In September 1877 at a meeting held under the flag of truce at Fort Robinson Nebraska, a foot soldier unexpectedly and mercilessly rammed a bayonet into the back of one of the greatest Indian chiefs to ever live on the vast American plains. Crazy Horse, the great leader of the Sioux died from his fatal wound. A few years after his death, Black Elk, a medicine man, told an interviewer Crazy Horse had spoken to him in a dream predicting, “I will return to you in stone.” Whatever you think of Black Elk’s prediction, Crazy Horse is returning by being carved out of a large granite mountain in South Dakota, just a few miles from Mount Rushmore.

Seventy years ago the federal government finished its silent tribute to four of our greatest Presidents:  Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. The tribute was meant to honor them and to symbolize the spirit that made America great. Carved out of the face of a mountain in bas-relief, each of them pointed outwardly as if they were sentinels standing shoulder to shoulder. At Mount Rushmore’s dedication, creator and master carver John Borglum said, “Hence, let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the works of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were. Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and the rain alone shall wear them away.”

In the fall of the same year Mt. Rushmore was finished, Chief Henry Standing Bear wrote an appeal to a Connecticut sculptor who had worked alongside Borglum. In his letter he wrote, “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, also.” With that, those chiefs started a letter writing campaign that resulted in them meeting the sculptor face-to-face to explore another mountain carving project. Thus, more than six decades ago and nearly ten million tons of rock later, Korczak Ziolkowski launched what became his life’s work. There is nothing like it in the world … if the sculpture is finished, it will be the world’s largest mountain carving. Crazy Horse sitting astride his stallion is almost mind-boggling as all four Presidents on Mount Rushmore could fit in the 9-story face of Crazy Horse. His outstretched arm will be longer than a football field and his finger, pointing over the Black Hills at the end of that arm will be larger than a city bus. The horse’s nostril alone will be large enough to hold a 5-room house.

Ziolkowski, a Polish immigrant and self-taught sculptor, gave 35 years to this project before his death – now his family (his wife Ruth and ten children) continue the work and there is no active timeline projection for its completion. What kind of vision inspired a man to give his whole life to this project? It’s been twenty years now since Korczak died and the work continues depending completely upon non-governmental donations.

I thought of Korczak as I thought about Solomon standing on the portal of his grand monument to God on the morning they dedicated the Temple. It was the vision of his father David that inspired Solomon to complete the Temple as a permanent house where God would reside.

History tells us that for magnificence, splendor and cost, Solomon’s Temple has never been equaled. It occupied three quarters of a square mile, and cost over a billion dollars in today’s currency, and yet, not one piece of it survives to this day. Most archaeologists agree that most of it was plundered before it was destroyed in 587 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar. After their return from exile, the beleaguered Israelites began the slow work of rebuilding, but the second Temple never achieved the grandeur of Solomon’s Temple. Surely all those present on the day of dedication could feel it in the air as Solomon uttered the prayer of dedication. All of them must have felt the communal sense of pride in their great achievement sensing they had been a part of some collective greatness in the unified efforts expended for the house of God.

Interestingly though, the description of the dedication of Solomon’s Temple in I Kings is a part of the larger group of scriptures that have come to be known as the collective writings of a group of historians commissioned to gather the history of their people while they were still huddled in exile. That’s not hard for us to imagine:  The severity of the exile bringing the need for a consistent history made all too clear because of what they had lost and how they had suffered. Maybe that gives us this history lesson meaning when we understand that the writer’s first audience was the Jews in Babylonian exile needing a fresh reminder of who they were. The words of this prayer and Solomon’s sermon preached on that auspicious day could be remembered in exile by a people who had lost their land, their holy city, and had seen their precious memories of the throne of God go down in ashes and utter destruction. They needed to remember they were the people of God and that they had a wonderful life in their own land until they had given themselves to outside deities and had let the uniqueness of being God’s children make them lazy and spoiled. Maybe this part of their history had added meaning knowing they were remembering this important day like a prisoner remembers his or her best day in freedom.

That’s our task today … to remember that God lives among us and has an untouchable place of reverence. Obviously we don’t attach the same meanings and holy reverence to our Sanctuary that the Jews did to Solomon’s Temple, but symbolically we still understand this is the place where God meets with the gathered believers who are here to worship. Gathered in this room where so many times the presence of God has been sensed, we need to remember God is truly with us and among us as the people of God. Maybe it’s important to remember God is with us not because of this place, but because of these people. For you see, we are the church … the church is not this building. It’s one of our earliest lessons as people of faith:  That this building is just the place where we meet because God lives in each one of us … inside our hearts and souls. But at the same time we claim these buildings to are our church buildings, it’s hard not to recognize it’s still more than just a place.

We love this place & many of you have spent a major part of your lifetime worshiping here while others of you are just getting acquainted here. We love it enough to seek to renew it. But the reality is that God has been here because we have been here. God lives among us when we’re here but then goes out with every one of us to all the places we go each week.

This is the house of God simply and completely because we recognize God is in us make our gathering holy and full of awe.

When I started writing Mid-Week Thoughts for Life & Faith columns 4 years ago, my intent was to push the staid boundaries separating piety from lived experience and the messiness of life. I’ve been at Holmeswood long enough and you’ve patiently listened to me teach and preach and have read enough of what I’ve written to know I’m interested in the crossroads of faith and life where the important issues, no matter how controversial they may be, can be considered from the basic teachings of the rich heritage of our faith.

I believe in our hearts people of faith are pragmatic insisting that faith must make sense. But I also believe we should temper our pragmatism with principled belief that recognizes the idea of the Kingdom of God has direct meaning when one considers the radical call to faith that Jesus of Nazareth lived and called each of us to follow. Such thinking may give us the tools to reflect upon the Christian response to any of a wide-ranging array of public issues … hunger, poverty, sexual attitudes & behavior, concerns for how public policy shares a fundamental commitment to the human condition utilizing the principles of our democracy, education, public taxation/public spending, etc & etc … but the field of Christian ethics is not only concerned with public issues because it includes the whole range of personal issues too. That’s for another day, however as this discussion will center on a single, very public, issue.

What our Christian heritage has not done well at in my estimation, is teach us how to think theologically about the important issues of our time. What most have received is an approach to piety that delicately separates the issues “thou shalt not talk about” from the purity of faith that refuses to dirty its hands by living faith through action and involvement.

Now let’s turn our thoughts to the current debate our country’s discussion on the health care system …

On July 12, on NBC’s Meet the Press Senator John McCain claimed, “The United States has the finest health care in the world.” In that, he told a half-truth. The statement would have been true if he’d added “for those who can afford it.”

Pastor colleague Ed Sunday-Winter pondered this issue this past week in his blog, Just Words:  “We could sure use a word from Jesus in the midst of all the talk about health care reform. Like so many issues in our country these days, it is one that can move quickly from conversation, to argument, to storm. Should health care be a right or a privilege? Should it be funded publicly or privately? Should it be limited to what you can afford or provided according to what you need? Should the government be less involved or more involved?”

Roy Medley, General Secretary of the American Baptist Churches USA wrote a nice column, “Good Medicine: Fix Broken Health Care System Now,” that was published recently on the www.ethicsdaily.com website. In that essay he identified some ideas he would hope come to mark the nature of reform:

Health care needs to be affordable
Health care needs to be portable
The health care system needs to be more efficient
Health care should not involve profiteering
Health care needs to be available

“Health care reform is coming in this country whether we want it to or not,” said one of my respected colleagues at an inter-faith meeting of clergy representing Jews, Catholics and a generous sprinkling of Protestants. My colleague was not declaring with any certainty what that reform would look like as that’s obviously still very much up in the air. What’s certain, however, is we need to address the problems we’ve determined to avoid. We have an activist president who’s unwilling to pass longstanding problems along hoping to God they won’t land but will keep circling in the air just above our heads like vultures. For our refusal to take measured steps in the past, we’ve now got a cancerous health care system that will not be solved by the system itself but must be treated by the largest, most powerful system in American, the federal government.

What’s been missing on this has been a basic level of civility about the discussion. What’s also been missing is the recognition that the issue is not merely a matter of politics but the larger moral implications that people of faith should consider. How do our faith values help us think about this issue beyond the individual impact it has on me and my life?

For those in the Kansas City area, I want to let you know of an important meeting where civility and faith will help us think more clearly about this issue …

“A Civil Discussion: Faith Conversations on Health Reform,” a faith forum is scheduled for Sunday, August 30th, 3-5 pm at the Community Christian Church on the Plaza, whereby people of faith can gather to have a civil conversation about the health care reform in light of our shared faith perspectives - joining no political alliances and promoting no set agenda items other than to consider how our faith might inform and shape us.

Some are fortunate enough to have access to the best health care on the planet while there are others who are fully dependent upon their own wits to care for their health. Some have generous benefits available to them while others suffer as they’ve lost their insurance or have been excluded because of pre-existing conditions or simply because they’ve been sick before. We can do better it seems, but how?

This is a huge issue in our country and I realize how important it is to each one of us as we consider what it means to try to deal with the issue. As people of faith, we have the resource of that faith to assist us in thinking as clearly as possible and to consider how we might respond not only on our own behalf, but also on behalf of the millions of our fellow-citizens who are outside the net of the health care system.

King David’s obituary is oh-so-brief and there is little pause in the story because Israel’s historian moves on just as time moves on. Most of the second half of David’s reign was given to the family struggle over who among David’s many sons would rule when he died. Like his father, Solomon was not the first-born and therefore was an unlikely heir apparent. So as he approached the days of his kingly rule, it became something of a mid-life issue about what he wanted. One writer described his own rise to power this way:  “Okay, so now you’ve arrived at a place of some power and position. You’ve climbed Everest, so what do you want with Fuji; it’s just a change of scenery, different view. Slow down and think about this before you run off mindlessly changing jobs or cars or wives or lives out of fear of your mortality. Time to think more about significance than success. Answer the question:  What do you want? What do you really want?”

As a part of my reading in preparing to preach this summer series on King David, along with other books I have on the life of King David, I reread Joseph Heller’s colorful novel on David titled, God Knows.  You may better remember Joseph Heller as the author of Catch 22, the 1960’s novel that offered a cynical look at the futility of war. God Knows is a “flesh on the bone” novelist’s telling of David’s life and loves and of his great genius and his very visible human failures. Admittedly, it’s more of a historical caricature than a historical novel.

But it’s what Heller does with Solomon, David’s son by Bathsheba, that’s striking. In Heller’s novel, Solomon, the man known throughout history for his great wisdom, is depicted as a foolish simpleton, one who goes about in life with clay tablets under his arm so he can write down all the colloquial wisdom he overhears in everyday conversations.

Some people collect sports memorabilia. Some collect salt and pepper shakers while others collect antique clocks from all over the world. Solomon collected wisdom. He collected everyday pearls of wisdom from every corner of the world as simple words intended to make life rich and meaningful. He was a librarian of the wisdom he overheard and scratched down on the clay tablets he carried around with him. Most see Solomon as wise beyond his years, but Heller portrayed him as one who collected wisdom but couldn’t seem to learn from it.

Maybe to understand Heller’s point we should ask, “How else do you explain the foolishness of life all around us?” We spend more than we make. We live throwaway lives. We throw away perfectly good stuff every season only to go out and buy more stuff. We treat our friends like they were our enemies. We ignore our children and wonder why they grow up and despise us. We sit in church every week and live as if there is no God. Maybe Solomon the simpleton is Heller’s commentary on contemporary society.

Despite Heller’s fictional story, there was a noble beauty about Solomon’s request in this passage. God asked him what he wanted and he responded that deep down in his heart he wanted wisdom. It was a beautiful request and God answered it. The Book of Kings chronicles a few anecdotes of Solomon’s wisdom such as what to do with the two women who both claimed to be the mother of a baby. When Solomon brashly pulled out his sword and offered to subdivide the baby giving each of them equal shares, the identity of the real mother became known. But after a few brief illustrations of his wise ruling, we are told he blew it.

Solomon brought great wealth into the kingdom and started an ambitious building program, but then he compromised Israel’s faith by making alliances through intermarriage and by introducing foreign deities to Israel. It was a peaceful pagan invasion the likes of which Israel had never seen and not at all a wise move on Solomon’s part. What’s more, his harsh policies and high taxes dressed the stage for his great kingdom to divide into two weak kingdoms shortly after his death.

Solomon’s reign marked the flowering of an artistic spirit. There was a cultural-intellectual revolution that took place during his reign. Solomon was a creative soul who put plans to many of the dreams conceived by his father. A great and wonderful temple was built for the worship of God. No expense was spared in bringing into reality one of the great marvels of the world. The people of Israel were put to work in one of the most aggressive building projects of their time, surpassed only by their memories of working for Pharaoh in Egypt.

But something was missing. There was a poverty of the soul that was startlingly absent from the opulence of Solomon’s life. In Solomon’s time, the greatness of David’s life still hung in the air as Israel enjoyed its finest days. There was peace in the land and the freedom they enjoyed is remembered until this day. But there was also foolishness stirring because while Solomon demonstrated that while he was bold in public works and building projects, he was weak in his relationship with God. He allowed the things of God to go lax. He forgot that the people needed a strong visible commitment to Yahweh as the one true God.

In Solomon’s time, he was known to have hundreds of wives, maybe even thousands. Likely, Solomon’s marriages outside the faith were the daughters of political foes. They were either acquisitions of the bargaining that took place on their borders, or they were the blood assurances that their enemies would not have the stomach to kill their daughter’s families. Solomon demonstrated a great naïveté about dabbling with other gods that came to find a home in Solomon’s Israel. Read past the words and you realize Solomon forgot how to keep separate in his own heart the reign and rule that Yahweh demands of us in our allegiance of faith.

Solomon reminds me of a friend that I had in Houston who was caught up in the oil boom of the late 70’s and early 80’s. Those were heady days when the oil market had skyrocketed and independent wheeling and dealing could generate vast sums of money by negotiating large global oil deals. I walked into his garage one day and noticed six or seven full sets of golf clubs in large leather bags. They were all brand new and hardly scuffed at all and I asked him if he was opening a sporting goods store out of his garage. He laughed and said that he occasionally would be on the road and would stop in to visit with a client and they would go play golf and he wouldn’t have his clubs with him so he would just buy a set right on the spot even though he had several full sets at home.

It was a wild time and there was huge money for the entrepreneurs willing to play the game. My friend was just a “good old boy” from Oklahoma who had left his firefighter job back home to get into making oil deals and he had been amazingly successful. He was living a life beyond his wildest dreams. My lasting memory of him was the day I found him out by his pool talking furiously with “his people” about a deal he was trying to make on behalf of the nation of India for a few million barrels of oil out of the Gulf of Aqaba. Literally, his whole world was wrapped up in closing the deal and he was frantically trying to save himself. Ultimately he lost it all. He lost everything because he didn’t live by the wisdom Solomon could have shared with him.

In the end, even Solomon’s wisdom couldn’t save him either. Solomon spent his time and energies in acquisition and building. But he forgot to remember the simple things about God. For you see, God really asks very little from us:  Fidelity, a love that is unhindered and undistracted, and a joyous response to the grace that we find so freely offered. Solomon had the unique and generous opportunity to ask anything of God.  With that unlimited possibility in front of him, he asked for a heart of wisdom. If you were invited by God to ask for anything, and you knew God would grant it, what would you ask for?