Preached · September 11, 2022
Series · Faithful Presence a Theology of Place
Text · Genesis 28; John 1; John 1.35-51; Genesis 28.10-18
Series Introduction
Welcome, everybody. We are launching into a new sermon series, a new study for the next few weeks that we're calling Faithful Presence: A Theology of Place.
A theology of place, if you're anything like me, may be a new concept to you. We talk about theology — we've spent the past eight weeks on all sorts of theological issues around what God is like, what Jesus did, the Holy Spirit, heaven and hell, all of that. But a theology of place was definitely a gap in my own church education, my seminary education. Quite frankly, it's something I am just now learning all about. And as a church that's going to recognize ten years next spring, it's something we need to be thinking about as we hunt for a more permanent place to worship and serve out of, and as we merge together with Resurrection City, D.C. We're in a city that is always in a constant state of turnaround and turmoil, and yet also has a long history under our feet.
Slido Poll
Let me start with a couple of poll questions. There should be a web link in Proclaim. If you go to Slido.com on your phone — pull out your phones, looks like a lot of you live that corporate life where Slido is a thing — go to Slido.com and put in the code TABLECHURCH, or scan the QR code.
Tonight we're asking: How many miles do you live away from home? Now, home can mean a lot of things for a lot of people. I've seen a sign — a Hobby Lobby sign, I was in Hobby Lobby once — that says something like "home is where your mom is." Not all of us have moms who are alive, or moms we would consider home-like. So whatever your definition of home is: where do you go when you go home? Where did you grow up? Where did you spend the most time as a kid? I know that's a complicated question for military brats and all of that. But how many miles do you live away from home?
We can see the results live. So far, the 100-to-1,000-miles-away crowd is the largest. Maybe I could have divvied up these categories a bit more. But you also have almost a third at more than 1,000 miles, which is significant. A couple of folks are in that 1-to-20 range, a few fewer in the 21-to-100 range.
We've heard it said that D.C. is often a transient city, but it's not solely a transient city. There are people who grew up here, and their parents grew up here, and their grandparents grew up here. The Table Church has a history of maybe appealing more to the transient crowd. But how did that happen? How did that value get decided — or did we stumble into it? And what would it look like if we didn't appeal just to the transient crowd?
Let me ask a second question: How many places have you lived in your life? Fuzzy numbers here. I'm counting addresses, so even if it was within the same city, we'll count that as a different place. How many different addresses? About 43% say more than 10. More than a third say 6 to 10. Only about 3% say one to two places. So we Americans tend to move a lot, which can be a disruption of our sense of place. What is belonging when so many of us are so transient?
The Stats
Here are some stats:
• 63% is the percentage of Americans who live outside their hometown — the large majority.
• 43% is the percentage of Americans who live outside their home state — almost half.
• 18 miles is the median distance Americans live from their mother. That surprised me. It's a real stat I found; I can give you sources for all of these.
• Millennials move once every two years.
• About a third of Gen Z over the age of 18 live with parents or relatives — and you can get into the reasons why, around housing affordability, the economy, being underemployed and underpaid.
So while it's true that many of us tend to be transient, tend to live far away, there's also a significant portion of the population who live about 18 miles from where they grew up. The takeaway: many folks don't have a big sense of place because we move constantly, but another significant portion do have a strong sense of home because they're not that far from it. These ideas change and form the way we think about the cities and neighborhoods we live in, and about what's happening to those neighborhoods as we all move in and out of them.
For the City
Now, the Table Church has long had a mission statement that says we want to join God in the renewal of all things. Occasionally I've heard it said that we want it to be "in D.C. as it is in heaven." The original founding vision, almost ten years ago, was around the church being for the city. The founding pastor and the founding team recognized that people moved into D.C. all the time. They did what they came to do — they went to college, they had their internship, they worked on the Hill or whatever — and then they moved out. They got what they came for, and then they left. And the founders of the Table Church wondered: what would it look like to create a spiritual community that actually caused people to stay? Something so compelling about what was happening here that it would attract transient people and get them to stay.
But there's a whole group of people who've lived in D.C. for a generation or more. Pastor Tonetta and I and others began to ask: why has our focus not been on them? We've been looking and looking for a more permanent place to put down roots. What does it mean for a church, a congregation, to move into the neighborhood?
Then there are all sorts of headier themes that are, quite frankly, hard to wrap our minds around: gentrification — what is it, what's good about it, what's bad about it? Displacement. Colonialism. The rootedness of a people. Many of us here, me included, are in this place because of the effects of white supremacy, racial colonialism, and the displacement of indigenous people. That's not necessarily our fault, but what responsibility do we have as we wake up to those facts? And for those here who have been on the receiving end of that colonialism, what does repair look like? How do you set the terms of reparation and forgiveness? How do we think about where we should live and where we should work? How do we think about the implicit or explicit racism that often goes into choosing "good neighborhoods," "good schools," "safe cities"? And how do we think about these questions as Christians, as Jesus followers?
Land as a Character in Scripture
Because place and land and neighbors are massive themes in Scripture that are largely invisible to those of us brought up in a Western mindset. One biblical scholar has gone so far as to say this: land is the central theme of biblical faith.
In Scripture, land is often a character of its own. One of my favorite shows is Parks and Recreation. What's so great about it is that there are the characters shown during the opening credits, and then there's a separate character — Pawnee, the city itself, which is its own separate set of weirdos doing their own thing. Land in Scripture is also a character that has its own desires and characteristics. Land and creation in Scripture produce life — that's Genesis 1. Yes, God is the creator, but God says, "Now the land shall produce." The land can vomit you out. The land needs rest and deserves respect. It should not be permanently sold. Creation groans for redemption.
The Mother Earth motif doesn't actually find its origins in a so-called pagan worldview. The book of Job refers to being born out of the earth's womb and returning there upon death. The Apostle Paul talks about creation screaming out like a mother in labor, trying to bring about new creation.
But the sacredness of land and space is rarely a feature of the Western mindset. Another biblical scholar states: the overturning of space is modernity. So much of our history is about taking space and land and place from one culture and claiming it for our own.
Even with Time — with a capital T — we're usually more able to see it as sacred. We can at least think of sacred days that we observe, and the traditions and rituals we've placed around those holy days. But now try to think of a sacred place. Can you name any significant places in your life, or in the life of your family? And do you actually have traditions and rituals built around those places? The only example I could think of was a cemetery or a gravestone — and honestly, I can't think of the last time I've been to any of my family's gravestones. In general, I at least don't have a culture that recognizes pilgrimage as a spiritual practice.
A Shift in Preaching
Before we move forward, I want to note a shift I'm trying to make in my own preaching. So much preaching, at least that I've heard, is about trying to make you as an individual feel guilty — guilty enough about something you did or didn't do so as to force you to make a change. But I think this sort of guilt-based preaching fails to grapple with an important fact: we're often forced into patterns and decisions that we would not otherwise make. Why? Because there are systems in this world that force us into those decisions.
Even if we aim to become less greedy in our dealings as, let's say, business people, we immediately have a problem. Walter Wink puts it like this: the system is greedy on our behalf. There's a great passage from his book Engaging the Powers:
The owner of a business may undergo an experience of spiritual rebirth and genuinely desire to humanize the conditions under which her employees work. But she immediately encounters a constraint: cost. She can't raise salaries sharply and still remain competitive when a factory owner in Taiwan or South Korea is making the same product with a teenage girl laborer paid one-tenth of the salary and working twelve or fourteen hours a day, six days a week. The system is greedy on her behalf, and if she rejects the system's values, she may be ejected by the system. It's not just that people are making choices about how to behave in an economic system; the system is also making choices about who will remain viable in the system. We don't contend against flesh and blood, but against the world rulers of this present darkness.
Now, that's not to deny our own individual responsibility. This is not a get-out-of-jail-free card — "oh, the devil made me do it." This is not to deny our responsibility to act as agents of justice in an unjust world. But sometimes I think we think of ourselves too highly. The world is unjust on our behalf, and we just go along with the flow.
So I'm going to attempt — and I'm encouraging our other preachers to do the same — to make the aim of our preaching not just to get you to feel guilty about the systems forcing you into bad decisions. The aim of preaching, I hope, is to unveil the evil of those systems that are attempting to malform us at any given moment — to unmask the ways the world works that we've been told are a given but are in fact evil and not the way it has to be. And specifically for this series, the goal is to help our community see place — our city, our neighborhood, our block — as the site of divine possibility.
Genesis 28: Jacob's Ladder
I want to read one brief Scripture and tie one large theme to it as I conclude tonight. There's a story about Jacob, one of the patriarchs of Israel, in Genesis chapter 28. Notice all the place names in this section. He is leaving one place and setting out for another:
Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. He reached a certain place and spent the night there. When the sun had set, he took one of the stones at that place and put it near his head, and he lay down there. He dreamed, and he saw a raised staircase, its foundation on the earth and its top touching the sky, and God's messengers — angels — were ascending and descending on it. Suddenly the Lord was standing on the staircase and saying, "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will become like the dust of the earth; you will spread out to the west, east, north, and south, and every family of the earth will be blessed because of you and your descendants. I am with you now; I will protect you everywhere you go, and I will bring you back to this land, and I will not leave you until I have done everything that I have promised you." When Jacob woke from his sleep, he thought to himself, "The Lord is definitely in this place, but I didn't know it." — Genesis 28:10-16
You may have heard this story referred to as Jacob's ladder.
The Jewish rabbis and mystics dwelled endlessly on the mysteries of this passage. Notably, one rabbi noted the connection between the image of God in human beings and being in the very presence of God. There is no spot on earth absent of God's presence, because wherever you are, God's image is. Wherever your friend or neighbor is, there is God's image. Wherever your enemy is — and that's the lesson Jacob needed to learn — there is God's image.
As we walk the streets of this city and our neighborhoods, they all have histories: histories of the indigenous peoples, the Anacostans and the Piscataways and the Pamunkey people, of whom at least 75% died when Europeans showed up on the Anacostan shore; histories of self-liberated Black men and women who made this city their home, their families now pushed out due to predatory land development; histories of the people who have lived here for generations, each with their own story. God is in these places and in these people, and we did not know.
So over the next few weeks, we want to have a vision like Jacob. We want to open our eyes and see the presence of God in place, and become more aware of how we might find our place as well.
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
