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. Do we ever not desire a king? When we find a leader we want to follow, doesn't the temptation to think of him as king too often follow?
For Christians, there is a tendency to want to make Jesus our king? Even though in John 6:15: after feeding the five thousand, the crowd wants to “take him by force to make him king.” Jesus withdrew 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 stayed the Trump administration’s attempt to deploy the National Guard to our city this week, it was not merely a legal action. It was, 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.
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 us 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 am reminded 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.
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