John 10.1-10 21 April 2008
“WHERE GOD SET UP HOUSE”
Has something ever happened to you that you felt deeply compelled to talk about but lacked the words to describe? Maybe the marriage of a child or the death of a parent; the moving from a beloved home to another or the last child moving out. My trip to Israel is like that. I must speak, having been struck dumb. Thank you for your support of my trip, your prayers along the way, and your interest today.
Having stood at the intersection between Europe, Asia, and Africa, having stood where past and future meet, having entered the gap between that which is most sacred and most profane on God’s earth, having visited the place where heaven and hell touch, I am newly aware of how little I know about anything. But my life has changed and my perspective is forever altered for having been led out there. I usually don’t work in the three-point sermons of my childhood, except for today.
First, the most helpful part of going to the Holy Land is simply seeing the Bible’s geography. I can’t convey the deep impression it made. Have you ever stared at the colored maps in the back of your Bible, trying to sort them out? Well, my eyes glazed over just like yours. But having been, the maps can now help remind me of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, sticking out like the chin on God’s face.
Having been, I can see the cliffs of Gerasa rising above the Sea of Galilee where Jesus cast out the demons tormenting the demoniac tending his herd of swine. Having been, I can see the pools of Bethsaida with its porticoes where Jesus bid a lame man to rise and angered the religious leaders. Having been, I can see what Luke meant by the “hill country of Judea” where Mary ventured to visit E-lizabeth when they were pregnant with Jesus and John the Baptist, respectively.
The impact of finding yourself in faith-filled places like these is dramatic. Jerusalem, for example, is all hills and valleys. Until you walk and drive them, getting lost and then found, no map makes much sense. But once you do this, it seems as much a town as it does a city (yes, surely one large, complex town).
You get a sense of the sides of town, Palestinian and Jewish, the neighborhoods, emanating from the quarters of the Old City, Arab, Christian, Jewish, Orthodox. You walk around a corner or pass under a threshold and--look out--you’re trans-ported from one empire to another, one era to another and one reality to another. Having been, I can see how Jesus crossed the Kidron Valley, up to the Mount of Olives, before his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. It all flows from hill to hill.
When we finally left Jerusalem, our excellent guide Henry played a trick on us. He mentioned we would pause at a lookout just off the highway that was maybe worth pausing over. But we didn’t notice that with one large hill we had passed from the springtime green of Jerusalem’s semi-arid heights to the stark dry desert wilderness below, frequented by nomads tending their flocks, like John ch. ten. We turned a corner and it hit us: the deep limestone valleys and the desert rock mountains spreading into the distance. It was at once forbidding and inviting. The whole bus gasped in unison. This is where Jesus was tested in the wilderness.
We huddled together as the Rev. Mary Luti offered reflections. The wind pressed so hard we held her scarf so it wouldn’t whip her face. She couldn’t see her Bible. The wind pushed, prodded and parched us. No wonder Jesus went there to be tested. Next we all spent a quiet hour, alone with our own thoughts and prayers.
Then we arrived in Galilee, Jesus’ home stomping grounds. I always saw Jesus as a desert kind of guy, with his sandals and tunic. Wrong. Galilee is green. The Sea of Galilee is like a smaller Great Lake with trees, sunlight and the sounds of birds filling the air. Jesus hailed from a place not unlike Michigan where I grew up. Who knew? I certainly didn’t till I saw the lay of the land. My first point is how the geography of these holy sites opened and connected new realities for me.
My second point today is Jerusalem is a place of deep and difficult ambivalence. Perhaps like you, my image of Jerusalem was shaped by old hymns roman-ticizing the city. Take our opener. “Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest, beneath thy contemplation sink heart and voice oppressed. I know not, O I know not what joys await us there, what radiancy of glory, what bliss beyond compare!” Yes, it is a beautiful hymn. Yes, Jerusalem is golden in color because the omnipresent white limestone over time turns a golden hue. But most of these old hymns depict and celebrate the new heavenly Jerusalem beyond this earth.
The earthly Jerusalem is different. How shall I speak to the enmities palpable in as you cross armored checkpoints, divisions as towering as a 38-foot wall run-ning 400 miles to keep the right people in and the wrong people out? There can be no peace in Jerusalem so long as the Palestinians are on the other side of apartheid’s wall. There can be only simmering hatred and ongoing violence. Still, as I sat in a fashionable Jerusalem enclave having coffee with my college room-mate who has lived there 30 years, Bob described his colleague blown up five years ago in a café on the next block. And I understand the impulse to build that wall. Jerusalem is thorny not just for the spiny plants that grow there but also for the stubborn intractability of its manifold dilemmas and millennia-old disputations.
How can I talk about this? When I was a boy, my older brother and I played a lot of chess. Chess is a very subtle and strategically challenging game. When we got bored with it, Lee cut up a second chessboard bunching squares at different levels so that we were now playing chess three dimensionally. Like regular chess is something simple, right? Understanding the strata of history in Jerusalem, the ebb and flow of conquering empires, and the strategic consequences today is like playing chess in three dimensions. You think you know what you see and you’re ready to move. Not so fast. Everything is more complicated than it seems.
Nothing is at it seems in Jerusalem. You look at a building and a colonnade. What are you seeing? Does it go back to the original temple built by Solomon? Does it go back to the Greeks who oppressed the Jews so hatefully and viciously the Maccabees overthrew them? Does it go back to the Romans who followed as overlords and razed Jerusalem in 70 AD, renaming it with Aelia Capitolina? Does it go back to Constantine whose mother Helena built magnificently in 328 AD to honor the Christian pilgrims who had already sojourned there for generations? Does it go back to the Persians who came and conquered and razed everything under the leadership of mad caliph Hakim in 673 AD? Or is what we are seeing merely the work of the Crusaders of the 12th century, what our guide kept calling “modern”. Never mind the Ottoman Empire or the British Empire. Teaching us the history of the city, Henry couldn’t be bothered with something so recent as 1178 AD. Think of it. Relative to the sweep of its antiquity, the 12th century in Jerusalem is only as far back as the Pearl Harbor attack is in American history.
Jerusalem is a threshold city straddling the space between greenery and desert, farmers and shepherds, Mt Tabor heights and Dead Sea depths, cities and fields, God’s sacred realm and our secular human space. It is held sacred in the world’s principal three God-religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Is it any wonder that Jerusalem is so conflicted, so controverted, and so intensely encapsulated?
My third and last point is also perhaps the most tender and relevant to our faith. As we ponder religion, so often it conjures images of abstract and universal truth, faceless mists of immortality, judging and remote landscapes of pure being. But this trip reminded me that is not what the Jewish and Christian faiths are about. We don’t move from generalities and attach them to particular people and places. No, we move in just the opposite direction, construing from particular stories of specific people who lived in a given time of an actual place, the truths of eternity.
This means our faith is intensely personal. The most meaningful moments of this trip for me were personal moments. The first that I recall is visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the holiest site for Jews, the foundation of Solomon’s temple. Amazingly, the day we went almost no one was there. I carried with me the hundred plus prayer requests you scribbled on scraps last Easter Sunday. It was great to feel those stones worn smooth by hands over the centuries. It was great to hear the chanting and praying buzzing all around me. But dearest to me was putting the prayer petitions into the cracks between the foundation stones. My friend, Martin, helped me jam them in, and claimed that your prayers were the most meaningful part of his being at the wall. And Martin hardly even knows you.
If our faith isn’t personal, it is nothing. And the trip made my faith personal for me. Standing in the quarried cistern likely supplying the water to irrigate the same garden where Jesus met Mary Magdalene on the morning of his resurrection. Sitting quietly on the grassy hillside where Jesus taught and fed the thousands.
Out in the middle of nowhere, picking hyssop along the path, and touching the Roman curb stones of the road that likely took Cleopas and his friend to Emmaus, where the risen Christ was made known in the breaking of the bread. Resting and praying in an outdoor chapel on the Mount of Olives and picking a sprig of rosemary to bring back with me. Wading into the Jordan to reaffirm our baptisms, like here last January, and filling my apple juice bottle with river water.
Pray with me for the peace of Jerusalem, Israel, and Palestine. For with a little peace, we might find ourselves pilgrims in these holy lands before we know it. Amen.
O Helper of all who turn to you,
Light of all in our darkness,
Creator of all that grows from seed,
Promoter of all spiritual growth,
Have mercy, Lord God, on me
And make me a temple fit for yourself.
Do not scan my transgressions to closely,
For if you are quick to notice my offenses,
I shall not dare to appear before you.
In your great mercy,
In your boundless compassion,
Wash away my sins, through Jesus Christ,
Your only Child, the truly holy,
The chief of our souls’ healers.
Through him may all glory be given you
All power and honor and praise,
Throughout an unending succession of ages. Amen.
(Prayer from a second century papyrus.)
