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.

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?