God's Place

Photo of The Rev. Michael Johnston by The Rev. Dr. Michael Johnston, Scholar-in-Residence

Exploring the geography of the land of the Bible can be a very disconcerting adventure.  There is so much of what you know from the biblical texts resting side by side in such a small space -— and often multiple sites for the most sacred events!  There are, for example, two sites for Calvary, only yards apart in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.  Built over one is a Greek Orthodox altar; over the other, an Armenian shrine.

Then there is the problem of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and Luke’s Sermon on the Plain: it would seem that even the evangelists couldn’t agree on where things actually happened.  Were the Beatitudes preached on a hill above Capernaum or from a more level place just below?!

Likewise, there is some dispute about whether the Transfiguration occurred on Mt. Hermon, which is on Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Syria –- at the tip of the northernmost finger of the Galilee -- or on Mt. Tabor, which is in the center of its palm.  In modern Jordan, I have visited two of three sites where Moses struck water from the rock.  Similarly, back in the early part of the last century, there was uncertainty about exactly which of two closely positioned locations on Mt. Nebo was the place from which Moses surveyed the Promised Land.  So the Franciscans secured rights to excavate them both.

By contrast, the site where Jacob lay his head on the rock is conveniently located alongside the main, modern highway running north from Amman.  All you need to do is ask your driver to pull onto the shoulder, scramble over a guardrail, slide down an embankment, and you are standing on Holy Ground.  Surely the Lord is in this place and, like Jacob, I did not know it. But then how could either of us have known?

There is no temple or shrine along the tarmac, not even the ruins of an abandoned Canaanite sanctuary jutting out of the stony ground.  No wall delineating a sacred enclosure, no image or altar, no erstwhile grove of trees on a hillock marking liminal space where earth touches not-earth.  No raggedy man of God about, no band of prophets tamborining themselves into an oracular frenzy.  None of the normal indications that would have disclosed that the Lord is in this place!

It is today, as I suspect it was in biblical times, a nowhere place. And the truth is the only way you can be sure that this barren piece of turf along the Jabbak River is where Jacob slept the sleep of the dead is to trust the word of your Jordanian tour guide.

Jacob, as you know the story, is the one fleeing his seriously peeved and galoot of a brother Esau.  His birthright has been bought and paid for, his father’s blessing slyly played for.  He is rushing to exile in the friendlier land of his mother’s cousin.  But you have to stop when the sun goes down –- anyplace where you can camp, anywhere you can find a big stone to place at you head and sleep like the dead.

And then the dream.  What one wag of a commentator calls the theophany of Rapid-Eye-Movement.  As it turns out, the dream that Jacob dreamed has become our dream too.  Because up on that ramp leading to heaven, with its uncanny messengers climbing up and down the stairs, there is this God –- making promises about soil and seed and security, blessing that family of Jacob so that Jacob’s family can bless all the families of the earth.  It sounds like an opportunity; it sounds also like a terrible burden.  And so I suspect Jacob woke with a start, filled with dread and with the reverberations of a mystery he did not quite understand.  Surely the Lord is in this place, he stammered.

We recognize the use of surely here.  It is a common rhetorical device, uttered when no other explanation can be imagined, when we encounter the unexpected and risk spiraling into the maelstrom of it-can’t-be but it-must-be.  Surely doesn’t make it so.  There may be another explanation. But as Jacob’s head clears and he returns to his senses, he’s still stuck in this nowhere place.  Rationalizations fade and he is left with the overwhelming conviction that “the Lord is in this place -- and I didn’t know it.”

Religion makes its home in the church sanctuary.  To cross its threshold is to enter a domain of limitless possibilities.  To the believer in us it’s a second home.  To the seeker in us it’s a place of refuge.  To the doubter and the worrier and the loser it’s the reception hall of the redeemed.  The very demarcation of the sanctuary creates the world outside its precinct.  The keeping of the Sabbath renders ordinary time comprehensible and meaningful.  We expect God to be in that place.  We walk in entertaining the possibility that the fullness of our existence, distilled to its essence, is within our grasp.

Often the church has turned this gateway to heaven into a bulwark of exclusion.  Often we mistake the shrine for what is enshrined therein, or desecrate the foundations of the sacred in our midst.  Nevertheless, we keep returning to those places where God has been and may yet be, where grace has been received and may yet be bestowed, where the broken, sinful, wounded community gather and may yet be renewed.  It is where we come to meet our Maker.

But the patriarch Jacob reminds us that God is not confined to the sanctuary –- not only in the sense that the Creator may seem manifest “out there” in earthquake, wind and fire (to say nothing of sheer silence)   –- but in places where there are no saints and sinners hanging around, no clergy, no praying, no singing, no sacrificing –- no healing, no liberating, no exorcising, no saving –- no crosses, no steeples, no domes, no billboards, no images, no signage whatsoever –- none of the normal indications that demurely or shrilly proclaim: the Lord is in this place.  There too God may choose to meet us.  Whether or not we are in search of God, God is in search of us.

We know where the Lord hangs out, normally.  We know when the Lord appears, traditionally. We know what the Lord wants.  But that the Lord is in this place, at this time, in these circumstances -- that we did not know until Jacob.