May 25, 2008
Second Sunday of Pentecost
Pastor Harry Mueller

I hope that you are all in the midst of a great Memorial weekend. This has been a crazy and busy weekend for Martha and me. We travelled to Watertown, MN on Friday for the funeral of Martha’s uncle, Bob. Thank you for the prayers. Then Friday night we partied with Martha’s classmates from St Olaf who returned to the area for her class reunion. We spent all day Saturday at the reunion. Today, after worship, we will attend the commencement exercises for Luther Seminary and celebrate with Martha’s brother as he receives his Doctor of Ministry degree. There are other’s from here, as well, who will get degrees or have family members who will. Congratulations to you!

Everywhere I go amongst church people I am asked the inevitable question: where are you now and what are you doing? I tell people that I am happily involved with the interim at St Paul Reformation. Very often I run into people who know of our ministry and they reply, “That’s a great place.” So I’ve been thinking about those responses as I also have been thinking about Isaiah’s words to the people of Israel, in our prophetic lesson for today. These were Isaiah’s words to the people who remembered the place of Jerusalem. But now they were in exile. So I want to talk about a distinction between open spaces and great places. In order to bring you along with me please allow me to go back and share a couple of experiences that have helped me understand the distinction between ‘space’ and ‘place.’

On Labor Day weekend in 1986 Martha and I moved with our family to rural Minnesota. Matter of fact it was to Spring Grove. This was just after the first wave of the farm crisis. Many farmers had followed the advice of financial counselors and experts and they had expanded by buying more land, and bigger equipment. They had borrowed against the equity of their farms. Then the price of commodities dropped and suddenly, much like we have going on today in the city, they couldn’t make their payments. Many people lost their farms by foreclosure. I soon learned the meaning of what was called a ‘century farm.’ These were farms that had been in families for more than a hundred years. Sometimes 3 or 4 generations. To lose a century farm brought great shame, guilt, and anger, and regret. Cousins, parents, and brothers, and sisters who had not stayed on the farm suddenly looked down on the one who lost the century farm. In some cases this even brought about suicides. It wasn’t just the farmers either,who suffered. I’ll never forget the day when the banker, who had foreclosed on someone committed suicide himself. This was a huge problem and during those years across the state there was the story ,and a book that was written about it, of a father and son who murdered the Ruthton, Mn banker, after he had foreclosed on them. To lose land is a huge and depressing thing.

This experience, for me, came years after I had also seen the depression of the refugee children, who had lived with us. They too, at a tender teenage time, had lost family, friends, culture, climate, community. All refugees, like this, know depression, fear, loss, and upheaval. They long to go home. For many the realization of the so called promise of America do not match what they have lost.

These experiences help me understand exactly what I imagine the exiles in Babylonia must have felt when Isaiah spoke to them. They were exiled from the land of promise. But there was hope to go back. God had said h I have not forgotten you. You are written in the palm of my hand.

The Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, whom I have traveled across this land to hear on some occasion s, has helped me understand and he has written that land is the ‘prism’ through which we can understand God’s grace. He makes the distinction between, ‘space’ and ‘ place.’ Space he says is free of promise, and void of authority, it is like a weekend with no plans or a vacation. There is a kind of neutrality to it. There is an emptiness waiting to be filled. America was a land in many people’s minds of open spaces. The farm land around metro areas is open space to many people. ‘Place,’ on the other hand, Brueggemann says, is a location where important words have been spoken, history has been made, vows spoken, promises made, relationships experienced, and a sense of belonging is felt. A century farm, a homeland, a congregation are places for this reason. But now it is important to understand that some people’s open spaces are real places to others. Furthermore, Jerusalem, the city Isaiah was referring to, has become an important place to three world religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. No wonder it is the powder keg for so much of our conflict.

In this 150th year of Minnesota’s statehood it is interesting and important to understand that what was seen as open space to settlers was a ‘place’ to Native Americans. It is interesting to read in the newspapers, about the fears of the city planners and land developers of the spaces around Chanhassen, as money flows into Mystic Lake, and now the tribal leaders are able to buy back the land that for them has always been a place.

Also a week ago, I was privileged to be a part of some interfaith dialogue on this very topic of the place of the land and the city of Jerusalem and how it now relates to Christians, Jews, and Moslems. This is no small ingredient for the hope for world peace. It calls for great understanding on the part of thinking Christians.

The prophet, Isaiah, understood the feeling and the need for a hopeful word to those who had become exiled, homeless, and landless. As caring Christians we can learn and gain sensitivity as we interpret events even of our own time. One person’s place may just be only open space to another. Much conflict in the world revolves around this. We are a thinking congregation and our awareness and reflection on this can be a guide for our actions and interpretations of economics, of history, and our voting.

As we ponder the large issues, let us also give thinks and uphold and upbuild, this place. As some people have said to me this weekend, ‘St Paul Reformation, That’s a good place.’ For here too, we find meaning. For in this ‘place’ promises have been made, relationships built, and we find a sense of belonging. This place is a prism of God’s grace. Amen.