The usual custom without which the worship service rarely begins is the Invocation of God's presence, as if in gathering God will come to be present in a way in which he is not normally. Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them (Mt.18:20). Even in an evangelical church where Pauline sentiments such as Acts 17:28 might receive more attention (In him we live, and move, and have our being), one will hear the congregation admonished to prepare their hearts to enter into God's presence and "to let all mortal flesh keep silence before him." It is still amusing to me that in one such church where I recently heard the latter as a call to worship, the congregation proceeded to do no such thing. Instead they all got on their feet and started to make a joyful noise unto the Lord for about twenty-five minutes, non-stop.
To the nomadic patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the presence of God was commemorated in various places where it had been keenly experienced in dreams, usually with piles of stones made into altars. And he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down to sleep. And Jacob rose up early and took the stone and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. 'And this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God's house' (Gen. 28:11,18,22). To Moses, God lived and revealed himself in fire on a holy mountain, a rather larger pile of such stones. To the children of the Exodus fleeing Egypt, he inhabited the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. After they were given the Law and the instructions to build an ark and a tabernacle where God said he would meet with thee and commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony (Exodus 25:22), the Israelites piled up stones to mark the spot in the middle of the river Jordan where the ark of the covenant had tarried (Joshua 4:9) to enable them to pass through on dry ground to the other side. The ark thereupon figured prominently in the collapse of an exceptionally impressive pile of rocks, formidably assembled as walls to protect the inhabitants of Jericho.
Years later King David wanted God to have a more permanent house like his own house of cedar, but it was his son Solomon who would build for God and his ark a more lasting pile of rocks in Jerusalem, despite his conviction that not even the universe which God had made was capable of containing him (1 Kings 8:27). Solomon's skepticism seems to have stopped there, and he leaves no record of doubt that God used the ark as his footstool.
The innermost part of this temple contained this ark, and as with the innermost part of the tabernacle, it was therefore thought to be a very dangerous place. As God had appeared in the cloud upon the mercy seat above the ark in the tabernacle (Leviticus 16:2), the cloud of God's presence also filled Solomon's temple, driving out the priests (1 Kings 8:10-11). The place where it did so was also called the holy of holies, God's resting place, and it was forbidden for anyone to enter into it on pain of death, except the high priest, and this but once a year, on the day of atonement. A later conqueror found this innermost place of the sanctuary rebuilt after the Babylonian Exile oddly vacant. Pompey the Great was famously nonplussed by the experience, and was not immediately struck down dead for his transgression, as previous transgressors of the ark's holiness had been (2 Samuel 6:6f.). It would seem that God had by then made an exodus of his own. Probably lost when Solomon's temple had been destroyed, the fate of the ark of the covenant still fires imaginations.
The Fourth Gospel records (John 2:19) that Jesus had said he could rebuild the then extraordinarily impressive Herodian temple in three days' time, if someone were but to destroy it (a saying hurled back at Jesus on the cross in mockery by bystanders, according to Matthew, but without justification, in his opinion). Jesus had more than once insisted that faith, even faith as tiny as the diminutive mustard seed, is capable of doing almost unimaginable things, even picking up a mountain (yet one more big pile of rocks) and casting it into the sea (Mt.17:20; 21:21). Despite the context of the cleansing of the Jewish Temple, John's opinion in 2:21 was that Jesus spake of the temple of his body, not of the real one. And so in fulfillment of this, the giant boulder blocking Jesus' tomb had to make way for the abolition even of death (John 20:1). John's Son of Man rises from the dead to ascend up where he was before (6:62) in order to prepare a place for you (14:2) and from where he will send the Spirit who shall be in you (14:17) and abide with you for ever (14:16). Gone is the apocalyptic Son of Man from Mark's Gospel. Gone is the imminent end of the world.
Instead, Peter, The Rock (Matthew 16:18), shall lead the new Israel, the church. He will obey the threefold command of Jesus in the closing chapter of John's Gospel and feed Jesus' sheep with the Bread of Life of John 6. In time, this would be equated with the Lord's Supper, despite the absence of a record of its institution in John. Once Christianity became a permitted religion under Constantine, the way was open for the rock-piling to begin anew, where sacraments could freely be dispensed.
Every parish soon had its church. Bishops eventually got magnificent cathedrals to mark the seats of their office. The Protestant Reformation later gave impetus to a new proliferation of buildings everywhere, and the force and vigor of sectarianism still plays out today in many places as even more churches go under construction, despite the new period of economic difficulties which confront the world, in which real estate of all kinds has played a defining role, and sits increasingly vacant.
Rocks, it seems, are inescapable elements in our lives, but we rarely think of them as such. We use them to make our roads. We then drive on these on vacation to see other more impressive piles of them. The Egyptian ones, carved into enormous blocks and arranged pyramidally as it were, still compel us. Writers resemble them, seeing that, as Johnson quipped, "no one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Hence the ubiquity of the novel, and now of the blog, by beefwits all. Especially beautiful and rare small stones we'll pay handsomely for to adorn our true loves, who later divorce us and take us to the cleaners. Others we'll hunt and polish to expose their colorfulness, and display them on shelves, requiring dusting at intervals. Adventurers climb the tallest piles of them. When the snow melts, their remains are sometimes found. Others practice climbing walls of them as "sport." We have spent billions of dollars to send men to the moon to collect boxes full of them to bring back to this our Earth, which our humorists call the third rock from the sun. From its bowels do molten ones continuously spew forth, augmenting the land. We regularly elect boxes of them to represent us in Washington, which they do admirably, giving us the government we deserve. To others whose heads were so full of them that they killed themselves by accident we posthumously give Darwin awards. We still mark the places where we lay our dead with them, that we may find them and visit with them. Although "dumb as a rock" is a common slur, to warn people who live in glass houses not to throw them won't really do much to deprive us of the spectacle. We dig them out of the ground where they interfere with our vegetable gardens, and assemble them in pleasing arrangements elsewhere on our property. Hadrian used them to build his wall in Britain. China's version dwarfs it by comparison. The Ten Commandments were inscribed on them by the finger of God. Moses broke these. Backward societies still use them to kill their malefactors. Muslims make pilgrimage to and circumambulate one that fell from the sky. Their houses of worship everywhere in the world face in its direction, as do they five times a day when they pray. The five main tenants of their religion are called pillars. Scientists have believed a very large one similar to theirs hit the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. Some fear another one might do the same to us. Still others pray for this.
In times gone by, our own criminals we put to work breaking big ones into littler ones. And if you break them little enough, you will get the dust from which we were made, and to which we shall return, as sure as the day follows the night.
And Abraham answered and said, 'Behold now, I which am but dust and ashes have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord. . . .' And the Lord went his way, as soon as he had left communing with Abraham: and Abraham returned unto his place (Genesis 18:27, 33).
