Let me read to you a description of a sacred site written by one of
my favourite writers, Frederick Buechner:

‘One holy place I know is a workshop attached to a barn. There is a
wood-burning stove in it made out of an oil drum. There is a workbench,
dark and dented, with shallow, crammed drawers behind one of which a cat
lives. There is a girlie calendar on the wall, plus various lengths of
chain and rope, shovels and rakes of different sizes and shapes, some
worn-out jackets and caps on pegs, an electric clock that doesn’t keep
time. On the workbench are two small plug-in radios, both of which have
serious things wrong with them. There are several metal boxes full of
wrenches, and a bench saw. There are a couple of chairs with rungs
missing. There is an old yellow bulldozer with its tracks caked with mud
parked against one wall. The place smells mainly of engine oil and
smoke—both wood smoke and pipe smoke. The windows are small, and even
on bright days what light there is comes through mainly in window-sized
patches on the floor. I have no idea why this place is holy, but you can
tell it is the moment you set foot in it if you have an eye for that
kind of thing. For reasons known only to God, it is one of the places he
uses for sending his love to the world through.’ (Wishful Thinking,
HarperSanFrancisco, 1993, p45-46)

Now Frederick has no idea why that workshop is sacred, holy, but he
knows that it is. There is nothing in his description that gives any
indication even of what is holy about it, but when he goes there he can
sense it as clear as day. It’s one of those places that we sang of where
earth and heaven seem to touch one another, where the gap between them
is tissue thin. A sacred place.

Places can be sacred. Objects can be sacred. Times can be sacred.
People can be sacred. Music can be sacred. Works of art can be sacred.
But what does it mean when we say that something is sacred? What do you
mean when you use that word? Let’s do some brain storming here. What is
it about something that makes you describe it as sacred???

Basically what we mean when we say that something is sacred is that
it somehow bears the marks of God. That it has a quality about it that
somehow enables us to sense the presence of God or that connects us to
God. That somehow in this place or at this time earth and heaven seem to
kiss; reality becomes transparent and you can see right through to
things far deeper and more mysterious. Right through to God.

You can encounter the sacred in all sorts of times and places, and
more often than not its unexpected. You’ve all experienced sacred
moments, or at least moments where you caught a fleeting glimpse of the
sacred. It might have been walking on a beach. It might have been
witnessing the birth of a baby, or even the hatching of an egg. It might
have been making love. It might have been opening a letter that says
‘I’m sorry’ from someone you’d given up hope of hearing from again.
Moments when, however fleetingly, it becomes suddenly clear to you that
there is more to life than shopping and watching television. When
suddenly the universe itself is pulsating with light and life and the
air is fragrant with the fresh and lively smell of mercy and you are
caught up in the almost unbearable preciousness and mystery of life.

Now although those kind of experiences are not everyday occurrences
for most of us, they need not be nearly as uncommon as they are.
Sacredness is not a rare and elusive quality. The sacred is all around
us in every sight we see, in every place we go, in every creature we
meet, in every thing we touch. All of creation is infused with the
presence of God. Everything that lives lives because of the life breath
of God within it. Everything that exists in heaven and on earth bears
the finger prints of its creator, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Everything we encounter is capable of being sacramental, of being that
window through which we see the sacred.

But most of the time it isn’t, is it? Most of the time we see only
what is immediately in front of our eyes and not what’s behind it,
within it. You can see this most clearly when we are encountering
people. In the majority of our encounters we just see bodies, and only
the outer appearance of those bodies. Some people we know a little more
deeply, but even in our deepest relationships we never exhaust the
depths of the mystery that makes up another person.

I know Margie fairly well, well enough to back my judgment and
commit myself to sharing the rest of my life with her, but there is
still a great deal about her that I don’t know at all. I know this
because I am still frequently surprised by new things I discover about
her, and because there are still plenty of things about her that totally
mystify me. And I know there are still things about her about which she
is totally mystified herself, so I don’t imagine that I’m going to work
them out in a hurry. But I certainly know her well enough to know that
she is not just a body, blessed though she might be in that regard. I
know her well enough to know that she can not be explained by itemizing
the proportions and the chemical formulae of her bodily parts.

If you just get chemists and biologists to explain people to you you
will get the impression that everyone is pretty much the same. It takes
poets and artists to convey the essence of an individual person. Why?
Because you can’t measure spirit. Because you can’t analyze mystery.
Because you can’t control the sacred. You can only sense it, feel it,
experience it.

Well by now some of you are probably wondering whether this has got
anything at all to do with the readings we heard read. It’s a bit of a
leap, I’ll grant you, but this question of the nature of the sacred is
an issue in our readings. In the story in our gospel reading we see what
happens when somebody does try to control the sacred. Tries to regulate
it, to guard it, to restrict access to it. The leader of the synagogue,
a man to whom the handling of sacred things has been entrusted, has so
lost his ability to see beyond the externals of things that even the
most transparently sacred things are just mundane objects now.

A woman comes in to the synagogue, a woman who has been crippled for
eighteen years and is bent over, unable to stand up straight. What does
the synagogue leader see? An outcast. Something grotesque and distorted.
Hardly human. But what does Jesus see? He sees a woman, a person of
dignity and worth, a beloved child of God. In short he sees a sacred
being – someone who bears in her very being the image of God. He sees
her disability too, but only as secondary. He sees her as a sacred
bearer of the image of God who just happens to have a disability. He can
however see that that disability has marginalized her in the community,
that it has caused her to be treated as of little value, to be shunned,
her sacredness denied. And so Jesus commits a sacred act. A sacramental
act – one of those acts that pulls the veil back and allows us to see
for a moment the reality of God that permeates the world. He heals her.
He said ‘Woman, you are free,’ and laid his hands on her back, and up
she came, as strong and straight as a mountain ash.

But the synagogue leader, not able to see the sacredness of the
woman and not able to see the sacredness of healing, is indignant. This
breaks the rules. This is not allowed. There are times and places for
these things and this is not it. This is the sabbath, a sacred day. You
can’t do that sort of thing here today.

Talk about missing the boat! What could be more appropriate than a
sacred action for a sacred being on a sacred day. Those who try to
regulate and control the sacred rapidly lose their ability to even
perceive the sacred. The blind themselves to the presence of God all
around them.

Jeremiah wasn’t blind to the sacred presence of God all around him,
but he did start out with a somewhat limited view of its extent. The
story we heard is the first story in the account of Jeremiah, the story
of God calling him to be a prophet. And Jeremiah starts out by
protesting the inappropriateness of God’s choice. ‘I’m not up to the
job. I don’t know how to speak. I am only a boy.’ One time you can be
quite sure some one has misread themselves is when you hear them say,
‘I’m only a . . .’ No one is only a . . .

God says to Jeremiah, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you.’ You what? I consecrated
you. Made you sacred.

Now that is not unique to Jeremiah. That’s all of us. Before you
were formed in the womb God knew you, and before you were born God
consecrated you, declared you to be sacred. Not just because you are
God’s own handiwork. Not just because you are created in the image of
God. But because within there is God. Within you there is all the
potential to be Christ-like, to be God-like, to bring to fullness in
your own being the essence of the holy God who is love. You are a sacred
being, a God-bearer, and no deformity, no profanity, no iniquity can
fully disguise that. The only thing that can prevent your sacredness
from being seen is the scales on the eyes of the beholder. And that can
include your own when you look in the mirror.

Of course you can drag your sacredness through the mud, you can do
your best to tarnish it. Everyone from a kid making racist taunts in the
schoolyard all the way up to the President of the United States is
capable of dragging their sacredness through the muck, but not of
dragging it beyond redemption.

No matter who you are, no matter how bent and twisted you may have
become, no matter how low you’ve gone, that image of God, that
sacredness is still there latent within you crying out to be set free
from its bondage. And if you will accept the call and set it free you
can, like that shed that Fred Buechner spoke of, become one of the
places, one of the people that God uses for sending his love to the
world through. You can grow into the fullness of your sacredness. You
can become someone who people know that when they’ve been in your
presence they’ve experienced something of the sacred, something of God.
It’s a startling image for sure, but every one of you was created to
experience and enjoy direct participation in the divine life of God.
Everyone of you was created to enter so fully into relationship with God
that you are in fact drawn into the very being of God. To be as the
Orthodox say ‘divinized’, that you will be in God and God will be in you
to such an extent that you become real embodiments and expressions of
God’s own being.

And yes, this does mean that Jesus of Nazareth is certainly not the
final incarnation of God. He is the trail-blazer; he is the first
fruit. But he has blazed a trail for us to follow and within you is all
that is needed to become another true incarnation of God – a true
sacrament, if you like, of God’s presence in the world. It’s a dazzling
vision! God has astonishing plans for us!

You can be one of those people in whose presence others know that
the Kingdom of God has come near, that heaven and earth have kissed one
another. Like a true icon, you become a window through which people see
beyond the crippling limitations of their quietly despairing lives and
catch a glimpse of the sacred and mysterious realities of a universe
infused with the Spirit of God and being drawn to fulfilment in Jesus
Christ. The sacred is all around us, in every place, in every moment.
And the sacred is always within us, calling us to embrace our God given
destiny as sacred bearers of God in a sacred world.

Nathan Nettleton
Pastor, South Yarra Community Baptist
Church
Melbourne, Australia