Sacred
Place 6 BFC 2016
I
Kings 19:5-18
September
18, 2016
One of the things I try to do as a
parent is to allow my kids to watch whatever media and entertainment they find
interesting as a form of trust. At the
same time, I try to balance that with listening to and watching the media and entertainment
with them. I do that as a form of
interest in their lives, a way to engage in conversation with them, and also a
way to share my values with them. I am
really lucky to have children who may make fun of me at first, but care enough
to then want to get my opinion. So it
was that my youngest son, Abraham, kept telling
me that I needed to watch the HBO series, “Game of Thrones” because he thinks
it’s the bees’ knees. I wasn’t so sure
when I saw a single episode saturated with such violence.
But then
President Obama, at the Media Correspondence Dinner, a dinner where he is
expected to show off his sense of humor, made a “Game of Thrones” reference, “Kahleesi
is coming to Westoros”, and it drew the biggest laugh of the night.. So I knew “Game of Thrones” had become a
cultural reference I had to learn to become part of the conversation.
“Game of
Thrones” is really about who shall sit on the iron throne in Westeros. I think the show works because everybody can
pick a different person or family to root for.
Will the iron throne be controlled by the wealthy Lannister family, who,
with Machiavellian precision, destroy their enemies and, in so doing, find
themselves also destroying their family?
Does Stannis have the bloodlines which suggest he should be the rightful
ruler on the iron throne, ordained by the god of light, and achieved through
blood magic? Should it be the Stark
family and the person of integrity and courage, the bastard John Snow,
resurrected from the dead by the Red Woman?
Or perhaps it shall be the strong young woman who begins with no army,
no ships, not much that would recommend her to sit on the iron throne, Daenerys
Targaryen?
I can imagine that for many strong
women, Daenerys Targaryen, her full name Daenerys Stormborn, First of Her Name,
The Unburnt, Queen of Mereen, Queen of the Andals and of the First Men, Breaker
of Chains, Mother of Dragons, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, for many strong
women, she is they person they root for.
All of those titles reference what Daenerys has been through as naïve
teenager to emerge as a confident young woman.
So the reference made during President Obama’s speech was Khaleesi is
coming to Westeros, a reference to Hillary Clinton’s claim to the White
House. I know. I went a long way for that one.
In this last season of “Game of Thrones”,
Daenerys has been demoted in the city of the Dothraki. She comes to the ceremonial center of the
Dothraki, a strongly patriarchal culture, where she listens to the insults of
all the men who think of her as weak and worthy of their threats of sexual
violence. In return, we can see that her
transformation is complete. She knows
who she is. She confidently tells them
that they should worship her as their ruler. Then she begins to calmly turn over the fire
pits in the ceremonial center. The men
try to flee but the doors have all been jammed.
You see, Daenerys, is the Unburned.
Fire does not
harm her. And she
emerges from that fire, where people were threatening the end of her life,
having transformed herself from a young, naïve woman to someone supremely
confident in who she is as a rightful leader.
That Dothraki ceremonial center becomes a sacred place of emergence.
 |
| Daenerys emerging from the fire unharmed. |
With no less violence, in
the Biblical story, Elijah has the prophets of Baal slaughtered after he shows
how jealous he is on behalf of God. No
word yet on whether this slaughter was something God required of him. And the word is sent that what he did to the
Baal prophets, Ahab and Jezebel will certainly do to him. Having proved that God is real to the people
but not so confident about whether God will protect him, Elijah goes off and
asks God to end his life. He is
sullen. He is depressed. He is ready to
end it all. He is given food for his
journey and he ends up on the mountain of God inside of a cave. There he has something new to learn.
A strong wind, an
earthquake, and a fire appear in all their violence. But God is not in any of these three. He comes to the mouth of the cave.
Caves are those broken
circles that connote sacred places of emergence. For the ancient Maya people, they were
considered their worship centers. You
enter in. You are beckoned into the womb
of a cave. You emerge transformed by the
experience. Perhaps what Elijah is asked
to remember is the very values that defined his God over and against the god of
commodification, profit margin, and commerce.
For later on in the story, Elijah confronts Ahab with the death of the
farmer, Naboth, and the values of the Living God in regards to land and sacred
place.
o
God owns the land.
o
The land is not for sale.
(You and the Land are one.)
o
The land is given for the shalom of the whole community
(Shalom meaning peace, wholeness, connectedness).
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.
The god of commodification, profit
margin, and commercialism tends to suck the sacred right out of sacred
place. Rather than asking questions
about the holy, the mysterious, and how we are to emerge from a sacred place
transformed, with this god, we ask the cost, the return, and the yield. The place does not act on us, has no value in
its own right. Rather, it is an object
from which we suck all of its marrow, extract all of its resources. Then, we too, show ourselves to be objects
ourselves, vampires who are just looking for where we can find blood next.
For many people in our community
the beginning of another school year has begun.
I think what we would hope for all of our young people is that they
might experience school as one of those places of emergence. It was Simone Weil, French political
activist, philosopher, and Christian thinker, who believed a particular
attention to study, would train us for patient, attentive prayer, help make
school as a place of emergence. Weil
believed that this attention to study was not about scanning a subject or
mental concentration that effectively tuned out distractions. Rather, it was a receptivity or an openness
to manifestations of truth. Attention to
study, as a spiritual practice, is a
waiting, a fruitful inactivity, an anticipation that truth would come—“a
hungering for truth and hopeful expectation of its arrival. The attentive person’s waiting is laden with
the desire that her intelligence bear fruit.”[1] We may grind, and wade through the monotony
of study for a long period of time, Weil believes, but eventually, through our
attention, a light bulb comes on and we emerge from the material with
connection and understanding and a sense of the broader whole. And in that moment, school becomes a place of
emergence.
If not voluntarily, a person’s
attentiveness is sometimes sharpened out of necessity or tragedy or
devastation. Dr. Cornel West believed
that white folk in the United States had a chance to emerge from the tragedy of
9/11 with a greater understanding of the world because that calamity, in one
fell swoop, might have brought attention to a bigger vision of the world and
its suffering and death. Much as the
calamity of slavery made the African-American people attentive to all who sing
the blues, white America might go through the grief process in a way that
opened them to the suffering of the world.
Instead, West argues, our grief process was short-circuited by an
authoritarian anger that immediately demanded revenge. And we refused our own transformation,
resisted emerging from our pain with greater understanding.
In talking to a parishioner some
years back about sacred places of emergence, he related one of the most amazing
stories I have ever heard. He related
that he was on board a submerged nuclear submarine just off the coast of the
Scandinavian countries when the power went out on the
We certainly do not want to create
unbidden moments of sacred place like that for ourselves or our children, but
how do we provide the cues for sacred places of emergence in ways that welcome
them in? How does our congregation
become a sacred place of emergence?
As I shared, caves have,
mythologically, been seen as sacred places of emergence. And the story of Elijah emerging from the
cave contains all the elements. Among the Native American Navajo people, the Hogan,
sometimes a home, sometimes used as a ceremonial center for spiritual
In Christian tradition, the
labyrinth, of course, is that broken circle that calls us into the center and
then spins us back out into the world transformed by the pilgrimage. It was the pilgrimage Malcolm X took to Mecca
that radically transformed his life. Malcolm
X began his pilgrimage believing that white people and black people could not
live in community. He walked in to see
people of all colors journeying in that pilgrimage to Mecca. He emerged from that pilgrimage with a
broader understanding of our kinship as a human community.
Ok, so I want to share the elements
of a sacred place of emergence but then I’m going to turn to you to break into
groups of three or four to talk about what your historical places of emergence
have been and how our church might organize or construct itself so that we
might become a better sacred place of emergence. So be thinking about that as we go through
these elements.
So here are the elements of what it
means to be a sacred place of emergence:
o
Calls us in to call us out.
Womb-like. And the womb can often
be messy and feel like a very safe and dangerous place all at the same
time. We are held. But something new and
transformative is about to take place.
o
May be a safe place that leads us out to a place of new
wisdom or learning about God, yourself, and/or the world.
o
A place that gives you energy for new tasks or new adventures.
o
Can be a scary place in that once you are there, you are
being prepared for something new or transformative.
o
It can be a journey or a pilgrimage to a particular place, a
path we walk that we know will help us discern where and how God is moving and
calling us out. We listen for this call
because, as Joan Chittister writes, we are all called.[2]
o
Sometimes we only know that place of emergence when we have
been devastated or the rules we thought governed life don’t fit. Much like Elijah experienced, his world
turned upside down by the realization that his life was not as charmed as he
originally thought, or that God did not act in the world in the way he thought.
o
It is a particular place that allows us to see the holy
everywhere. As Biblical scholar, Ellen
F. Davis has said, “If one place is sacramental, then perhaps every place,
provided we learn to revere it, may yield access to grace.”[3]
So what are our sacred places of emergence? Or what is your story about
For you, it
might never mean that Khaleesi is coming to Westeros, but I hope our church
might always be a place that helps you develop the attentiveness to know your
power and believe that God is doing great things through you in the world. Even today, transformation has begun in
you. May the God of the still, small
voice, the sheer silence, the thin quiet, call you in and call you out to your
life’s journey. Amen.
[1]
Bradford S. Hadaway, “The Education of Attention,” in Attentive Patience: Christian
Reflection: A Series in Faith and Ethics
(Waco, TX: Baylor University, 2016),
pp. 29-30.
