There is this holy place I know...

A sermon preached @LCMontheHILL on John 3.14-21, Numbers 21.4-9, Ephesians 2.1-10

There is this holy place I know...
It’s where a thread of asphalt winds through the hills of western North Carolina, tying together an old white house on the top of a hill, an apple orchard, the family church, and its adjoined cemetery. It’s a thread that stretches back over centuries. This holy place is a place where as an eight year old I walked barefoot through the apple orchard. Meandering down the rows of trees, I made my way back to the big white house with its rusted tin roof, lost in the captivating world of my own imagination.

I felt the stiff blades of grass and the sun baked clay push back against my exposed feet, when suddenly something shifted and my imaginative world came crashing down into reality. Under foot something moved, something squirmed. My eyes shot to the ground. Pinned beneath my foot were scales, a white under belly, and frantic writhing. I don’t do snakes; not now and most certainly not as an eight year old. So, I can’t tell you for certain if I stepped on a snake or if it was a fire-breathing dragon. Rather, instinctively, I ran, making a bee line straight through the orchard. With each breath, my heart raced and my lungs stretched, until finally I collapsed onto the ground in a heap.

As I travel back to this holy place, I find this story of my youth repeating itself. Time and again, I am drawn and then sent back out of this Eden; the place of my birth filled with apples and serpents, a place of destiny.  For weddings, funerals, and holidays, I still find myself walking barefoot through the orchard in the late afternoon sun, only to be cast out, running as hard as I can.

Each time I walk that orchard it is as if I am walking in a light that reveals who I am. I’m reminded of my identity rooted in the legacy of a people who, like the wandering Israelites, fled an insect invasion (the boll weevil) and moved into this promised land, where with apple orchards and pigsties they found a way to scratch out a living. With each piece of gravel and scattered thorn pressed into the soft flesh of my feet and the sentinel sight of the cemetery where my forebears lie, I am reminded of my own frailty and weakness.

Each time, I am sent from this light, running, more aware of who I am, of an identity ground in the earthen mix of sticky red clay and fallen, rotting apples.

There is the holy place I know...
It’s Tuesday and Friday mornings. It’s down on Marshall Road, right by Highway 93, as the road winds its way around the hill and up Cherryvale. It’s in the steep inclines of the streets at the far western edge of Boulder, where the city turns to mountains. This is the place where I run with my team. Each time we gather, it is as if we are running in a light that reveals the truth of who we are. Each time I learn that I am a miraculous part of God’s creation. I am an inconceivable mixture of muscles and tendons, strands of DNA and neurons woven together; capable of incredible things. I learn each time of the limits of who I am. As the digits on the stopwatch slowly roll by they tell me in very black and white terms who I am and who I am not. Again, I leave this patch of light, gasping for breath, hoping to be drawn back into it’s glow once again.

There is this holy place I know...
I just found it. It’s down in the basement of Trinity Lutheran Church, here in Boulder. It’s down on the corner of Broadway & Pine. It’s a place where on the second Sunday of the month a meal is served to the hungry and homeless who shuffle through a buffet line of pasta casserole, oranges, cookies, and hard-boiled eggs. Last week, Andrea and I were gathered into the light of this holy place. In light that shines even in a dimly lit basement, I saw who I was. I saw myself as a part of God’s marvelous hospitality. I saw myself as a part of the people, who in the name of God, feed those who hunger, heal the sick, and give drink to the thirsty. But I also saw the weathered faces that streamed through, and I was reminded that I am a part of a people who still wander in the desert; who hunger and thirst and yearn to be filled. I left this place running, out of breath, telling everyone I met about this experience in the light, hoping to be pulled back in.

There is this holy place I know...
Its right here, with you, when we are gathered in a light that shines in the midst of darkness, around these waters, around bread and wine, this table, and the table downstairs. Here in this holy place I am reminded of who I am. This is the place where together we say that we are broken, that our thoughts, words, and deeds are marked by darkness.

But I also come to known anew each week, in an embrace of peace, a small piece of bread in my hands, and in sloppy joe’s, that God fills those who hunger, that God brings us out of the wilderness, and that we are who God has made us to be, a people empowered for life, life and light for each of us and for the sake of the world. I leave this place running, out to the other parts of my life, renewed, refilled, re-known, hoping and praying to be drawn back into the light, to this holy place.

I think that we experience much of our lives darting in and out of these patches of light. There are days and seasons of dark clouds and transcendent moments when the light breaks through. The promise tonight is not the promise of a perfect orchard or a life of constant sunshine. The promise tonight is that as we scamper back and forth, in and out of the light, God pulls us forward. Through light and dark, through an Eden filled with snakes and rotten apples, God pulls us through. Let us go from this place out to the holy places you know, the places along the edge of darkness, the places where the dawn of a new light is breaking, the places where we know who we are, the ones God has made for life in the light. Amen.