God is Imaginary

A Pentecost sermon preached at Holy Love Lutheran Church based on Acts 2 and the presence of the Spirit, with some help from John Green. 

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, the Parthians, the Medes, the Elamites, the residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, those from Phrygia and Agloe. Suddenly, from heaven, there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, rested on each of them and they began to speak in a great variety of tongues. 

As this tongue twisting reading from Acts maps out these people and places, I’m reminded of how much I love maps. In fact, I think they’re holy. So much so that each year on campus our students spend a night discovering the theology of maps. 

Before we meet I go to the chamber of commerce and pick up as many of their free maps of Boulder as I can discreetly sneak out to my car. I hand out markers and I ask students to draw their lives on these maps. Mark the places where you live, where you study, where you go for fun, where you work. Draw the routes. How do you get from one place to the other? What roads or paths do you drive or walk?  

We connect the dots and each student ends up with a map of their life. Then we lay all the maps on top of each other, tracing our footsteps over one another. In the end what emerges is a mapping of the life of our small community. But this process produces something else, something that makes maps particularly holy. This map of maps also shows the places we don’t go. It reveals the white spaces; the places we do not go, the places we do not know.