Sermon on October 13, 2002 Susan J. Barnes
As some of you know, I have been away for a couple of Sundays, taking a bit of
vacation.
I needed to rest, get away, change the scene. But my spiritual yearning
made me want to visit place of holiness and beauty--a sacred center from a faith outside of our own tradition.
Why, you may ask? Because I have found that experiencing holiness in
another culture makes me grow. It expands my understanding of God’s
presence in human history. It reminds me that God is greater than any
one civilization, culture or belief system can ever encompass.
I learned that lesson first--by God’s Grace--when I was a new
Christian. My job at the Dallas Museum of Art took me to Japan to
organize an exhibition. The business was done with government and
foundations in Tokyo, but the art was in Kyoto, the ancient capital.
Our show was of late 16th-early 17th art, the Momoyama period. Some
objects were secular, marvelous armor and swords. But most of the
paintings and objects were related to the Zen Buddhist practice of the
warlords, including the Tea Ceremony. When I visited the
Temples and gardens that they built, I was stunned by the undeniable
presence of God. It was disturbing to this newly-converted Christian. But soon thereafter, reading Billy Graham’s autobiography,I found that no less a Christian than he felt holiness there, too.
I love those places, and I missed them. I yearned for their serenity,
their beauty, their refinement, their stillness.
So the plan was to return to Kyoto with a couple of friends.
God had different idea; we ended up in New Mexico. What a contrast!
Whereas Kyoto is a teemly, modern city, densely populated, New Mexico
Is vast, empty,, with rustic towns. The religion in Kyoto is Shinto or Buddhist, both well known, living faiths, practiced in beautifully kept buildings. Ancient native American religion is lost to us, their structures in ruins. Finally, because I traveled often to Japan on research, Kyoto is a very familiar place. New Mexico was terra incognita
The essential thing the two destinations have in common, though, is the
presence of God. God was there--everywhere--in New Mexico.
My friends and I encountered sacredness first in the land itself. Soon we found it in a place that none of us knew anything about.
Chaco Canyon in Northwest New Mexico contradicted all of our pathetically ill-informed ideas about American Indians. The people whom the Navajo called Anasazi (the ancients) built highly crafted urban complexes--made of magnificent stonework.
Far from the nomads stereotyped in Western movies, the Chacoans were rooted; they had an enviable sense of place. Their building technology was stone-age--i.e. they had no metal tools. But their science and engineering were astoundingly sophisticated. Chaco Canyon appears to have been the ceremonial center for a culture at least 1200 years ago that extended out for 95,000 sq.
miles in the Four Corners area. Chaco itself has ten massive buildings that are spread out through the Canyon, the largest of which--Pueblo Bonito--is the size of the Roman Colosseum. Building Chaco Canyon’s complexes took countless thousands of tons of stone quarried from the hills above. Also, an estimted 200,000 timbers were brought in from as far as 70 miles away. When the site was first studied people assumed it had been the habitation for thousands of people, the ancient equivalent of the modern-day pueblo. Now they think that few people lived there. It was, instead, a ceremonial center.
The buildings are oriented individually and in relation to one another
along axes of the sun and the moon at critical points in the year: the
solstices and the equinox. Because the lunar cycle is so complex,
extending over 18 1/2 years, the alignment is a feat that took many
generations of study to plan—and (unlike the solar orientation) it has no apparent practical application. The construction spread out over more
than 100 years, beginning in about the year 850. It shows that the
Chacoans sense of place on earth was inseparable from their
understanding of the cosmos. By about 1200 they abandoned the site,
carefully sealing up the stone entrances to the buildings.
In a century of study, scores of scholars have tried to interpret the
evidence, but mystery veils from us most everything about the lives and
the beliefs of this people. That is good, too, because it reminds us of
the ultimate mystery of God.
As you know, the root of the word vacation is vacate, to empty out. In
my workaholic past I never took vacations. Now I know they are
essential to the spiritual life. Only in emptying ourselves regularly
of our agendas, our busy-ness, can we be present to God. That is what
the weekly vacation, the Sabbath, is supposed to be about, too, not
rushing to the mall or catching up on office work.
In the most fundamental sense, vacating--weekly, annually, even daily
in times of prayer--vacating is a matter of stewardship. In fact, it is
the bottom line of stewardship: it’s central to how we thoughtfully
manage our lives in partnership with God. It’s when we can empty
ourselves to be open to God.
Stewardship! There’s that word again! Some people--including some pastors
--dread the stewardship season, the annual time when we ask you (and ourselves) to make a concrete financial commitment to support the facilities, the staff, and the ministries of the church.
Admittedly it is tough. Money is a touchy subject, because for better
or worse it is the center of our lives. Too often, it’s the measure of people and things in our society. Jesus shone the light brightly on that issue,
and I’ll come back to it with next week’s gospel and sermon.
Today I want to consider why we need to build and maintain churches? It’s a fair question, one I struggled with in my seminary days I thought a lot about the cost of large buildings and grounds. Would it be better stewardship to meet in a high-school auditorium? At least one parish I read about decided to do that permanently and put their resources into outreach. Some day I may
serve such a community.
But my visit to Chaco made me think about the importance of creating
and maintaining a beautiful campus like St. Matthew’s. In our very
rootless society, it says something about our commitment to place, our
desire and intention to glorify God right here for generations and
generations. Like Chaco, our church makes a statement about our
dedication. Also like Chaco, it is built with the materials of the land
on which it sits. St. Matthew’s beautifully honors the Texas Hill Country’s
limestone and live oaks; it grows up from the rock in harmony with its
surroundings.
My friends, 1000 years ago, natives of this land, living with stone-age
technology, were so dedicated to their sanctuary that they went to
unimaginable extremes to plan, create and maintain it, in an area with
little water and no vegetation, where the climate is brutally harsh,
summer and winter. The far-flung natives visited Chaco rarely, but
they supported it with their labor and love because it represented something that sustained them whether they were there or not.
In the wake of my vacation, let me invite you to join me in making all
of our Sabbaths count with God. And in this stewardship season, let’s
all spend some Sabbath time pondering the commitment we can make to the
community, the place, St. Matthew’s, that sustains us--whether we are
here or not.
