Where is God?

I recently attended and helped officiate a large wedding at a church other than my own. The excitement of the young couple, who are deeply in love, was infectious. The brief ceremony at the church was beautifully planned. The music was personal, yet invoked the grandeur of God. The liturgy moved along nicely, and the vows were sincerely exchanged. Later that evening, my family and I sat down to dinner at the wedding reception with hundreds of other guests of the wedded couple. The atmosphere was energetic – it was like being in the eye of a hurricane -- as the wedding party, family, and friends swirled around making toasts, laughing, singing, and enjoying the pleasure of a good meal. God is present in our worship, and God is present in our rejoicing.

As a pastor, I often visit church members in area hospitals, nursing homes, and independent living apartments. Often these visits are brief and casual, yet sometimes they become serious. People express their discomfort, fears, doubts, dreams, and annoyances. People in the hospital almost always tell me that they are tired and want to go home. I listen to voices filled with anxiety, anger, and exhaustion. I conclude my visit with a prayer. God is present in our pain, in our weariness, in our prayer, and in our hope.

My church offers a variety of Christian Education classes. The adults are studying the Bible, the youth are examining their faith, and children are being taught that they are part of a larger church family. We read, we ask questions, and we attempt answers. Our answers lead to more questions, more reading, more discussions . . . it seems that our faith grows not by finding answers, but by discovering new questions. Reading the Bible to learn morals is like picking up a World Atlas to find directions to the nearest grocery store. God is present in our reading, our learning, our wondering, and our queries.

There are empty spaces in this city: unused closets, boarded up storefronts, unheated attics, unsold houses, unvisited classrooms, and spare rooms. God is present in these empty places.

Where is God? God is where we gather and God is where we are alone. God is in our joy and in our tears. God is in our certainty and in our doubt. God is where we are, and God is where we are not.

(This is my recent column in the Saint Peter Herald)

Wedding in Cana

You are at a wedding -- on which side do you sit?

When you shake someone’s hand, which hand do you use? Yi-Fu Tuan, a geographer, in his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience notes that, in our upright stature, we can map space and time according to our bodies. As I stand here have a right and a left side, a front and a back, an up and a down. We give these sides to our bodies spiritual significance.

Our backsides are profane and signify the past. Our front sides are sacred and signify the future. It is considered impolite to turn your back to a respected person.

In most cultures, our right sides are holy and our left sides are considered to be dirty. The right hand is the hand of blessing. We shake with our right hands. In French, something unsavory is called “gauche” or “left”.

Up is also considered sacred. The Communion Table is up. God is “up” in heaven -- the devil is “down” in hell.

A standing person can therefore orient herself in space and can orient herself spiritually.

There are many reasons for this spiritual orientation. We humans have an innate desire to separate ourselves from dirt to protect us from germs, and so we invented ways to divide up space to keep us clean. Before the wide availability of clean water and soap, it made sense to use one hand, the left one, for dirty tasks and to save one hand, the right one, for clean tasks. It was important to keep our bodies healthy by separating them from filth.

Maintaining personal hygiene is related to spiritual cleanliness. Our sense of dirty and clean is related to the idea of profane and sacred. If we stay physically healthy by avoiding bacteria, we should likewise avoid the contamination of sin. And, given that some dirt and some sin is unavoidable, we need a way to wash our bodies and our souls.

In India, right now, nearly 10 million Hindus are making pilgrimage to the sacred rivers of the Ganges and Yamuna for the festival of Kumbh Mela, which occurs every twelve years. These pilgrims will bathe in the waters as a means of spiritual cleaning; of personal sanctification. Hindus understand that taking a bath is important to your body as well as your soul.  One would never eat food with your left hand or wear shoes into someone’s home. A good Hindu says elaborate prayers every day to attain spiritual purity. Hindus live in a spiritually rich geography; the sacred and the profane are clearly delineated, and there are rituals to cleanse oneself.

Our modern American world has shed much of our sense of the separation of the spiritually clean from the unclean. We have lost much of our sense of left/right, front/back, up/down having important spiritual significance. Most of us don’t use rituals to keep us spiritually clean, and we therefore don’t have a rich spiritual geography.

I wonder, therefore, if this is one reason so many of us have been caught up watching the British television series Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey, which airs Sunday nights at 8:00 pm on PBS, is a costume drama set in an English aristocratic castle in the early 1900s. The story follows the lords and ladies who live upstairs, as well as the many servants who work downstairs. It is a fascinating show to watch, in part, because it portrays an almost fantasy world that is wonderfully foreign to us. The men fret about which jacket to wear when - they have morning jackets, sports coats, dinner jackets, white ties, black ties. To wear the wrong jacket would be a major faux pas. It was a life focused on avoiding shame -- on knowing one’s place and acting accordingly. You wouldn’t want to eat the wrong thing on the wrong plate, and you certainly wouldn’t want to get married for the wrong reasons.

In last week’s episode, a middle aged disabled aristocratic man jilts his bride at the altar because he doesn’t want to dishonor her by allowing her to marry himself, an old cripple. People didn’t make decisions to increase their happiness; people made decisions to avoid impropriety. It was a society obsessed with spiritual cleanliness. There was moral order and direction. From the lowly servant to the butler to the dukes to the King to God, everyone had a spiritual place in the world. The further up and away from the stench of poverty, the better off you were.

Are we reminiscing for a time when there was a moral order to life? Do we feel lost without this kind of spiritual orientation? Do we watch Downton with a certain nostalgia?

Yet, despite our sentiments, the television show makes it clear that this moral system wasn’t perfect. Life was hard for people downstairs. Servants worked 17 hour days, doing arduous work by hand for little pay. There was no indoor plumbing, and with such inexpensive labor costs, there was no economic incentive to put it in. It was dirty work to keep the aristocrats clean. Maids carried overflowing buckets of hot water upstairs to fill bathtubs to the rim.

After WWI things changed for the people downstairs. Many made sacrifices for their country; those who lived returned to England expecting respect, women demanded the vote, taxes went up, and many British aristocratic families went under.

It is interesting to think about the last one hundred years of history this way: On the one hand, the established system gave people moral direction and an orientation away from sin. On the other hand, working people, women, left handed people, anyone who had suffered under the previous regime fought for dignity. Our culture wars are between those who see the value of tradition and those who are sick of being the ones who pay for that value.

My grandfather was born left handed, but his teachers “corrected” him and forced him to use his right hand. Being “righteous” came at the cost of those who were south paws.

We have much more personal freedom today than we did then. This is a good thing. But we lack a sense of moral direction in our lives. Fewer things are profane, but less is sacred. There is no right and left, no up or down, no front or back. Sunday is just another day of the week, church is just another optional activity. We are free, but disoriented. It’s hard to find God when you don’t know which way is up.

What if there were some way to right ourselves morally that was less concerned with distancing our souls from dirt and sin and instead was oriented toward drawing our souls into the abundance of God’s love?

And so we find our Gospel today. Jesus is invited to a wedding -- it's like a scene from Downton Abbey! They run out of wine -- a major faux pas! Then Jesus talks back to his mother -- my! Mary retains her graces and orders the servants to do as Jesus tells them.

Standing there were six stone jars used for purification. Like Hindus in India and Anglicans in England, the ancient Jews were a people who knew about moral cleanliness. They had water available not only to keep the dirt away, but also to wash away the sin. Each stone jar could hold twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus ordered the servants -- the downstairs people -- to fill the stone jars with water, and they filled these jars to the brim. Jesus had them take some water out and take it to the head butler -- er -- the chief steward, who did not know from whence the drink had come. The steward called the groom, and famously said, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.”

This is the miracle of turning water into wine. But not just any water -- Jesus turned the water of purification into wine suitable for a wedding feast. It was the role of the bridegroom to provide the wine. This is why the steward compliments the groom of providing such good wine so late in the party. But, if Jesus is providing the wine, then whose wedding is this? If the groom provides the wine, and Jesus is the one providing the wine, then . . . isn’t Jesus the groom?

If Jesus is the groom, to whom is he wedded? Is this Gospel not a story about how God -- God the pure, the holy, the Other, the ineffable, the Clean . . . married  . . . us? Is this not the Gospel about how God became flesh and moved into our neighborhood, to dwell among us. How God broke the curtain of the temple, how God’s new temple descends to a new earth, how God chooses to live down here past the barrier that keeps the clean apart from the dirty, the sacred from the profane, how God got hitched to humankind, to us creatures formed out of soil?

Isn’t this Gospel about how God’s goodness is so powerful that it overcomes the distance created by our sin? And this distance isn’t overcome only by the washing of our sins through water and baptism but also by turning this cleaning water into abundant, delicious wine? Not just spiritual sanitation, but also spiritual blessing of the most extravagant kind? No spiritual separation, but sacred covenant and mystic, sweet, communion.

What would our spiritual geography be if we worried less about keeping our right hand distant from our left? If, instead of worrying solely about avoiding sin and those we deem to be sinful, we also turned to accept the blessings of God, the presence of God, in each other?

This would be a geography of finding God not above the King nor above the Dukes nor above the Lords and Ladies nor above the maids, but finding God downstairs all along, laughing, working, washing, serving, preparing the wedding feast for a bride who will not be jilted at the altar.

And so we return to our wedding. Which side will you sit on? It doesn’t matter what side you sit on. You are more than invited to simply watch this wedding. You are invited to join. Our groom waits for us, beckoning us forward -- your sins are forgiven, he cries, your sins are forgiven. And then, reluctantly at first, we step forward.