"Sacred Space and Bloody Business," the sermon by the Rev. Theodore Wardlaw, Dean of the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, given on November 8, 2007 at St. Matthew's Church, Austin, during the Installation service of the Very Rev. Douglas B. Travis as Dean and President
of the Seminary of the Southwest
Mark 1:21-28
A few weeks ago, Garrison Keilor wrote an essay about a recent trip to Baltimore, and an encounter on a Sunday morning with sacred space. “[It was] a splendid Fall day under blue skies,” he writes, “[and] we marched off to the nearest church and found ourselves in an old brownstone temple of 1852, wooden box pews, stained glass on all sides, old tiled floor, for a high Anglo-Catholic Mass, a troop of choristers in white, altar boys, bearded priests in medieval vestments, holy water and puffs of smoke and bells and chanting of scripture, precision bowing and genuflecting, all rather exotic for an old fundamentalist like me but deeply moving…”
“It was formal High Mass,” he continues, “none of that hi-and-how-are-we-all-doing-this-morning chumminess, and the homily only summarized the scripture texts about healing, it didn’t turn into an essay on health care. Ten voices strong and true in the choir and positioned as they were under the great arch of the chancel, their tender polyphonic Kyrie and Gloria infused the whole building with pure kindness.
“The singing,” he writes, “was O my God just heartbreakingly good. There were less than thirty of us in the pews, fewer than the names on the prayer list, and to hear ‘Behold, how good and joyful it is, brethren, to dwell together in unity’ sung so eloquently as the priests swung to their tasks was to be present in a moment of extravagant grace that does not depend on numbers or any other measure of success for its meaning, just as the Grand Canyon does not depend on busloads of tourists to be magnificent. Most of our brethren, bless them, are off enjoying brunch or reading the funnies or lifting weights at the gym, and our faithfulness does not make us better people. We simply happened to walk by and see this vast canyon of God’s love and stand looking into it.”
Keilor goes on to rhapsodize of what is essential about the work of worship that was going on in that church that day, much like the work that we about together just now. And finally he concludes: “Now I’m an old tired Democrat, sick of this infernal war that may go on for the rest of my life and in which more of our brethren will die miserably, both American and Iraqi. I’m sick of politics today, the cleverness and soullessness of it. I am still angry at Al Gore for wearing those stupid sweaters in 2000…and I am angry at everyone who voted for Ralph Nader. I hope that the next time they turn the key in their ignition their air bags blow up.
“But here in an old brownstone church at an ancient ceremony, there is a moment of separation from all the griefs of this world. Ten men and women are singing a cappella, ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name,’ and their voices drench us fugitive worshippers kneeling, naked, trembling, needy, in the knowledge of grace, and when we arise and go out into Baltimore, the blessing follows us.”
That’s the most eloquent argument for sacred space and its purpose that I have heard in some time. Sacred space that turns us upside down and conveys a blessing. And it’s a counter-cultural argument, for sure, because the popular take on sacred space in our culture—sacred space like this space, sacred space like your wonderful chapel at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, sacred space like our chapel at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary—is that it is a kind of demilitarized zone on the other side of relevance into which we step when we’ve had too much of life as it is lived elsewhere, out there in the so-called “real world.” Sacred space, our culture so often tells us, is time-out space, where maybe what happens is something reflective and quiet and contemplative and perhaps even useless.
Or, increasingly in our time, churches re-think the whole purpose of sacred space. We opt for so-called “worship centers” and we design them to be large, friendly entertainment venues that make us think of nothing quite so much as, say, basketball. After all, we wouldn’t want to frighten off that potential believer with too much symbology—crosses and all of that—that might suggest to him or her that there’s a story out there larger than his or her own. The popular take on sacred space like that—or, for that matter, sacred space like this—is that, whatever else happens in it, it is certainly not anything that much resembles struggle.
But if our text from Mark’s gospel is any indication at all, it may well be that the Biblical understanding of sacred space is thicker, by far, than ours. It may well be that, in the gospel of Mark at least, there’s more at stake in a sacred space than we are often prone to think. For sacred space, as far as Mark is concerned, is not primarily a place for quiet repose or a few verses of Kum-Ba-Yah; it is instead primarily a place for struggle.
Jesus and his just-recruited disciples—all of them brand new at this gospel business and hardly halfway through the very first chapter of Mark—“went to Capernaum; and when the Sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching,” Mark writes, “for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” We don’t know what he taught them—whether it was “Introduction to the Old Testament” or “Pastoral Care Since the Age of Aquarius” or “Oliver Cromwell As A Model of Conflict Management”—but, whatever it was that he taught them, there developed a struggle. Not just a struggle, actually, but the struggle—between Jesus and a demon, between the God of all time and places and an anti-God, representative, maybe, of every other object of devotion that we’ve ever flirted with. Right there in the middle of sacred space, where, as far as Mark is concerned, what was going on was not entertainment or quiet repose but bloody business! Right there, somewhere between the narthex and the sacristy, Jesus exorcised a demon. To which the congregation responded: “What is this? A new curriculum?”
When was the last time something like this happened in any sacred space you know anything about? And yet, right here in Mark, hardly out of the first chapter, Jesus—standing somewhere, if you will understand my meaning, between the manger scene and the Paschal candle—is demonstrating a kind of teaching that has authority; a kind of theological education, if you will, that, at its best, is nothing less than exorcism.
You may think that what we’re really about tonight is the task of setting apart someone whose job it will be to oversee an ecclesial credentialing process by which, after jumping through a series of hoops, students get a union card of sorts; and if that’s what you think is going on tonight as we install Doug Travis, then please—think some more. Think more deeply about the role of theological education in the church of Jesus Christ. Moreover, to go deeper still, think about the role of the faith to challenge the demonic assumptions of our culture that show up, even, now and then (perish the thought) on a seminary campus. Early on in my presidency at Austin Seminary, I was in a meeting of a few faculty and board members—it was a task force of some sort—and we were thinking in specific ways about the direction we would chart for the future. One board member said, “Well, whatever we do, we should always strive for balance.” It sounded like a reasonable comment and no one said anything, until, finally, one senior faculty member spoke up. “With all due respect,” he said, “a seminary should always be about the gospel, and the gospel is always a bigger thing than merely striving for balance.” We needed to hear that, because sometimes we have been guilty of turning “balance” into a demonic assumption. And there are other demonic assumptions—like the narrow partisanship that so infects the life and public discourse of our world and our country and certainly our church. Assumptions that are so powerful to us, in part, because we’ve gotten so comfortable with them that we have failed to recognize how demonic they are.
Demonic assumptions like the partisanship that begins with the notion that there’s an ecclesiastical Right and there’s an ecclesiastical Left, and you’ve got to be one or the other, for those are the only options for being in the life of the church and one excludes the other by definition. That’s a demonic assumption—certainly in the Presbyterian church, that, somehow, it’s too late for, say, evangelicals and liberals or moderates to even think about cultivating an ecclesiology that could create something of great beauty between the two of them; and so instead we hack away at each other until we add new wounds to the Body of Christ.
And then, of course, in these days when our national rhetoric so often devolves into the sort of name-calling that describes other nations as “evil,” it is the church’s job to remind everyone that Original Sin does not exempt any nation or ideology. For, if in the name of defeating the beast, we become the beast, then the beast has won. And who in the world will say that, if not us?
Think about your sacred space at E.T.S.S.—and not just your chapel, maybe, but also the classrooms and the offices and the refectory and every nook and cranny of your campus where a redemptive conversation might take place—think of it all as the arena where it’s possible that our various demonic assumptions about the way the world works might be exorcised by the One Who bears in His own person nothing less than the Kingdom of God. For if theological education isn’t about learning, within the context of sacred space, to encounter the bloody business of the exorcism of our own demons with which we are probably far too comfortable, then what good is it? And how does it serve the will of God?
What’s happening here all through the Gospel of Mark is that Jesus is confronting a world gone to Hell with the news that the Kingdom of God is near, and that that nearness changes every routine assumption we have about the way the world works. And this project, by the way, is not just a matter of imparting new information; it’s the bloody business—even, in fact especially, in the midst of sacred space—of exorcising the power of the old information. And, before this gospel is over, it’s clear that our job, too, is to take part in that bloody business, if we’re up for it. For, after all, if the church cannot take part in the call of the Kingdom of God to follow a different, transformational set of values that turns the world upside down, then, to put it theologically, who in Hell can?
Once in a while, we get to see what happens when the Gospel overthrows the world, and it’s always a stunning sight. And those who have eyes to see and ears to hear are always amazed at it.
A few years ago, at the graduation exercises at Emory University, there were four people who received honorary degrees. The exercises were held outside, and it was a nice, crisp Spring day, and those graduating seniors had more on their minds than the dusty obligations of academic ceremony. So, for the most part, as the ceremony droned on up at the stage, they tossed their mortar boards in the air and threw Frisbees to one another and just generally gave it all the back of the hand, the thumb of the nose. One of the honorees was a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, another was an African-American ambassador to an African country, and still another was Alfred Uhry—the playwright who wrote Driving Miss Daisy and Last Night of Ballyhoo. Pretty impressive people, I would say, but the Frisbees and the mortar boards kept on flying. Until the last guy was honored, and it was that only time that the students at graduation settled down. He was a helicopter pilot who had flown missions during the Vietnam War. He was the guy who intervened with his helicopter at the My Lai Massacre. Right there in the middle of a moment when Lieutenant Calley and various of his men were attempting to kill a mother holding a baby, the man set his helicopter down between the mother and the baby and those men. For thirty years he was considered unpatriotic; he was court-martialed, in fact. And then, we got more perspective, I guess, and on this day he was receiving an honorary degree. He stood up at the podium and said, “I’ve always lived with words I first learned from my parents: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”
“What is this? A new teaching—with authority!”
That’s the kind of stuff that Mark says happens all the time—in sacred space. On this occasion when we celebrate Doug, for sure, but also the task of theological education; it’s important to remember the Gospel at its authoritative best is not just the imparting of new information. More fundamentally still, it is exorcism.
Before I came to Austin a little over five years ago, I served for twelve years in a church in Atlanta—a church that will celebrate its sesquicentennial in February. During the Civil War, as Sherman approached the city, intent on burning it down, the priest at the Catholic church just behind our church prevailed upon Sherman to not burn his church down because, if he did, every Catholic soldier in Sherman’s army, he said, would mutiny. And on the strength of that act, the Catholic church was saved, and our church was saved, and the Baptist church next door was saved, and St. Phillip’s Episcopal Cathedral (which was then across the street) was also saved.
In that church, after the Civil War, they had occasion to call a new pastor. And then, over the next ten years, he managed to haul approximately a third of that congregation before the Session (the same thing as your Vestry), where they were tried for various warm-blooded sins. It must have been his way of getting their minds off of all the cannon balls embedded in the walls of that building, all the bloodstains down in the undercroft where Union troops had literally used that space as a slaughterhouse—a place to butcher cattle. Possessed by a sense of moral righteousness, the pastor was diligent—summoning one parishioner after another into the Session Room over the years of his ministry. And they weren’t hauled in over the unexciting stuff—usury, for example (Presbyterians never get tried for usury). It was the warmblooded stuff—public drunkenness, dancing in front of other people, taking excursions to Savannah on the Sabbath. Trials before the Session! It went on like this for ten years.
On one occasion—the occasion, in fact, that prompted the Session to perform finally its own exorcism and to show that man the door—two young girls were brought before the Session. They had recently been confirmed there, but now they were commanded to confess to the Session that they had recently attended a “Sweet Sixteen” party where there had been dancing. They confessed, and the Session minutes read that these girls, these confirmands, vowed that they would never dance again for as long as they were members of Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta. The very next entry in the Session minutes, by the way, was their request that their letters of membership be transferred to another church (I’m not sure, but I think it was an Episcopal church!).
Soon the man was gone, and a few years after that, they tore that building down and built the present Victorian gothic structure. I haven’t got a shred of evidence to back this up, but I have often wondered if they just had to tear that sacred space down—afraid, maybe, not just from the Civil War bloodstains from the slaughter of cattle, but also of the spores of any lingering post-Civil War pathology that might have been evident still in the plaster and the pews.
I wish they hadn’t done that. I wish they had kept the stately old Greek-Revival structure, which would have been Atlanta’s oldest church building. I wish that they had been more willing to own the bloody business that went on inside that space; and to accept it as simply what happens in sacred spaces when, by the grace of God, people encounter the grace of God. And demons get exorcised, and broken hearts get mended, and new teachings dazzle the imaginations of broken people until they come to see—somewhere in a line of vision higher than the feverish whims and rages of a given generation—nothing less than God’s own authoritative, redemptive Self: sovereign and inscrutable and scary and, most of all, good.
Doug, my brother, may you see it, too, before your work is done in that sacred space, that wonderful seminary, that we commission you this night to lead.
In the name of God: Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
