Sacred Place

2 Samuel 7:1-17, Ephesians 2:11-22, Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

July 19, 2009

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

I have been away on vacation and study leave for three and a half weeks, and I returned to you all this past Thursday. Someone asked me this week if it was nice to take a break from church and see what the majority of folk do on Sunday morning, and they were surprised to hear me say that I went to church every Sunday morning, and during my study leave this past week I went to worship daily. While we were in Michigan, I worshipped at my sister-in-law’s very New England-looking UCC church in Muskegon, and the two Sundays I was in town here between trips, I worshipped at the church where Gavin is a member, the dark, stone, formal Christ Episcopal Church on Broadway in New Haven. In Craigville on the Cape this week I worshipped at the Tabernacle, a wooden structure with open sides which let in the light and sounds of the trees and houses around it. And I had other moments of worship, when I felt connected with the holy, where I was drawn to praise God and give thanks in places that became sacred in that moment: standing with my children watching the sun set over Lake Michigan on a perfect evening, at the rail of a boat off the coast of Massachusetts surrounded by magnificent humpback whales, and, for those of you who participate in the sacredness of baseball, sitting in a minor league ballpark in Allentown, Pennsylvania with my kids and mom and brothers and hot dogs and funnel cake watching the slow unwinding of a good baseball game. (The PawSox beat the Allentown Iron Pigs)

Knowing the topic for this sermon, I have been doing some thinking over these weeks about sacred places. Before I left, I put together a little slide show of places that people hold sacred around the world, and I want to show that to you to prime your thinking about sacred places in your life, and what it means that a place is “sacred.”

People have been designating particular places as sacred for as long as there has been human society. The first picture in that slide show is of the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, England, where, allegedly, Joseph of Arimethea brought the chalice from the Last Supper and buried it in the well. The garden surrounding the well has a circle of yew trees, obviously planted purposefully many centuries ago, which indicates that before Christians claimed the spot, Druids had been worshipping there. There is something in us that makes us look for specific places where we can intentionally connect with the divine, places that the founder of the Iona community in Scotland (also shown on one of the slides) called “thin places,” where it seemed that the walls that divide earth and heaven are “thinner” than in other places, or places that have some connection with divine visitations in the past, like the plethora of holy places in the Middle East. Even people who have no religious affiliation and never go to formal worship anywhere will seek out places like lakes or forests or oceans or mountains and connect there with something that brings them strength or insight or hope. It seems to be the human way to search for that divine connection outside ourselves.

When we read the three texts for today, however, there’s a little tension raised up. David knows the desire for a place to connect with God, and so he wants to build God a “house” like his great house. God says, “When have I ever needed a house? I am free to move where I will, and I do! But listen, you and your descendents and this people are going to be a house, a sacred people, and I will dwell in you.” Paul speaks to the Gentiles of the church in Ephesus, telling them that the walls of a sacred place, the Temple in Jerusalem, that had once kept them out have now been superseded by the person of Jesus. In Christ’s body a new structure is being built, not a structure of stone or wood, but a household of many different kinds of people, including those who were once enemies, and that structure’s foundation is the great cloud of witnesses of apostles and prophets and its cornerstone is Christ and its beams and rooms are actually human beings. And when Jesus and his disciples look to go have a retreat in a sacred place apart, they find themselves in the midst of women and men and children yearning for wholeness and connection with God, and Jesus and the disciples become sacred place for those people.

Do you get it? While we seek out and build and set apart sacred places looking for God, God is saying that you and you and you and all the other you’s in the world are sacred space, a body in which God dwells. In our bodies, our minds, our spirits, we always have access to the presence of God. In our bodies, our voices, our actions, we can connect others to the presence of God even as the teaching, healing Jesus did on the shores of Galilee. All of those buildings I showed you have the capacity to act as dividing walls, claiming possession of God, keeping out people of whom they disapprove for whatever reason. One of those pictures was of a chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Do you know who holds the keys to that building? It is Muslim guards. That came to pass because the various Christian groups argued over who should have control of the space and sought to keep each other out of what is arguably the most sacred place in the world for all Christians. So at one point in history, Muslim caretakers took charge of access to the space and forced the Christians to share. But excluding people from sacred places is not the sole forte of Christians, as rival Muslim groups in Iraq bomb each other’s mosque’s, and if we explored the other world religions we’d find similar attempts at control and exclusion.

“In Christ,” Paul writes, “you are built together in the Spirit into a dwelling place for God.” So should we get rid of all the human made or designated “sacred places” in the world? That’s not what I am saying at all, nor was it what Paul intended, I believe. But Paul’s words to the Ephesians, and God’s words to David, and Jesus’ actions can help us to gain a better perspective on the purpose of sacred places. A place becomes sacred when people gather there and discover in themselves and in one another the holy within each of us because they expect to find it there. It is not some kind of special access to God that makes a place sacred, not the bricks and mortar and gold and linen, but the human beings who have gathered there in the past and who gather in the present and actually believe they might discover what they have been missing in themselves and others. Sacred places are places where we expect to meet the holy. What if we expected that to happen to us in other times and places as well?

Do you remember when Dorothy stood next to Glinda the Good Witch at the end of the film version of the Wizard of Oz? Dorothy was looking for a special spell or magic to activate the ruby slippers and get her back to Kansas, and Glinda told her that she had always had the power to go back home. It was in her all the time, but she did not expect it to be, and so she could not use it. The slippers merely provided a way to access the power she had always had. So it is with sacred places. If we come to them with open spirits, expecting to connect with God, they help us to activate the spirit of God within us, God who is yearning to make contact with us and to help us make contact with one another. The beauty and wonder of a sacred place like this one are there to help open our senses so that we remember what we already know and touch one who was just as present to us when we woke up in our beds. Sacred places also are there to bring us together so that our bodies can build the dwelling place of God that is portable, like a tent, for “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Jesus didn’t build a house where people came to him; he constantly went to them. And now the Spirit dwells in us, always, and sends us out to dwell with others.

You are sacred places. You individually and us collectively. That’s the picture that would complete our slide show; that’s the most sacred place of all in all the world. Expect to find God in you, and you will discover one who has been waiting for you all along. Amen.