“Short Stories, Lasting Calls” Part 4: Bezalel & Oholiab

July 16, 2023 — Ordinary Time

Exodus 35:30—36:7

Pastor Mike

This sermon series, Short Stories: Lasting Calls, has taken us off the beaten path to encounter characters in the Bible who we might otherwise pass right by. If this were English class, we’d call them “minor characters.” But from the perspective of faith, they are individuals who responded faithfully to a diverse set of purposes and transformed the world for God. Ananias blessing his enemy, Shiphrah and Puah disobeying Pharoah, Jethro counseling Moses. They’re starting to gather around us, these faithful witnesses, and as they gather, they pose a question. This was my sacred story, what’s yours? How is God calling you into his kingdom and glory (1 Thess. 2:11-12)?

This morning, we head to the wilderness to meet two of the Bible’s great artists as they work: Bezalel and Oholiab, makers of the tabernacle.

After God liberated the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, the people wandered in the desert for forty years, slowly winding their way toward the Promised Land, camping here, camping there. During those forty years, God traveled with the people in the form of a cloud of glory that covered and filled a special tent called the tabernacle. The tabernacle was always at the center of the Israelite’s campsite. Here’s how it’s described at the very end of Exodus:

Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. …Whenever the cloud was taken up from the tabernacle, the Israelites would set out on each stage of their journey, but if the cloud was not taken up, then they did not set out until the day that it was taken up. For the cloud of the Lord was on the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, before the eyes of all the house of Israel at each stage of their journey. (40:34, 36-38).

It was a big change for God to want to live among the people like that. Up to that point, God’s appearances were more subtle and individual: a voice telling Abram to go, a man wrestling Jacob in the night, a burning bush catching Moses’ eye. The cloud in the tent was God’s first crack at domesticity, and the tent had to be perfectly made and perfectly maintained. It was holy.

Several chapters of Exodus are devoted to outlining the proper construction of the tabernacle – because it wasn’t just a tent. It had a perimeter with a gate. It had a courtyard, a bronze altar, a washbasin, a tent of meeting with table, altar, and candlestick inside, and, finally, a holy of holies. God explained the tabernacle’s layout, dimensions, materials, and furnishing to Moses in precise detail. Making it was a huge, complex project, especially for a community new to the wilderness, new to independence, new to the free expression of its own creativity.

This is where Bezalel and Oholiab enter the picture. God called them by name and set them apart for the task of making the tabernacle. Artists know who they are. God filled them with them a divine spirit of creativity (Exod. 35:30-31), and the spirit blessed them with knowledge and skill in all sorts of crafts – metalwork, woodwork, stonework, weaving. In Hebrew, “spirit” can also be translated as “breath” or “wind.” Bezalel and Oholiab, the artists, were filled with God’s breath, inspired to create.

The twentieth-century American poet Denise Levertov once wrote, “I believe poets are instruments on which the power of poetry plays. But they are also makers, craftsmen: it is given to the seer to see, but it is then his responsibility to communicate what he sees, that they who cannot see may see, since are ‘members one of another.’”[1] She’s saying that poets are both seized by the creative impulse, which they cannot control, and responsible for turning that impulse into work, a process they can control. Bezalel and Oholiab’s names even echo the creative yin and yang. Bezalel means “in the shadow of God.” Oholiab means “father’s tent.” Artists are overshadowed, overtaken by the creative spirit; but they also make tangible works for it to live in. Some of you are called to be creatives, artists, craftsmen and craftswomen. God needs all the poets, writers, woodworkers, sculptors, architects, musicians, chefs, jewelers, painters and so on that God can get. Your creative work casts the mystery of God in what we can see, hear, taste, and touch. You are the ones who help us feel that this world is truly where God lives.

Importantly, Bezalel and Oholiab were able to live their purpose as creators only because the rest of the community brought them all the materials that they needed to get the job done. Actually, the people brought more than enough. Moses eventually had to tell them to stop bringing more materials. That’s a good problem to have! The gifts are specifically called freewill offerings, which means that the people gave them voluntarily. No one forced their hand. No one tried to guilt them into it. Here’s how it’s put in Exodus chapter 35:

Moses said to all the congregation of the Israelites, “This is the thing that the Lord has commanded: Take from among you an offering to the Lord; let whoever is of a generous heart bring the Lord’s offering: gold, silver, and bronze; blue, purpose, and crimson yarns and fine linen; goats’ hair, tanned rams’ skins, and fine leather; acacia wood, oil for the light, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, and onyx stones and gems to be set in the ephod and the breast piece.”

And they came; everyone whose heart was stirred and everyone whose spirit was willing, and brought the Lord’s offering to be used for the tent of meeting and for all its service and for the sacred vestments. They came, both men and women… (35:4-9, 21-22a).

Without these materials, Bezalel and Oholiab could not make their vision a reality. The creative endeavor was supported by the whole community. What we have here is a bit like a Trustees committee – a group of artisans receiving the gifts of the people and using them to make God’s house. This is the kind of work that Roger Hanson, our beloved Chair of Trustees who passed away 10 days ago, did. And it’s the kind of work that you’ll have more opportunities to participate in, from either the making or the giving side, in the coming weeks and months.

We’ve got a lot more than a tent on our hands; we’ve got our building, a building that needs a new roof, greater accessibility, more energy-efficient heating and cooling. It’s a building that blesses the lives of over a hundred children five days of the week, every week of the year, by hosting a strong licensed childcare center, which, it turns out, is an increasingly vulnerable public good. We have the Wesley House, Idaho State’s Methodist campus ministry, soon to be inhabited by the Morton family. All of these spaces, from Sanctuary to Chapel to gym to basement to playground to Wesley House are spaces that, literally, hold us as we live the Christian rhythm of worship, learning, praying, and serving. They are the places where we and others meet the God who dwells among us. I believe that some of you are called, whether for the hundredth time or the first time, to step up and help us perfect these spaces. I believe that we are all called to give freely to the creators, so that our sacred spaces can thrive.

At first, this felt like a bizarre sermon to prepare for the Sunday morning when we’re worshipping outside, away from our property. But then I realized that we have an opportunity out here to get a little perspective.

Bezalel and Oholiab built the tabernacle in the wilderness with nothing but Moses’ vision and the people’s gifts. The first Methodists who worshipped in southeast Idaho, and then in Pocatello, and eventually at the corner of 15th and Clark started out with nothing but their dreams and raw materials. That’s not our exact situation, but it means we should not take for granted what we’ve already got on hand to work with. We should not let things fall into disrepair. We are a step ahead of our ancestors from a material perspective; but from a spiritual perspective, some of our urgency, our belief in the necessity of communal creative act, has waned. Truth is, every generation, even ours, needs its Bezalels and Oholiabs and freewill offerings.

I understand that God is not contained by buildings.

I understand that churches are notorious for driving their people into destitution in order to make opulent places of worship.

I understand that God’s people often engage in idolatry when it comes to their property, caring more about liability than livelihood.

I understand that we worship in spirit and truth, and that the sacrifices truly acceptable to God are a broken spirit and a contrite heart.

But none of that changes the fact that the creative spirit cries out for expression, and the Church can be a place where that spirit gets expressed for the good of many. Assets like ours can be leveraged to do work that others in our community find harder and harder to do.

Here’s something: In the Hebrew text, the word wisdom is like a bead strung throughout this story. In verse 33, “every kind of artistic craft” is, in the Hebrew, “every work of wisdom.” “Skill” in verse 35, which is something God gives to Bezalel and Oholiab, is, in Hebrew, “heart-wisdom.” And “every skilled person,” a phrase used in 36:1 and 2 to refer to those who come forward to assist the master craftsmen, is “every man of wise heart.” God is Wisdom. Art is wisdom-work. Artists channel the force of our endlessly creative God into the world. They, you, have heart-wisdom. Buildings can be albatrosses, money pits, burdens, idols. They can also be places of meeting, out of which life and glory and joy and energy reverberate into the neighborhood, the block, the city. A great divine drum, if tightened and struck just right.

When we sing, “Take, O take me as I am, summon out what I shall be,” we acknowledge that we are God’s handiwork, the work of God’s hands. God makes things beautiful, new, strong, and good. With God’s spirit, so can we.

Amen.

[1] Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World (New York: New Directions, 1973), 3.