Sacred Place Worship Series 3, August 28, 2016, "God of Place/No Place"

Sacred Place 3 BFC 2016

Psalm 90; Jeremiah 7:1-11

August 28, 2016

To my smart and strong nephew, Kian James.  May you know that your life matters.  May you know that you were made in the image of God—today, tomorrow, every day.

Two poems.  One that teaches God as place.  The other that sees God in no place. 

The first poem.  There is that great poem by David Wagoner, which suggests that even though we might not know our place, God is placed here, with us, that God permeates all of creation, here, in this place.  Wagoner writes in his poem, “Lost”:

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. you must let it find you.[1]

Even before the mountains were born, the Psalmnist writes, or you gave birth to the earth and the world, O God, from the beginning of time to the ending of time, you were our Dwelling Place.  You have held us in your womb.  It is the beginning of a beautiful Psalm which is an appeal to the motherly compassion of God.  In effect, saying, do not now abandon your character to be something else in your anger.  It is the Psalmnist saying that our true place is within the being of God.  And within Rabbinic tradition is a great debate as to whether all of creation is the dwelling place of God or whether God is the dwelling place of all creation. 

What wins out is the idea that God is the dwelling place of all creation.  All of creation, then, finds its meaning as it participates in God as place.   So as we move, live, and breath, we are to ask ourselves whether we are participating within God as place.  Or do we find ourselves moving, living, and breathing as we can act apart from God?  Do we poison the womb?  Do we infect the bloodstream?  Do we upset the stomach?  The author of Psalm 90 uses descriptive, concrete words, symbols, images, and ideas to describe God as our dwelling place, mother, teacher.  In hope, the author writes, God is our compassionate forgiver.

Within spirituality, particularly within the language of prayer, two fancy words are used to call upon God, both found in Psalm 90.  Kataphatic prayer is a way of talking about God’s concrete presence that is describable and known.  We use metaphors that are near to us, attainable, see, heard, tasted, and touched.  We point to the places where we see God active and moving in the world.  St. Ignatius used these in the spiritual exercises he developed for the Jesuit Order.  Ignatius knew the role of imagination in faith and called upon it so that we might see God ever-present, active, and involved.  This is called the kataphatic.  Kataphatic prayer and spirituality is powerful as we seek to teach children and youth the meaning and movement of God.  We should help our children and youth develop metaphor after metaphor, a diversity of images and concrete understandings that often translate into a plurality.  We may use some images more than others but our children and youth sense that we are never anchored into a singular understanding because we too are growing, moving, and changing.

 Apophatic prayer or spirituality is one that feels the profound absence of God, God’s abandonment.  Apophatic strips God of all images and metaphors until one knows that God cannot be understood but is a mystery to be beloved.   The apophatic is particularly critical of the kataphatic tradition when it knows that God is too easily placed and captured.  In the passage from Jeremiah for today, the political and religious authorities point to God in the Temple and all being right with the world.  “Too easily,” Jeremiah the prophet would say, “too easily you assume that God is in your project, your work, your building, your house of worship, when you, as a people have abandoned the very spiritual practices that describe the nature and character of this God.  Too easily you have placed God in your grand political theater, your religious rites and festivals and then pretended like God blesses your blood-soaked violence, your imperial war, and your injustice against the poor.”  God is, in effect, no place.  The apophatic tradition remembers Jesus on the cross, experiencing the God who cannot be found in the Roman justice, torture, and execution, quoting Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”   God’s absence is given as a gift as if to say that God refuses, will not, fasts from systems of domination and violence.  God has no place in them. 

As human beings, the apophatic is forever a critique against a simplistic, kataphatic statement that God’s place and blessing are found here because we are the chosen, we are the righteous, we are the blessed--not because of our relationship with God or because we act in accordance with God’s character and nature, but because we hear a message that makes us believe God’s presence is found in my genetic code but not yours, God’s ordains some to be slaves and some to be masters, that the present state of affairs is true evidence that God is here with me and by your poverty, your imprisonment, your torture, the death of your people, God is certainly not placed with you.  The apophatic does not let this simplistic theology stand. 

You may have seen the protests erupting in Milwaukee a couple of weeks ago.  The protests were sparked by the killing of 23 year-old Sylville Smith after years of rising tension between the community and the police.  My sister-in-law posted news of the protests on Facebook, remembering the difficult decision they had to make with their new son, Kian three years ago.  My brother and sister-in-law were aware that Milwaukee is considered the worst city in which one can raise an African-American child.  So they packed up their small family and moved out of Milwaukee hoping and praying they might find a better environment for my beautiful, kind, and strong nephew, Kian. 

Upon seeing the eruption of protests in Milwaukee, Muhibb Dyer, African-American activist and co-founder of the organization Flood the Hood with Dreams, wrote this heart-wrenching and beautiful poem.  To me, it sounds much like Psalm 22, Jesus from the cross, asking about the presence of God.  See what you think.

I want you to see beyond the bottles being thrown.

I want you to see beyond the anger
and see a young man on his hands and knees
looking up to the heavens
not knowing if God exists
on a street called Burleigh in Milwaukee.

And he says, "It’s like I’m sitting in a jail cell,
Lord, listen to me.
It’s like I’m sitting in a jail cell,
God, listen to me.
It’s like I’m sitting in a jail cell,
Lord, with invisible bars
waiting on death row
counting down the days
because I know they’re coming.
You see, I know they’re coming.
Them police, them jealous dudes and chicks
they’re all coming.
And it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

You see, Lord, they never told me you were in me.
They never told me you were always there.
So, in turn, I believed what I saw.
And what I saw was a daddy that was never around
and a mama that was always crying
because we were always broke
when there was money outside,
and rats and roaches and pissy mattresses
me and my brother slept on
when there was money outside,
and teachers that told me
I had to wait 12 years to get paid.
You see, my teachers told me
I had to wait 12 years to get paid
while all of them got paid off of me right now
whether I learned or not
when there was money outside.
And what else was I supposed to do?

“They never told me you were in me, God.
They never told me you were always there.
And how was I supposed to know
that being created in your image and your likeness
meant that if you made the Earth, Lord,
I can make my own business,
and if you made the sun,
I could make more than just babies
more than just babies
but buildings and networks
and that busting guns wasn’t the only way
to get access to your power, Lord,
and shaking these dudes down on the block
for this dope money was not the only way
to get access to your power, Lord?
How was I supposed to know?
And how was I supposed to know
that downing shots of Hennessy and smoking weed
wasn’t the only way to accept this and get to heaven,
that I could have gotten down on all fours and talked to you, Lord?

“They never told me you were in me.
They never told me you were always there.
And how was I supposed to know
that every time mama was like
’Stay in school, baby,
stay off those streets,’
that was you, Lord,
and every misdemeanor charge I ever beat,
that was you, Lord,
every felony charge I ever beat,
that was you, Lord,
and when those bullets missed me
when I was on the block doing wrong,
that was you, Lord,
and when my boy laid in that casket
cold and lifeless,
that that was like you was trying to tell me
he would be me if I didn’t change?

“And now I’ve fallen.
My time is up.
I know they’re coming.
And I don’t even know
if you listen to kids like us, Lord.
Do you even care about kids like us, Lord?
But I know now what I should have known then.
And it took me to fall to see the light.
You were always in me.
You were always there.
Forgive me, Lord,
for I knew not what I was doing to myself.
Please, send me somebody
a voice
maybe from across the nation
a sympathetic voice
that understands
that I need to be taught
something that I’ve never been taught before.
Please, send me someone
anybody in humanity
that can teach me to love me
teach me to love me

teach me to love me."[2]

In contrast to David Wagoner’s poem, where the whole world seems to vibrate with God’s presence here, in this place, Muhibb Dyer’s poem asks difficult questions about the absence of God, of a God in no place. 

          I believe we must forever hold the kataphatic and the apophatic in tension.  We should be working hard to say how we see God in this place, naming God, defining God’s work in the world as a way of developing our own spiritual growth and giving hope to one another as we discern next steps in our lives.  But we should also be saying that even though we have a wonderful historical legacy in this place, have a wonderfully beautiful sanctuary, and have experienced the presence of God here in powerful ways, God is not here just because we will it to be so.  Sometimes God’s absence, God’s “no place”, is given as a gift so that we move out of our pews and into the world seeking God in those stripped and abandoned places where our love and compassion are required.  And perhaps, the hope is, the hope against hope is, that much like Muhibb Dyer, when we, ourselves feel that we have been stripped and abandoned of all the traditional ways of God’s power and presence, maybe we find that God is actually holding our hand and weeping with us, shouting in protest and marching with us, or once again, screaming in labor pains as She seeks to give birth to a new earth and world.  Amen. 

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[1] David Wagoner, “Lost,” Collected Poems:  1956-1976 (Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University, 1976). 

[2]Muhibb Dyer, Democracy Now!, August 15, 2016, http://www.democracynow.org/2016/8/15/this_is_the_madness_they_spark.