October 26, 2025: God's Presence in Cloud and Fire

Josh Stromberg-Wojcik preached today about Solomon fulfilling his father David’s dream: to build a house where God’s name may dwell. 

Josh preachied that the construction and dedication of the Temple marked a transition, from a God who moves in a pillar of cloud and fire to a God who chooses to dwell in a house among the people.

When the ark is brought in, the text says:

“The 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 of the Lord.” (1 Kings 8:10–11)

The same divine presence that had led Israel through the wilderness now settles, thick and luminous, within the walls of stone and cedar. God’s movement and God’s mystery remain, but now they inhabit the heart of community life.

In Exodus, the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night is the first theology lesson for a people just liberated. It teaches that God accompanies even when the road is uncertain. Despite what we might assume, God's presence transforms danger into direction. What Josh suggested with these parallel Exodus passages was that Light and darkness are not opposites in God’s hands, but interwoven expressions of divine care, even when God's particular response can be unexpected.

in Exodus, God dwells in the “thick darkness” on Sinai (Exodus 20:21). and, in the Red Sea story, the cloud even becomes a paradoxical sign:

“The cloud was there in the darkness, and it lit up the night” (Exodus 14:20). 

Light within darkness, not apart from it. Later, in Exodus 40, the cloud fills the completed Tabernacle, the portable sanctuary, foreshadowing the later Temple scene in 1 Kings 8. Both moments mark a dwelling of divine presence, a resting of glory that both conceals and reveals.

Stromberg-Wojcik reminded us throughout Scripture, light often represents revelation, guidance, and hope; darkness can signify mystery, unknowing, or oppression but the Bible’s portrayal of “darkness” is not always negative, it’s often where God hides to heal, After all in Genesis 1, God speaks into darkness to bring forth light, but the darkness is not destroyed. Also, the darkness brought to Josh's mind a seed planted in dark, fertile soil containing its mystery of new life

This is why in 1 Kings 8:12, Solomon says: “The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.” Darkness, then, becomes the womb of revelation, not its enemy. The cloud that conceals is the same presence that comforts.

Stomberg-Wojak's sermon also brought up light and shadow as seen in the American church, which reminded me of reading Lenny Duncan's Dear Church

In his book Lenny Duncan, a Black Lutheran pastor and prophetic voice, confronts the church’s tendency to claim “light” while ignoring its complicity in systems of racism and exclusion. He calls the ELCA, and the wider white church to confess that “our light has cast shadows.”

In Dear Church, Duncan invites us to redeem darkness, not as evil, but as the place where truth is uncovered, where marginalized voices, so often dismissed as “too angry” or “too radical,” speak with the clarity that light sometimes blinds us to. In his sermon, he admitted to wrestling with that understanding.

Ducan asks: What if the church stopped equating whiteness with light, and instead allowed the Spirit to dwell in the thick cloud of God’s transforming mystery? This could be the same cloud that filled the Tabernacle and Temple. 

Recording of Today's Sermon

 

October 22, 2025 - Looking forward to Reformation Sunday: After a "No Kings" Weekend

Reading: 1 Kings 5:1–5; 8:1–13

In 1 Kings 5, Solomon begins building a temple “for the name of the Lord my God.” It is a project of immense ambition, stone by stone, cedar by cedar, the dream of a permanent dwelling for the Holy One who journeyed with Israel through wilderness and exile. 

Yet when the temple is finally complete and the Ark is brought inside (1 Kings 8), a cloud descends. The priests cannot stand to minister, for the glory of God fills the house. The moment of triumph is also a moment of holy interruption. The presence of God eclipses the power of kings.

This text meets our own moment with piercing clarity. Don't we always desire a king? When we find a leader we want to follow, isn't the temptation to think of him as king?

 For Christians, we want to make Jesus a king. Even though, starting with John 6:15, when the crowd wants to “take him by force to make him king,” Jesus withdraws to a mountain alone. And in Luke 17:20, when asked about the kingdom, he says, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed… For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” Also in Mark 10:42-45 he tells his disciples, “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them… but it shall not be so among you. Whoever wishes to be first must be a slave of all.” 

In Portland, protesters gather beneath the banner “No Kings.” The cry is not anarchic; it is theological. It names the truth that divine presence cannot be possessed by empire or enthroned in human institutions. When the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals considers the Trump administration’s attempt to deploy the National Guard to our city this week, it is not merely a legal action. It is, in its own way, a moral pause, a reminder that peace cannot be manufactured through militarization, and that the rule of law must bend toward the rule of justice.

As to God dwells in the cloud that descends, when the winds rise and the sky darkens, our first instinct is often to seek shelter, to run from the storm. Yet in Scripture, dark clouds and the storm are sometimes the very place where God chooses to speak.

When Job demanded answers, God’s voice came out of the whirlwind (Job 38:1). When Moses met the Holy One on Sinai, the mountain shook, cloaked in cloud and thunder (Exodus 19). The God of the storm is not a destroyer, but a revealer. In the whirlwind, old certainties are swept away. In the thunder, false gods of power and control are drowned out. The dark cloud becomes both veil and revelation, hiding what we cannot bear, revealing what we most need to know: that God is not absent in darkness and turmoil, but deeply, fiercely present.

Our scriptures remind us that the line between temple and throne has always been fragile. Solomon built a house for God, but the monarchy that surrounded it grew corrupt. Power hardened into entitlement, and worship became ceremony without compassion. The prophets would later cry out that God desired mercy, not sacrifice, that the living God was not contained in any house of cedar or system of control.

The “No Kings” protest echoes those prophetic cries. It refuses to bow before the idols of nationalism and cruelty disguised as order. It insists that true authority belongs to the God who sides with the poor, who shelters the unhoused, and who weeps in the tear gas of Portland’s streets.

Sixteen days into a government shutdown, the air is thick with blame and despair. Those with power wield cruelty as policy and call it governance. Yet as Paul Tillich reminds us, the opposite of faith is not doubt, it is despair. To have faith in this season is to refuse despair’s logic. It is to claim the courage to be, to act, to speak, to love, to protest, as though another world is possible.

The theologian Dorothee Sölle called that courage “suffering with”, standing in deep solidarity with those who bear the brunt of systemic violence. God is not distant from such suffering. God is in the breadlines and jail cells, in the parks and protest marches, in the hearts of those who dare to say “No Kings” because they believe in a kingdom of justice and peace.

We are being asked now: Will we be content to worship in temples built by fear and fortified by force? Or will we, like Solomon before the cloud, fall silent before a presence that refuses to be contained, a presence that calls us out of comfort and into communion?

The Spirit still fills the house, but not the house of kings. The Spirit fills the house of the people, those who hunger for mercy, who work for justice, who stand against cruelty as a matter of faith.

To believe in God, in this moment, is to believe that what we do for the least among us matters infinitely.

While celebrating this Reformation Sunday, let's remember not only Luther’s hammer and theses but also the Spirit’s ongoing protest in our own time. Let us remember that “reformation” is not a day in October but a posture of the soul, open to repentance, resistance, and renewal. I keep in mind that every act of mercy, every march for justice, every refusal to bow to tyranny is a confession of faith:  
 

The presence still moves while the "cloud" still descends. The reign of God inevitably has no king.