Sacred Place Worship Series 2, April 21, 2016, "The Elements of Sacred Place"

Sacred Place 2 BFC 2016

Genesis 28:10-19

August 21, 2016

Always before us, when we talk about sacred place, we must remember the character and intent of God.  And we learned that last week through the iconic story of Naboth’s vineyard.  Naboth’s vineyard reminds the Jewish people of the importance of Sabbath and Sabbath mythology.  It is the teach and story that keeps them free on the land.  Here are the character and intent of God where we begin with sacred place, the values of God.

Slide 1:  The Values of God

• ·        God owns the land
•           The land is not for sale (You and the land are one.)  If the land is up for sale, it means that you can be bought too.  You are up for sale.
•      The land is given for the shalom of the whole community.  In Jewish mythology, shalom had profound and multivalent meaning.  It meant peace, wholeness, connectedness, the welfare of the entire community and nation.  It meant that things were right and well in your relationship with God and things were right and well in your relationship with your neighbor.
•            Keeping the land “in the family keeps you free” because it can always be “redeemed” or “bought back” at a later time so that a family did not continue to fall deeper and deeper into debt slavery.  And keeping the people free was the whole point of being a Sabbath people.
•       As I said, the land can be redeemed to avoid debt slavery and provide Sabbath.  It is the final act of the prophet Jeremiah as the Babylonians storm the gates of Jerusalem.  He buys back the ancestral land as a reminder of God’s hope for the people.  By itself, it is a singular, hopeless act.  But it is a prayer that the people might some day remember God’s intent for them.
•      The land requires, as people do, rhythms of Sabbath and rest.

These values then, set the stage for the rest of the Biblical story.  They provide the context for how God seeks to live in community with the Jewish people.  So moving on from God’s values, we come to this story of Jacob and the stairway to heaven.  Jacob’s ladder not only reminds us of the way God works in the world but also begins the discussion of what is a sacred place.  For Jacob marks this place as sacred, as the House of God, as the Gate of Heaven—a portal or thin place.

Jacob is a scammer, a refugee, and yet God appears to him in this place to share that God will accompany him, protect him.  As stated in the introduction to Scripture, he was not a priest or king.  Jacob must wonder if God would even have anything to do with him in this patriarchal world where his father and the first-born always hold sway.  For his mother, it was about life and the potential of losing all of hers if Esau marries a foreign woman and she loses all of her connection.  For Jacob, not as much is at stake. 

What the story seems to teach, what Jacob learns is what was taught by early Shaker communities:  earth and heaven are of one loom, if we have the eyes to see it.  The Divine is not so far away.  Heaven and earth, sacred and profane meet, as T.S. Elliot wrote, “at the still point of the turning world.”  Jacob holds no special office is of no special moral quality to witness this place as sacred. 

Slide 2:  The Elements of Sacred Place

 I think Dr. Belden C. Lane, a professor of theological studies at St. Louis University, provides great study material for working out the elements of sacred palce. In reading through his understandings of what makes a sacred place, in his books, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes and Landscapes of the Sacred, I discerned these criteria, these elements, for what makes a sacred place.

So here are those:

• ·        A sacred place is a storied place
• ·        A sacred place is about our perspective or point of view.  There are some people who might look at the same place and not experience it as sacred or holy.
• ·        Sacred places have the capacity to move with us through a process of mystery, demystification, and then experiencing a reawakening to wonder.  Think about it as to how a child who might experience the wonder of Christmas, learns that not all the stories told of Christmas are literally true, and then reawakens to discovery the wonder of the season while still holding onto the critical nature of passing beyond those childhood assumptions. 
• ·        A sacred place usually involves a boundary or a border with different claims or perspectives.
• ·        A sacred place is not chosen.  It chooses.  There is something about the inert quality of the sacred place, the chora, an energy or a vibrancy.  If we did the choosing, we would be mandating to God God’s movement and life.  We affirm the freedom of God when we do not get caught up in choosing ourselves.
• ·        A sacred place may be a common place that is made extraordinary by spiritual practice.
• ·        One can tread upon a sacred place without entering it.  Maybe it is heard or seen.
• ·        The impulse of a sacred place is to draw inward to particularity and then outward to a universality.  We can only really know sacred through the particularly local manifestation we have experienced.  But it brings about a larger awareness.

Slide 3—Christmas Eve service at Billings First Congregational

•      Sacred place as storied place.

“The identity of a sacred place lies in the stories it bears and the power that these tales exert on the people who repeat them.”  What stories do we tell of this place, our church, that identifies it as a sacred place? I chose this slide because so many of you, in your dinner groups, named the special services at our church as one of the primary ways you knew our church as a sacred place.  Many people related special services at our church as one of the ways you know our church to be a sacred place.

•    Having the eyes to see it

As I said before, sacred place is about a perspective or a point of view but an awareness that a place seems to have a life of its own. 

   Slide 4-Sophia Heilman in Yellowstone

•     Mystery, demystification, reawakening of wonder

Theologian and Biblical scholar, Marcus Borg described this as beginning with a pre-critical naivete, moving to an ability to offer critique, and then arriving on the far side of that critique to a post-critical naivete. 

Belden Lane writes about this.  If there is hope for a genuine rediscovery of the spirit, it will not be found in looking back to an innocence once lost, a simplistic return to the paradise of Eden.  It will demand a reaching back into the spiritual practices and critical insights gathered by the whole of the Western (and Eastern) spiritual tradition.  It will require a metanoia, a turning away from efforts to manage the mystery of God by means of abstract Enlightenment reasoning by an accumulation of individual spiritual techniques.  It will even necessitate an attentiveness to the questions of power, gender, and ethnicity that cultural studies have posed, requiring us to test our motives and listen carefully to voices long silenced in the past.  Only then may it be possible to encounter, by grace, a second naivete—a renewed sense of wonder glimpsed within the myriad landscapes of the holy.

I chose this slide because I think this is one of the hopes Tracy and I have for our daughter when she encounters places like Yellowstone.  We hope that she is able to experience the wonder and awe of Yellowstone but from a perspective that is becoming more and more adult that she just doesn’t “ooh” and “ahh” at the waterfalls or the bison but is able know some of the complex relationships that exist between the environment, the animals, and herself and still know its beauty and wonder.  So “not a return to Eden’s innocence” for her but “an openness to transformation.”

     Slide 5-The Standing Rock Sioux Protection/Protest at the Missouri River  

•      Usually a boundary and border with multiple claims and perspectives—stretch of the Missouri River now known as sacred because of the multiple and disputed claims to it.  Might argue that the Standing Rock Sioux have joined with God to infuse it with divine and sacred purpose.

•      Sacred Place is not chosen.  It chooses.  This affirms the incarnational particularity to Judeo-Christian faith.    It also reminds us that we do not have God in a box or captured.  And when claims are made to that extent, there is a need to “tear down” the high places to affirm the freedom of God.  We will talk more about this next week. 

         Slide 6-Spiritual practice-regularly, consistently, persistently

•      Ordinary Place made extraordinary by spiritual practice—creates an opening, a portal, a possibility for God to be made known.  Nelson discovered in his work among Koyukon (indigenous of Alaska) elders in the far north, “There may be more to learn by climbing the same mountain a hundred times than by climbing a hundred different mountains.”  (Lane, pp. 254-255.)  As I have always shared, my definition of spiritual practice is what we get into our bloodstream by doing regularly, consistently, persistently.
•     Can tread upon without being entered—Belden Lane writes about his experience of coming to a clearing every day for many, consecutive days and waiting silently outside that clearing.  Nothing unusual happened for several days until one day a deer moved into a clearing and looked directly at him.  That place then became holy and sacred for him.  He did not need to walk into the clearing.  But there was an encountering of the clearing that happened. 

Slide 7—The sacred mountain is everywhere

       Impulse is to draw in to particularity and be spun out to universality—found in our spiritual practices like a labyrinth or even communion (come to altar or take in food to then go out).  Dom Virgil Michel (Benedictine co-worker of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin):  No one could enter into the heart of the liturgical spirit without having been seized by a vision for the realization of social justice in every specific locale.   

     Native American spiritual leader Black Elk talked about the sacred mountain as being Harney Peak in South Dakota but then, out of that experience as Harney Peak being sacred, he was able to universalize to say that the sacred mountain is everywhere.  “A sacred place draws us into a holy center and draws us out in an awareness that God is not confined to a single place.”

Slide 8-What has historically made Billings First Congregational a sacred place?  How is God leading Billings First Congregational to continue to be a sacred place?

So now I want you to spend time talking to one another about these two presenting questions and then I would ask you to share as you feel led.  Please remember to ask permission is you want to share someone else’s observation.  We will take a minute of meditation and then answer the presenting questions you see here.