Duo Dickinson | November 28, 2024 (Thanksgiving Day)
As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”
“Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”
Mark’s words hit me last week. I help make buildings for a living. I get it.
It was a fully human effort to build Solomon’s Temple that Jesus visited in Jerusalem – costing perhaps $300,000,000 in today’s money. $1,000,000,000 has just been spent to restore the effects of existential damage to Notre Dame in the heart of Europe’s rejection of religion. All buildings, like Trinity, are a human effort. Religion itself is a human effort too and tries to manifest all God has given us to do. Every bible is a book. Every hymn is a song. Every service is an interactive play, with a script. Every icon, every ritual is invented and effected by us.
Jesus embodies the sacred and the human, too. I think life is “Both/And” not “Either/Or.”
Jesus was clear that “magnificent buildings” can simply go away. Even “great buildings.” Even sacred buildings. What we create can be removed.
You may remember the shock when it was proposed to cut out sections of the brownstone wall that surrounds the Grove Street Cemetery: between the new residential colleges and the old Yale campus. It was thought that breeching that wall with perfectly detailed and secure iron fences to match those at the entry made the walk more beautiful, revealing the cemetery to those walking down Prospect Avenue.
But preservationists including our Joe Dzeda went ballistic. The tone-deaf human impulse to make beauty had a consequence so elemental as to be invisible: the truth is that Grove Cemetery, and every graveyard, is sacred. It has a beauty that is not just historic, it is human. It is us, where we will be.
Beauty is all around us, and sometimes created by us – like the beauty of the “Magnificent Buildings” of Solomon’s Temple. We know that beauty exists because God reveals it to us. That beauty is gut-punching because it defies human logic, just like faith – because the beauty we try to make is reaching to God in our world.
Just like those temple stones. Humans cleft them, transported them, installed them in a design we created, and a building that happened in a city made by and for us. But we want to be more than us in the moment – we want to have connection with what is completely beyond our capacity to control, let alone understand. So we try to discover the beauty that has been given to us.
In Exodus, God makes it clear that God gives us beauty when God says to Moses:
“8 Then have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.
9 Make this tabernacle and all its furnishings exactly like the pattern I will show you.”
Despite what Moses heard, humans want ownership of what we make. We believe we own the buildings we make – until we don’t. We even want to own our intimates too – spouses, children, even religion – but we ultimately own nothing. All our temples will be knocked down. In 40,000 years, an Ice Age will sweep away the 1,000 things I have designed – if they even exist. But in truth I will not exist in a generation: so my faith in the world that I make is laughable.
But I am a human, given the facility to manifest the loves, fears, hopes and beliefs of this world even though I cannot control any reality beyond my effort. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”
I think that means that thanks on Thanksgiving is not just for the food, family and friends we are with: we also are given a state of grace where beauty is revealed – a gift we did not ask for, cannot earn and are left, especially today, in the well of gratitude that beauty gifts to each of us every day.