Standing on Holy Ground

The word this Lent must be, “Take off your shoes, you’re standing on holy ground.”  Wisdom such as Eddie’s is truly Holy Ground.  What Eddie had to share is no different from that of the great Jewish theologian, Martin Buber.  God is RELATIONSHIP.    

Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 63:1-8; I Cor. 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9
Third Sunday in Lent, Year C, 2004
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Preached at St. Francis Episcopal Mission, San Bernardino

I received an invitation from a friend this week on LinkedIn.  I usually don’t use that platform – I’m already busy enough with everything else.  However, since I had just seen him last night, I responded to his invitation.  Looking through LinkedIn, I came across a video of Eddie Jaku, a 98-year-old survivor of the Holocaust.  He was speaking on what it takes to live a good life, the secret he has learned.  Curious about what a person who had experienced the worst of what humans can do to one another, I listened.

You must not hate.  You say, “I don’t like this person,” but you must not hate.  Hate is a disease.  It destroys first your enemy, but you also.  It destroys you.  Hate.  They ask me what is my secret.  My secret is a good wife and friendship.  Friendship you cannot buy.  When I was eight years old my father says to me, “Eddie, there is more pleasure in giving than taking.”  I thought he’s coocoo.  Now that I have children, grandchildren and great grandchildren – what you give, you get back – if nothing, you get nothing back.  So, this is important.  I want to teach you, all the people who are younger, if you don’t learn from us there’ll be no future.[1]

You can find it on YouTube.  As I sat there listening to this old Jew sharing the wisdom that has redeemed the most excruciating of experiences, I realized that I was on holy ground.  Through the profound words of this man spoke another as well.  The very same voice Moses heard from an incandescent bush, “I AM WHO I AM.” In an instant, listening in my chair, I was filled with profound awe and an overwhelming joy.  Joy, that this one survivor was now sharing with me and all others on LinkedIn, a truth that has the power to set us free.  Free from the hatred that produced the carnage in a New Zealand Mosque, free from the hatred that floods our airwaves and daily discourse.  “Hate first destroys your enemy, but also you.”

The word this Lent must be, “Take off your shoes, you’re standing on holy ground.”  Wisdom such as Eddie’s is truly Holy Ground.  What Eddie had to share is no different from that of the great Jewish theologian, Martin Buber.  God is RELATIONSHIP.  The gospel of John puts it a bit differently, “God is LOVE.  Those who abide in Love abide in God and God in them.”

To speak of an experience so sublime, so profound…there are no adequate words.  All fails.  That is the quandary of all who in a moment find themselves before the Presence.  The word, “God,” seems inadequate, for in as soon as we’ve uttered the sound, our mind is flooded with images of something less than…less than the present, vivid experience.  Less than RELATIONSHIP that pervades all that is, binding us together as one.  A relationship Jesus called, “Abba” – or Daddy.

We’ve seen this divine reality in the coming together of New Zealanders after that tragic mosque shooting.  As mourners gathered to bury the dead, this is the witness of Imam Gamal Fouda of Al Noor Mosque, one of the two attacked:

“This terrorist sought to tear our nation apart with an evil ideology that has torn the world apart — but instead we have shown that New Zealand is unbreakable,”

Take off your shoes, you’re on Holy Ground.  Indeed!

When in the presence of profound grief, silence is often the only possible response.  Such grief as my friend from West Virginia reported several days ago concerning a suicide of a young girl, Samantha – known to those who loved her as Sammy.  I knew her step-mother Michelle.  She was often at the farm, and she had catered the lunch for our House of Hope community forum in Wellsburg.  The girl had been depressed for some time, I gathered, and ended her life by consuming the entire bottle of antidepressant medication.  What led up to this, I don’t know.  But suicide is rampant now amongst the young.  It is epidemic among our older adults who feel they no longer have a purpose in life.  Suicide is doubly prevalent in depressed areas, like, the entire middle of the nation, like, in our urban areas with twenty percent youth unemployment.  Scott, our development officer on West Virginia, says that the community has surrounded Michelle and the father Joe with a love that can only be said to be divine.  This is the strength within rural communities that is so unique.  Last Thursday many gathered at the Forney Farm just to be together with the Sammy’s family and friends.  To have a cry, to tell stories, to open a beer or two.  Just to be together.

Take of your shoes, that little clubhouse on the farm was Holy Ground that evening.

Our son Christopher reports that among the last graduating class of PhD students at Yale, no one got a tenure-track job.  No one!  In the new gig economy, all are disposable.  To view the waste of discarded lives, to witness the despair of young and old, is to stand speechless on Holy Ground.  Knowing there will be no answer, we still ask, “Why?”  O Lord, are all these not precious in your sight?  And, if we’re attentive, if we’re engaged in holy listening, we ought to hear the only response there is: “Pay attention.  See what’s going on.  Do something.  You there, start something.  Begin a new beginning.  You, go to pharaoh and tell him…  You!  You!”

The one thing we do know is that an endless stream of the idiot tube is not the answer.  Whether it’s Fox News or MSNBC, research has shown that seniors who spend more than three hours before the TV are on a fast track to dementia.  I would have suspected that one of those two outlets, more than the other, would have been directly connected with dementia and Alzheimer’s.  But that’s a political guess.  A life of service and friends will place you on Holy Ground. 

We substitute the fake and plastic for what truly nourishes.  To my mind, Las Vegas is the epitome of the ersatz – the symbol of our cultural junk banquet.  Utter malnourishment.  Built out in the middle of a desert with fake lakes and mindless entertainment, — all substituting for real life.  Glitter, neon and hype. 

One trip I took quite a while with a business partner and his wife was to Las Vegas – Yeah, this really was a business trip.  Really!  However, I must say that I did give my secretary a start when I told her that we would be home late because we would be walking.  We lost the car to the slots.  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.  “Just kidding, Lacy,” I quickly added to relieve her anxiety.

Now let me tell you about real temptation in Sin City.  When I noticed that the band Chicago was playing at the Stardust, I was sorely tempted to stay the weekend and catch the show.  There’s temptation indeed.  The get-thee-behind-me-Satan-and-push-harder kind of temptation. But sanity and responsibility won out.  I did make it home on schedule. 

There’s much to find that is disturbing in Las Vegas, but what caught my attention was a group of several people with large signs over by the crowd watching the pirate battle at one of the hotels.  One of their signs loudly proclaimed “Jesus saves from Hell.”  A second sign was some other theological warning of dire consequences.  Maybe it wasn’t so much the theology – for Jesus does indeed save us from the emptiness, futility, and purposelessness that I would interpret Hell to be.  It was more their demeanor.  These religious scolds were certainly not the heart of the Beatitudes — In that moment I felt embarrassed for the church.  No evocation from these folks of the sublime or even fearsome awe of the Holy.  No blessed tenderness of that Good Shepherd or of a Mother Hen who would gather us under her wing.  Where is the Daddy who envelopes us in loving arms?  How many people, through our vindictive, judgmental attitudes, has Christianity damaged over the years, I wondered.  This is not the Gospel.  The Gospel means Good News.  This is Bad News.  Very Bad News.  Who would take of their shoes for this sort of hateful nonsense?  No one!  This is not the reality Moses encountered in a desert wasteland.

Some Sundays when I look out over the congregation coming forward at the Eucharist, I am profoundly moved as my mind goes from one to another.  We each humbly bring our frayed humanity before the Mystery of Life, seeking nourishment for the days ahead.  Some struggle with life-threatening illnesses, some bring the concern for a child or grandchild.  Some bring an ineffable joy she dares not mention.  But there we all are, standing on the most holy of grounds – our love for one another and for the One who has brought us thus far.

In Exodus we have one of the most profound proclamations of Good News in all of scripture.  Moses, a wanted murderer on the lam, is accosted by a Love behind all and within all.  A force intrinsic to the entire created order.   By the glint of something in a bush, something seen out of the corner of his eye.  A nondescript desert shrub burst into a blaze of fire and Moses’ life is permanently changed – it, too, burst into a blaze of fire. Consumed and not consumed, in ways he could never have imagined.  His identity is no longer that of a murderer, no longer that of an escaped slave.  His identity is entwined with the liberating power of the same Almighty who created out of nothing the stuff of all that is.  He is sent back to bring freedom and a renewed identity to his people.  I AM WHO I AM has hijacked his life to this most incredible end.

And of course, we all know the story.  After some initial protests that I AM WHO I AM has gotten the wrong guy for the job, Moses does descend down the slopes of Mount Horeb into the den of Pharaoh to demand in the name of God Almighty, “Let my people go!”  And before there before Pharaoh, Moses again is standing on Holy Ground.

A simple glint, the voice of a survivor by chance caught on LinkedIn, the tragedy of yet another suicide…in a moment we’re transported beyond ourselves to Holy Ground.

Maybe silence is the first and most appropriate impulse.  As Paul Tillich enjoins his reader,

Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”[2]

In that moment, in a blink of an eye, you are standing on Holy Ground.  All is inalterably changed.  Forever.

This Lent, take time to savor the Holy Ground moments that come to our living.  Let us take courage to incline our ears to their summons — to heed their call that leads to the broken in spirit and to those who weep.  Send us, O Lord, to the brokenhearted and also to those too full of good things, too full of themselves for their own good.  Let us learn to let go of our own inflated selves that we might possibly be put to some good purpose. 

But, in those moments – and you’ll know them when they come — for God’s sake and for yours, take off your shoes. You’re standing on Holy Ground.   Amen.

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[1] Eddie Jaku, “The Secret of a Good Life,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdbxJKijn5U

[2] Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948).