Holy Ground

Sermon

“Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

Earlier in June, Westminster took some of our high schoolers and went to S.L.A.M. Trips, run by and hosted by an indigenous organization on the Yakama Reservation. The goal was explicitly to learn from Native folks and reverse the stance of quote-unquote “missions” from one of conquest to learning. One of the places they took us was White Swan Longhouse, a place of worship. You walked in this long wooden building, and you noticed in front of you the center of the floor, a large portion about the width of a pew and the length of 20 pews, was earth, displaced soil exposed. We were told the building was built to honor the sacredness of the land beneath. And so when we walked in, the whole group participated in a ritual in which we walked up to the dirt then took off our shoes and walked around slowly.

When we did that, the leaders told us that even these buildings that we build or the actions of worship we take are meant to mark the sacredness that is already there. What do you do to mark the sacredness around us? The ground, the earth? The relationships that connect us with one another? The body that we call home? The Divine Spirit in and among us?

Moses was called by God to the foot of a mountain, specifically Mount Horeb; it may not ring a bell, but you may know it by its more famous name—Mount Sinai. God tells Moses, this place is so sacred, you’re going to come back here after you go to Egypt and confront Pharoah, after your people are freed from slavery, and you’re going to worship me HERE.

I want us to see what comes out of Moses stepping into this holy ground, recognizing the holiness of the place he stood. Moses has a deep encounter with God, the infinite mystery of “I AM WHO I AM.” Moses recognizes his calling, his vocation. Moses also becomes deeply in touch with his past and ancestors, hearing about the God of Abraham and Isaac and Sarah and Rebecca. And Moses becomes deeply in touch with the hope of the future, specifically the liberation of the Israelite people from slavery and oppression.

Sacred Presence, calling, past, present, future—all rooted in the place where Moses stood. In a book about Filipino indigenous spirituality, the spirituality that flourished before the Spanish and American colonized our land, Leny Mendoza Strobel defines indigenous, katutubo, as “People whose memory of belonging is defined by their relationship to the land or ancestral domain. The importance of place, of the land, is more important than abstract concepts like time.”

Imagine if our relationship to land meant more to us than our relationship with Google Calendar? Think of the Biblical narrative; humans literally come out of the ground. God in Genesis 2 molds A-dam, humanity, out of adam-ah, the earth (poetry you miss when you try to interpret the bible literally!). This is why the Hebrew narrative, and really so many religious narratives, talk about connection to land, that Pharaoh enslaving the Hebrew people was preventing them from being in the Promised Land.

But what happens when we do not recognize we are standing on holy ground? Theologian Willie James Jennings, a Black American, writes that modern Christianity explicitly changed humanity’s narrative to remove us from our relationship with adam-ah, the earth. Why? In Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race he writes one of the foundational crimes of colonization and white domination of the last 500 years is that we have moved human identity away from “place” to “race.” From “place” to “race.” This had a practical purpose—if people were not the “tribe of the river by the mountain” or “Germanic folks with a shared mythology and history” but white and non-white, then the white colonizers could see themselves as gifts of God, and they could rip people from their land in Africa to enslave them on another land, while dividing up their continent not based on local tribes but by resources needed in Europe. The African slave trade, which financed the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the birth of the United States, forever ripped the African diaspora from ever being able to trace their lineage—what land they come from—further back than the slave ships that stole them.

Partnering with a statewide cohort called Reckoning with Racism, an initial group of Westminster members started putting together the land story of this congregation, Westminster, documenting the story of indigenous communities that were well before any white settlement, and now a current group of folks are expanding on that land story, centering African Americans on this land in Northeast Portland. Because genocide and erasure, enslavement and separation of families, and then redlining and displacement, are rooted in separating people from the land, A-dam from a-dam-ah. And of course, this centuries act of not recognizing our relationship to holy ground is culminating in the environmental destruction of our literal home with climate change.

God tells Moses, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

Remove the sandals off your feet. At our weekly staff Bible study on that Sunday’s text, Eliz pointed out to us, this step of Moses removing his sandals feels so important because there is holy ground all around us. There is encounter with the sacred, encounter with natural beauty, there are relationships, and LIFE happening in us and around us. But often our lives are so busy and noisy that we don’t notice. And we need that intentional practice, to remove our sandals, to remember we are standing on holy ground.

Think about what you are doing when you take off your sandals, your shoes. It is an act of taking off the excess of what you brought with you. And also literally getting closer to the ground, becoming more vulnerable.

It is very common in Asian households that as soon as you walk into the house, you take off your shoes, sometimes even putting on house slippers. It was both a way to keep out stuff from the outside and also a cultural sign of respect for the home, recognizing holy ground. I remember growing up having friends and girlfriends come to my parents’ house, and my mom would greet them and say, “Hi, take off your shoes,” and “Here are my house slippers.” And if my girlfriend thought it was weird, I’d be like, “Put on the house slippers, it means she likes you!”

But then I remember growing up, being a brown Asian kid in the ’90s when American culture wanted us to assimilate, and I was in a white suburb and wanted to fit in. I distinctly remember watching sitcoms where the characters would be in the house and would be wearing their shoes! Nevermind this had much more to do with television optics, I as a kid internalized, the Americans keep their shoes on in the house, and so will I. Now, imagine the look on my parents’ faces when I tried to go in the house with shoes on, and I, a punk kid, said, “Well my white friends keep their shoes on.”

Keeping my shoes on in the house became a pretty literal symbol of disconnecting from where I come from, keeping on the armor of the dominant violent assimilation culture around me, of not being vulnerable and leaning into the holy ground around me.

What does removing the sandals from your feet look like for you? What is the intentional action, the practice, the ritual, you need to take to stop just going through the motions of dominant culture, and dig into the place you stand on as holy ground?

Maybe it is very literal, once a week, taking your shoes off in the grass, and recognizing where you stand. Maybe it is just taking a beat, a breath, in the middle of a holy moment, to notice, to recognize this is holy ground.

Where you stand holds Sacred Presence, calling, past, present, future. So, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”