Sacred Geography: Ground | Rev. T. J. FitzGerald | 02.18.24

We start our lenten journey together and ask where we experience the holy? How do we find sacred places in our lives when we aren’t in church?

This is the first sermon in the Sacred Geography sermon series, where we are locating sacred touchpoints in our inner world and the world around us.

Sermon Transcript

When I was young, I was taught a little bit about some streams and some water, and it went a little like this. (singing) The God of my childhood was Irish. That Shel Silverstein poem, “The Unicorn,” was a huge part of my childhood. We’d run around free not long after we were born, singing this song all about “The Unicorn.”

Now, if you don’t know the song or the studio album of the same name by the Irish Rovers, well God certainly can forgive you for not being sufficiently Irish. Glen Campbell plays lead on that album, friends. I’m just saying. It’s great. And along with this charming children’s song about the flood and Genesis, you’ll also get a hilarious tune about religious bigotry, a lilting love song about mass incarceration and a rousing number about indentured servitude.

I think that album might be one of the most Irish things on earth actually. I bet lots of us here learn some songs about the flood story in Genesis. So I’m just going to let those bounce around in your heads a little bit. But in The Unicorn we hear about this magical animal and how they avoided Noah’s Ark and as the result, when the floods came, they were lost. They were gone forever. That’s what happened to the unicorns. The author keeps the focus on this one lost animal and assures us over and over about what was spared, what did survive, what made its way onto the ground after the raging flood washed so many away, all because the Lord saw some sinning.

Well, that’s just a children’s song, T. J. Come on. I’m trying to have church here. But it’s chilling because it’s a children’s song. The number of songs for children that make heinous genocidal acts the center of the action that bounce large-scale violence along a jaunty beat. It’s alarming, right? (singing) Yeah, exactly. I thought so. I thought so.

Exploring Lent and Sacred Geography

Well, welcome to Lent at First Unitarian, friends. Here this Sunday we start our fourth series. Our fourth series in our annual theme of Waves of Purpose, Tides of Change. Every series this year we hope is a chance to pause, to discern, to reflect on your purpose, on our purpose as a church and as a vital part of our shared world community so that we might swell the tides of change that we hope to see in the world. Sound good? All right.

Our series for this Lenten season is called Sacred Geography. Through the coming weeks, we’ll explore ways to take our faith into all the parts of our lives, whether that is at the checkout counter or the gas pump school board meetings or all important elections maybe at the dinner table at the bedside, or making sense of the raging nightmares aflame in sacred grounds across the earth right now.

Here we are at Lent and the word Lent comes from the old English lencten, which means spring, which means this season that’s approaching. And in the Christian tradition, it begins on Ash Wednesday when we are reminded that we are dust. And to the dusty ground, we shall return. And next year on Ash Wednesday, I want to be telling a few more people than we’re here this last Wednesday about that. So we’ll see you next year.

Lent as a time of reflection, preparation, and renewal

It lasts 40 days from that evening and 40 is an auspicious number in biblical literature. It’s the number of days that Jesus was in the desert before beginning his public ministry, and it’s also the duration of the flood that Noah escaped with his family on the ark. Traditionally, as we talked about in the story, Lent is a time for giving things up, but it is also a time for journeying, for finding our ways. A time of challenge and preparing for renewal for new things.

It is the heralding of springtime when buckets of peonies are coming for us all and our neighbors. So this Lent, we hope you will journey with us to these places of sacred geography. Now, in our reading today from Genesis, which is in fact the same reading that faith communities around the world will also read this morning we learn about the God that the family of Noah encounters. In this chapter in Hebrew, this is Elohim. Scholars tell us when you see the name Elohim, this is the more folktale kind of manifestation of God.

When God is walking or talking in the Hebrew scriptures, this is likely Elohim. When God is thunder and lightning in Hebrew scriptures, that is likely Yahweh. Got it? All right. Noah, his wife and the three other couples, the women are not mentioned in the text, I just have to say, but there’s eight people there. They debark from the 40-day maelstrom and are met by Elohim who just wiped all of life off the face of the earth.

How do you think they were feeling at that moment? What is it like to meet someone with such power and active homicidal inclinations who runs up to you and is all like, “You know what, my bad. Never again. I promise I won’t do this again.” And here’s a rainbow, a big, bright, shiny reminder so that when I do forget because lots on my mind, not to mention Lot’s wife. So when I do forget that I’m not supposed to wipe you out, this will remind me of the promise I’m making right now. This is the promise I’m making to you. Rainbow, no kill. Rainbow, no kill. Got it? Peace. Oh, by the way, have you seen my unicorns? I’m here all week.

Those eight people, they don’t say a thing, right? No questions, no assurances, no screaming. They listen and accept the promise that’s being made because as anyone who has seen Dexter knows that’s what you do when a homicidal maniac is talking to you. That’s what you do when you’ve been terrorized on a boat with a floating zoo. That’s what you do when someone is busy setting up a reminder not to kill you. You stay quiet.

Now, we don’t hold the factual truth of biblical literature. I don’t. But many of us do draw wisdom from it and we share a world friends, we share a world with many who do hold the literal truth of these texts. And though the temptation in me is strong to throw the arc out with the floodwater, really smart people have been wrestling with the truth and wisdom in these texts for a lot longer than any of us has. And in all that wrestling, I got to believe there is some common ground to be found.

The Ground of Being

Now, for a long time, some churches and some theologians taught that God was a supreme being like the Diana Ross and the Trinity of The Supremes. But even early on, this is early on, not just recent, the concept of God as a being was challenged because a being comes with what attributes of a being, not the least of which for Noah was forgetfulness like needing a shiny rainbow to remember not to flood the earth again. And by the middle of the 20th century, one of the great theologians finally had it with the being with the Elohim, the Diana Ross God and Paul Tillich offered this answer to the problem by calling God the ground of being. Not a being, the ground of being.

And this is perfect for the Lenten season. On Ash Wednesday, when we said to each of you, remember, you are dust and to dust you will return. We evoked the words of Elohim spoken to the beings, banished from Eden and made human, made mortal. Ground in Hebrew is adamah. Not a proper noun, just ground, just dirt, earth dust, adamah. Human in Hebrew, adham, not a proper noun, not Adam, adham, a being whose name is entirely composed of ground of earth, of dust, of adamah. Except for that final syllable there that differentiates the two. Ah. That final syllable is all breath. Ah. Is it discovery? Ah, is it pain? Ah, is it wonder?

Is it all of these things and so many more that water and give life to the ground of being? One ground made us all one clay and rough earth formed us. One soil lets us live. One dust, one dust will be wrestled to the altar of the world at each of our deaths in only the most human, the most regular, the most mundane and universal sacrifice. One, we will all make in less time than any of us would like. And it’s one that far too many for far too long in a land that holds the ground said to have given first life are being sacrificed at the hands of a force, transgressing humanitarian norms in a flood of targeted willful violence. And it must stop.

At an event at Temple Emanuel, I attended on Tuesday some faith leaders and members of this congregation were there are two. And we assembled to hear a rabbi who refers to himself as a settler in the West Bank and a Palestinian Muslim who worked for years as a tour guide in the West Bank. They presented together about their organization that works for peace there. The most striking thing to me, and there were many, was how they both explained, they were taught from youth about what the other was like, what they act like, what they believe, what they do, and how long it took either of them to meet a Palestinian or a Jew in person.

The rabbi had never met a Palestinian Muslim and the Palestinian had never met a Jew settling in the West Bank, living right next to each other. The rabbi had never in his life, he said, heard his actions, called those of an occupier. And the Palestinian had never in his life heard the actions of the rabbi called settlement. They were thoughts that had never crossed their minds, walled off from any other possible reality. I want to be clear, I’m just quoting what these two men said their lives were like. I’m not making any of my own generalizations here.

The impact of dehumanization on understanding and empathy

But what blew my mind was that everything one said challenged a sure reality the other held. And it was so clear in that moment, dehumanization robbed these people of any common ground. These poor men, I thought. And then it really hit me, has dehumanization robbed me of common ground and I don’t even realize it. Yes, it’s not rhetorical. It has. See, some walls built in our minds are there long before any brick of that wall is laid in the ground and every wall laid in the ground is a marker of where our human understanding of each other died.

You hear what I’m saying, right? Adamah ground with no Adhamah human is only a cry, only a whisper, a sigh, a final breath maybe. This is why when dehumanizing acts are taken in the name of God, a cry must rise up from the ground of being from the children of the earth who are suffering and who need relief. The Unitarian Universalist Association issued a statement this week and it’s been officially supported by your ministers here. And it says in part, I quote, “This terrifying moment calls all people of faith and conscience to do everything in our power, to push our governments to interrupt genocide, address humanitarian crisis, avert multinational war and weave just and lasting peace across the globe. And it goes on to call on the US government to use all possible influence and means to bring an end to Israel’s state violence against Gaza now, now.”

Anger, Courage, and Action

I know many of you are angry. I get it. Angry at this violence that is happening. Maybe angry at feelings we don’t understand. Angry at feelings we really do understand. Angry that people you thought you knew maybe you didn’t. Angry as the feckless supporters of totalitarian rulers, even in our own nation, curry favor with outright enemies of democracy. There is plenty to be angry about and that is okay because if you’re angry with the world right now, it’s only because you’re paying attention. Okay? David White though, David White on anger says this, the poet. “Anger is the deepest form of compassion for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family, and for all our ideas, all vulnerable and all possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care. The internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.”

It is a call to those around us back into community. It is a caring in the world so deep that it earns the respect of your risk. It is a cry with tears that water the very ground of our being. And we must never forget that the cousin of anger is always courage. Tillich said this, courage to be has a religious root for religion is the state of being grasped by the power of being itself. In some cases, the religious root is carefully covered. In others, it is passionately denied.

In some it is deeply hidden and in others superficially. But it is never completely absent for everything that participates in being itself and everybody has some awareness of this participation, especially in the moments in which we experience the threat of non-being. Regardless of intended military goals, if the outcomes, if the impact of those goals disproportionately impact civilians, women and children, then the means are unjust and must stop.

Regardless of intended military goals, if the outcomes, if the impact of those goals threatens the existence of a culture and a people with extermination, with the threat of non-being, it is time for courage in facing that threat. Courage of friends to speak plainly, courage of nations to stand strong, courage of faith to say no. Friends, courage is part of every single one of us.

In the moments when our ancestors faced the gravest catastrophes of their lives, they lived encouraged so that we could live. In the moments when dehumanization threatened their lives, they believed in courage so that we could believe. In the moments when they could not go on, they loved encourage so that we could love. They wrestled the very floods of destruction into tides of change that is our root in the ground of being. And that is the fruit that nourishes us still today, right here, no more and no less.

Under Pressure

I want to leave you with the words of a refugee. He was forced to flee ethnic violence against Arabs in Africa with his family. Though most people do not know that about Freddie Mercury. He reminds us always along with David Bowie, in case we weren’t paying attention, that love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night. And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves. This is our last dance. This is ourselves under pressure. May this Lenten journey through the sacred hold you in courage, hold you in courageous love. And may our ground of being together show us the true path to justice. May it ever be so. Bless you all and amen.