A Sense Of Place
Sermon
Sermons On The First Readings
Series II, Cycle B
In one of his books, writer Scott Russell Sanders tells that whenever his father would come to new place, he would bend down, scoop up a pinch of dirt, sniff it, stir it around in his palm, squeeze it, and finally rake it across his tongue. When asked why he did this, he explained, "Just trying to figure out where I am."1
I have never used that particular method to locate myself, but being in ministry in a denomination where the bishop periodically sends pastors to new churches and communities, the dirt-tasting routine might have been useful. In fact, the system used by the United Methodist denomination to move its pastors is called "the itinerancy." That word comes from Latin root itiner, which means "journey," and journeyed my wife and I have over the course of my ministry. This church is my seventh pastoral appointment.
Among the ways that my wife and I are different is in how we have related to the places where we have lived over the years and how we have felt about those moves. I have liked most of the communities in which we've lived and I have liked the churches. Some of the parsonages I liked and some I didn't care much for. But each time the bishop pointed me toward a new appointment, I found myself looking forward it with some anticipation. I was always sad about leaving people of whom we had become fond, but I don't become so greatly attached to the physical locations that it is wrenching to leave them.
My wife, however, tends to get rooted in a place. She has the nesting instinct, and so she put a good deal of herself into decorating the houses we have lived in. She became very settled in each place and attached to the people. Each time we moved for my assignments, for her it was a painful uprooting, one usually complicated by the fact that while I was going to a ready-made job, she was having to quit hers and go looking for another one.
Simply put, this difference between us is that my spouse has a stronger sense of place than I do. She is a settler and I am an itinerant.
Well, if you think about it for a few moments, each of you can probably decide the strength of your own sense of place. For some of you who have grown up in this church and perhaps even had great-grandparents who were members here, this building may be important to your feelings about faith and worship. Also, some of you may finally be in the home you've always wanted and would be devastated if you had to give it up. Some of you may feel a deep and strong connection to your community.
But some of you may not. Some of you, if your job required a move to a new state, as long as it didn't separate you from your loved ones, would easily move there.
There is no right or wrong about this; it's just a difference in people. But there is this to be said about places: They are among the things that give us our identity and sometimes they become focal points for our religious experiences.
With that in mind, let's look at our reading from 2 Samuel. Saul had been king over Israel, but before his death, God had instructed the prophet Samuel to anoint David to replace Saul. After Saul died in battle, the people of Judah, the southern region of Israel, installed David as their king. David set up his capital in the city of Hebron. The rest of the nation, however, was governed by a son of Saul named Ishbaal, who ruled from Gibeah, where his father's throne had been. Later, however, in an incident having nothing to do with David, Ishbaal was assassinated. It is at that point that our reading for today begins. Some elders from the area that had been ruled by Ishbaal came to David and asked him to be their king as well. David agreed, and became the ruler of all of Israel.
The rest of our reading for today tells of one of David's first acts as king of the united Hebrew tribes. He took his army and captured the city of Jerusalem, setting it up as the new capital of Israel.
At that time, although Jerusalem was situated within the area controlled by the Hebrew tribes, it was occupied by a people called Jebusites. It was well fortified, which was probably why the Israelites had not previously taken it over. Now, however, David and his men do capture it, and it is known ever thereafter as "the city of David."
From a symbolical standpoint, setting up his throne in Jerusalem was a brilliant move. For one thing, Jerusalem was between Hebron, his earlier royal seat, and Gibeah, from which Ishbaal had ruled, so it was a way of not favoring either of the previous Hebrew kingdoms. For another thing, although Jerusalem sat within the territory of Judah, it was really neutral ground because it had been occupied by a non-Hebrew population and so was not really part of either kingdom.
This reminds me of what sometimes happens when two congregations of the same denomination in the same area decide to unite. One of the problems that often arises is the question of which congregation will give up its building. People get very attached to their buildings. Sometimes, when the decision is made to abandon building A and move its congregation A into building B along with congregation B, some members of congregation A say, "No way," and use that uniting as an excuse to either find a new church or stop attending worship anywhere. Some of the more successful church unions have happened where both A and B leave their buildings and together build a new church building C.
What we are really interested in today from this story of the capture of Jerusalem, however, is that from this point onward, Jerusalem becomes the center of Israel's identity as a people and the focal point of their understanding that God is in their midst. So strong is their connection with Jerusalem that years later, when the Babylonians overrun the city, burn it, and march the citizens off into exile, there is great mourning over the city among the people of Israel. Later still, when they are finally able to return, the people set about rebuilding the city, seeing it as central to who they are as a people. And when the prophets spoke of God's kingdom fully coming at the end of things, they described that ideal kingdom as a restored or new Jerusalem (Zechariah 8:1-8), a vision Christianity has embraced as well, as seen in Revelation 21.
It is worth asking ourselves how a particular physical location figures into our life of faith today. To what degree has this building or a particular church camp or a certain retreat center or some other specific location become the repository for your sense of God's presence? If, for example, this building were to be lost in a fire, what bearing would that have on your commitment to worship God? Or if your job forced you to relocate to a distant community, would you feel less connected to God because of your exile from this place? How do we translate a localized experience of God into one that is not tied to place?
Let me give you another way to think about those questions. Recently, my uncle, who lives in Medina, Ohio, gave me an editorial he had clipped from his local newspaper. In it, the columnist bemoaned the fact that several of the churches that had long stood in the downtown center of that community either have moved to the suburbs or are contemplating doing so. One reason that the columnist didn't care for what was happening was because it gave people one less reason to come downtown. In Medina, there is a charming park in the city center surrounded on all four sides by quaint-looking shops, businesses, and other establishments. It's an attractive place, but as the columnist pointed out, the downtown is "not the center of commerce anymore for people who live here ... there are few downtown stores that serve day-to-day needs. There's no grocery downtown anymore, no drugstore, no department store."2
In terms of a desire to preserve the character and appeal of the downtown, I can certainly sympathize with that columnist. But in terms of the churches moving out to where most of the people live, it's hard to fault them. Commitment to Christ is not limited to where a house of worship is located. Or to say it a different way, regardless of how we relate to places outwardly, we need to have a different kind of place/sense that focuses us toward God's presence within us.
Now it's fine to have a location that serves as a visible symbol of God's presence. But it's another thing to rely on the symbol for salvation rather than on the presence of the God the city symbolized.
To continue with David's story for a moment, after he captured Jerusalem, he had the Ark of the Covenant, the fixture thought of as the throne of God, brought into the city. For his people, this further encouraged them to think of Jerusalem as the place of God's residence. Later, this idea was solidified even more when David's son Solomon erected the first temple to house the Ark. Thus the "city of David" also became known as "the city of God."
What the people of ancient Israel missed is that while God was in the midst of the city, he called them to trust not a place but a presence. And if they had paid attention to their history, they'd have seen that the dwelling place of God was never static. In the wilderness, it was represented in the moving pillar of cloud and pillar of fire and by the Ark of the Covenant carried along with the people. Later, a shrine at Shiloh symbolized God's dwelling among them.
So what made them think that after the temple was built that God's presence would be forever thereafter localized there? Perhaps it was because the temple seemed such a permanent structure, with its massive stones and overlays of gold, but it was eventually brought down.
Then the people were marched away to exile in Babylon. No temple, no shrine, no Ark of the Covenant. But there, separated from the city of God, they found that God was just as present.
Today, while there are those within Judaism who want the temple rebuilt, others have a view not tied to brick and mortar. Rabbi Pesach Schindler of Jerusalem put it that "we have all our spiritual centers within us. That is where the temple should be built."3 Or, to put it another way, the city of God is a place within, and our ultimate confidence is in the holy presence in that "place."
Revelation 21 relates a vision of God's kingdom fully come, describing it as a new Jerusalem, a place to which all the faithful people of the earth stream. As the person having the vision looks around the city, he makes this observation: "I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb" (the Lamb is a reference to Jesus). It is significant that in the kingdom of God, there is no temple, no "place," needed to symbolize God, because the presence of God so fills the realm that a temple would be superfluous.
Though God's kingdom has not fully come yet, the way we live as kingdom people today is by inviting God to live within us. That's why, for years the church has talked about opening our "hearts" to Jesus, because we understand that the inner place is the one that matters most in the life of faith. Our gathering here together for worship reinforces and feeds that relationship, but until we let Christ move inside us, we have no spiritual home.
Earlier, when I was describing the difference between my wife and me in how we relate to places, I probably overstated my lack of sense of place. In reality, I have certainly preferred some of the communities where we lived over others, and I enjoy occasionally revisiting places where we once resided. That admission reminds me that though we talk of having Christ within us, we still need physical geography in which to live out our Christianity. Yes, we are members of the worldwide church and yes, we are citizens of the universe, but it's hard to translate that into anything concrete and to interact with the whole of anything. We need a localized place on which to focus our interaction. The troubled poet John Berryman once wrote a poem in which he tried to say places were unimportant. It read:
Exile is in our time like blood. Depend on
interior journeys taken anywhere.
I'd rather live in Venice or Kyoto
except for the languages, but
O really I don't care where I live or have lived.
Wherever I am, young Sir, my wits about me,
memory blazing, I'll cope & make do.4
That view is all fine and dandy, but it wasn't enough to keep Berryman, not long after writing those lines, from leaping to his death from a Minneapolis bridge into the Mississippi River. The truth is, if we try to live entirely cut off from place, then not only we suffer, but so do the places where we might have contributed our energy and efforts.
We can say we love all of humankind, but in reality, we need to perform concrete loving actions to a few real people for those words to have meaning. Likewise, we can say we are members of God's universal kingdom, but for it to have any substance, that's got to demonstrate itself in how we act in the actual communities where we live and work.
The location where we most need to worship God is within us, not tied to any physical place. But the location where we most need to live out the results of that worship is in our churches, our homes, our workplaces, and our communities in solid acts of faithfulness to God.
____________
1.ÊScott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), p. xiii.
2.ÊJohn Gladden, "Medina's Churches Heading for the Suburbs," The Gazette (Medina, Ohio), February 25, 2003, A4.
3.ÊRichard Ostling, "Time for a New Temple?" Time magazine, October 16, 1989, p. 65.
4.ÊBerryman died in 1972. The poem is from the posthumous volume of his works, Henry's Fate & Other Poems 1967-1972 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), quoted in Sanders, op. cit., p. 103.
I have never used that particular method to locate myself, but being in ministry in a denomination where the bishop periodically sends pastors to new churches and communities, the dirt-tasting routine might have been useful. In fact, the system used by the United Methodist denomination to move its pastors is called "the itinerancy." That word comes from Latin root itiner, which means "journey," and journeyed my wife and I have over the course of my ministry. This church is my seventh pastoral appointment.
Among the ways that my wife and I are different is in how we have related to the places where we have lived over the years and how we have felt about those moves. I have liked most of the communities in which we've lived and I have liked the churches. Some of the parsonages I liked and some I didn't care much for. But each time the bishop pointed me toward a new appointment, I found myself looking forward it with some anticipation. I was always sad about leaving people of whom we had become fond, but I don't become so greatly attached to the physical locations that it is wrenching to leave them.
My wife, however, tends to get rooted in a place. She has the nesting instinct, and so she put a good deal of herself into decorating the houses we have lived in. She became very settled in each place and attached to the people. Each time we moved for my assignments, for her it was a painful uprooting, one usually complicated by the fact that while I was going to a ready-made job, she was having to quit hers and go looking for another one.
Simply put, this difference between us is that my spouse has a stronger sense of place than I do. She is a settler and I am an itinerant.
Well, if you think about it for a few moments, each of you can probably decide the strength of your own sense of place. For some of you who have grown up in this church and perhaps even had great-grandparents who were members here, this building may be important to your feelings about faith and worship. Also, some of you may finally be in the home you've always wanted and would be devastated if you had to give it up. Some of you may feel a deep and strong connection to your community.
But some of you may not. Some of you, if your job required a move to a new state, as long as it didn't separate you from your loved ones, would easily move there.
There is no right or wrong about this; it's just a difference in people. But there is this to be said about places: They are among the things that give us our identity and sometimes they become focal points for our religious experiences.
With that in mind, let's look at our reading from 2 Samuel. Saul had been king over Israel, but before his death, God had instructed the prophet Samuel to anoint David to replace Saul. After Saul died in battle, the people of Judah, the southern region of Israel, installed David as their king. David set up his capital in the city of Hebron. The rest of the nation, however, was governed by a son of Saul named Ishbaal, who ruled from Gibeah, where his father's throne had been. Later, however, in an incident having nothing to do with David, Ishbaal was assassinated. It is at that point that our reading for today begins. Some elders from the area that had been ruled by Ishbaal came to David and asked him to be their king as well. David agreed, and became the ruler of all of Israel.
The rest of our reading for today tells of one of David's first acts as king of the united Hebrew tribes. He took his army and captured the city of Jerusalem, setting it up as the new capital of Israel.
At that time, although Jerusalem was situated within the area controlled by the Hebrew tribes, it was occupied by a people called Jebusites. It was well fortified, which was probably why the Israelites had not previously taken it over. Now, however, David and his men do capture it, and it is known ever thereafter as "the city of David."
From a symbolical standpoint, setting up his throne in Jerusalem was a brilliant move. For one thing, Jerusalem was between Hebron, his earlier royal seat, and Gibeah, from which Ishbaal had ruled, so it was a way of not favoring either of the previous Hebrew kingdoms. For another thing, although Jerusalem sat within the territory of Judah, it was really neutral ground because it had been occupied by a non-Hebrew population and so was not really part of either kingdom.
This reminds me of what sometimes happens when two congregations of the same denomination in the same area decide to unite. One of the problems that often arises is the question of which congregation will give up its building. People get very attached to their buildings. Sometimes, when the decision is made to abandon building A and move its congregation A into building B along with congregation B, some members of congregation A say, "No way," and use that uniting as an excuse to either find a new church or stop attending worship anywhere. Some of the more successful church unions have happened where both A and B leave their buildings and together build a new church building C.
What we are really interested in today from this story of the capture of Jerusalem, however, is that from this point onward, Jerusalem becomes the center of Israel's identity as a people and the focal point of their understanding that God is in their midst. So strong is their connection with Jerusalem that years later, when the Babylonians overrun the city, burn it, and march the citizens off into exile, there is great mourning over the city among the people of Israel. Later still, when they are finally able to return, the people set about rebuilding the city, seeing it as central to who they are as a people. And when the prophets spoke of God's kingdom fully coming at the end of things, they described that ideal kingdom as a restored or new Jerusalem (Zechariah 8:1-8), a vision Christianity has embraced as well, as seen in Revelation 21.
It is worth asking ourselves how a particular physical location figures into our life of faith today. To what degree has this building or a particular church camp or a certain retreat center or some other specific location become the repository for your sense of God's presence? If, for example, this building were to be lost in a fire, what bearing would that have on your commitment to worship God? Or if your job forced you to relocate to a distant community, would you feel less connected to God because of your exile from this place? How do we translate a localized experience of God into one that is not tied to place?
Let me give you another way to think about those questions. Recently, my uncle, who lives in Medina, Ohio, gave me an editorial he had clipped from his local newspaper. In it, the columnist bemoaned the fact that several of the churches that had long stood in the downtown center of that community either have moved to the suburbs or are contemplating doing so. One reason that the columnist didn't care for what was happening was because it gave people one less reason to come downtown. In Medina, there is a charming park in the city center surrounded on all four sides by quaint-looking shops, businesses, and other establishments. It's an attractive place, but as the columnist pointed out, the downtown is "not the center of commerce anymore for people who live here ... there are few downtown stores that serve day-to-day needs. There's no grocery downtown anymore, no drugstore, no department store."2
In terms of a desire to preserve the character and appeal of the downtown, I can certainly sympathize with that columnist. But in terms of the churches moving out to where most of the people live, it's hard to fault them. Commitment to Christ is not limited to where a house of worship is located. Or to say it a different way, regardless of how we relate to places outwardly, we need to have a different kind of place/sense that focuses us toward God's presence within us.
Now it's fine to have a location that serves as a visible symbol of God's presence. But it's another thing to rely on the symbol for salvation rather than on the presence of the God the city symbolized.
To continue with David's story for a moment, after he captured Jerusalem, he had the Ark of the Covenant, the fixture thought of as the throne of God, brought into the city. For his people, this further encouraged them to think of Jerusalem as the place of God's residence. Later, this idea was solidified even more when David's son Solomon erected the first temple to house the Ark. Thus the "city of David" also became known as "the city of God."
What the people of ancient Israel missed is that while God was in the midst of the city, he called them to trust not a place but a presence. And if they had paid attention to their history, they'd have seen that the dwelling place of God was never static. In the wilderness, it was represented in the moving pillar of cloud and pillar of fire and by the Ark of the Covenant carried along with the people. Later, a shrine at Shiloh symbolized God's dwelling among them.
So what made them think that after the temple was built that God's presence would be forever thereafter localized there? Perhaps it was because the temple seemed such a permanent structure, with its massive stones and overlays of gold, but it was eventually brought down.
Then the people were marched away to exile in Babylon. No temple, no shrine, no Ark of the Covenant. But there, separated from the city of God, they found that God was just as present.
Today, while there are those within Judaism who want the temple rebuilt, others have a view not tied to brick and mortar. Rabbi Pesach Schindler of Jerusalem put it that "we have all our spiritual centers within us. That is where the temple should be built."3 Or, to put it another way, the city of God is a place within, and our ultimate confidence is in the holy presence in that "place."
Revelation 21 relates a vision of God's kingdom fully come, describing it as a new Jerusalem, a place to which all the faithful people of the earth stream. As the person having the vision looks around the city, he makes this observation: "I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb" (the Lamb is a reference to Jesus). It is significant that in the kingdom of God, there is no temple, no "place," needed to symbolize God, because the presence of God so fills the realm that a temple would be superfluous.
Though God's kingdom has not fully come yet, the way we live as kingdom people today is by inviting God to live within us. That's why, for years the church has talked about opening our "hearts" to Jesus, because we understand that the inner place is the one that matters most in the life of faith. Our gathering here together for worship reinforces and feeds that relationship, but until we let Christ move inside us, we have no spiritual home.
Earlier, when I was describing the difference between my wife and me in how we relate to places, I probably overstated my lack of sense of place. In reality, I have certainly preferred some of the communities where we lived over others, and I enjoy occasionally revisiting places where we once resided. That admission reminds me that though we talk of having Christ within us, we still need physical geography in which to live out our Christianity. Yes, we are members of the worldwide church and yes, we are citizens of the universe, but it's hard to translate that into anything concrete and to interact with the whole of anything. We need a localized place on which to focus our interaction. The troubled poet John Berryman once wrote a poem in which he tried to say places were unimportant. It read:
Exile is in our time like blood. Depend on
interior journeys taken anywhere.
I'd rather live in Venice or Kyoto
except for the languages, but
O really I don't care where I live or have lived.
Wherever I am, young Sir, my wits about me,
memory blazing, I'll cope & make do.4
That view is all fine and dandy, but it wasn't enough to keep Berryman, not long after writing those lines, from leaping to his death from a Minneapolis bridge into the Mississippi River. The truth is, if we try to live entirely cut off from place, then not only we suffer, but so do the places where we might have contributed our energy and efforts.
We can say we love all of humankind, but in reality, we need to perform concrete loving actions to a few real people for those words to have meaning. Likewise, we can say we are members of God's universal kingdom, but for it to have any substance, that's got to demonstrate itself in how we act in the actual communities where we live and work.
The location where we most need to worship God is within us, not tied to any physical place. But the location where we most need to live out the results of that worship is in our churches, our homes, our workplaces, and our communities in solid acts of faithfulness to God.
____________
1.ÊScott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), p. xiii.
2.ÊJohn Gladden, "Medina's Churches Heading for the Suburbs," The Gazette (Medina, Ohio), February 25, 2003, A4.
3.ÊRichard Ostling, "Time for a New Temple?" Time magazine, October 16, 1989, p. 65.
4.ÊBerryman died in 1972. The poem is from the posthumous volume of his works, Henry's Fate & Other Poems 1967-1972 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), quoted in Sanders, op. cit., p. 103.
