Sacred Time And Space by Cheri Holdridge (with an assist by Kurt Young)

If you visit the Holy Land, or talk to someone who has, you will find they built a church on top of all the places that are deemed some of the most Holy places of the life of Jesus. There is one big church, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built in two parts, one over Golgotha where Jesus was crucified and one over the location believed to be his tomb. If you go to Bethlehem looking for the stable, you will of course find a big church built on top of the location of said stable. 

We Christians like our big churches, can I get an Amen? In fact, every time we build a church, we have a worship service where we “consecrate” the space. This is when we dedicate it to God; we make it holy or we claim it as God’s Holy space.

Now, if you have been paying attention to our Sabbath series over the past couple of months you might say: hmmm. Why would we have to consecrate any space? Isn’t God everywhere, at every minute, in every space? Do we not simply have to stop, take a breath – breath in peace and breathe out chaos, and attend to the presence of God?  In our awareness, the time and space becomes holy, does it not? Why would we consecrate some spaces as holy? That implies that God is not in some other spaces.

It is a good question. To be honest, I don’t have a good answer. The truth is, we meet in a in a movie theater and call it our worship space.  I could just as easily call it a sanctuary.   I would say we consecrate it every Sunday as we put out the flowers on the table, as the band gets ready to play music, even playing hacky sack in the parking lot. We prepare food, because we know that when Christians gather around a table for food and conversation, we also share our lives together and care for one another. We get ready to meet God together.

And then by our actions in our worship together, we make this place holy. You see, when we pay attention to God in any space, then we can make that space holy (Kurt has felt the presence and spirit of God even in places of unimaginable horror & suffering that have been made holy by the expression of God’s love.  Places like the rubble of Ground Zero in New York, the place where Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania, even before the memorials were built, or the memorials in Washington, DC like the Vietnam, WWII & Korean War Memorial, The Abraham Lincoln or the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial). 

Some might disagree with me. Some would say, there are sacred spaced and there are ordinary spaces. A beautiful cathedral with stained glass windows and a ceiling that draws our attention to the heavens is built to fill us with wonder and draw us closer to God. And indeed I have experienced just such wonder in just such a place.

Others say, they experience the wonder, and are, in fact convinced of the reality of God, when they climb to the top of a mountain and observe the beautiful landscape of the valley below, or travel to the ocean and stand ankle deep in the water and watch the waves roll into the shore.  In that moment of seeing and experiencing the vastness and beauty or creation, one cannot help but feel the presence of God. 

These magnificent spaces are indeed holy. But when I light a candle in the morning on a little table in the corner my living room next to my rocking chair I am consecrating a holy space. I am carving out a tiny little time and space where I will breathe in the peace of God and breathe out the chaos and the anxiety in my life. 

When I take time to pull out an old photograph album and think about loved ones who are far away, or those who have died, this can also be a time that is consecrated. Oh sure, you could just say I am being nostalgic. But if I have even the slightest awareness that these people are blessings from God, then suddenly an ordinary experience becomes holy. I have consecrated the time and space. I have invited God into my time of remembering as I ask God to bless the living and give thanks for all who I see the those old photographs and what they have meant to me.

How do you make time and space sacred in your daily life? In the scripture we read (Genesis 28:10-22 for those following along from afar), Jacob was running away from his brother Esau because they had a fight. It was a big fight over the family birthright. He has to leave his home and find a new one. He went to sleep one night using a rock for a pillow. (I know, a rock pillow does not sound comfy to me, but it’s important to the story.) God speaks to him in the dream and says: I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring.

Jacob woke from his sleep and said:  “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it! …. How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God.” So he gets up. And as the story goes, he uses that stone (the one he had been using as a pillow) as the starting block to build a pillar for a house of God and he names the place Bethel (the House of God). This becomes his new home. He consecrates this sacred space because God gives him a new home and promises him a new life with land and with generations of offspring. Jacob is blessed by God and so he builds and consecrates a holy space. 

So I ask again: how do you, how do we create space and time for God? What rituals do you have to remind yourself of your connection to God? 

Jenny Gill told me this week of a family ritual she has to remember her mom and to give thanks to God for her life, and I’m retelling it this week with her permission. Her mom loved to collect little angels when she was alive. When Jenny goes home to Clyde to visit her dad, she drives right past the cemetery where her mom is buried and she often stops. One snowy day as she drove past, she decided to get out of the car and she just lay down on the ground and made a snow angel right on top of the grave. It is her own private ritual. She said she is sure the people that drive by must think she is crazy. (People will often think we are crazy when we do things that make us feel alive, by the way!) Now her boys, Trevor & Tanner, get out of the car and do it with her every time they go home and there is snow.  And they remember her and imagine her looking down from Heaven and smiling. What an amazing way to create a sacred space. 

My mom and I both have plans to be cremated and we made a deal years ago. Whichever one of us dies first is to take a trip wherever they want to go and spread the ashes there! Why not take a trip to a beautiful place to spread the ashes. After all, this body is just a shell. We came from the dust of the earth and to the dust we shall return. She and I have never been the type to visit cemeteries much. Some people do that, but we don’t. But whatever place I take her ashes, should she die first, could be a place a revisit as a beautiful place to remember the beauty of my mom. 

And not to digress too much here, let me just say a word here about a practice that seems to be gaining popularity. People are keeping the ashes of a loved one in an urn, or even sharing them among several family members. I even heard recently about companies that are making necklaces with a little bit of grandma’s ashes in them. As your pastor, I would caution you to think carefully about this. It may sound good, until you have several people die, and then you have several urns sitting on your mantel. And then what are your children and grandchildren going to do with all those urns that begin to add up. But more important than that: when someone dies, we need to let go. The body is just a shell. If we trust that their spirit is with God, which I hope we all do, then we need to find a way to let go of the physical. Find a beautiful place to scatter the ashes and then visit that place it you want to have some sacred time and space to remember the one you loved. 

          Getting back to our day to day life, my point is this. Of course we believe, in our heads, most of us, that God is with us every moment of every day and in every location. In reality, we go through most time and space too distracted by things of the world. We lose sight of God. Or we just get caught up in what is ordinary. So we don’t feel God’s presence. We forget God.

So we do need to consecrate sacred time and space. We need to consecrate Sabbath moments, Sabbath hours, or days. We need to set apart time and space and say: I will focus my attention on God now. I will listen to God. I will give thanks to God for blessings. I will pour out my heart to God. Or maybe I will simply breathe and remember that every breath comes from God, it is a gift from God. 

Each one of us has to find our own rhythm for doing this. Sunday morning worship is a good piece of that balance. Daily prayer is another. Creating a corner somewhere in a room in your home that is your space to be with God is also important. Family rituals to mark sacred moments and relationships are another. It all comes together so that we can join our ancestor Jacob each day in saying: “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it! …. How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God.” Amen.