William H. Willimon - "Where Is the Holy Land?" (May 6, 2001)

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-	The gospel for this Sunday	0:10
	is from the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John.	0:12
	"Those who love me will keep my word,	0:17
	"and my Father will love them, and we will come to them,	0:21
	"and we will make our home with them."	0:26
	"Whoever does not love me, does not keep my words,	0:29
	"and the word that you hear is not mine,	0:32
	"but it is from the Father who sent me."	0:34
	"I have said these things to you while I am still with you,	0:38
	"but the advocate, the Holy Spirit,	0:42
	"whom the Father will send in my name,	0:44
	"will teach you everything,	0:47
	"and will remind you of all that I have said to you."	0:48
	"Peace, I leave with you."	0:53
	"Not as the world gives,	0:56
	do I give to you."	1:00
	"Do not let your hearts be troubled."	1:02
	"Do not let them be afraid."	1:05
	"You heard me say to you."	1:08
	"I'm going away and I'm coming to you."	1:09
	"If you love me,	1:13
	"you would rejoice that I am going to the Father,	1:14
	"because the Father is greater than I."	1:17
	"And now I have told you this before it occurs	1:21
	"so that when it does occur,	1:24
	"you may believe."	1:27
	This is the word of the Lord.	1:30
	Thanks be to God.	1:33
	Next week,	1:39
	we had plans to go	1:41
	on a trip	1:44
	sponsored by the chapel,	1:45
	to the Holy Land.	1:48
	But when the rocks started to fly,	1:50
	the place looked a lot less holy to a number of us.	1:54
	So we're not going to the Holy Land,	1:59
	which is a shame because	2:01
	I have been to the Holy Land,	2:04
	and I would welcome the opportunity	2:05
	to take some of you there.	2:07
	I remember so well Nazareth.	2:11
	Nazareth,	2:16
	a town, a dusty town,	2:18
	not too attractive today.	2:20
	But it's a town where Jesus grew up.	2:23
	He was a Nazarene.	2:26
	Today they've got this big,	2:27
	not very attractive concrete church, monument to the 60's,	2:29
	over the place	2:33
	where Joseph is said to have lived.	2:35
	And from Nazareth you can go down to Capernaum,	2:40
	down by the sea.	2:45
	Capernaum is where Jesus spent a memorable Sabbath	2:47
	preaching in the synagogue.	2:50
	You can still see the synagogue there at Capernaum.	2:52
	It's not the same building in which Jesus preached,	2:56
	but it is right there on that very spot.	2:58
	There, in those places, it's,	3:04
	even though they're in ruins,	3:09
	even though, of course,	3:12
	they've changed dramatically over the millennia,	3:13
	it still feels holy.	3:17
	And of course if you go there,	3:21
	you're going to eventually want to go to Jerusalem.	3:24
	Walk those narrow streets, the same streets	3:29
	in which Jesus carried his cross up to Calvary.	3:33
	Today there's this big, dark, wonderful church	3:38
	over the side of Calvary.	3:41
	If you're in Jerusalem,	3:45
	you'll certainly want to go down the road to Bethlehem.	3:47
	Bethlehem today, a kind of crowded, dusty place,	3:52
	but a surprisingly holy place.	3:58
	Over the place where it is said, Jesus was born, there's a	4:01
	church, a great big church,	4:05
	that is bound to	4:09
	move you.	4:11
	The place just feels holy.	4:12
	You know there are a few places in my memory	4:17
	that I can say of that.	4:19
	The place just feels holy.	4:21
	That's how I first felt	4:25
	when I visited the French town of Chartres	4:26
	I was a sophomore.	4:31
	I was bumming around Europe	4:32
	with a couple of friends for the summer.	4:33
	We were in a blue VW.	4:36
	We had bought a bottle of French wine	4:37
	in an alleged vineyard.	4:40
	And we were driving through the countryside,	4:42
	and then as if a great apparition,	4:46
	this huge cathedral rose before us	4:49
	over this little medieval town,	4:54
	clustered about it in the wheat fields.	4:56
	And even though we were sophomores, and--	4:59
	We just fell silent.	5:03
	Even though we were a mile away,	5:05
	you could just feel the holiness.	5:07
	Walking in that great stone church,	5:10
	that gray stone church, with it's beautiful carvings.	5:13
	It's just such a fitting container	5:17
	of the Almighty.	5:22
	You could feel the holiness.	5:25
	You could feel the awe.	5:28
	I think maybe the first time in my life,	5:29
	that was my first real experience of awe.	5:31
	Something you don't often feel in modern life.	5:36
	It was just holy.	5:38
	That expression, the house of God,	5:41
	often applied to churches	5:43
	really seemed to make sense there in Chartres.	5:46
	It really was God's very house.	5:50
	That was what our ancestor Jacob said	5:56
	after a sleepless night by the river.	5:58
	That night during his sleep,	6:02
	it was as if heaven's ladder was lowered to him.	6:04
	There were angels ascending, angels descending.	6:08
	Jacob, this conniving, lying, scoundrel	6:12
	awoke and said of the place,	6:18
	"Surely, the Lord was in this place	6:22
	"and I didn't even know it."	6:25
	That place, there beside the brook,	6:28
	despite all that Jacob had done in his life	6:31
	and had not done,	6:34
	and it was holy.	6:35
	We, we human beings seem to have this need,	6:40
	this yearning for holy places.	6:43
	Oh sure, I know, God is everywhere, in everything.	6:47
	But pantheism just doesn't cut it for us.	6:53
	If God is just everywhere,	6:58
	anywhere, then there is a sense of which God is nowhere.	7:00
	We need some place, some bethel,	7:07
	some holy place.	7:10
	We speak of Israel as the Holy Land.	7:12
	That's where I'd planned to go with some of you	7:17
	in about a week.	7:19
	And yet, there is no one place	7:21
	that is the holy land.	7:25
	A man was telling me,	7:29
	a man who works at a nearby university,	7:30
	that he makes a habit of going to Alaska every summer.	7:33
	He takes a couple of weeks off.	7:39
	He goes all the way up to Alaska.	7:41
	He takes a plane and then he rents a car.	7:42
	And he drives it in,	7:45
	and then he takes a boat,	7:46
	and then he gets out and he hikes the rest of the way.	7:49
	And he gets way back in the Denali National Forest.	7:52
	Back in there, in the wilderness.	7:56
	He says he's got a place,	7:59
	a place there in the woods.	8:01
	He wonders if any human being	8:03
	has ever been there before him.	8:05
	He said, "You get back in there,	8:07
	"you don't hear the sound of cars and even an airplane."	8:08
	For two weeks, he pitches a little tent there.	8:12
	He builds a little fire,	8:16
	and he stays there	8:17
	without speaking with another human being.	8:18
	Why?	8:22
	To get away from his demanding job at the university?	8:24
	To get away from the hustle and bustle	8:27
	of his family responsibilities?	8:29
	He says he goes there because for him	8:32
	everything gets so quiet	8:36
	that God can come to him.	8:39
	He said to me,	8:42
	"That little spot in the woods in Alaska	8:44
	"is my holy land.	8:48
	"I've never gone back up in there.	8:51
	"I've never pitched my tent,	8:53
	"that I'm not visited by almighty God."	8:56
	It's in Alaska but it is the holy land.	9:01
	I was there with the Duke Chapel Choir	9:08
	when we went to,	9:11
	in Poland,	9:12
	to the great shrine of the Black Madonna.	9:14
	There, as these out-of-tune trumpets played,	9:17
	and the panels were pulled back,	9:20
	exposing this icon of Poland's Black Madonna.	9:23
	And all those Poles fell to their knees like thunder,	9:27
	prostrate before the Almighty.	9:32
	Nobody had to say to the choir,	9:36
	now, this is holy ground.	9:38
	Take off your shoes.	9:41
	The ground you're on is holy.	9:43
	You could just,	9:45
	you knew it.	9:46
	Undeniably.	9:48
	You could see why generations of the faithful in Poland	9:49
	had come to that place.	9:54
	Later, on a cab ride from the O'Hare Airport into Chicago,	9:57
	I looked there on the dashboard,	10:02
	and my, the cab driver had a photograph,	10:03
	there on the dashboard, of the Black Madonna.	10:08
	He was Polish.	10:12
	Yes, he had been to the shrine.	10:13
	He said he brought back that picture.	10:16
	And he said, "Wherever that picture is,	10:19
	"that for me is,	10:22
	"it's holy."	10:23
	"This taxi?'	10:25
	"Yeah. Yeah"	10:27
	"As long as the Madonna is there, it's a holy place."	10:28
	Even that little picture brought some of that sense of awe,	10:32
	and transcendence and holiness.	10:37
	I know that for some of you, this chapel	10:42
	has been, for you,	10:45
	the holy land.	10:48
	Maybe you've been thinking to yourself as I've been talking,	10:51
	"Hey, I don't need to get on a plane and go to Israel."	10:53
	"I don't need to go to France or Poland."	10:56
	Because, well maybe not every Sunday,	11:01
	but Sundays often enough,	11:04
	I come here,	11:06
	and I feel met by God.	11:08
	In the music or in the readings,	11:14
	in the gathered believers,	11:17
	this music bouncing off these stone walls, it's,	11:21
	sometimes it's as if heaven's ladder	11:26
	is lowered to your reach.	11:29
	And you believe.	11:32
	You're able to say with your ancestor Jacob,	11:34
	"Surely the Lord was in this place and I hardly knew it."	11:37
	Or maybe you're like Peter,	11:42
	there on the Mountain of Transfiguration, when Jesus--	11:44
	There was Moses and there was Elijah.	11:48
	And Peter,	11:51
	just awestruck at the miraculous wonder of it all said,	11:53
	"Lord, it is good for us to be here."	11:56
	Even here, even with me as your preacher,	12:01
	God has, gotten in.	12:05
	The place has become sanctified.	12:08
	God has come among us.	12:11
	In this once pine forest in North Carolina,	12:13
	it has been the holy land.	12:16
	Here God fulfills his promise from the psalm we read today.	12:21
	Where the psalmist is able to say,	12:29
	"I will dwell in the house of the Lord,	12:32
	"not just on Sundays, but for all eternity."	12:35
	Because when it comes down to it,	12:41
	that's really what it means for a place to be holy,	12:44
	to be sanctified, consecrated.	12:48
	It means that God Almighty has come and dwelt among us.	12:53
	That's why the Holy Land is called holy.	12:58
	Cause God has undeniably touched that place,	13:01
	and left a mark on it forever.	13:04
	You can feel it when you go there today.	13:06
	That's maybe that's why you keep coming back to this chapel,	13:10
	this place, this house of God,	13:13
	in which you know God's undeniable presence.	13:16
	Every year at Christmas,	13:22
	I stand in this pulpit on Christmas Eve	13:23
	and proclaim, from the beginning of the Gospel of John,	13:25
	the word became flesh, and it dwelt among us.	13:30
	In the Greek,	13:35
	more literally,	13:37
	the word became flesh and tabernacled among us.	13:38
	Or more,	13:41
	the word became flesh and it tented among us.	13:43
	Just, God pitched his tent here among us,	13:48
	because that's what makes the Holy Land holy.	13:54
	What makes this place holy is not what we bring here.	13:59
	It's not what we do here, but what God gives here,	14:03
	It makes this place holy, despite us.	14:10
	The poor Duke theology professor,	14:16
	who said earlier this year,	14:18
	"If you allow, if Duke allows them to do one of these	14:21
	"same-sex unions anywhere within 60 feet if that building,	14:24
	"it will deconsecrate, abominate, de-sanctify that place	14:28
	so nobody--"	14:34
	"I can't worship in it ever again."	14:35
	What a stupid statement to make.	14:39
	We can't sanctify this place.	14:43
	Only God can do--	14:45
	We can't consecrate and we can't deconsecrate.	14:47
	I know a man who works with the severely retarded in Canada.	14:53
	He's a graduate of Duke.	14:59
	I was up there this fall.	15:01
	I knew him here as a student.	15:03
	And every day for the last seven or eight years,	15:06
	he's been working at this center	15:09
	for the mentally, the physically handicapped.	15:12
	He works every day with people with tortured limbs	15:16
	and twisted bodies.	15:19
	Many of them cannot feed themselves.	15:22
	They can't get along by themselves.	15:25
	He's been there for seven years.	15:28
	I remember when he went up there.	15:29
	I thought it was an undergraduate, brief infatuation,	15:31
	but he has been there all that time.	15:34
	I said, "How do you do it?"	15:37
	"Why do you do it?"	15:41
	"How do you manage to cope in this place	15:42
	"with such great need?"	15:44
	"What has kept you going?"	15:47
	And he responded,	15:49
	"Well, somehow,	15:52
	"I don't know whether it was through my mother,	15:53
	"or through campus ministry while I was at Duke."	15:54
	"Somehow I just got fixed in my brain,	15:57
	"that every single person	16:01
	is a temple of the Holy Spirit."	16:05
	"Isn't that a phrase somewhere in the bible?"	16:08
	"You', Paul says, "A temple of the Holy Spirit."	16:11
	Everybody, no matter how twisted,	16:16
	how ill-formed of the body,	16:17
	this is a place	16:20
	where God has chosen to dwell, has tented among us.	16:21
	I think he may have read John 14.	16:29
	Did you get it?	16:34
	Did you pick up on that in today's gospel,	16:36
	where Jesus says,	16:40
	"If you abide in me,	16:43
	I'll abide in you."	16:44
	"The Father and I will come to you and will move in you."	16:48
	He doesn't say, "I'll move in with you."	16:53
	It's just, "I'll move in you."	16:55
	Jesus doesn't simply say, "I will come	17:01
	"and I'll stand beside you,	17:04
	"and I'll put my arm around you	17:05
	"and I'll help you through some tough times."	17:06
	He says, "As God is in me,	17:10
	"I am going to be in you."	17:14
	"I'm gonna take over your body."	17:19
	"I'm gonna take over--"	17:21
	"I'm going to inhabit your soul."	17:23
	"We're gonna move in."	17:25
	""Last week in Time Magazine, Patty Davis,	17:30
	daughter of Ronald Regan,	17:34
	wrote an article called, "Dope. A love story."	17:37
	Patty Davis has been struggling with addiction to cocaine	17:41
	for much of her adult life.	17:44
	The article was occasioned by Robert Downey Jr	17:47
	in his loss with his struggle with cocaine.	17:51
	Patty Davis talks	17:56
	about what it's like to be addicted to the stuff.	17:57
	She says, "It's like you're in love	18:00
	"and you will do anything for your lover."	18:02
	But then, toward the end of the article,	18:07
	Patty Davis talks about how she,	18:09
	wonder of wonders,	18:13
	was able to climb out of such debilitating addiction.	18:14
	She writes, "I finally gave up my lover, cocaine."	18:20
	"I finally stopped	18:26
	"because I kept feeling I was letting God down."	18:27
	"Because, I didn't want to die like that."	18:32
	"Because, even though I was in love,	18:35
	"my lover was cold and cruel and hardly faithful."	18:38
	"I just felt I owed it to God."	18:43
	Get it?	18:49
	You don't have to go to the Holy Land.	18:51
	You don't have to get on a plane with me,	18:54
	and take a trip across the sea.	18:56
	You don't have to stand in some sacred place.	18:58
	You are a sacred place.	19:03
	You heard the scripture.	19:07
	You are the Holy Land.	19:10

Item Info

Title:

William H. Willimon - "Where Is the Holy Land?" (May 6, 2001)

Description:

Sermon start time: 01:39. Sermon end time: 19:15.
A sacred place, or the Holy Land, is not a geographical place, but anywhere that has the presence of God. A human being is thus a holy temple of God, a sacred place where God dwells. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)
Key quotation: “When it comes down to it, that’s really what it means for a place to be holy, to be sanctified, consecrated. It means that God Almighty has come and dwelt among us.”

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4w37m91s

Date:

May 6, 2001

Speaker:

Willimon, William H.

Liturgical Calendar:

Easter

Biblical Book:

John

Chapter and Verse:

John 14:23-29

Subject:

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 CS-1066
ref10289_pv3
uachapelsermaud
duke:320642
dcrau001710
ark:/87924/r4w37m91s
91b72fda-1cc3-45df-9de8-1d58078e4a88

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings

Language:

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United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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Provenance:

The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

Rights Note:

This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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