Baptism is the gateway into the church, the body of Christ. While a person is baptised it is not a solitary experience. All baptised persons are in God’s saving grace together. Being a part of the Body of Christ, in spite of all our frailties, through baptism we are called to be Christ to the world. Remember, that Jesus said that by the love that we have for one another we show the world that he came from God.
Architecturally, where the congregation sits in a church building is called the “nave”. The word nave comes from the Latin root “navis” or ship. It is from whence our word navy is derived. We are in God’s boat on the sea of life. By our baptism we are “ordained” individually and collectively as the priesthood of all believers, to assist to broaden the boundaries of the reign of Christ. As Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth century mystic has written;
“Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world,
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”
Baptism is an initiation rite. Initiation rites have been strategic for human survival in most of human history, and initiation into sacred space is important no less now than ever. Sacred space is very hard to come by in the modern and now post-modern world. Modern people are all now too strategic, functional, and hurried to easily seek what the ancients sought above all else.
Sacred space is the threshold, the space betwixt and between. It is a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where God is always leading us. Last week we read about Elijah trying to run away from life. He came to a sacred space at the end of his tether. A sacred space is when we have left the “tried and true” but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when we are in between our old comfort zone and any possible new answer. It is not fun. Think of Israel in the desert, Joseph in the pit, Jonah in the belly, Elijah in the dark cave, and the three Marys tending the tomb.
In our society if you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait upon God, you will run, or more likely you will try to “explain”. Not necessarily a true explanation, but any explanation is better than scary sacred space. Anything to help us flee from this terrible “cloud of unknowing” of the God who is beyond all names and shapes. Those of a more fear-based nature will run back to the old explanations. Those who love risk will often quickly construct a new explanation where they can feel special and again be in control. Few of us know how to stay on the threshold, the edge of the existential cliff. We just feel stupid there and we are all trying to say something profound these days as a result.
Everything genuinely new emerges in some kind of sacred space. We each should have a meaningful place to stand, after all. It does settle a bit of the dust, the floating dust of fear and anxiety. It is a hard place to be, a narrow road that few risk to walk. Hopefully, as we participate here today, we will find our sacred place where God meets with us.
Our society is largely a profane space now, and the best we can do is create “ceremonies” that give the appearance of sacred space but not the reality. We sing the National Anthem at sporting events, we have naming ceremonies and not baptisms, we have funeral and wedding celebrants, not Christian ministers. Such ceremony is a false sacred. It apes the sacred by sentiment, scale, and heroic language, but there are clear differences between the ceremonies of profane space and true sacred space. Have you noticed that at secular weddings the celebrants most often ape the liturgical forms of Christian liturgies? Profane space has no absolute centre, but rather many centres that periodically take their turn; it always reflects the dominant thinking of the moment and it never allows the appearance of the shadow, uncertainty, or a different point of view, as such would be far too threatening to the fixed world view.
True sacred space grounds us around one undeniable reference point that is bigger and beyond any of us. It is the “tree of life” that connects heaven with earth. We believers would call it “God”. This focal point is never doubted in sacred space, even if it cannot always be clearly named, or even understood. Such focus aligns us correctly in the universe, with a clear reference point outside the individual ego, the cultural mood, and one’s passing feelings. Sacred space allows believers to move away from ourselves and into the world securely and with truthful perspective.
Sacred space is where we are not in control and not the centre, and so something genuinely new can happen. Here we are capable of seeing something beyond self-interest, self-will, and security.
True sacred space allows an alternative consciousness to emerge.
All the exorcism stories of the gospels, and especially that of Legion, in last week’s gospel reading, tell us,
“the only cure for possession is possession”.
If the Holy Spirit captures us, we can recognize, reveal, and let go of smaller and negative spirits, the fruits of the flesh, without much fear. Sacred space gives us something better to hold us, and to hold onto, and we gain the fruits of the Spirit.
Inside of sacred space, God’s space, we can reveal our shadow, that part of us which we don’t want to show to others, our inner most being and not fall apart. We are contained and safe. Sacred space allows us to live with paradox, mystery, and even evil, although now we will have the power to stand against evil properly. When Jesus enters the scene as the absolute and loving possessor of the soul, we the possessed are rightly freed from our false burdens and loyalties.
Inside the ship of the church we are indestructible, even though we may feel quite vulnerable and unsure of ourselves in many ways. As Deuteronomy 33:27 reassures us:
“The eternal God is your refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms”.
Inside of sacred space we can imagine an alternative universe. Inside of sacred space we can, if we can dare to imagine it, hear God, as did Elijah. Inside our sacred space we can see things in utterly new ways. Ways that seem foreign and even dangerous to those trapped inside of the closed system.
Pain is the cauldron of transformation. When it comes, most of us will flee to quick formulas to avoid that destabilization, by finding that dark cave just like Elijah. We must learn to not to get rid of the pain until we have learned what it has to teach us. Not what it has to teach others! Out of the pain of crucifixion came the joy of resurrection and new life.
The preferred language of Christian mystics is the language of darkness. They are most at home in the realm of not knowing. Often, therefore, it was called “luminous darkness”. In such darkness, things are more spacious, freer, and more open to creative response. God has a much better chance of getting in.
This is most difficult to understand after centuries of a Catholic and Protestant spirituality of “light”. We have become a people who demand, and even expect, answers and explanations for questions. There is a proper technique, a formula, and a certitude for every occasion. Clergy are trained to give people answers, even though Jesus seldom gave into the same temptation.
“Who made me the arbiter of your cause?”
he says in Luke 12:14. Instead of giving people answers, he instead leads them into the dilemmas of life and leaves them there too. Jesus knew how to create spiritual desire, how to foster a longing for God, how to make communion possible. He is a teacher of vulnerability, more than anything else. It is recorded that he only answered three out of 183 questions that were asked of him in the Scriptures! He left us on the cliff edge where we are never in control and that leads to participation.
The opposite of control is not non-control or giving up. The opposite of control is actually participation. Without easy answers we collapse into a deeper participation with the whole roller coaster of life and death. The suffered cycle of death and resurrection is itself the great teacher, “the contemplative stance”. Jesus would just go into the daring desert.
Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote,
“Because we are not capable of knowing what God is but only what God is not, we cannot contemplate how God is but only how God is not”.
Ironically, he then goes on to write twenty volumes about God! In the midst of it, he repeats his principle,
“This is the ultimate knowledge of God, to know that we do not know”.
He then ends his career by refusing to write any more, because,
“it is all straw!”
Post-moderns would be pleasantly surprised but also shocked to see such brilliant knowing combined with such humble not knowing. There is an essential connection between the two that is seldom understood, even by us believers who should know better. This is where we need to be, and where we have always been anyway. It is a good place.
It is with this certainty of uncertainty that we baptise. No one of us has all the answers, however as we are all in the same boat, we are part of the body of Christ, and we can help one another to live in the footsteps of Jesus. Through baptism we support one another as we step into the dark unknown of our life, holding the light of Christ to guide us on, whether we be two months old or ninety-eight years old.[1]
[1] This sermon based upon the work of The Reverend Richard Rohr, OFM, found at http://sojo.net/preaching-the-word/grieving-sacred-space? parent=41227
