Sacred
Place 5 BFC 2016
Gospel
of Thomas 77
September
11, 2016
One of the gifts I would regularly
give out for graduation was a book by the late Nazarene minister, Rev. Bob
Benson. Unlike many books I read out of
the Christian conservative tradition, Benson’s writing was filled with such
practical love and compassion for the human condition. That was never more so true as his
recollection of how his family came to accumulate set after set of fine
drinking glasses. Benson’s glass
collecting happened over a 25-year period that began with his marriage to his beloved
Peg. On their wedding day, Mrs. Payne, a
beloved parishioner, gave him and his wife a lovely crystal set—beautifully
shaped, delicately etched. This began
Rev. Bob Benson’s careful, deliberate tradition of securing this crystal set in
a protected, safe, and untouchable place where he and Peg could retrieve the
glasses and take them out when things got “good.” His family became so aware of how tenderly he
treasured these ornate, beautiful glasses, that every Christmas Eve, he would
receive another set of ornate, beautiful glasses.
It became Bob Benson’s tradition. After every bike and toy was put together,
after everyone was tucked into bed on Christmas Eve, Benson could be found
arranging the old and new sets with tender care in perfect, neat, orderly
rows—all waiting for the “good” to arrive in Bob’s marriage to his beloved
Peg. Rev. Benson remarked that if use of all those beautiful, ornate glasses
was to be a judge of his marriage to his beloved Peg, they had not had much
“good” for 25 years. Those lovely
drinking glasses given by Mrs. Payne were probably the least used of anything
in the house. Meanwhile, the toaster and
mixer they received for their wedding had long since bitten the dust.
So what did they use, what glasses adorned their table for
drinking? He wrote,
After a few
weeks, the same thing always begins to happen.
Someone will empty the peanut butter jar. Someone else will stick in the
dishwasher. Someone else will put the
jar on the shelf. At last, it shows up
on the dinner table. There it is, thick
and ugly, with part of the label attached.
There is no delicate etching. It
doesn’t match. It’s just a big, old,
ex-peanut butter jar.[1]
So it is that those ex-peanut butter
jars became the ordinary source for the sharing of refreshment and joy at
family gatherings, became a common fixture at meals filled with laughter and
tears, turned into a reminder of the everyday ties that bind in familial
compassion and love. In contrast, the
beautifully etched, delicately shaped crystal went unused, untouched, perhaps
because it was known that they could not handle the everyday, rough and tumble
of the real world.
I think religion does quite a bit of
that in the wider world. We declare
something “sacred” and it therefore becomes untouched, unpracticed, unused in
the rough and tumble real world. We
draw a circle around what we call sacred and never know the God who often
operates in the common and even in the profane.
As the circle draws tighter and tighter around us, creating ever more
pressure, until it strangles all of life and joy until from our lives.
We call the Bible sacred, perhaps
buying the Bible with most beautiful and ornate cover, pages of fine onion skin
never to be marked or noted or dog-eared, never meant to be used, sitting
ceremoniously on some shelf or left to be prominently displayed as a family
heirloom but rarely cracked open. We do
not engage it, fail to critique it, and do not recognize that its sacredness is
found in the common struggles and joys of people throughout the ages who are
struggling to find meaning in relation to God and neighbor.
We call sex sacred and create an
almost impossible threshold that does not allow sex to be regularly practiced
and enjoyed or not enjoyed as common.
Mature and healthy adults should have sex often and claim our common
sexual nature. Rather, in the sacredness
of sex, we develop out-of-this-world expectations that every sexual encounter
will lead to our emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual fulfillment. For it is pornography that truly represents
sex as sacred—everyone without blemish and odor, perfectly made up,
experiencing the highest of pleasure in every encounter. Nobody slips and falls. Nobody breaks out laughing. Nobody ends up in tears as historic pain is
relived. That’s unreal. It doesn’t happen that way. There are times when the common practice of
sexuality brings together longer, intentional practices of tenderness, care,
and true intimacy that can make sex sacred.
But sex, in and of itself, is meant to be common.
In the Gospel of Thomas, the verse
Vivian read for us today, Jesus says that we do not find him in some house of
worship or a place of political power or even seated at some prominent place in
the afterlife. Rather, we are to look
for him in the common and mundane.
“Split a piece of wood, I am there. Lift up a stone, I am there.” And in so doing, in looking for the sacred in
the common and mundane, the common and mundane become sacred.
Can we see our children, our life
partners, our friends as holy? We all
carry with us a longing for locus
mirabilis—literally, an amazing, wondrous, and remarkable place—a place of
extraordinary import found among the common and even the profane. “Don’t carelessly pass over small things, the
Shakers warned each other. to know God
is to be attentive to the presence of heaven in every leafstalk and sprig.”[2]
And that is how the Shakers practiced
their faith. Their villages, their
handiwork were shaped with perfectly straight lines, angles that were exactly
right, and deceitful work was expressly forbidden. In regular, consistent, and common work, they
believed the divine was expressed. “Contemplation
of any ordinary thing made extraordinary by attention and love can become an
occasion for glimpsing the profound.”[3]
Martin Luther believed that landscapes
or places could function as the larva Dei,
the mask of the Divine. We all seek the
mask that invests with power and life.
We may take a photo of beautiful sunrise or sunset that may have seemed
infinitely divine or glorious to us when we were present in the moment of the
photo’s taking, but which seems to lose its luster as we try to describe it to
family and friends. Sometimes describing
the mask removes the mystery. For a mask
identifies the character represented but hides its identity as well. The mask is never able to contain or consume
the holy or divine yet neither can the holy or divine be known apart from the
mask. That is what we seek to become as
a sacred place as Billings First Congregational Church, a larva Dei, a mask of the divine.
But there is a great chance that we
strangle the sacred, put too much pressure on ourselves and this place, or seek
to contain the uncontainable wild and free God by declaring our place “sacred”
without regular, consistent, and persistent practices that reflect our
attention and love.
For any of you who have ever spent
time in New England, you know that many Congregational Churches spilled out
onto a common or a green where people experienced the whole of community life
together. The common was the place where
the congregation intersected with their neighbors, came together for the sober
meetings or the joyous celebrations of community life. The common was a place that was well-trodden,
shared, and open to all humans, and in an earlier time, animals alike.
From the pulpit I stood in at the Congregational Church in North
Hampton, New Hampshire, I could look to my right, outside the long window, and
see the common with its bandstand.
During the summer, on Wednesday evenings, people from all around the
community would bring out their blankets and their lawn chairs to hear the Air
Force Band or the local cover band or even a touring polka band. Kids ate hot dogs and watermelon. We would give our kids a little money to run
over to the common and get one of the ice cream treats sold by one of the local
community organizations. That little
stretch of green with a bandstand became a sacred place for many people in
North Hampton. Even when we remained at the parsonage
listening to the music, Wednesday nights on the North Hampton common lightened
the rest of our week and made us feel connected to our wider community.
I think that is the great opportunity we have before us as a
congregation. When our congregation
functioned historically as a common in downtown Billings, we become ever more
God’s sacred place. From when our
congregation began a day care as a mission and ministry, to how we have served
as hosts for the Boy Scouts, Family Promise, and refugees, to how we have
provided the space for art, cultural, and political events, to today when we
have become the safe space for so many Native American recovery groups, when we
have functioned as a regular, consistent, and persistent common for our
community, we become the larva Dei,
the mask of God.
That is my hope, my dream for this spiritually powerful congregation. That we recognize God has little value for
delicately etched and little used crystal stored on an empty shelf and used
only for what we might call “the sacred.”
Rather, I believe we are better off extending our work as peanut butter
jars--a rough and tumble common for our community that is well-tread, a place
where our neighbors find hospitality, shelter, and rest, and invites others
into a spiritually diverse and rich place so that this congregation might
continue the work of partnering with others to build God’s Beloved Community. I think that task is worthy of this
spiritually powerful congregation.
Sisters and brothers, you may never get this invitation anywhere else at
any other time in your life. But I
invite you to be peanut butter jars—an ordinary source for sharing refreshment
and joy, a common fixture for laughter and tears, an everyday reminder of the
ties that bind us in compassion and love.
Split a piece of wood, I am there.
Lift up a stone, I am there. For
it is in the ordinary, the common, and the everyday, where Christ is
found. Praise God. Amen.
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