SunAug282011
Scripture: EXODUS 3:1-15
A number of years ago, when our family was traveling across the country, we drove through South Dakota. As we were traversing the state, Mary found herself in tears much of the time. It was as though she had some primal connection to that land, as though it were home. It felt, somehow, holy to her.
I have never quite had that experience. But I have felt the clear presence of something sacred at other places: when I first saw the Grand Canyon; as I’ve looked out across a beautiful swath of central Vermont from Stowe Pinnacle; as I’ve explored the mile-long sand bar that juts out from Pine Point on the coast of Maine.
Most of us, I think, have some sense of what it means when God says to Moses, “Take off your sandals, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Ex. 3:5). We have had that experience of knowing there is something special about a particular spot, something set apart, a quality that is rare and different. Holy ground is not like the rest. It’s not tainted by the ugliness and drudgery and selfishness that mar the everyday world. Holy places are generally peaceful and beautiful and positive.
These holy things and places vary greatly from person to person, of course. Like Moses at Mount Horeb, holy ground, for some, may be a distinctive spot in the natural world—a camp on Lake Michigan, for example, or a garden or a special path in the Cleveland Metroparks.
For others, the arts have a way of conveying the sacred. Years ago I saw a portrait of a doctor by Thomas Eakins in which the eyes and stance revealed both a life of accomplishment and a depth of weariness. The intensity I saw there conveyed something mystical. A Schubert Impromptu, a Smokey Robinson song, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a Mary Oliver poem—every once in a while, we come across something that stands out and gives us pause and conveys beauty and truth. Holy Ground.
For me, I confess I often find this sanctuary to be holy ground. The silence of a Maundy Thursday service, Marcia launching in to “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” candles raised during the singing of “Silent Night,” a person remembered at their death, a child baptized, a couple making their vows to each other: here, something sacred happens. And I am lifted into the presence of God. Holy Ground.
Holy: it means that something evokes God. It’s related etymologically to the words “health” and “wholeness.” It would be foolish, as our sermon title suggests, to say that all ground is holy, because it’s not. The desk of the office back-stabber is not holy ground. The toxic mud-slinging of political posturing is not holy ground. The gruesome starvation of Somali people is not holy ground. Israeli-Palestinian tension is not holy ground. Any of us could filibuster for days listing the places that are not holy ground. The very problem with the world is that so few places seem holy any more. Every motive seems tainted, every hero compromised, every building desecrated, every natural site polluted. Contamination is in the very air we breathe. No, not all ground is holy ground.
There’s a built-in tension in our faith, though, because, as the Bible itself proclaims, everything was created by God, and all of it was pronounced good (Genesis 1). All of it. Not just some of it. Not just a few privileged places. All of it. “God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).
Many of us, I suspect, wrestle, at one level or another, with that tension between what’s sacred and what’s profane. We come here wanting to believe that God is enmeshed in every moment and every place. But even a cursory glance at the world around us makes us wince. The coldness and cruelty and desperation that clothe so much of everyday life virtually scream of an empty void where God has gone missing. No, it’s not all holy ground.
And even in those places that aren’t necessarily awful, we’re seldom acutely aware of any special presence, any holy overlay. Who of us, as we butter our toast and empty the trash and strike a golf ball, is blissfully attuned to the presence of God? If we’re lucky, we may occasionally be transfixed by something holy. But most of the time, on most days, life can seem pretty flattened out. The humdrum routine of the day seems far removed from anything smacking of God. No, it’s not all holy ground.
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. And yet at the very same time, every day people starve for food and companionship, they’re slain by drugs and wars, they’re beaten down by betrayal and illness. What gives? Is it all holy ground, or isn’t it?
The subject came up recently, in a slightly different form, as some of the men who arrange Federated’s Men’s Breakfasts pondered whether to invite a local TV personality to be our guest speaker. I gather this man would deliver a humorous speech, sometimes colorful, with no mention of God. The question is: is such a speaker appropriate at a church breakfast?
My take on it goes something like this: I’m not bothered by the colorful parts of his speech. Prudery has not always been the church’s best feature. But as a church, it does seem important that everything we do here be an attempt to reveal something of the glory of God. We’re not here to entertain. We’re not here even just to talk about important issues. We’re here fundamentally to deepen people’s connections to the creative Mystery that underlies it all. Everything we do needs to be about developing faith.
We’re here to transform lives, to connect people to the source of all goodness, to offer them ways to serve and care. We are a sanctuary. We offer a lens through which to see holiness. Sometimes that lens is comforting: “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Mt. 11:30). Sometimes it’s incredibly daunting: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mt. 16:24). But that Godly lens is what’s central to the church. We avoid it at our peril.
So from one angle it’s folly to have a breakfast speaker who simply talks about secular subjects. If it doesn’t fire us for God, what good is it? We need to focus. Years ago, one of my colleagues (Lillian Daniel) said she wanted no godless announcements in church. Church is about God.
So why would a church group sponsor a speaker whose main shtick is to poke fun in a totally secular vein? Well, the other side of it is that God created it all good. Hard as it may be to find, there’s a holy reason for ticks and snakes and slugs. And there’s a holy place for infantile jokes and family spats and emergency room visits. If we claim that only what happens inside these walls is good and holy, that only “church-y” language and liturgical settings are sacred, then our faith isn’t much more than a shell. It’s not that God created church to be the holy place. It’s that God created church to help us see that the world around is the holy place. Church itself isn’t the only holy ground. Church is the eyeglasses through which we see the sacredness that fills the earth “as the waters [that] cover the sea” (Is. 11:9).
So at church, we look to see what’s holy not just in the beautiful places, but also in the humdrum everyday places. Is there holy ground in the dull workplace routine, the household chores, the stand-up comedy act we see on TV? And in the more difficult dimensions: is there holy ground in the argument we had with our spouse last evening, the broken bone that ends the soccer season, the political discourse that seems unusually arid, the devastation of hurricane Irene, the senselessness of the starvation in Somalia? Here the question that haunts us is: where, if anywhere, is God in this?
The biblical promise is that there is indeed holy ground, whole and healthy ground that manifests the radiance of God. Part of what’s asked of us is that we fine-tune our perceptions. None of us is likely to have the same experience Moses had, of being in the presence of an actually burning bush. But we are all regularly graced by figuratively burning bushes. The story says about Moses that he had to “turn aside” (3:3) to see what’s there. So, too, do we.
If we turn aside, perhaps we will see a burning bush in the new puppy that suddenly brightens up our interactions with the neighbors. In that first week of school, a child looks to a parent for some reassurance, and if we turn aside, we see in that connection a bush that burns. If we turn aside, we may see Palestinian and Israeli girls forge a fragile peace, as in “My So-Called Enemy.”
As I reflect on that need to turn aside in order to see the bushes burning in our lives, I can’t help but repeat two stories told at yesterday’s funeral service for Shirley Culbertson. Shirley, as you may know, could be somewhat mischievous. A couple of weeks before she died, one of her children sat with her and earnestly told her how much she loved her, going on at some length about what a wonderful mother she had been. After a long, heartfelt pause, and looking straight into her child’s eyes, Shirley finally said, “I don’t think I can take any more of this.”
Then one day this past summer, Shirley was engaged in a memory exercise with some of the other residents at Governor’s Village. She was asked, “What do you call the speech the minister gives in church on Sunday morning?” Without missing a beat, she said, “Boring.” Can you believe that!?
If we turn aside, we see in moments like that a holy ground that grabs us. We see, as Wordsworth said, “that all which we behold/ Is full of blessings” (“Tintern Abbey,” lines 134-5). And if we’re anything like Moses, we see in such moments an invitation to be part of that holiness. Biblical revelations never happen just for their own sake. They are always given by God for a reason. And the reason is: God wants some response. God wants us to be part of that holiness. God doesn’t just show Moses a burning bush so he’ll feel better, or so that his faith will be made stronger. God doesn’t need that. What God needs is a world transformed by that holiness into one where peace reigns and justice prevails and love makes all things new. And Moses is an agent in that healing.
So are we. As we turn aside to see the bushes burning in our lives, the call always comes to us to make of this world a better place than when we entered it. Old South Church in Boston is being recognized by the United Church of Christ later this year for something incredibly simple that has guided and shaped their congregation for several years now. And it’s this: everything they do is about blessing. I don’t know any of the details about what it’s like in their congregation, but I can imagine it. In response to the burning bush they’ve seen, they know the only way to live their lives is to be a blessing to their world. Which means, I imagine, that they make sure to remember each other’s birthdays; that they pray for and visit each other when they go into the hospital; that they acknowledge there will be differences of opinion among them, but that they will still treat each other kindly; that they recognize that there is suffering way beyond our narrow little neighborhoods and that embattled lands and soup kitchens and devastated nations need our blessings, too.
The other day, as I was out for my morning walk, the recycling truck was coming down the road and it arrived at the end of a driveway just as the resident was delivering his recycling to the curbside. As the driver got out of his truck, the resident said to the driver, “Thank you for all you do.” I couldn’t hear the driver’s response, but I could see his startled, sheepish, and grateful smile, and I knew he had been blessed.
Our days are full of the plain and the profane and sometimes the demonic. But if we turn aside, we will see burning bushes. And if we heed our call and bless each other, the world will be made new.
So let’s bless each other. Let’s treat each other as if there were something precious about each one of us. And let’s extend that blessing to the world around us. We can be vessels of reconciliation and peace. We can be agents of tender care. We can be powerful messengers of God. And it will all be good. Every place on which we stand will be holy ground.