Sunday, July 15, 2018

Surprised by Holiness: Stonehenge, the Ark and the Eucharist

I didn’t intend to go to Stonehenge when I booked my trip to England. I had been to other WOWZA religious sites and thought, ‘meh’. On that same trip, I had found other stone circles fascinating, especially the one at Avebury, where the town had built itself overlapping the circles there. I do believe in thin places, that there are places where we can breathe more deeply and see more clearly and have the sense that we are more intimately connected with God. It isn’t that God is there more than other places, just that something in the interplay between earth and sky and the human heart becomes more open and soft to the presence of the divine. Yet there was something about Stonehenge, about the elaborate human project of the place that made me perhaps a bit more cynical of experiencing the holy there.

I didn’t find a Buddha-like moment of nirvana enlightenment. It wasn’t a sense of union with the whole universe either. However, there was something. Something that I felt there that was mysteriously deep and inviting and holy. I don’t have many words to put around it, except to acknowledge that there was something free of shame and fracturedness on that gentle hill around those tremendous pillars. Touching the one stone you are allowed to touch it wasn’t electrifying, but it wasn’t a bland feeling either. Perhaps the word to put with that experience was centered, with an outer ring of genuine surprise at having found anything sacred at all.

Contemporary people like us can struggle with the very idea of extraordinary holiness or divine presence. So the return of the Ark to the story of ancient Israel may find us inattentive. Despite years of Sunday School, Indiana Jones was my first notice of the Ark of the Covenant when I was young. Perhaps that is the image that comes to mind for you too. The Ark of the Covenant that David brings to Zion in our lesson today, it was incredibly central to Israelite religious practice and historical self-understanding, and also, occasionally nearly forgotten about and sometimes seemingly misplaced. The Ark is a multivalent symbol seen as a footstool for God’s presence, and a container for the most important elements of Israel's sacred history: the broken tablets of the Commandments, a jar of Manna from the wilderness, and Aaron’s staff, which in some versions is forever flowering. It is a human construction that centers God’s self-disclosure and presence. 

It is said that the Ark is where God’s presence dwells, and in the Hebrew dwell is a word of unresolved tension. It means both an ever after home, and a purpose to be always in motion. The Ark of the covenant, the rectangular container with its golden cover and carrying beams is trying to both honor the freedom of God to be always on the move and the human need for a regular and reliable connection.

King David, is for some, including his first wife, the bitter Michal, is a usurper of Saul’s throne. So his fetching of the Ark and bringing it to rest on Zion is making a public ritual of the divine alliance between God and David’s reign. He is also making a shrewd political move by bringing forth and honoring the most potent symbol of Israel's heritage the very container of God’s desire for human life together, a just society, food for all, liberation for the last and least and lost, David calms and brings into his influence factions he needs to govern effectively. It is a move that is pious and authentic that is also paraded in such a way as to have a strong undercurrent of political spin.

In the Ark, God sees our restlessness and need for reliable practices that help us make contact with God’s holy presence. When David brings the Ark to Zion, he calms the fears of those who are anxious about these changes and reaches into sacred history to centralize for the people disciplines and patterns of life that at their best live into the promises between God and humanity. Sometime around or before the Exile, the Ark disappears from history. It is generally believed to have been looted of its gold and treasures and then destroyed. However there are also other theories, and the plot that Indiana Jones follows, that a Pharaoh took it and hid it in the deserts of Egypt, is genuinely one of the most popular theories. Alternately there is an anciently rooted Ethiopian church that claims to possess it, but they won’t show it to anyone. In some streams of mystical Catholic theology, there is the idea that Mary, Mary the mother of Jesus, in some mysterious way was the Ark that became human. Which at first glance I dismissed as much as I dismissed expecting to find anything holy at Stonehenge.

However, the more I thought about it, theologically there is something amazing and beautiful and profound in that idea. If as we state, that Jesus was the very presence and witness of God’s self, and Mary was the bearer, the vessel that carried that presence, then the idea, not the physics, the idea is astonishingly compelling. The alliances between what we trust about Jesus and the theologies regarding the Ark are strong. Jesus and the Ark of the Covenant are experienced as a mediator of God’s presence and promises and a reliable way to connect with God. Very little that we say and believe and practice regarding Jesus and the sacrament of the Eucharist is very far at all from the intention and concepts around the Ark of the Covenant.

It even takes that matrix of eternal dwelling and portability to a whole new level. Eucharist is an offer of God’s fidelity to us, an offer of fidelity to anyone who is lost or isolated, which certainly abundantly expands the ancient practices regarding who was in and who was out around the socio-religious-political access to the Ark. Eucharist is an offer of connection with anyone who desires a larger sense of belonging in God. No matter what you believe or don’t understand about the Eucharist, it is lifegiving and connective and an encounter with holy presence, no matter what we think or believe about it. One of the things I love about the Episcopal Church is that people who celebrate and receive together comprehend it in vastly different ways. And God can handle it and be present and make it beautiful in a myriad of ways. Jesus gathers friends and foes around the table again and again and again. All of those moments are feasts full of wonder and brokenness, and each meal stretches the bounds of the real and the possible.

I believe that the church is called to be Jesus’ grace made visible and tangible, that our mission is to be a compelling witness of God's’ desire for connection with us. Eucharist makes what is always going on in the big picture tangible in the small picture, universal love small enough to place in our hands, abundant enough to never run out. God’s presence can be reliably connected to like stone henges raised high and standing year after year after year. Encountering God’s presence may not always be an electrifying moment. Instead, I find that God’s presence is found most often as humble and often surprising encounters moments of life and of earth that reveal the deepest truth that the entire creation belongs to God is never far from God and is ceaselessly called to the holy promises of liberation and wholeness.

So I wonder, have you ever felt a thin place or been deeply moved by a holy moment or sacred object? And I wonder how is this place, Grace Episcopal Church, all these lovely acres and buildings in Pemberton, New Jersey, how is it a testimony of divine blessing and peace for you and people in decades past, and how can it continue to be raised up as a holy place for this neighborhood?

God has offered a myriad of ways to dwell with us and journey with us throughout the ages. Jesus offers us a way of life together with a way of love in the church and the sacraments where there is a real and transforming presence, wherever the journey takes us.

Amen.

Pemberton, New Jersey

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