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At Home with God
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23 August 2009 While John and I were in Jerusalem, we went to the Mount of Olives, which is directly across from the eastern wall of the Temple Mount–the one we see in pictures of the stunning gold-domed, blue-tiled Dome of the Rock. That shrine is said to house the rock upon which Abraham bound Isaac for sacrifice. And that Temple Mount area is the same area upon which Solomon built the first temple. Our scripture this morning is a portion of the dedication of that first temple. As the crow flies, the Mount of Olives and the Temple Mount aren’t much farther apart than UCCSV is from the Giant grocery across the street, but in between the two mounts is a steep valley, the Kidron Valley. It takes about 45 minutes to walk from one spot to the other...and it’s impossible not to imagine throngs of people coming down along the valley and up the hillsides as they make their way to the tiny piece of real estate that is sacred to all three Abrahamic religions. In fact, as we made our way down the Mount of Olives, an exuberant group ahead of us–that to me sounded as though they were from the Caribbean–sang and lifted their hands in the air, caught up joyous celebration in their own personal pilgrimage. That theme of pilgrimage came up more than once in our journey to Israel and Palestine. In hotel elevators we were asked if we were visiting the area. When we answered ‘yes,’ the inevitable follow-up question was, “Are you on a pilgrimage?” The assumption of religious underpinnings to a guest’s presence in the area – especially that area – is probably fair. But as one who lives in the far more secularized culture of the mid-Atlantic United States, I was surprised not to be asked if we were tourists or if we were there on business. The reality is that we were there to study with Jewish scholars and to visit sacred places and to meet with Palestinians who are working hard to improve conditions for their people. As the best of journeys do, each element of our trip involved some element of pilgrimage, an opportunity to reflect upon God’s presence in our lives. But to be asked directly if we were on a pilgrimage took me to the dictionary to look at the word itself. A pilgrim is one who journeys to a sacred place–a place where a particular divine activity was made known. A pilgrim is one who journeys to this sacred place for religious reasons–often but not always involving worship. That much I knew. What I didn’t know is that the word comes from the Latin peregrinus, related to peregrine falcons, or pilgrim falcons. Falconers caught these birds full-grown on migration; they were not taken from the nest. This suggests that in its truest meaning, a pilgrim is not an infant or a child; a pilgrim is an adult who is intentional about his or her journey, intentional about the intended destination of his or her journey, intentional about the preparations needed to make that journey. For some reason, the pilgrim’s intentionality struck a chord with me, especially in our contemporary era when all around us, the religious landscape is in a state of flux. As Christians, we are in a new place in our faith journey. Diana Butler Bass[1] describes us in broad strokes. Few of us are villagers, belonging to the same church to which our parents and extended family belonged–or in increasingly rare cases, still do. Even for those who still live in the same area as our families, some of us are exiles, displaced because we no longer find a home in fundamentalist theology, or because we understand our sexuality as God-given, or because we have been disenfranchised in some other way. Still others are immigrants. In addition to many of those who worship here on Saturdays in the Spanish-speaking Seventh-Day Adventist church, many more of us have moved here immigrated–from a formative community we once called home. And there are those of us who are converts, those who, either through an individual event, or through a continual process of transformation, find ourselves joining God’s people and becoming incorporated into the body of Christ. Bass’s descriptions are helpful to a point. Rather like Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, they tell us something of those who travel with us. But I think she was missing one group: the passenger. I was at least a passenger on our journey–seat 8A by the window, originating at National airport, transferring in Philadelphia to Tel Aviv. There was intentionality there: I agreed with the destination; I packed; I showed up for the flight. But a passenger is not always a pilgrim; a pilgrim is aware–however imperfectly–that they seek an encounter with God. The story Mike read of Solomon’s dedication of the temple captures that yearning. The story comes from historians known as Deuteronomists, who collected and edited accounts of Israel’s history from the time of Moses to the time of the Babylonian Exile, about 560 years before Jesus. The sobering reality is that this is not the transcript of an on-site stenographer, written at the time of the temple’s dedication. Instead, this scripture is written for a people who have lost their land and their holy city, for a people who know that their temple lay in ruins.[2] Here is a story for exiles, forced immigrants in a foreign land, trying to make sense of reality when the elders who knew their traditions are no more, when all of their touchstones, all of the institutions of village and family and temple have been ripped away. In other words, it is a story especially for people especially in a period of flux, a time of transition on nearly every front. Ours is a story that reminds us not only that God is present with us in all times in all places, even in times of great upheaval and transition, even in places as remote as Germantown, Maryland or Babylon or Golgotha. It is a story speaks to us as a pilgrim people, villager, convert, immigrant, and exile. It is a story that sustains us in our present dislocation. It is a story that calls us forward with a vision of a home with God that welcomes villager and exile and foreigner alike as fellow pilgrims in our journey with and to the sacred. *** Peregrine >noun a powerful falcon with a bluish-gray back and wings and pale underparts, that breeds chiefly on mountains and coastal cliffs. ORIGIN Latin, ‘pilgrim falcon’, because falconers’ birds were caught full-grown on migration, not taken from the nest. Oxford University Press, WordPerfect X3. *** [1]Bass, Diana Butler, Christianity for the Rest of Us, HarperSanFrancisco, © 2006. |