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The following message is preached by Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler-Thielman. His sermon is entitled "Gleaning the Gleaming." Let us continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the first book of Kings, the sixth chapter, beginning the reading at the verse numbered 11. "Now the

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Word of the Lord came to Solomon concerning this house which you are building. If you will walk in my statutes and obey my ordinances and keep all my commandments and walk in them, then I will establish my word with you which I spoke to David your father, and I will dwell among the children of Israel and

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will not forsake my people Israel." So Solomon built the house and finished it. He lined the walls of the house on the inside with boards of cedar from the floor of the house to the rafters of the ceiling. He covered them on the inside with wood and he covered the floor of the house with boards of cypress. He

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built 20 cubits of the rear of the house with boards of cedar from the floor to the rafters and he built this within as an inner sanctuary as the most holy place. The house, that is, the nave in front of the inner sanctuary, was 40 cubits long. The cedar within the house was carved in the form of gourds and

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open flowers. All was cedar, no stone was seen. The inner sanctuary he prepared in the innermost part of the house to set there the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord. The inner sanctuary was 20 cubits long, 20 cubits wide, and 20 cubits high, and he overlaid it with pure gold. He also made an altar of cedar and Solomon

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overlaid the inside of the house with pure gold and he drew chains of gold across in front of the inner sanctuary and overlaid it with gold and the overlaid the whole house with gold until all the house was finished. Also the whole altar that belonged to the inner sanctuary he overlaid with gold. In the

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inner sanctuary he made two cherubim of olive wood, each 10 cubits high. Five cubits was the length of one wing of the cherub and five cubits the length of the other wing of the cherub. It was 10 cubits from the tip of one wing to the tip of the other. The other cherub also measured 10 cubits. Both cherubim had

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the same measure and the same form. The height of one cherub was 10 cubits and so was that of the other cherub. He put the cherubim in the innermost part of the house and the wings of the cherubim were spread out so that a wing of one touched the one wall and a wing of the other cherub touched the other wall.

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Their other wings touched each other in the middle of the house and he overlaid the cherubim with gold. He carved all the walls of the house roundabout with carved figures of cherubim and palm trees and open flowers in the inner and the outer rooms. The floor of the house he overlaid with gold in the inner and

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the outer rooms. For the entrance to the inner sanctuary he made doors of olive wood. The lintel and the doorposts formed a pentagon. He covered the two doors of olive wood with carvings of cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers. He overlaid them with gold and spread gold upon the cherubim and upon the palm trees. So also

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he made for the entrance to the nave doorposts of olive wood in the form of a square and two doors of cypress wood. The two leaves of the one door were folding and the two leaves of the other door were folding and on them he carved cherubim and palm trees and open flowers and he overlaid them with gold evenly

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applied upon the carved work. He built the inner court with three courses of ewe stone and one course of cedar beams. In the fourth year the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid in the month of Ziv and in the eleventh year in the month of Bol which is the eighth month the house was finished in all its parts

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and according to all its specifications. He was seven years in building it. And may God bless to us this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. The pulpit problem which I confront today is how to bring a word which will

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be applicable to those newly ordained and installed in office today as well as to all of the members of the congregation and the clergy that seek to serve it. I'm going to try to meet this triple responsibility by asking you to go with me to the first book of Kings and to the chapters of that book which

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talk about the building of the temple by King Solomon. If you noticed in the reading there were three symbols which were mentioned more often than any others. Cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers. Again and again over and over they are mentioned. They are in the most sacred precincts of the temple and they

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are also in the outer courts. In other words, the clergy, the leaders of the people, and the people who follow those leaders, all of them saw these symbols on every hand. The inside of the temple was made of wood covered over with gold and the scriptures say he carved all the walls of the house roundabout with

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carved figures of cherubim and palm trees and open flowers in the inner and the outer rooms. Now what can we glean, what can we gather from these gleaming walls of gold carved over with cherubim and palm trees and open flowers? What message is there here for all of us?

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Well the cherubim of course were heavenly beings whose first function was to worship and glorify God. You will notice they are always listed first in the symbology of the temple and they are the only beings who are represented by great statues. There were freestanding statues of the cherubim, two of them. Each

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statue was more than 30 feet high and had a wingspan of more than 30 feet. The cherubim are very important in the symbolism of the temple and their first function is to worship God and that says to us, to pulpit, to people, to the leadership of the congregation, that our first responsibility is to worship God,

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to pull ourselves out of the dust of our daily experience and in worship to experience the deity. To be like those people who come stumbling out of the darkness of a cave and are almost blinded by the stunning light of the sun. That's the way we are, to come out of the shadows of life and be dazzled in

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worship by the contemplation of the divine. Now the essence of worship of course is love. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." And love is both a principle and an emotion. Sometimes it is almost imperceptible in a person, other times it is the raging and driving passion of his or her life. But in any person in whom

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love is, there will be with regard to God a growth in that love until that love becomes total. Remember we are told to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy might. The novice Christian, the beginning Christian, may have a barely imperceptible love, but as we mature in

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the things of the faith, the level of our love for God should grow. Now love has two sources. Its first source is gratitude. We love God because we are grateful for the things that he has done for us, for the salvation he has brought us, and for the grace with which he fills our lives. This is a good and a holy love,

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but it is a lower level kind of love. The second kind of love is that love in which you love God for himself, not for what he has done for you, but for God as God. This we might call admiration. I learned that term from the great essayist of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, A.W. Tozer. He says that

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higher than that love which is gratitude is the love which simply extols God and esteems God for his own being. Now this kind of love is rather rare in the church. If you listen to most people's prayers or if you listen to their testimonies, you will find that they very often speak about the things that God

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has given to them. They thank God for getting them out of this or enabling them to do this or pulling them out of this and making it possible for them to do this. And that's altogether good and proper. There's nothing wrong with that. The Psalms are full of that kind of praying and that kind of testimony. But

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higher than that is when you admire God not because of his service to us, but because he is who he is. Now above and beyond this admiration, there is an even higher level of worship which we might call wonder. Thomas Carlyle described this as delightful astonishment. It means to be amazed by God. Now we encounter

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this often in the Scriptures. When Abraham discovers himself to be in the presence of God, he falls on his face. When Moses encounters God, he hides his face. When Paul was caught up into the third heaven, the contemplation of God was so wonderful that he was rendered mute, he couldn't speak. When John sees

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Christ walking amongst the churches in his great vision, which we call the book of Revelation, when John sees Christ so moving, it says, "He fell on his face as one dead at Christ's feet." Now that falling on one's face or hiding one's face or being struck dumb, that is all part of being amazed by God. Now these acts are

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not part of our culture. We do not show amazement by falling on our faces. But there are moments in worship, aren't there, when we are so caught up in the majesty of God that we cannot speak. There are moments when the contemplation of God, qua God, leads us to weep. There are times in our moments of exaltation

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when we are praising God, when we discover that the only words that are adequate are the words of hymns or of psalms, poetic utterance superior to prose. In those moments of awe and amazement and wonder, we are soaring to an even higher level of worship than that of admiration. We are in

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wonder. But higher even than this wonder is the adoring of God, and the adoring of God is only possible to the Christ- mastered heart. It's to this that Paul refers when he says, "The love of Christ constrains us." It's when thinking of God is thinking of him as the fairest of ten thousand, seeing him as high and lifted

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up, as the friend of sinners but at the same time as the terror of evil, to see him as graceful lover and at the same time as the judge of all creation. This kind of encounter with God wounds and it heals. It fascinates and it frightens. It kills and it brings life. It's sobers and it intoxicates. And sad to say, this

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level of worship, this level of adoration is almost never seen in the church today. Oh, our worship services are filled with joy and affability and fellowship and sometimes we are thrilled or deeply moved by an anthem of the choir or some paragraph of a preacher's sermon. But the sweetness of the pure adoration of God

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is most often missing. It is so absent in our day that it is impossible even to explain it to people who have never seen it or understood it. Yet this highest form of worship is what the chariot man did before God and it's what we are called to do. This is the purest worship of all. Not the theological prattle that

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comes from some pulpit, not the people of the church or the programs of the church or the policies of the church, but to love God, to love God for himself, that is, to admire God, to be filled with wonder and amazement in the contemplation of God, and to adore him for the excellence of his being, to reach out and touch his

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face, and in that touch to have a heart so full it cannot receive any more. The chariot man called all of us to this. Now the palm tree is the symbol in the Old Testament of usefulness, of being of service in the kingdom of God. The Arabs have a saying, and you hear it even until

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this day, that there are 360 different uses to which the palm tree may be put. It has more uses than any other thing which grows in the Holy Land. They use its wood and its bark and its leaves and its sap and its root and its fiber and its fruit and its husk and so on. It is totally useful. And the church, of course,

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has been the most useful organism in all the history of humankind. The service of the church has made Western civilization what it is in terms of its goodness, and it is the service of the church that is changing the Eastern world as well. It is the creed and the conscience of the church that has informed every decent

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discipline known to human beings anywhere. And it's to this kind of creed and conscience, it's to this kind of service that we are called by this symbol of the palm tree. You remember when Jesus called his disciples, he made no promises to them. He did not pledge to them popularity. He did not pledge to

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them fame or fortune. He simply said to them, "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me. Take up your cross daily and follow me. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." And what is "it"? It is to visit the imprisoned and to

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clothe the naked and to feed the hungry. Now it's a very interesting thing that in the book of Revelation, where we are given a picture of people worshiping God in heaven, they are described as wearing white robes surrounding the throne of God, adoring God, and what do they have in their hands? Palms. You see,

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worship and service are very closely related. They're sisters, just as Mary and Martha were. You remember when Jesus came to the home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus there in Bethany. Mary sat down at Jesus' feet. She didn't want to miss one word he had to say. Martha, on the other hand, went to the kitchen and began

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preparing for the crowd of people that were going to have to be fed after the service was over. Now the perfect balance in the Christian life is to have a mixture of both of these things. The listening to and adoration and glorying of Christ, and at the same time the desire to serve him through the service

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of others. It's in worship that we gain the motivation to serve, and then when we are serving, we find ourselves gradually bent down by the burdens of life, the burdens that we are bearing, and we must go back to worship again to be restored in strength in order to serve once more. To me this is summed in a very

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interesting way in Goethe's parable of the three reverences. Some of you will remember it. Wilhelm Meister finds himself in a strange land, and he sees children playing in a field, and some of the children are looking up, and some of the children are looking about, and some of the children are looking down. And it

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is explained to him that those who are looking up are looking at the glory of God, and those who are looking about them are looking at the needs and the beauties of the earth, and those who are looking down are contemplating the suffering and the agony of so many of the people of the planet. Now Meister doesn't fully

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understand this, so he asks for a more extended explanation, and he's taken to a palace. In the first room of that palace, he sees many paintings from the Old Testament, which all speak of the power and the glory and the wonder of God. He's then taken into a second room, which is decorated with paintings from the New

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Testament, and here he sees the love of God being spread abroad in life. He goes to open the door into the third room, and it's locked, and it is explained to him that this room is the chapel of the third reverence, and that no one can enter that chapel until she or he has lost himself or herself in the glory of

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God in that first room, and spent himself or herself in service in the second room. What Gert is giving us here is a very beautiful allegory. He's saying that you can't touch the heartache and the anguish, the quivering agony that's down at the bottom of so many lives. You can't touch that and help that or heal that.

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Until you have been touched by the Spirit in worship and led to offer your heart to service. The cherubim and the palm tree. I read in a column by Irma Bombeck that one of her goals was to come to the end of each week with her pockets empty. She said she also liked to have a

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refrigerator empty and her gas tank empty and her purse empty, and then going on discussing this, she concludes with the remark that to her judgment will be when we stand before the maker and creator of all that is, and he will say to us, "Are your pockets empty? Do you have anything left that I gave to you? Is there

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any talent that I invested in you which you have not spent? Is there any need you encountered which you did not meet? Is there any cry for love that you heard and did not answer?" And Bombeck concludes, "The only acceptable answer will be to be able to say, 'I have nothing left. I've spent it all. I'm as naked as

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the day I was born.'" That's what it is to carry the palm, to be useful, and one can only do this when one is moved in the power and the holiness of worship. That's the reason the psalmist says, "O Lord, truly I am thy servant, for thou hast set me free." Now the last symbol is the open flower, and of course the flower

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obviously represents beauty. The flower speaks of the sweet smell and the loveliness of the kingdom of heaven spread upon the earth. Sudi Black died a little while back. She was a Christian woman, 67 years of age, perished from cancer. She lived in a little apartment in a small commercial

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corner of our nation's capital. As word spread that Sudi had died, friends of hers gathered in a restaurant where she often went. A businessman told of how when he had come to Washington 19 years earlier, he was totally broke and she had fed him for the first few days just to give him a start. Another told of how she

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had found him a place to live. Another told of how she had found her a job. Another told of how Sudi rode with a certain woman on the bus many times so that that woman could learn what stops to get off at and what stops to get on at. Every summer Sudi would fill a bus of city kids and take them out into the

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country to pick strawberries, and when she brought them back at the end of the day hot and exhausted, she wouldn't let any of them go home until she had baked for every one of their families a strawberry pie. When the memorial service was held, a restaurant owner got up and talked about how one day he was short of

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waitresses, so Sudi pitched in and became a waitress. A Greek gentleman told of how Sudi was the first real friend he had in this country. She reached out to him. On and on the stories went of how this single Christian woman had spread beauty like an open flower throughout all the lives she touched. Well, let's go to the

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other end of the spectrum. Here's Trevor Farrell. Now Trevor Farrell is 18 years old now, but this happened seven years ago when he was 11. He was watching television one night, a Philadelphia channel, and he saw pictures of some of the people who were living homeless, cold and shivering on the streets. So he

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turned to his mother and dad and asked them if they could take any extra blankets they had and give them to those homeless, cold people. So Frank and Janet Farrell took their extra blankets and of course their son Trevor, and they got in their car and they drove from the rather affluent suburb of Washington where they

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live down into the heart of the city. And the first person they saw shivering on the street was a man. And little Trevor, 11 years old, took a blanket over to the man and said, "Sir, here, this will help to keep you warm." And the man said, "God bless you and thank you." Ever since that time, Trevor and his family and their

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friends have been distributing blankets and clothes, and they estimate a quarter of a million peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He was interviewed as a little boy on national television several times, and each time he was interviewed he said, "I do what I do because of Jesus inside me." His parents

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have now opened a home for the homeless in Philadelphia, which they call Trevor's Place. And Frank Farrell, the father, says, "We used to just read the Bible, now we're living it." Beauty, the redolence, the perfume, the loveliness of heaven brought into the earth. These people are good Samaritans who stand by

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the roadways and help those who are wounded with the beauty of blessing. Well, I could go on and on with similar illustrations, but the point of all this is simply to say that these people have experienced God in worship, and this has led them to service, and their service has brought beauty where ugliness was.

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They are the incarnations, if you will, of the cherry bim and the palm trees and the open flowers carved on the walls of the house of God in both its inner and its outer rooms. And it seems to me there is here a message for us all, for clergy, for leaders of the people, and for the people of God. We are called by the

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sacred symbolism of Scripture to be involved in renewing the world for Christ's sake, and we can do that only as we offer, like the cherry bim, the highest worship of which we are capable. As we respond to the Spirit's movement in that worship, like a palm tree moved by the wind, to serve those we encounter in life. And

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it's then as we do this that we will begin to see beauty where the hideous was. We are, it seems to me, all called to nothing less than this. And this is what I glean, I gather from the temple's golden gleaming walls. May it be a blessing to your soul.

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