I completed my chaplaincy training at an inpatient hospice facility in middle Tennessee. Trust me, this sermon ends in a hopeful place. I know you’re probably like, “It’s a joyful homecoming Sunday, I’m excited to see my friends after the summer away and now our brand new minister is talking about hospice.” But trust me for a minute. So, I worked at a hospice and Medicare rules require all hospice patients to be offered chaplain services. Patients can refuse but I had to go by their room and introduce myself and find out. Some folks made it very clear they did not want me there; others were eager to have someone to pray with them. Most were somewhere in between, and I had to gauge what was just southern hospitality and what was real desire for spiritual companionship. One day I went into a new patient’s room and introduced myself and she said, “Honey, I don’t want to talk about God one bit, but you can stay and watch The Young and the Restless with me if you want.” I didn’t always know how to offer comfort to the dying or reassure their family members. I didn’t always know how to answer questions about life after death. But I was raised on CBS soaps and by God I knew how to talk about Victor Newman. So, I stayed and I kept going back mid-day to see what the Abbots and the Newmans were up to. Eventually I started feeling guilty, like I was shirking my responsibility.

I finally confessed my daily transgression to my supervisor, saying “I know there are better things I should be doing with my time.” “Like what?” he asked. He couldn’t think of any. My fellow classmates had commented on how I had the hardest clinical placement, dealing with death all day. “It must be so stressful,” they told me. But here I was, spending part of each day just watching soap operas. When we use the phrase “a matter of life and death,” it usually conveys urgency. But I was spending my time in a place that existed for the sole purpose of helping people transition from life to death and it was the most peaceful and unhurried place I’d ever been. We were, in the most obvious way I had ever experienced, operating only on God’s time. We had no control over this unfamiliar clock, which was both freeing and humbling. I could stop watching soap operas to do “more important things,” but I wasn’t going to be able to stop death. Accepting that lack of control opened up space that allowed me to really be present with people.

I was in divinity school, I had been a faithful church goer for years, I loved to visit ancient cathedrals and charming chapels when I traveled, but it wasn’t until this experience that I truly understood the meaning of sacred space. The built environment was part of it of course, the building itself made scared by the holy work that happened in its walls and the building's design meant to honor and facilitate this work. There was a chapel and gardens and comfortable rooms for families to sit and visit. But I also came to understand a more metaphorical understanding of space. Time slowed and expanded there, in that place that sat so outside our modern capitalist values of production and efficiency. There was a profound and holy spaciousness to this place. There actually wasn’t something more important to do than taking time to watch The Young and the Restless with a patient. It was a place full of memories and storytelling as families gathered at bedsides, it was a place of quiet, of sitting and waiting, it was a place of questioning and mourning and crying. And I saw the way that spaciousness helped patients and family members feel held, nurtured, and cared for. How it made room, in the shadows of death, for the life-giving work of grief and love and healing.

Work that can’t be rushed. Work that needs time and space.

I’ve been thinking about that place a lot lately because as I meditated on my first sermon with you all, I kept returning to this idea of “tending sacred spaces.” Something was telling me that was our work together: tend sacred space. There are several possible reasons. Maybe it was the cross-country move out here, the experience of driving across rivers, streams and prairies. These sacred places, long under threat from greed and overconsumption and newly under threat from the policies of this administration, seemed to be calling out, “care for us the way we care for you.” Or maybe it’s because one of the first members of this congregation I met was search team member and structural engineer John Wathne, who spends his days literally tending to the foundation of some of the region's most sacred spaces, ensuring places of cultural and spiritual significance don’t collapse under the weight of their own history. (How’s that for a good metaphor?) Or maybe it was the energy and excitement building around the tours, as you prepared to open this sacred space to visitors in a new way.

Likely it was some combination of these, along with the general state of the world. I have not even been ministering here for a month, and I’ve already written a minister’s message in response to a school shooting, watched a militarized takeover of a city I called home for 10 years, talked with several of you about your fears around weakened vaccine policies and mourned the loss of funding for sustainable energy initiatives. Poet Wendell Berry says, “there are no unsacred places, only sacred and desecrated places.” So much feels desecrated lately, by violence, greed and division by the rushed and exhausting grind of capitalism and the constant competition for our attention that demands we offer instantaneous opinions on everything from Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaze. We are scared and angry and grieving and so, so tired. Some of us are lamenting all that has been lost, some of us are energized to build a new, more just world in its place, and many of us are just trying to get through the day, trying to get the kids off to school, pay the bills, caring for sick loved ones. But all of us are hungry for sacred space. Literal places where we can gather in community and bring our hopes and fears and questions, find some support and care. And we are also hungry for a kind of holy spaciousness, room and time to take a breath, take a break, take a nap, to grieve and mourn and then to dream and imagine and create.

In her fantastic and radical book, “How to Do Nothing,” author and artist Jenny O’Dell writes about how modern society has created a kind of “arms race” of urgency that abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think. There is always too much to do and not enough time to do it and plenty of companies ready to sell you a solution to this very problem they have helped create. “We absolutely require distance and time to be able to see the mechanisms we thoughtlessly submit to,” Jenny O’Dell writes. “More than that,” she continues,” we need distance and time to do or think anything meaningful at all.”

Perhaps, this then is the vocation at the very heart of this community, to be co-creators and caretakers of sacred space, in every sense of the word. This is the calling that unites our building and grounds committees and pastoral care team and social justice advocates and religious education volunteers. It is the work that unites me and Theo and Catherine and Micael and Billy, all of whom are caring for and holding sacred space in their own way. Together, we are called to tend these increasingly rare and increasingly necessary spaces of community, rest, imagination and resistance. And I believe this is indeed a calling in the deepest, truest sense of that word.

This church recites some version of the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in depth more this year. But for right now, we do and have for generations. So, I’m examining my own theology around that. And I find it helpful to understand it not just as a tradition and a passive recitation but as a reminder of my calling to enact the kingdom of heaven here on earth. It is a call to examine the qualities of that which I consider the utmost holy, the utmost sacred and make them come alive in our present moment, through our own living. And for me, that means inviting folks into a kind of counter-culture spaciousness.

I hold my theism lightly, and the words I use to describe God or the divine change almost daily, but I once heard Franciscan writer and contemplative Richard Rhohr refer to the spaciousness of God and that has stuck with me. Several of the psalms even speak of God leading people into a “spacious place.” This descriptor helps me understand a few things about the kingdom of God, about the nature of the sacred, however you name it. One is as a place of rest, where we are not asked to rush and perform or produce but where there is room to just be. Don’t you feel your shoulders relax a little bit and your breath calm at that phrase, that idea of being led into a spacious place. It also makes me think of expansive and unimagined possibilities. When we are attuned to the sacred, perhaps we can discover new ways forward, paths towards the beloved community, creative solutions to our most intractable problems we haven’t even dreamt of yet. A spacious God is a God who delights in imagination and creativity. And lastly, it helps me understand the sacred as a site of belonging. The concept of a spacious God conveys the idea that the divine can hold all of us, as we are. Angry or sad, marginalized, oppressed, privileged scared, joyful, strange, lonely. There is space for all of that and more. Rohr’s concept of a spacious God feels like a particularly universalist expression of the divine, an all-encompassing love in which each of us is welcome to rest. It helps me to imagine the “kingdom of heaven” as a place of true respite, expansive imagination and deep belonging. And that is what we are called to create here and now in the present.

So, what then does it look like, for us as a church community, to create and tend sacred spaces made in that image?

Maybe it means a standing committee decision we wanted to happen this month doesn’t happen until next month, as we give ourselves more time to discern, consider, sleep on it. Maybe it means in the middle of a contentious committee meeting, we pause for a moment of meditation or prayer or silence to collect ourselves, resist urgency and anxiety and return to love. Maybe it means opening our doors to be incubation space for community groups or social justice organizers who are experimenting with new ways of working towards equity and justice. Maybe it’s more events like the ones Theo has been organizing where people show up to be together for reading and crafts with no strategic plans or five-year goals or expectations. Maybe it’s taking the time in the early days of this new ministry together to just slow down and get to know one another.

I don’t really know yet. I think it’s ours to discover together. What I do know is that so much in our world feels desecrated and I feel called to partner with you all to re-sacralize at least one little corner of it. Here, together, we can show up differently. We can create spaces that value our humanity and that give us time, space and community support for the work of being human- the grieving and loving and healing and dreaming that can’t be monetized and so has little value to our greater society.

So, let’s experiment with this idea as a guiding principle for our ministry together this year. Everything we do, let’s ask if it’s in service of tending sacred space. When we feel stuck or we disagree, when we feel uninspired, when we aren’t sure what programs to prioritize in the budget or where to offer our time and talents in the church, come back to that fundamental calling. Return to our shared vocation as co-creators and caretakers of sacred space. If we keep doing that, we won’t ever get it perfect, but I don’t think we’ll get it wrong.

Welcome home, dear ones. Welcome home to this beloved sacred space. Let us go forth and tend it together.

Amen.