Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church - Sermons

Sanctuary as safe haven, as inviolable shelter, as space sacred and separate, as refuge and resting place, has worked its way deeper and deeper into my soul’s most basic needs, not over the last year, or the last three years, but most of my paltry 44 years. Sanctuary has saved my body and my mind when my weaknesses and failures in “the real world” of work, or grown-up family and friendships, or political responsibility, were made painfully clear, when all I knew was broken, and when I was forced, like many of us in this sanctuary today, forced to feel my utter vulnerability to assaults on mind, heart, and body. These realizations of vulnerability were, at first, hard to take seriously, and were quickly moved past – I’m a Calvinist, after all. When I was the “it” kid in kindergarten through 8^th grade, the one everybody loves to hate, my mother, God bless her, taught me these strategies for dealing with bullies: (1) ignore them and they’ll eventually lose interest; (2) don’t let them see your fear; (3) never, ever let them see you cry; and, my favorite for its utter disconnect with reality – but total testimony to a mother’s blind love, (4) they’re only jealous of you, just ignore them. Now, picture, if you will, a girl on scholarship in one of the poshest schools in Nashville. Add to this knock-knees, buck teeth, heavy, black-rimmed glasses, a pitiful head of straw-colored hair, not a lick of common sense or physical coordination, wearing the hand-me-downs that had been traveling for 10 years down the ranks of 3 older sisters, then out to 2 cousins in St. Louis, and then back to Nashville for my mother’s painstaking mending, altering, washing, and ironing.[1] Jealous? I don’t think so.

Oh, and the terror and delight of picking out the one new outfit and one new pair of shoes budgeted for every school year! Narrowing down all the choices to just one outfit and one pair of shoes was agonizing – much worse for my mother who, no question, had better things to do than watch a 6-year-old have a fashion crisis. And in an omen of things to come, the August before first grade, having learned the price of noncomformity, I spent weeks deciding between perforated Mary Janes, or Buster Browns with laces. I finally chose the Mary Janes, and, come September, stood stock still at the threshold of Miss Elizabeth Witherspoon’s classroom in shock – all the popular, pretty girls were wearing Buster Browns! I burst into tears and dug in my wee tragic heels, put my hands on either side of the doorframe, and refused to go in. Somehow, though, my mortified mother – the strictest, most no-nonsense, anti-hysterics teacher in the whole school except, perhaps, for my new teacher, the stern, forbidding and, I swear, 8 feet tall, Miss Elizabeth Witherspoon – got me through the door and seated at my desk of footwear misery, where I rapidly forgot all about it, once presented with a real first-grade book – more words, fewer pictures! – and a teacher who got a real kick out of teaching children – even funny-looking, poorly dressed ones – ways into a fascinating world of ideas. And what a portable, adaptable refuge that world can be when your mind is healthy and your own! Completely open, completely private if you want, ever-changing, and moving with you wherever the winds take you!

In adulthood, my mother’s advice proved, in the end, poor protection against the kinds of real-world traumas to mind and body that make grown therapists cry. Solitary hours with books as always gave both escape and wisdom, but in the end, these too were insufficient. Work, 12 to 16 hours a day, felt wonderful, the more physically demanding the better. But at a certain point, on a bitterly cold day in Boston, I went back to church, a vast, grey, drafty edifice called Church of the Covenant. No particular belief in God, but great need for safe human company, though even an hour of company once a week was just about too much. And you know, in Protestant Boston, the total emotional weight of one hour of human contact equals, say, 45 minutes in Chicago, 30 minutes in San Francisco, 15 minutes in Cincinnati, and about 1 minute in Mt. Auburn time. They tried to be friendly, but well, it’s Boston, I’m from the South, and besides, I was so poor, dressed now in Filene’s Basement and thrift store clothes and clothes I sewed (still without physical coordination) out of remnants from the fabric district in Boston’s Chinatown, I didn’t even think about joining – what would they want with me? And kept my distance out of embarrassment for a good long while. But it was safe, the music and words took me back to sitting next to my mother in church on a Sunday morning in Tennessee, even if they do talk funny up there. It was good. It was, by the sheer grace of God, safe haven. Healing happened there, for everyone, and I gained a sense of perspective on one small person’s suffering in a world of woes. Can’t say I had any Joan of Arcadia moments there, but definitely I was hearing John Calvin, John Knox, the whole grim crew thundering in my ear – Get (thee) over it! Move (thy pitiful self) on! Hoppeth (ye) to it! Or, as a greeting card puts it – old Zen saying: fall down twice, get up three times.

So – sanctuary, safe haven, refuge, rest. The renewed need for such is what brought me to Mt. Auburn, and Mt. Auburn has been all those things, and much, much more than I ever imagined a church could be -- but Mt. Auburn has lately struggled over the meaning and purpose of sanctuary, and “safe haven” is a phrase that came up over and over again in Session meetings in the year I served – initially, in my mind, “safe haven” = “sanctuary”, and vice versa, end of equation. But in retrospect, after I left Session, it became clear that I just did not fully understand the concept. I’ve been trying to figure it out, see what I missed, and while it’s still early days in learning about sanctuary, it’s already clear that I knew hardly anything at all. In fact, I was stuck on the threshold.

Here’s some of what I’ve learned since then – and feel free to tell me if I get anything wrong here. First, that sanctuary, in the Old Testament, originally meant the area around the Ark of the Covenant, or the Ark itself. That only priests could approach the Covenant and that in the Temple once it was built, even they could only approach it once a year behind its walls and veilings. It’s interesting, though, that for so long, while the Hebrews were a wandering people, the Ark was portable, visible as an object in motion, even if covered from the eyes of ordinary men and women. In church architecture, “sanctuary” often referred to what used to be up here, a railing or solid wall that blocked the choir and clergy off from the congregation – for whose protection is not entirely clear. Did Mt. Auburn have a particularly tone-deaf choir at some point? Or a choirmaster in need of physical restraint when someone in the congregation sang off-key? Or, did the well-to-do Presbyterians of early Mt. Auburn prefer their fire-breathing, or ice-breathing, preaching safely fenced in behind railing and pulpit? Were there confirmed bachelor pastors hiding from the eligible Presbyterianettes? Whatever the reason, that so-called sanctuary came to be seen as a barrier and was torn down in 1993 and replaced with what you see here: open – not empty, but blessedly open – space, clear air through which our hearts and souls reach out to each other in communion. At that point, Mt. Auburn physically came to represent the great tradition of reformed and always reforming. The “always reforming” part cannot happen in a closed, segregated, partitioned sanctuary. Here the wounded are healed, the frightened made safe, hearts opened to sing with the Psalmist,

Your love is better than life itself,

My lips will recite your praise;

All my life I will bless you,

In your name lift up my hands;

My soul will feast most richly,

On my lips a song of joy and, in my mouth, praise.

But we are only one small group out of countless souls who have built sanctuaries in a Christian tradition – or against Christian tradition – and who have suffered to keep their sanctuaries whole and safe. In medieval Christian Europe, “sanctuary” was actually a legal status, of exemption from state authority. Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo was immortalized by Dick, oh, excuse me, Lon, Lon Chaney crying “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” in great Hollywood belltones, but in the book, sanctuary is, indeed central to the plot. While we know the book, and now the Disney spectacular, as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, the title in French is “Notre Dame de Paris” or, “Our Lady of Paris”. Is the lady the cathedral of Notre Dame or is it, more likely, Quasimodo’s beloved Esmeralda, the wild green heart of a Europe resisting the new order of a 19^th-century world of money, industry, and an ever-more-intrusive, powerful state, newly reaching into households as never before to tell people who they were and what they must do. Surely, “Our Lady of Paris” was the gypsy spirit unconstrained by city wall and city manners and city laws. It was her ill fate to become the fixation of the cathedral’s archdeacon, and in her attempts to escape his clutches, to fall accused of a murder he committed. It was Quasimodo who gave her sanctuary, and Quasimodo who lost her to the archdeacon’s tricks and stratagems, and who witnessed her death on the gallows at dawn from the heights of the Cathedral’s parapets, all by the doing of the cathedral’s own keeper. Right there, in the plaza in front of the church, in front of God and everybody. But, of course, it was a cathedral drowning in its own parapets and flying buttresses and legions of gargoyles (our own two pale in comparison) – glorious, awe-inspiring, but to Victor Hugo perhaps, symbolically overgrown and stifled, especially in the terribly modern, secularizing French 19^th century, with superstitious sculptures and superstitious mental structures. How could there not be a serpent at the heart? How could the innocents truly be safe in a sanctuary built of men’s intricate, compelling, but ultimately limited and fallible conceptions?

Margaret Clitherow tried to build sanctuary, in reality, in another part of Europe. Born Catholic in 1553, into an England that became a constrained sort of Protestant at Henry VIII’s whim and will, she married, at age fifteen, a prosperous Protestant in York, an old fortified medieval city. After her marriage, though, she returned to Catholicism, and turned her house into what Deborah Smith Douglas calls “the heart of the underground Catholic community… in York.”[2] Here is how Douglas narrates her life from that point forward:

“Margaret befriended and harbored priests in her home, running a small (and highly illegal) school for the Catholic education of children, and ‘providing place and all things convenient’ for the celebration of the Mass. For most of a decade she was in and out of prison for these crimes, released once only long enough for the birth of one of her children. Margaret’s time in prison, in company with other recusant Catholics, seems to have been a profound experience of religious community…. But the deadly risks of recusancy caught up with her at last. A raid on the Clitherow house in March of 1586 revealed the existence of the priest’s hiding place in the attic (although the priest had time to escape), as well as the altar and chalice and books and vestments for the Mass. Margaret was arrested, imprisoned, and formally charged. She was allowed no [legal] counsel, and conducted her own defense, repeatedly refusing to consent to a trial (‘Having made no offense, I need no trial,’ she calmly told the judge), lest her own and others’ children be compelled to give testimony against her.” Convicted and executed by “being pressed to death by heavy weights laid upon her prostrate body, she prayed ‘Jesu, Jesu, have mercy on me.’” [3] And was granted a mercifully short death, fifteen minutes instead of the normal day or more of slow torment. “When she died, [her still-Protestant husband] wept aloud [for] ‘the best wife in all England, and the best Catholic.’”[4]

The next generation of York Catholics saw another remarkable woman, Mary Ward, who fought to establish an order of nuns not in seclusion, but out and active in the world like the Jesuits. In trying to gain papal approval for her radical new idea, “she crossed the Alps four times… on foot, to present her case to the pope in person.”[5] Imprisoned, inveighed against by her co-religionists, she persisted to establish “schools for girls and Institute houses in England, France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, and the Low Countries”,[6] only to see them destroyed by papal edict. The order re-emerged, however, and the York branch was built “in 1765… when it still was illegal to build a Catholic church in England. The convent’s magnificent chapel is completely hidden at the center of the house, invisible from the outside…. The elegant Georgian brick building still presents a courteously bland face to the world, protecting the secret chapel at its heart, bearing architectural witness to a long era of persecution – and of standing fast.”[7] In the changed landscape of England of the 16^th century, where state and church were one, sanctuaries had become places of necessary and hidden refuge, hidden because they had lost their inviolability to a scandalous fight over principle and privilege in the Church.

In the U.S.A., as I understand it, sacred ground does not have legal status as sanctuary from state authorities. After all, the U.S. is supposed to be safe haven itself. And yet, when in disagreement with the policies of the government, or yet another vicious combination of social prejudice and political “comfort”, fierce and gentle people with compassionate purposes and ethical dilemmas have built sanctuaries anyway – the Underground Railroad, a hidden sanctuary on the move for its own survival, the Sanctuary Movement for Latin Americans fleeing from oppression in this century, safehouses for abused women and children, a once-radical idea. In Canada this week, an Algerian immigrant, an activist against forced deportations of immigrants back to such war zones as Algeria and Colombia, Muhammad Cherfi was forcibly removed by the police from the church where he had taken sanctuary in Quebec. Canadian activists continue to build on a tradition of sanctuary not guaranteed by Canadian law, and to argue for the necessity and inviolability of sanctuary, but the human costs are high. As Shirley Chisholm said, “There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price.”[8] And indeed our sanctuaries get broken, black churches bombed simply for housing black people claiming equal access to God’s infinite love – those beautiful little girls in their starched petticoats and Mary Jane shoes – what did they do, but go to church? Well, what they did was prove that God made ALL of us in God’s image – not our puny image, but in God’s uncomprehendingly diverse and still manifest images. That, apparently, was a killing offense. And may I point out, that even as these horrific atrocities were playing out before them, Presbyterian pastors were right there with the worst of them, preaching “separate but ‘equal’”, building the intellectual structure to support violence, even against sweet little girls on a Sunday morning in church, on the basis of race, on fake science and perverted theology. The Presbyterian Confession of 1967, read today, was a great leap forward, an attempt to get pastors out of the business of preaching in line with social prejudice and more in line with God’s word – and yet I defy you to find “she”, or “her” in any of the main operative clauses of the document dealing with humanity’s relationship to God, and God’s relationship to us, ALL of us.

It is time for a Presbyterian Confession of 2007, again putting pastors out of the business of feeding prejudice, and back to the business of reminding our people that the Gospels specifically order us to get over it, when “it” is an arrogant, lazy attitude about how fully Jesus loves his people, ALL of his people. Today’s inclusive churches have been bombed and harassed in the courts, the press, among fellow Protestants where it ought to be safe to ask in fine Protestant tradition whether, mm, maybe we’ve been misreading the Bible on this one point? Is there really some reason Jesus’ arms, open to all, would not open for everyone in this room and beyond this room today? Is it so wrong to ask those questions? Is it a punishable offense, one that can wrest us from our church homes, drive us into exile? And why is it waged in terms of sides, in military terms?

We are Christians, after all, in a church, Mt. Auburn, that when forced to the choice, has often chosen to be Christian rather than Presbyterian when there is a conflict between the two. And conflicts there must be. Presbyterianism is a human construct – it can communicate the Gospels beautifully, but it has in the past and still does confine the radical love and mercy of the Gospels – but why must the conflicts be not vigorous debates carried out in good spirit, but divided into “sides” and “alliances”, leaving lasting enmities? As the pacifist Jeannette Rankin said, “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”[9] And as al-Watwat, an Arab and Muslim satirist told the tale, “A man of Medina was asked: ‘Won’t you go out to fight against the enemy?’ He answered: ‘I don’t know them and they don’t know me. How did we become enemies?’”[10]

So, this is the little bit that I’ve learned so far: that building a sanctuary, keeping a sanctuary, means taking risks. That keeping ethical sanctuary against the prevailing will of the state, or even against one’s own church doctrine, or against prevailing social opinion, is to invite conflict, pain, and danger. It’s a time to acknowledge that if we were there, as adults with free will, when something went terribly wrong, then we are all culpable, no matter our intentions. And let’s further disagree with Mel Gibson, and refuse to focus obsessively and without mercy on the suffering to the near exclusion of the glory. Keeping sanctuary matters, matters enough for good people to disagree and for mistakes to be made – and it matters enough to persist in creating the idea of sanctuary even if, like Mary Ward, Catholic in Anglican England, we see our physical sanctuaries torn stone from stone. It takes vigilance against attackers of sanctuary, warriors for mercy, stout guardians against whatever or whoever would strip sanctuary from those who need it most.

But in the safety within, we, as Christians especially, must be equally vigilant against our own internal failings. It’s our great luxury as Christians that we can afford by a miracle of God to struggle, to disagree, to get mad as hornets over how best to build and guard the sanctuary of God against becoming a place where people “lose their humanity in futile striving and are left in rebellion, despair, and isolation.” (Confession of 1967) Because, my dears, it does not have to end that way. Lent is the time set aside for desert thoughts, for wilderness thoughts, all the redemptive, scouring, but remember, Mel Gibson, ultimately redemptive passion that one must feel in the presence of the empty cross – but Easter is coming. Christ gave us every reason to celebrate triumph over human frailty, human evil, human culpability when things go terribly wrong. And because the season of celebration is coming and, truly, is always with us in our hearts since that day in Jerusalem, my beloved ones, grace is already here – ready or not. You can dig in your heels and brace your little hands against the doors all you want – but grace is upon you, all around you in the good people here, and all around you in the good people beyond our walls and just down the street. Grace is sitting next to you in the pew, is poised within every cell of your being to surprise you, comfort you, inspire you; grace is just bursting to create of you and of us, and of those who have left us, something more wonderful than our tiny minds can imagine. For “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to God’s own self through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” (II Corinthians 5:17-19) And even if reconciliation proves a trial – as it so often does – we must remember with unbreakable hope that “with any trial, God will give you a way out of it, and the strength to bear it.” (I Corinthians 10:13) Amen.

[1] Even so, had I been black instead of white, it would not have mattered one whit how hard my mother worked or how ambitious she was for her daughters – I wouldn’t even have gotten through that school door at all in the 1960’s. Who made that rule? See below.

[2] Deborah Smith Douglas, “Standing Fast on the Pilgrim Way: Margaret Clitherow and Mary Ward,”, in John Wilson, Editor, The Best Christian Writing 2001 (Harper-Collins, 2001), p. 75.

[3] Ibid., pp. 75-76.

[4] Ibid., p. 74.

[5] Ibid., p. 71.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., p. 72.

[8] Autumn Stephens, Wild Words from Wild Women: An Unbridled Collection of Candid Observations and Extremely Opinionated Bon Mots (Conari Press, 1996), p. 52.

[9] Ibid., p. 57.

[10] Bernard Lewis, A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History (Random House Modern Library Classics, 2001), p. 404. The “enemy” in this case comprised the Meccans, who refused to acknowledge the prophecy of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), who lived between ~570 and 632, ruling Medina as a Muslim city from 622-632.