Christ as Map

Here is a map of the world. Up is east, with Christ's head. His right hand is to the north, his left hand is over Africa, and his feet are to the west. The resurrected body of Christ is the world.

The Ebstorf map of the world drawn in about 1234.
Source: J. Brooman, Imperial China

http://asia-for-teachers.educ.utas.edu.au/CD/cdx/units/unit1/module1/lernact1/perspec1.htm

Psalm 48

Our experience of God is closely related to our experience of place. This may strike you as a "pagan" notion, but consider scripture. For example, in worship yesterday we read Psalm 48.

The first part of the psalm praises the LORD in God's city, noting both the geomorphology (it's a mountain), the location (the far north), and the function (a fortress and temple) of this city.

¹Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised

in the city of our God.

His holy mountain, ²beautiful in elevation,

is the joy of all the earth,

Mount Zion, in the far north,

the city of the great King.

³Within its citadels God

has shown himself a sure defense.

The psalmist recounts how other kings fear this city which God establishes forever. The armies of the world cannot conquer the city of God!

⁴Then the kings assembled,

they came on together.

⁵As soon as they saw it, they were astounded;

they were in panic, they took to flight;

⁶trembling took hold of them there,

pains as of a woman in labor,

⁷as when an east wind shatters

the ships of Tarshish.

⁸As we have heard, so have we seen

in the city of the LORD of hosts,

in the city of our God,

which God establishes forever.

Selah

God is worshiped in the temple in this holy city!

⁹We ponder your steadfast love, O God,

in the midst of your temple.

¹⁰Your name, O God, like your praise,

reaches to the ends of the earth.

Your right hand is filled with victory.

¹¹Let Mount Zion be glad,

let the towns of Judah rejoice

because of your judgments.

The psalmist urges us to walk around and admire this city that we might give witness to God to the next generation.

¹²Walk about Zion, go all around it,

count its towers,

¹³consider well its ramparts;

go through its citadels,

that you may tell the next generation

¹⁴that this is God,

our God forever and ever.

He will be our guide forever.

This psalm (and many others) point to a God who is deeply related to a particular place. The geomorphology, location, function, and holiness of this particular place point to God. The Bible affirms that our experience of God is closely related to our experience of place.

Clearwater Forest

The goal of Christian Education is to help children and adults become disciples of Jesus -- to become a people that seek and follow the way of God first in their lives in the world. Our goal is to nurture holy souls within a holy community.

Will our children will become disciples of Jesus Christ?

Places form communities. We need holy places to form holy communities. We need places set aside from the dominant rules of our secular society; places that are different, places that are somewhat remote, that are special.

We need special places to know God.

Last weekend families from my church enjoyed time in a special place -- Presbyterian Clearwater Forest. We stayed in two lodges and ate in the dinning hall. We canoed, boated, swam, hiked, walked, biked, played games, prayed, worshiped, did crafts, took naps, and tried to sleep while the loons called.

Holy places are set aside to experience the Divine.

More important than what we did is how we did these activities together as families with other families and as a church with other churches.

Holy places are unlike other places in our lives.

Presbyterian Clearwater Forest is helping to form Union Presbyterian into a special, yea, a holy community.

Holy places form holy community.

Upon this Kasota Stone

Theologians, pastors, and Christian historians spend much effort in describing the, well, theological, ecclesial, and historical foundations of Christianity. In doing so, we think of the church as an idea which has been formed by prior ideas. There is the Liberal church, the Evangelical church, the Roman Catholic church, etc.

However, church members typically describe going to worship as, "Going to church." And by "church" they don't mean an idea. They mean a building -- a place. Wouldn't it therefore be of some use to describe the physical foundations of a local congregation?

For example, Union Presbyterian Church of Saint Peter, Minnesota is a Presbyterian Church. Its theology and worship practices are within a North American derivation of the Reformed Christian tradition. It is also a church made out of stone.

What you see there is Kasota stone. Kasota stone is limestone quarried from the nearby town of Kasota, Minnesota. Limestone is a sedimentary rock formed when this area of the world was a sea. It is still being quarried today.

Kasota stone was also used to construct the new Twins baseball stadium:

In the same way that Union Presbyterian Church has a particular theological history, it also has a particular geological history. It is a place formed by a strand of ideas that started in places like Jerusalem and Geneva, as well as by a sea that has long since disappeared. We have a responsibility to our theological fore-bearers like Paul and Calvin, as well as a responsibility to the valley from which our church was hewn.

Geography is the study of how human cultures interact with their environment. To understand the geography of Union Presbyterian Church of Saint Peter we need to know much more than its location on a map -- we have to understand how a people informed by Reformed thought interacted with their environment in the Minnesota Valley to build a church in 1871.

Eruvin

I just read this fascinating article on Slate about eruvin. I'll let you read it first before I briefly reflect on what this might mean for The GeoTheo. Click here.

Interesting, huh?

These lines aren't marking the boundary between the sacred and the secular; they are marking a place for the Sabbath. We are accustomed to think about the Sabbath as a time period, but here is an example of the Sabbath as a geographic boundary.

Does your own sabbath-keeping have geographical boundaries? If you make a point of going to church on Sundays, are there also places you avoid? I'm not always successful, but I avoid commercial places on the Sabbath. We avoid the grocery store, the movie theatre, and even the gas station. I like to spend time at home on Sundays after worship, or perhaps go to a public park or playground with my son. Places that are easy on the soul, and don't make demands on my attention, are good places to be in rest.

If each day of your week had a map, would your Sabbath map be different?

McCormick's Place

Place is powerful. Places are important. McCormick needs to find its place.

I will soon be attending the 2012 McCormick Theological Seminary Commencement, Board meeting, and Alumni Council meeting. During these meetings there will surely be much talk about “sharing the vision” and the “telling the story”. Sharing and telling the vision and story of McCormick will be offered as a way to increase recruitment and donations to the seminary.

The elephant in the room; however, will be place. McCormick has a long history of moving locations. Founded in Indiana, it has institutionalized itself in several places and buildings across the American Midwest. Many alumni remember fondly the campus on the North Side of Chicago. McCormick now finds itself in a relatively new and expensive building in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. (Learn more here). The surprising announcement made several years ago that the seminary was putting the new building on the real estate market, and other subsequent announcements concerning the selling of other real estate owned by the seminary, have produced copious amounts of confusion amongst alums. Is McCormick going under? What is the future of McCormick? Anxiety about place has become anxiety about McCormick’s future.

Rest assured -- McCormick is not going under. It continues to have a sizable endowment. The Board, President, and other leaders within McCormick are making the right financial and strategic decisions that will not only keep McCormick a going concern, but will have McCormick become a recognized national leader in theological education for the emerging cross-cultural Church.

However, I do not believe that McCormick can truly find its feet until it finally resolves its sense of place. McCormick has to be more than a story and a vision for it to be an embodied community. It cannot tiptoe around this incarnational issue forever. We need bones, sinew, muscle -- living breathing beating flesh -- before we can be a community of our Risen Lord. We need concrete, steel, glass and stone before we can be more than just a good idea. We cannot treat our current body like a commodity.

Easier said than done. Yet there are some significant ways in which McCormick’s location have already granted McCormick unique opportunities. McCormick is not a neo-gothic campus in a leafy White suburb. Being located in Chicago, and in the South Side in particular, gives McCormick access to thousands of churches and religious communities. These communities are flush with innovation and vision. McCormick has strong relationships with Chicagoland congregations, and McCormick is creating innovative ways to serve Chicago’s large Christian communities and their leaders. While location and place have been problems for McCormick, location and place may well be its saving grace.

Questioning George Carlin

By now you may have read this quote from George Carlin:

Which leads me to question the wisdom of his quote.

To question a text is to assume a relationship with the text which puts the reader in a position of authority over the text. An individual who questions every text makes himself (or herself) the ultimate critic of every truth claim. In this system, only individuals have authority over truth. Other claimants to truth, such as the larger community or the larger tradition, find themselves stripped of any authority.

Theologically, this is like a man who reads the Bible only to find whether the Bible agrees with his already held notions. Geographically, this is like a woman who travels the world only to question whether other lands and other peoples measure up to her home town. Having discovered that Paris is a lousy replica of Saint Peter, MN, she returns to the culinary delights of The City Grille. Having discovered that the Bible does not say everything he would have said, he returns to his own prejudices.

Skepticism, like tourism, has value when we allow the texts we read and the places we visit to question us. What is it about Paris that might cause me to rethink my home? What is it about sacred text that might cause me to rethink my priorities?

Materialistic Enough?

Americans aren't materialistic enough.

"What's that" you say, "We consume more resources -- more minerals, land, water, we pollute more of the sky -- all in the name of having more stuff, than any other country in the short history of this small planet. How could we be not materialistic enough?"

Consider this link from NPR. It shows that in 1947 we Americans spent 11.7% of our income on clothes. Now we spend just 3.6%. The 1940s was a decade of well dressed men and women -- of sports jackets, ties, hats, dresses, and a certain degree of formality. People bought nice clothes and they took care of them.

Now our closets are piled high with junk. We grow tired of clothes and buy cheap new clothes to replace them. We don't dress as well or take as good care of our clothes as we once did.

Perhaps if we were more materialistic (and a bit less spiritual) we would take care of the nice things God has given us and would have less junk in our lives.

Perhaps if we understood that stuff is God's gift to us we would treat it with more care and respect. And if we took more care of the gifts we have we'd consume fewer resources.