideons bible. It's not to be read wistfully as if David&Abigail were a pulp romance. It's not to be read superstitiously or awkwardly – neither that it contains secret codes, nor that it contains specially redactable embarrassment. And, mostly as a note to myself, the Old Testament is not intellectually recreational reading to be engaged with a detached morbid fascination.

  • Read it like it is the guts of the universe, the interpretative key to my own pathologies and my precarious place in the cosmos and the patterns which recur. The New Testament is the answer to a question the Old Testament is asking, and without the Old Testament, you lack the vocabulary to fully ask it.

  • This development of the story of a nation, from abrahamic roots, then Mosaic exodus and wilderness, into a land and constitution around the poet-king David

  • David has unified tribes - expecting messianic king from his line, but none live up to that

  • David couldn’t build vs Solomon - given ‘rest’

  • Temple - extravagant, move to a more permanent home from it’s boy scout tabernacle form,

  • Olympic Opening ceremony, festival of booths, grand hurrah. Competitive multiplication.


[2] What is interesting / questions arising

[2.1] Solomon as complicated character

  • How to imitate/critique, how to take at face value?

This ambivalence about King-forms of leadership

  • On the one hand Israel’s demand for a King seems to have come from sinful motives - 1Sm8 - ‘like all the other nations’ - wrong motive, wrong time

  • On the other hand God speaks of kingship in promises to the Patriarchs, and in various ways (Kings will come from you - Gen 17:6 to Abraham; Gen 35:11) even that .

  • 2nd Longest Prayer -

    • Nehemiah 9 (1213wds);

    • 1 Kings 8 (1079wds),

    • John 17 - Jesus High Priestly (636wds)

I was reminded..

  • Prophet/priest/king

    • Priestly - cares and mediates, what has been with what has become

    • King - declares what is, ordering the present responsible authority to administrate

    • Prophetic - see what is critically, and calls for what could be

These each have a shadow form - that doesn’t even need to be tyrannical.

  • Gifted Kings presiding over administrative over-reach and deranged state-building

  • Gifted priests smothering with a toxic empathy the uncritical enablement of a corrupt status quo

  • Gifted Prophets casting mere critiques, armchair socialists with an adolescent angst

These actions have a bivalence - their meaning/motive always being mixed with their partial grasp of god, their fallen interpretation and execution, and their perpetual potential redemption.

**Brueggeman on Solomonic kingship

  • Prophetic imagination vs the Royal Imagination


[2.2] Temple as complicated object

  • Physical/Brand/face/representation - but not but not superstitious. The temple is this key vehicle for the narrative of the OT, but also, God is not confined by it and will survive its destruction.

  • 27 “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built! 28 Yet have regard to the prayer of your servant and to his plea,

  • ‘My name shall be there,’

  • Expense/worship/ornament - mixed motives, as with all architecture - normatively of abundance. Speaking as someone inclined to a scarcity mindset (sacrifices overflow to middle court, exceeding the altar. Life should be characterised such ~~ spilt perfume

  • Solomon's intensity - Compare with David's temple x10 lampstands, the baptism basin laver, becomes this 15000 gallon metal bath dubbed the ‘sea’ - Olympic opening ceremony - Grandiosity -

  • Temple as garden of eden, god’s presence - some of this is fore-shadowing

    • “Secondary architecture ... is imported and propagandistic ... superimposed by imperial requirements ... pseudo-transcendentalist ... it is a merely imaginary aesthesis ... that exists in vacuo ... its hypothesised population, undifferentiated or stereotyped.” and, “Primary architecture ... is rooted in landscape and vernacular traditions. It exists in perpetuity ... it is reconciled to the accidents of its own material, not offering to ‘defy’ the fallen nature of the world and its inhabitants.”

  • Nodal/placed - infinite god in finite objects - how to do that without contradiction - recurring refrain - this matryoshka doll of “..and pray to you toward their land, which you gave to their fathers, the city that you have chosen, and the house that I have built for your name..”

  • Worship/memory/tragedy - Like there is a sort of innate megalomania about building like this

  • When exile.. “If they sin against you—jfor there is no one who does not sin—and you are angry with them and give them to an enemy, so that they are carried away captive kto the land of the enemy, far off or near, 47 yet lif they turn their heart in the land to which they have been carried captive, and repent and plead with you in the land of their captors,

    • “For somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.” Austerlitz WG Sebald (https://phil-blogs.blogspot.com/2009/09/austerlitz-by-wg-sebald.html)


[2.3] Benediction as a complicated practice

- Fidelity of God by contrast with other gods

- Praying the promises

- deference to David, a discretion? - Solomon's discretion re fathers. In your heart to do. David man of war

- Prophecy of future trials

- Longest prayer


[3] What are we?

  • Good times, weak people - cain/Abel - Characters Temperament and sequence - liberation theology

  • Artefacts and building

  • Prayer and performance

  • Archetype of kings -


[4] What are good questions for us

  • We are the temple, yous are the temple - housing of the Holy Spirit, Christ in you, The aroma of life to life, Incarnation, being in the world

- Architecturally or no, there is a character to God which we are the built form of,

  • We have a Place / Nodality - in London, in oval, the peculiar fixation of God’s willingness to use the miniature, the foolish things, the non-global, non-elite

No unsacred places? New covenant. Does not negate this enchantment but extends it. Does not mean that everywhere is blessed but that anywhere can be

  • We are called to Action - They were a mixed bag, so do-nothing - vs my own Precautionary approach - there is a lion in the street pr26v13, you are a harsh mt25v24 - vs the gung-ho, faith in faith, doing the doing of building the building

https://medium.com/@philpawlettjackson/the-product-that-church-housing-could-be-%EF%B8%8F-435f9f559c13

[4.1] To then pray this blessing over us-as-Temple?

Related generally to the travails of the Israel in the coming years, and maybe specifically - battles/famines and ultimately exile. But also, as 7 categories of administrative dilemma, pertaining to the nature of having a symbolic node giving orientation to a land.

  1. Sins against neighbour - give justice - condemn guilty / indicate righteous (wisdom, cities of refuge joshua 20, beacon of just/reconciliation 1Cor6 - where paul is remonstrating the church for not being able to resole disputes)

  2. Defeated in battle - bring them back to land

  3. Drought - forgive sins, grant rain - heal the land

  4. Famine / siege - forgive, restore to land - heal the land

    https://churchforests.org/

  5. Foreigner prays in your name - answer so all peoples know you - missional - proactive welcome

  6. Go out to battle - maintain their cause - proactive

  7. Sin against you, taken into captivity - maintain, forgive, grant compassion - terminal, but still hopeful. Durable even in worst case.

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