Sacred Place 11
Luke 10.25-37 BFC 2016
Luke 10:25-37
October 30, 2016
We begin, as we did for many sermons
in this sacred place sermon series, with our values found in the iconic story
of Naboth’s vineyard:
o God owns the land. It does
not vest in the State or the multinational corporation or the local or transnational
financial institution. God owns the
land.
o The land is given for the shalom of the whole community (Shalom
meaning peace, wholeness, connectedness).
So if the land usage or residence or treatment does not, in its
materiality, its “thingness”, provide access to life, then it falls outside the
will of God.
o The land is not for sale. (You and the Land are one.) And if the land is up for sale, best bet is
that you can be bought and sold as well.
o Keeping the land in the “family” keeps the community free.
o The land can be redeemed to avoid debt slavery and provide Sabbath
o The land requires rhythms of Sabbath and rest. If the people and the land are one, rhythms
of production and consumption cannot be the governing or sole rhythms. The commandment, of all the 10 commandments,
that receives the most attention is the Sabbath. We are to remember that those people and places
that operate solely in a way that produces and consumes are known by one
name—slaves. God did not liberate the
Children of Israel from Egypt only to become slaves in the promised land.
We begin with
our values. As my favorite satirist, Jon
Stewart, said, “If you don't stick to
your values when they're being tested, they're not values—they're hobbies.” And
in one of our great faith traditions, holy Scripture, we find many of our
values rooted in story. Our job, as
people of faith, is not to accept them whole, but to engage them, critique
them, to ask if they stand the test of time.
And, if they do, if they hold up a necessary mirror to ourselves, our
community, our culture, and our world, then we should allow those stories to
move on us, shape us and form us.
Whether it is the Hebrew Scripture story of Naboth’s vineyard asking,
“Who owns the land? And to whom is the
land given? And for what purpose?” Or perhaps it is the New Testament story of
the Good Samaritan asking, “Can we see our own enemy as capable of great
compassion—a compassion that surpasses even the most holy of our own
people? Would we be willing to stop
along the dangerous Jericho Pass? If we
were battered, broken, bruised, and bloodied on the Jericho Pass, would we be
willing to accept the goodness of our own worst enemy?”
We
tell these stories in worship. We
rehearse them and effectively act them out so that when the time comes, we
move, live, and breathe with our highest, most radical values. We do that as a community because we
recognize that great courage will be required of us and we have a greater chance
to act out that great courage if there are people who stand shoulder to
shoulder with us. I draw great strength,
as your pastor, to write, act, and move in our community with courage because I
know the history of this congregation and trust that you would not want me to
wither and blink in the face of adversity.
And really, who wants a life empty of danger and risk? Right?
How boring!
Probably
the most widely read author in the world, Paulo Coehlo, speaks to this
truth:
Every morning I
find myself a different person. I’m always a mystery to myself. If I knew in
the first hours of the morning what I’m going to do, what is going to happen,
what attitude or decision should I take — I think my life would be deadly
boring because, well, what makes life interesting is the unknown. It is the
risks that we take every single moment of our day, of a single day.[1]
I think that
reflects back on what Wendell Berry references as the necessary “thingness” of
place that the worst of Western Protestant Christianity has often given up in
favor of something more transient. We
have become an extraction society that diminishes the “thingness” of the air,
the land, the water in a place believing that we can just find the grass
greener on the other side of the fence, go find our manifest destiny further
West, or move on to a place where the air is not toxic, the land is not mined,
and the water . . . and the water, well, we make sure we are upstream from
whatever happens to the water. Berry
argues that we must be willing to know that the doors of Eden are closed and
that the sacred is not to be found “out there” but to made with intent, shaped
with our hearts, and partnered with God, right here. Right here.
When I related to Lisa Harmon that I
was beginning a sermon series on sacred places, she gave me a book titled, Sacred Places. In that book was the story of Waimapihi
Reserve in Wellington, New Zealand.
Formerly a landfill, a dumping ground for old beds and refrigerators,
the community decided to clean it up and make it into something beautiful. And so now the Waimapihi Reserve is a sacred
place—a place “where people go to celebrate birthdays, to remember friends who
have passed away, or just to walk in the woods and find peace in the middle of
the city.”[2]
Billings First Congregational Church
is a sacred place. It is one of the
reasons I came to pastor this congregation.
I had read about and talked with the search committee you all about the
number of risks this congregation has historically taken to know yourself as
something more than boring. So in my
first six months of being here to hear that some people believed we should sell
our building to move out to where suburban growth and mega-churches were
booming in Billings, I literally caught my breath, a little disillusioned that
we would not see the risk and danger found in downtown Billings as an
invitation to be something more than boring.
As a sacred place, I believe God is forever calling us to engage the
world and partner with God . . . and
others to seek out risk and danger so that hopelessness is infused with the
sacred and becomes a haven and a place of hospitality for those in need of
healing; injustice is infused with the
sacred and becomes a place of persistent courage and care for those regularly
excluded; hatred and fear are infused
with the sacred and become a place of solidarity and prayer with the vulnerable
and the victims of war and violence; desecration and ruin are infused with the
sacred to make the good earth a place of life, growth, and beauty. As
Aden might say, “It becomes gleen.”
Ambassador
Andrew Young, a United Church of Christ mentor, former global spokesperson for
Operation HOPE, a Civil Rights leader, and the first lieutenant to Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., recounted a conversation that he and Dr. King had on this
very topic. Dr. and Mrs. Coretta Scott King had just returned from Israel, and
predictably people began talking about the Good Samaritan and the Jericho Road,
and associating this image with Dr. King. Dr. King told Andrew Young then, “
. . . Andy, I think the Good Samaritan is a great individual. I of course, like
and respect the Good Samaritan . . . but I don’t want to be a Good Samaritan.” Dr. King continued, “ . . . you see Andy, I am tired of picking up
people along the Jericho Road. I am tired of seeing people battered and bruised
and bloody, injured and jumped on, along the Jericho Roads of life. This road
is dangerous. I don’t want to pick up anyone else, along this Jericho Road; I
want to fix . . . the Jericho Road. I want to pave the Jericho Road, add street
lights to the Jericho Road; make the Jericho Road safe (for passage) by
everybody. . . .[3]
Who knew that when I arrived in Billings, one of the first things I
would be invited to was a partnership with these incredible people named Lisa,
Greg, Ray, Natasha, Joe, Virginia, Mel, and Mollie to be a very small part of
the holy work to make downtown Billings a sacred place with celebrations,
festivals, 5ks, trick or treating, and cultural events? For me, it really started to get traction
when Lisa helped us with language that saw the people battered and bruised and
bloodied by life,, lying alongside the road not as enemies to be feared or
disposable people to be “managed” but as people who are our friends and
neighbors.
The Downtown Billings Alliance invited all of us to a partnership where
we might engage the dangerous or risky place and find our salvation there. As we join hands with them, stand shoulder
to shoulder with them we become a haven and place of hospitality, a place of
courage and care, a place of solidarity and prayer, a place of life, growth,
and beauty. May we always be willing to
engage the Jericho Pass, the place of risk, so that Billings First
Congregational may forever be known as a sacred place. After all, who wants to be boring? Amen.
[1] “Paulo Coehlo, The Alchemy
of Pilgrimage,” OnBeing with Krista Tippett, http://www.onbeing.org/program/paulo-coelho-the-alchemy-of-pilgrimage/transcript/8855#main_content.
[2] Phillip Carr-Gomm, Sacred Places: Sites of Spiritual Pilgrimage from Stonhenge
to Santiago de Compostela (London:
Quercus, 2008), p. 6.
[3] John Hope Bryant, “Fixing
the Jericho Road
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