I want to talk today about
holy ground, about noticing the little things, and what we can do to find God in front of us.
I’m guessing most of you remember something about Moses and the
burning bush. It might literally be just that—that there was a guy named Moses
and a burning bush—but at least that’s something! We remember it because of its
simplicity. God speaking from a fiery bush that is not consumed. How cool is
that?!
The first thing that God says from the bush is “Remove
your footwear!” because Moses is standing on holy ground. First of all, it’s
worth considering why the ground is holy. It’s not because the ground possesses
any kind of special resources or geological features; the ground is holy
because God is there. Just like heaven is heaven because it is where God lives
(for lack of a better term) so the ground before the bush is holy because that
is where God meets Moses. That meeting requires not only God’s appearance but also
Moses’ recognition. Moses recognizes
that God has met him there, and, thus, the ground is hallowed.
We all have our holy ground. Each year, I joke about the
high holy days of deer hunting season, though, let’s be honest, a lot of what
happens during those days is not exactly holy, but there is an element in hunting of returning to a holy space—a place where
God might meet you in the silence, a refuge from the hustle and bustle of daily
life. Another holy space might be this one—this sanctuary. We know that God
doesn’t live in the church, but God may very well meet you here. Still, holy
ground is not confined to the places you might expect. Holy ground can be at
home, in nature, on the road, at work, or at the cemetery, or a garden, or it
might not be on ground at all. How many times in scripture does God show up on
the water, for instance?
I suspect this is why we remember the burning bush story
so well. It is a story grounded in a place that feels familiar to us. The bush
is so tangible and not just because we all know what a bush is. It is a setting
unencumbered by the specifics of historical time and place. You don’t need to
know anything about Jewish history to grasp it. You are as qualified as me to
understand it. It’s simple.
Our lives are getting less and less simple. It’s hard to
see God for all the craziness going on out there. Since I’ve started preaching
this sermon—oh, maybe two minutes ago—how many of you have been thinking about
something you need to do today? You don’t need to raise your hands; this isn’t
confession. I’m guessing most of you have at least idly considered something on
your to-do list. How many of you are expert multi-taskers? You can do two,
three things at once, no problem? How many of you will check your phones after
the service (or during this service) and you’ll find new text messages, emails,
Facebook notifications, Twitter notifications, Instagram notifications, Snapchat
notifications, twenty-five political posts you agree with, and fifty political
posts you disagree with, a message from your mom (or your children) about
Sunday brunch, a cat pic from that aunt who is always liking your posts, and,
oh my goodness, did you set your fantasy football lineup yet, because time is
running out!?
If you’re under 50, I bet you will have half of those
things waiting for you. If you’re under 20, you might have all of them. And I’m
not saying this because it’s all bad, because our connectedness is valuable.
This week I learned about three different people who could use a prayer or a
visit, and I certainly wouldn’t have heard about any of them as quickly, if at
all, if I didn’t have this phone. Every one of those notifications came via
text. I bet your phone has allowed you do more than you could have ever dreamed
of twenty years ago, let alone thirty or forty, but it does come with a price.
It is awfully hard to be attentive.
We are distracted. We all recognize this. It’s the reason
we have new laws pertaining to driving. I suspect that if we’re texting and
checking Facebook while driving, we’re probably also doing it every other
moment of the waking day. For that matter, when we have an hour free from it,
what’s the first thing we do when we log into our phones again? We catch up.
But OK, I’m not going to be all fuddy-duddy about this
and pretend that cell phones are going to go away or that they should. It’s
going to get worse—much worse. It’s going to get worse because so much of what
these phones do can be good. Social media has provided an outlet for millions
of people young and old who never fit in before, and now they have a community
of people like them. This isn’t a bad thing, and we can’t pretend that before
cell phones everybody was super attentive to holy things either. They weren’t.
But we do have new obstacles that require us to be even more careful about how
we interact with the world.
I
bet you believe you would see a burning bush if it appeared before you, but you
might not, and more often God appears to us in much less dramatic fashion—in
the faces of strangers you walk by, in the budding of plants, and the whistling
of the breeze; in quiet conversation and the silence between the words of
friends. You want to know the worst thing about online communication? We don’t
learn anything in the silence. We just wait for more words! And we miss the
space between words where God so often shows up. God shows up in the liminal
space between things—in gardens and in fields, in the way our hands do work,
the tangible connection between us and the physical universe, and in any other
place where we spend our time attentive to the little things. Holy things are
subtle things.
When Moses removes his shoes, he subtly connects with the
ground in a way he hadn’t before. Likewise, when I take off my shoes, I feel
the carpet in a way I didn’t before. It’s a small thing, but if we strip
ourselves of some of the little things holding us back from the world around
us, whether it’s our technology, or our need to move fast, or our shoes, then
we might start to see new things. One of those things might even be God.
That’s pretty much what I was doing for a month on the
trail. When all the other stuff was stripped away and it was just me and a
backpack walking on a path, I started to see things. One day, after stopping in
the town of Finland for breakfast and groceries, I returned to the trail
passing one of the wooden signs with blue text constructed by the Superior
Hiking Trail Association, which displayed the distances between campsites and
roads on the section of trail ahead of me. It looked like the one on the cover
of your bulletin, because it was the
one on the cover of your bulletin.
At a passing glace, I noticed only the distances ahead of
me on the sign. That’s what the sign was for, after all. On a second look, it
appeared that some of the blue text had been obscured by a splinter in the
board. I noticed this, but who cares? It’s just a splintering board. Yet, as I
looked closer (and if you look closely at the bulletin cover perhaps you can
see it, too), I noticed on the third look that it wasn’t a splintered board at
all. It was a moth. And I know you can’t tell with the black-and-white bulletin
cover, which actually makes it much easier to see. The moth is exactly the same color as the wood
behind it. If it wasn’t covering blue text, I would have needed a fourth or a
fifth look to have a chance at seeing it.
Even though it was covering the text, I barely noticed
it, and here’s the thing that struck me most poignantly about this: I’m pretty
sure that a week earlier I wouldn’t have noticed it at all. It took time to see
even such a beautiful thing as that. You can’t flip the switch by deciding to
care about the little things. It doesn’t work that way! You have to start new
practices that will at first feel extremely hard. I had to walk over a hundred
miles to see that moth, and I wouldn’t have seen it at mile 1 or mile 50. Who
knows what I missed at mile 1?
Our
life of faith is exactly the same. Faith must be practiced, and it is practiced
by coming to church—sure—but if you aren’t actually practicing attentiveness to
God’s presence in the little things then your faith isn’t going to be
strengthened just because you are in church. This place is only as holy as you
are attentive to it! You might find a holier place in your garden or out on the
lake, because you might be more attentive out there to the world around you.
You can find God anywhere. The question isn’t “Where is
God?” The question is “Where are you so free from distraction that you can see
the God who may be right in front of you?”
This is a lesson I learned from David O’Hara, a teacher
of mine in undergrad who has begun the practice of taking pictures of tiny bugs
from his garden and posting them on Twitter. But I didn’t actually learn this
lesson until I put it into practice over the course of a month of walking. I
knew the theory and I wanted to care about little bugs, and bear poop, and
other things that maybe even display the fingerprints of God, but I couldn’t
actually do it until I spent some serious time walking. On that subject of bear
poop, Dr. O’Hara gave a TED Talk in Fargo a couple months back about bear poop
and unnecessary knowledge, which centered on understanding the way things are
deeply connected when you look at them more closely. The reality is: you don’t
need to appreciate this moth, and you don’t need to wonder what is in bear
poop, and you don’t need to share the same curiosities that I have or that
anybody else has, but you do need to figure out a way to remove distractions
from your life so that you have half a chance of seeing God when he’s right in
front of your face.
This is prayer. It’s why I’ve come to believe that the
best prayer for me, personally, is often active prayer. I start hiking, or
biking, or even running, and suddenly I have a bunch of personal time with God.
For you, it might be crochet, or gardening, or even driving when you put down
the cell phone, turn off the radio, and start to notice things. I mean, keep
your eyes on the road as you do it, but you can notice a lot legally and safely!
We were created to meet God in our lives, and I believe this is as true for you
and me as it was for Moses. What God will do with us I have no idea, but that’s
just it: We’re never going to know unless we open our eyes.
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