Finding Sanctuary Without and Within. In the passage Peter read from I Kings, we ve just dropped in on a huge

Transcription

1 1 Finding Sanctuary Without and Within Stephanie Ford, Binkley Baptist Church August 26, 2012 In the passage Peter read from I Kings, we ve just dropped in on a huge moment in the history of the Hebrew people. The Ark of the Covenant, the sacred box carrying the tablets that Moses received at Mt. Sinai, has finally been brought to rest in the newly built temple in Jerusalem. It has been taken into the inner sanctuary of the temple and placed under the wings of angelic cherubim. And then a spectacle happens! Just as the priests leave the inner sanctuary, a great cloud fills the temple to the point that the priests are unable to stand to minister to the crowds before them. Perhaps like me, you begin to conjure up scenes from Raiders of the Lost Ark! The smoke seems a sign of God s approval: that the ark, the defining symbol for the Hebrew people of divine holiness and promise, has found a dwelling place on earth. It s a solidifying moment for a people, for a religion. And the drama continues. Somehow King Solomon manages to find a way to stand before the altar, spreading out his arms to heaven. He entreats God to find favor in such a humble abode, for as Solomon is quick to name, the God of Israel the I am who I am cannot be confined to any space; indeed even all of heaven and earth cannot contain the Holy One. Nevertheless, Solomon cajoles Yahweh, Won t You make this place, this temple special, make it a site so sacred that whenever

2 2 Your people pray towards this place, or even outsiders pray in its direction, You ll hear them, forgive them, and answer them? A few thousand years later, we especially as Baptists are more than a bit wary of such theology. Enshrining a particular place, we might argue, distracts us from the reality that God is with us regardless of location, that God hears our tiniest sighs in the middle of a night of pain that no longer has words, that God attends the groanings of all creation aware even of a sparrow s falling whether or not we pray towards a holy shrine or sanctuary. We know God s house is beyond time and place in transcendence, even as it is immanent in every heartbeat. You may know the proverbial story about immanence: A baby fish in the ocean once asked the grandpa fish: I hear others talk about ocean all the time. What s the ocean? To which the grandpa fish answered, You re swimming in it. Still, I get the importance of space set aside for worship, for prayer. On a Monday morning after the holy cloud of Binkley worship has settled from the weekend, I pass the watery sounds of the baptismal pool and walk into this physical sanctuary and I can still feel all of you here again, and know viscerally that prayers still echo in its chambers. I remember again that I need such a place as this and our community to help me experience God. I believe that we all long for sanctuary, for places, for experiences, for community to help us encounter God s nearness, regardless of whether or not we

3 3 have ever entered a church, regardless of whether or not we have ever named God as the source of our being. It s the habit of the soul to look for symbols, to seek refuge, to ask why. The psalmist longs to pour out his heart, to sing for joy to the living God and to do so in the midst of sacred architecture and objects of meaning, in the fellowship of the people of God. Beyond the sanctuary of church and temple, this kind of sacred space and time may be discovered in nature, in music, in art, in poetry, in story, and even, I believe, in moments such as the joy of seeing the light from the window of your home after a long trip. The sanctuary of creation comes alive as we listen to the birdsong, rest our eyes on a hillside of trees, or pay attention to a flower; we are swept up into a sanctuary that reveals itself through our body, our senses. Painter Georgia O Keeffe s huge flowers, you know the ones that seem to spill off their canvases, were often analyzed for their voluptuous petals and provocative stamen but she herself never identified with that Freudian analysis. She actually started painting flowers while cooped up in New York City in her 30s. She would write about her work saying, When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not. In the middle of skyscrapers, O Keeffe was creating sanctuaries of beauty, of soul life through her paintings.

4 4 It might sound as though I am watering down the term sanctuary too much, and perhaps I am, but I d rather err in that direction. A former student of mine reported being swept into communion with God one night while she was taking out the garbage under a moonlight sky. Unplanned, unscripted, without walls or candles. I think we need both, time in a community like this one, gathered in this hallowed space of worship, as well as time in the daily sanctuaries that we discover in the ordinary. This is not just a nice devotional thought; rather it is vital to our fellowship with God and our own souls, and with each other and for the healing of this world. I have found sanctuary most simply in the breath, when I have quieted myself enough to follow its rhythms. My ego struggles with the lack of accomplishment or excitement in such stilling, but sometimes I let go enough to experience God breathing through my very soul. When the Spiritual Life Group meets, as it did this past week, our habit is to spend twenty minutes of centering silence in the chapel before we turn to our work. Frankly, last week, being stilled in this way was the last thing I wanted to do; I had too many thoughts, too many internal lists running over in my mind. But once I settled in, dwelling in the quiet of God s presence and in the communal energy, I began to rest, to lay down my burdens, to realize the stillpoint of God in the midst of my turning. When the time ended, I was hungry for more.

5 5 Another sanctuary I have recently visited resides in my memory, hidden from plain sight, but deeply embedded in my senses. I ll explain. At Kroger, I pick up one of those bunches of tomatoes on the vine and hold it close to my nose, and suddenly I am whisked back to my grandmother s tomato garden in Wake Forest and its splendid aroma. While sniffing, I imagine myself sitting in a kitchen nook around a table too big for the room, a table that wobbles when you accidentally knock it on the way to get more tea. I can see my grandparents, aunts and uncles, my parents in different configurations around that table eating, talking, laughing. A breakfast nook is rather homely for an inner sanctuary, but in the midst of countless moves I have made, including this one I have just made to Chapel Hill, I find it helps my soul to find its bearings. For God is there in that memory, reminding me that I belong to a family, to a place that goes beyond the veil that separates us on this plane of reality. Meditating on the meaning of sanctuary this week, I have thought a lot about the school year that starts tomorrow. Even if you are not in school, you can feel it in the air, the anticipation tinged with a bit of dread of the busyness that September brings. Recently, I heard that we face on average about 23 frustrations a day, up from about 13 a day just a few years ago. I am not sure how this number is calculated, but it certainly feels true to me. Maybe it s the number of gadgets we rely on, or the speed with which we want everything to work, or the

6 6 overscheduling of good activities; I am not sure. What I do know is that I am too often distracted, hurried, and reactive within. When my printer clogs or the hot water heater breaks, small things really, I need to take a deep breath. Personally, I have found no better remedy than spiritual practice. Even if I only eke out 10 minutes or so of prayer, journaling, and reading in the morning I notice that I am more present to myself and to others, and hopefully to God, through the rest of the day. It is a sanctuary I need to visit every day and return to every hour. In Psalm 84 that Dick read for us, I find some of the most beautiful verses in all of the psalter: Happy are those whose strength is in You, in whose heart are the highways to Zion. As they go through the valley of Baca (or weeping), they make it a place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools. They go from strength to strength (vs. 5-7a). Such a person was Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman living during WWII, who kept a series of journals that record her spiritual awakening during a time of great suffering. These diaries, published forty years later, detail a spiritual transformation, a deeply ecumenical mysticism that grew even as she and her

7 7 family lived out their last months in the misery of Westerbork, a Nazi transit camp. She meditated on the book of Matthew and Rilke s poetry among other writings. On the face of it, you would think that reading her journals would be depressing. Yet, even as your eyes are open to the awfulness of terrible evil, you are drawn in by her transparency before God with whom she seems to be in continual conversation. You join her in spontaneous prayer, as she lies awake in her barracks hearing the breathing of the women and girls around her, and incredibly you also experience her joy. In a small pebble, the petals of a flower, the curling branches of a tree, she could detect the entire cosmos, and this discovery made her burst out with the exuberance that life was beautiful and God was good. When Etty had decided to volunteer working at the Nazi transit camp and insisted on remaining there against the urging of friends it was from the conviction that she would be carrying the peace and love into the world in order to transform the world even in its suffering, at least to some small degree: Ultimately, she wrote, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world. Not only Etty Hillesum, but I believe all of us have a sanctuary within, where God dwell, an inner sanctuary which we need to tend with care. Each of us will tend that sanctuary in different ways. Perhaps you are one who finds that

8 8 sanctuary in your garden, hiking in Duke Forest, or walking the dog. Last year, I found such a sanctuary on my commute from Apex along back roads. While there are so many reasons I am grateful to live close, I am having to rediscover new ways to tend my sanctuary within. What is your way? For by living from that sanctuary, it may be through your very presence that you will become a vessel of God s love to others. It won t be from effort alone, but by returning to that center of listening, of openness to God in the encounter of daily sanctuary. A-men.