A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
26 October 2025
1 Kings 5.1–5; 8.1–13
John 2.19-21
We are, I think, a people deeply
formed
by the places we inhabit.
We mark our lives by them.
The home we grew up in, the
streets we walk daily,
the corner of a café that
feels like ours,
the pew where we habitually
sit on a Sunday morning.
Place shapes us. It tells our
story.
And over time, places take on
layers of meaning
— the echoes of prayers
whispered, the resonance of song,
the memory of laughter and
grief alike.
Here in The Sanctuary at
Bloomsbury, we know something of that.
This space is not merely a
room.
It’s a meeting point between heaven and earth
— or at least, it gestures
towards one.
It’s a place where we bring our
full selves before God;
a place where we remember
those who have gone before us;
a place where we gather, week by week,
hoping once more to glimpse
something of glory.
So perhaps we understand, more
than we realise,
why Solomon longed to build a
temple.
The reading from 1 Kings
opens with Solomon at rest.
After years of warfare and
instability under his father David,
Solomon inherits a kingdom at
peace.
“The Lord my God has given me rest on every side,” he says,
“so that there is neither
adversary nor misfortune.”
And out of that peace, he
conceives the idea of building a house for God.
There’s something beautiful in this,
with the instinct to build
sacred space coming not in the heat of battle,
but in the quiet that follows
it.
It’s when a community has found
stability
that it can turn its energies
towards worship, towards beauty,
towards imagining something
beyond survival.
We might ask ourselves:
what do we build when the
fighting stops?
This is the question of every
war-torn community,
from the cities devastated by
the bombings of the second world war,
to the communities of Ukraine
and Gaza,
right back to the post-exodus
community of ancient Israel.
Because Solomon’s project wasn’t
only about architecture.
It was a theological
statement.
He was saying: we are no
longer wanderers in the wilderness.
The ark that had travelled from
tent to tent,
symbol of divine presence
among a nomadic people,
would now have a resting
place.
The God who had journeyed with
them
would now dwell among them, in
the heart of Jerusalem.
Of course, it’s a risky claim
— to say that God has been housed.
The moment you try to contain the
infinite,
you flirt with idolatry.
But it’s also an act of faith:
a belief that the transcendent
can be encountered in the particular,
that the eternal can take up
residence in the temporal.
Solomon builds not because he
thinks he can trap God,
but because he dares to
believe that God desires to dwell among the people.
When the temple was completed,
Solomon assembled the elders
and leaders of the tribes.
The priests brought the Ark of the
Covenant
— that ancient chest that held
the tablets of the law —
and placed it in the Holy of
Holies.
And then something extraordinary
happened.
As the priests withdrew,
the story says, a cloud
filled the house of the Lord,
so that the priests could not
stand to minister because of the cloud;
for the glory of
the Lord filled the house.
It’s one of the most arresting
moments in scripture.
Everything stops. The ritual,
the liturgy, the carefully choreographed ceremony
— all of it brought to a halt
by the sheer presence of God.
And Solomon, faced with the
dazzling incomprehensibility of what has happened,
utters words that deserve to
be lingered over:
“The Lord has said that he would
dwell in thick darkness.
I have built you an exalted
house, a place for you to dwell forever.”
Thick darkness.
It’s an extraordinary phrase.
It upends our assumptions
about what divine glory looks like.
We expect light, brightness, clarity
— but what Solomon encounters
is darkness, density, mystery.
The Hebrew word suggests a darkness that can be felt.
This is the paradox of presence:
that God’s arrival is not
always illumination, but sometimes obscurity.
The divine glory both reveals and conceals.
It fills the temple, yet hides
its source.
The same cloud that guided the
Israelites through the wilderness
— a pillar of cloud by day and
fire by night —
has now entered the temple.
It is as if the wild, untamed
presence that travelled with them
refuses to be domesticated,
even by Solomon’s splendour.
God will dwell among the people,
yes, but not on their terms.
What fascinates me about Solomon’s
dedication speech is its ambivalence.
On one hand, he declares with
confidence:
“I have built you a lofty
house, a place for you to dwell forever.”
But a few verses later — beyond
our reading today — he admits,
“But will God indeed dwell on
the earth?
Even heaven and the highest
heaven cannot contain you,
much less this house that I
have built!” (1 Kings 8.27)
Solomon knows what we must all
learn:
that every attempt to contain
God is provisional.
The temple is not a prison for the
divine.
It is a sign, a sacrament, a
meeting point,
but not the limit of God’s
presence.
The God of Israel will not be
domesticated
by cedar beams and golden
cherubim.
And yet, paradoxically, God
chooses to dwell there.
This is the mystery at the heart
of faith:
the God who cannot be
contained nevertheless consents to be present.
The transcendent stoops to meet the finite.
The holy condescends to the
human.
In theological terms, we might
call this the logic of incarnation,
the same mystery that will
later find its fullest expression in Jesus.
But already, in Solomon’s temple,
the pattern is there:
God makes a home among us, yet
remains beyond our grasp.
For us, here in Bloomsbury,
this passage invites a deep
reflection on what our own sacred space means.
The building in which we sit —
this Sanctuary —
is also a testimony to faith
across generations.
Its walls have held a century and
a half of prayers,
its floor has been trod by
saints and seekers,
its air filled by song and by
silence.
When we gather here,
we are surrounded by that
great cloud of witnesses
whose faith has sustained this
community.
And yet, if we ever start to think
that God lives here and nowhere else,
we’ve missed the point
entirely.
This place is holy not because God
is trapped within it,
but because God meets us here.
It is a thin place, a place where
the veil between heaven and earth grows translucent.
But the holiness does not
reside in bricks and plaster
— it resides in what happens
between us and God,
between us and one another.
When we sing together, when we
pray for the world,
when we share bread and wine,
when we listen and are changed
— that’s when the cloud of
glory fills the house once again.
And sometimes, as in Solomon’s
day,
that glory may come as
brightness
— a moment of clarity, a sense
of peace.
But sometimes it comes as
darkness:
when prayers go unanswered,
when faith feels fragile,
when the future of the church
seems uncertain.
The thick darkness of God is not
the absence of God,
but the presence of God in
forms we do not yet understand.
So as we continue the slow work of
building up our congregation
— of strengthening the
community that gathers in this Sanctuary —
we do so knowing that God’s presence will not always feel luminous or
predictable.
But still, God dwells among us.
Still, the cloud fills the
house.
And of course, the work of
building a temple never really ends.
The stones may be set, the paint
may dry,
the scaffolding may come down,
but the deeper work, the human work, continues.
Because what makes any sanctuary
sacred
is not only what happens
within its walls,
but what is built between the
people who gather there.
Solomon had artisans and
architects, stonemasons and priests.
We have something different but no
less holy
— musicians, welcomers, those
who make coffee, or look after the PA,
those who pray faithfully from
their homes,
those who dare to dream new
dreams for the church.
Each week, as we open these doors
in the heart of London,
we are engaged in an act of
construction.
We build hospitality in a city of
loneliness.
We build courage in a world
that teaches fear.
We build community in a culture that prizes the individual.
And what we build here is not for
ourselves alone.
The sanctuary becomes truly
holy when its doors are open
— when people find here not exclusion but welcome,
not certainty but hope,
not judgement but grace.
In that sense, we are co-builders
with God.
The Spirit continues to
fashion living stones into a dwelling place for the divine.
And sometimes, as with Solomon’s
temple,
the glory of God interrupts
our work
— reminding us that what we
are building is always larger than we can see,
and that its true completion
lies in hands not our own.
It’s worth noticing that, in time,
the temple itself did not last.
It would be destroyed by invading
armies,
rebuilt, and destroyed again.
The glory that once filled it
seemed to depart.
The people went into exile,
and they discovered — to their
astonishment —
that God was with them even there,
in Babylon, by the
rivers of captivity.
The prophets began to say strange
things:
that God does not dwell only
in temples made by human hands,
that God is near to all who
call.
The destruction of the temple,
painful though it was,
became the occasion for a new
discovery
— that the presence of God was
never confined to one place.
Every community that loses a
building learns that lesson in its own way.
The holiness was never in the
stones alone;
it was in the people, in the
promise, in the God who journeys with them.
And so by the time we reach the
New Testament,
the temple has become a symbol
ripe for reinterpretation.
When Jesus, in John’s Gospel,
enters the temple and drives out the merchants,
he is not rejecting the
temple’s holiness but exposing its fragility.
When he says, “Destroy this
temple, and in three days I will raise it up,”
he is speaking of his body —
the new dwelling place of God.
Here, the mystery deepens.
The divine glory that once filled
the temple
now dwells bodily in a human
life.
The Word becomes flesh and dwells
among us
— literally, pitches a tent
among us, echoing the tabernacle of old.
In Jesus, the place of meeting
between God and humanity
is no longer a building but a
person.
The Holy of Holies now has a human face.
And when that body is crucified
and raised, the veil is torn,
the boundary dissolves,
and the presence of God spills
out into the world.
We, the church, are now called the
body of Christ.
Which means we too are called to
be a temple
— a living, breathing dwelling
place for the Spirit.
Every act of welcome, every prayer
for justice, every moment of compassion
— these are the stones with
which God builds the new temple in our midst.
When some of us from this
congregation visited Palestine,
we went to the farm known as
the Tent of Nations,
where the Nassar family
declare that they refuse to be enemies.
And Daoud Nassar said to us that
the Palestinian Christans,
bearing peaceful nonviolent
witness to the way of Christ in awar-torn land,
are the ‘living stones’ – they
are the stones of the temple that is the body of Christ.
But what does this mean for us,
on an ordinary Sunday in the
heart of London?
It means that our calling as a
congregation
is not simply to preserve a
building, however beautiful or historic.
It is to make of this place a living temple
— a place where people can
encounter the mystery of God,
whether in light or in
darkness.
It means that when we gather in our
Sanctuary,
we do so not to contain God,
but to be contained by God’s
love.
We come here not to show how much
we understand,
but to stand together in the
cloud of unknowing,
trusting that God is present
even when hidden.
And it means that when we leave
this place
— when we go out into the
streets of the West End,
into the offices and universities and hostels and cafés —
we carry that presence with
us.
The temple goes mobile again.
The glory that once filled a
building
now walks the pavements of
London.
Every act of kindness becomes a
sanctuary.
Every word of justice becomes
a hymn.
Every life that reflects the love of Christ
becomes a dwelling place for
God.
When Solomon finished his prayer,
the story says the glory of
the Lord filled the temple
so that the priests could not
stand to minister.
Perhaps that’s a word for us, too.
There are times when our
ministries, our plans,
our carefully arranged
programmes,
must fall silent before the mystery of what God is doing among us.
Because God still fills the house.
Sometimes in light. Sometimes
in darkness.
Sometimes in our certainty, sometimes in our doubt.
But always, God is here.
And so, like Solomon, we might
dare to say:
“I have built you a house”
— not of stone and cedar, but
of community and compassion.
And we might dare to believe that
God chooses to dwell among us still,
filling this Sanctuary with
glory
— even, and perhaps especially, in the thick darkness.
Amen.
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