“Holy Ground”
As the summer draws to a close, I find
myself thinking back to all that we have missed during these long months of the
pandemic. It has been such a strange, challenging, and frightening time. We
have endured the sadness of being apart and somehow survived the anguish of
losing loved ones without the chance to say goodbye in our usual way. Some of
us have lost jobs and some are on the edge of eviction. At the same time, we
have remained close to one another through frequent and fervent prayer, united
in heart and faith.
I have missed gathering with you in our
beautiful sacred space, praying and singing together, exchanging the peace,
sharing Communion, enjoying coffee hour, and all of the many other activities
that we took for granted. Out of all our special events, the Good Friday
Stations of the Cross Procession has been the hardest to give up. I believe
it’s our most important event of the year, drawing together the suffering of
Jesus long ago and the suffering that occurs daily on the streets of Jersey
City. If you have walked with us, you know that at each station we pray, we
hammer a nail into a battered wooden cross, and, in one last gesture, we
sprinkle Holy Water, symbolizing that God has restored holiness to the ground
that had been profaned by our hatred and violence.
Holy ground.
Throughout history, people have sensed
that certain locations are particularly holy – special places like islands,
rivers, or mountains – places where God seems to be so present that we can
almost step through the usual boundary between now and eternity. For example,
two Sundays ago we heard the story of God appearing to Moses on Horeb, “the
mountain of God.” It’s there on that holy ground that God reveals God’s name
and announces that the cries of the longsuffering people have been heard, and
liberation is about to begin.
And then there are places constructed
by human hands that have been made holy by what has happened there. After
twenty years of deep connection, our old wood-frame Victorian church is my holy
ground. When I’m in there, surrounded by walls washed by over 150 years of
prayers, I feel close to the many who have gone before us. It’s there that I
feel closest to God.
Today, on the nineteenth anniversary of
the September 11 attacks, our minds turn to the holy ground of Lower Manhattan.
In just a few horrific minutes, what had been a marvel of human ingenuity and
engineering, a transportation hub, and a place of business, was transformed
into an inferno of terror and heroism. Today it is holy ground where we
remember the thousands of people whose lives were cut short by hatred and
violence, and where we especially honor the valiant firefighters and police
officers who raced into danger and sacrificed so much. For those of us who
witnessed this catastrophe, the shock and pain will linger forever. Frankly, I
still avoid the World Trade Center. And, even after all these years, on the
rare occasions when I take the PATH train over there, I’m still momentarily
surprised that the old station with its brown and gold earth tones is gone,
replaced by something very different, sleek and white. I’m not sure if this was
the architect’s intention, but whenever I walk through the cavernous Oculus
with its marble floors and whitewashed walls, it feels like I’m in a mausoleum,
walking through holy ground.
Over the past two decades, we have shed
precious blood in unending wars and have had livelihoods and hopes upended by
economic downturns. We have watched great American cities swamped by “once in a
century” storms and, as we saw just a few months ago in Australia and see now
in our own West Coast, many millions of acres of land containing innumerable
trees, animals, and homes have been lost to wildfires. And, here in Jersey
City, and all across our heavily armed country, there is the steady
bloodletting of gun violence. Just the other day, a JCPD officer shot a 21-year-old
young man. As usual in cases like this, the truth is in dispute. The police say
he was pointing a gun at the officer. Community members have doubts and demand
proof. This incident took place at the Salem-Lafayette housing complex – a
place that our police chief described as “notorious” – a place where several of
our parishioners live – and a place where we stop every year on Good Friday,
remembering yet another act of violence, mourning yet another victim.
It seems to me that, as fire and rising
tides, and poverty, racism, and violence continue to make more and more places
nearly unlivable, as many of us refuse to take the steps necessary to stop the
spread of Covid, and as we allow partisan politics to tear us apart, we desperately
need to widen our vision of holy ground. Yes, we may sense that certain
locations are particularly holy, either because of natural beauty or the lasting
memory of prayer, suffering, and sacrifice. But, the truth is, the whole earth
is holy. As the psalmist declares:
The
earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
the
world and all who dwell therein.
(Psalm
24:1)
So, California’s magnificent redwood
forests and the gleaming white PATH station and, yes, the glass-strewn streets
around Salem-Lafayette are all holy ground. If the whole earth belongs
to God, then it is all holy. In fact, there are no “bad neighborhoods,” no
matter how “notorious” they may be. When we sprinkle Holy Water on places of
violence on Good Friday, we’re just washing away a temporary stain on God’s
good earth, restoring the holiness that sin had hidden from our eyes.
I don’t need to tell you that we are in
big trouble. And I wish I could say that it looks like things will get better
soon. But, if we are going to get out of this mess, if we are going to find our
way to living the way God has always intended, then we must ask God to give us
eyes to see the world as it was always meant to be, as it really is – to see the
world and all who dwell therein, as holy and worthy of deep love and great care.
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