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What does it mean for a thing to be sacred?
And: What does it mean for a thing to be profane?
These two questions have troubled religious people
and anxious souls
and spiritual nomads for thousands upon thousands of years.
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According to one ancient Roman custom
(which engages these very questions),
an object was made sacred (or it was sanctified)
when it was removed from the world
and used exclusively for religious rituals or ceremonies.
An object was made sacred (or it was sanctified)
brought into the realm of the sacred
when it was removed from the world
and used exclusively at the temple--
for religious rituals and spiritual ceremonies.
For example, if I have a cup at the dinner table, it is a cup.
But, in accord with this ancient Roman tradition,
if I take that cup, and dedicate it
(and all if its cup-ness)
to the temple,
and to that which is sacred,
then it is no longer simply a cup,
but a chalice, a sacred artifact, given for the altar, AND
(again, according to this particular tradition)
never again to be used at suppertime.
It has a holy purpose, says that tradition, and therefore it is sacred--
set apart,
for use
in service
to the sacred.
Of course, this would also be true of a chalice made especially
for sacred ritual--
one that was never a cup,
and this would be true, for example, of a baptismal font (today),
or an altar,
or holy linens,
or so on...
These are all dedicated to the temple, and so they are sacred, given fully to one purpose and one purpose alone,
never
to be
profaned.
Never to be profaned…
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So… this brings us to our second question:
What does this mean? To be profaned?
This word itself (even today) carries a ton of weight---and, of course, baggage and (for me) a feeling of judgment.
Doesn’t it?
What does it mean to be profaned?
In contrast to a common contemporary understanding,
which often sees the world as divided into sacred and secular, holy and profane,
in this ancient Roman sense,
the world was not divided into two categories (where one is either one or the other):
But rather, again, “profanation” (or becoming profane) referred to a very specific motion or movement.
That is, profanation occurred when one took a sacred object--
a chalice,
a sacrificial knife,
a priestess’s robes,
and used them instead (for example) to have a tea party with the neighborhood youth.
Or: used the chalice, instead, perhaps… as a hat.
Or the linens as a blanket-fort or for sails on an imaginary boat.
Or whatever other fun examples you might imagine.
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According to Roman usage, only the sacred can ever become profane.
And this (profanation) happens when a sacred object or a sacred thing,
a thing dedicated to one specific use,
is taken and, well... “played with,”
or used for something other than its original (sacred) intent.
For a sacred object to be profaned it to remove that sacred object from its sacred realm,
and to play with it--or to use it for something other than its original
intent.
For just one more example
(although they are not necessarily dedicated to a sacred cause),
often our daughter, Hannah, will often take the glasses off of my face (especially) when I’m on a Zoom call.
And then she’ll shake them up and down or put them in her mouth.
It can be very distracting because to me,
these glasses are a tool with a specific use,
but to her, they are a toy that she can play with,
that brings her joy.
She frees my glasses from being glasses,
from their defined use.
And in freeing them from being glasses, they become free also to be so much more--a chew toy, a drumstick, and so on.
In playing with my glasses,
She frees them from their defined use
so that they might be so much more.
Her play opens up a whole new world of possibilities.
And yet, in this Roman sense, such play, such violation of a dedicated use, would be considered as profanation.
The tool turned toy is considered profaned.
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This ancient Roman understanding of the sacred and of profanation
was not uncommon in Jesus’ time,
and in the days of the early church.
This understanding was also not restricted to Roman religious thinking.
It seeped into the many faiths
that lived and moved under the empire,
including the Christian faiths,
and beyond.
It was a part of the language,
and so (naturally) it was also a part of how people perceived and interacted with reality every day.
It was a part of how they dreamed.
This is perhaps why, for some groups of people the very early Christian teachings about the Incarnation--that Jesus, body-and-all, was God,
(or even that God was Jesus),
in Jesus body,
in Mary’s womb,
in a manger with animals,
and on a cross, pierced in the side,
was so disturbing!
(x2?)
“How could this be?” they asked.
The sacred would not be profaned in such a way, would it?
They also coupled this with their own dualism:
“How could the holy dwell in the dirt?” they asked.
How could the holy dwell among us?
These were the skeptical-critiquing-questions of the Gnostics,
a group of church people who created their own sect of Christianity
that (as you might imagine) rejected the Incarnation,
the idea that God became a body.
It was too gross for them, too disturbing.
Too fleshy.
Too contrary to their world view.
It was too...
profane.
Many of these Gnostics (along with others)
claimed Christ only appeared as flesh,
something of a hologram or an avatar--there is no way, they reasoned, God would never touch a body, a manger, a leper, the world, and so on.
There’s no way spirit would touch matter.
God would not be so profane (they believed).
Instead, God calls us to be sacred, (they taught) to be set apart, to leave this earth, escaping from the body, and from the evil, painful, gritty fleshiness all around us.
Instead, they taught among themselves, Christ calls us to ascend from the flesh into the realm of the spiritual.
[PAUSE]
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This Roman sense of profanation,
I also think is why his disciples did not understand
Jesus’ welcome of children.
“They don’t even get it!” the disciples critiqued.
How will they know how to behave in the presence of one who is holy? How will they comprehend his words from their inferior state?
This is the same critique those “holy ones” made of the tax collectors and the prostitutes.
Of course, Jesus rebuked this fear: “Let the children come to me,” he says (and still does).
For these and the least of these, along with the tax collectors and the prostitutes, the lowly, and the pressed down,
the nobodies and the have-nots...
These are nearer to God’s Reign of Love than we will ever understand…
(PAUSE)
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Jesus also rebukes, simply by his very nature
(at least as we confess it in our creeds: being God and being human),
any illusion that the sacred can actually be or become profaned.
Jesus rebukes, by his very nature
any illusion that the sacred can actually be or become profaned.
What is sacred, we learn, in the mystery of the Incarnation,
in contrast to the spiritual aspirations of the Gnostics,
(and in contrast to those of us who would keep the children--and all the others--far away from what is holy)...
is everything.
What is sacred, we learn,
in the mystery of the Incarnation,
is everything.
All matter.
All being.
All of creation.
All of you.
There is no sacred and profane, holy or unholy, there is no distinction between us and them.
In Christ, God in flesh, God in material, God in creation, God in stuff and matter and spit and manger and womb and flower and rock and bone…
In Christ, in God-in-the-world all things are holy.
All things are sacred.
A things are blessed and hollowed and anything but profaned.
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Today is the first Sunday in October,
And on this day, with many churches all over the world,
we celebrate the feast of St. Francis of Assissi,
a human who is said to have preached to birds
and negotiate with wolves.
But Francis also lived in a time when the Church itself was convinced that
crusades were an acceptable form of Christian mission.
That is, Francis lived in a time when
church members were being sent to the ends of the earth
to convert others by sword and to pillage and conquer other lands,
and to literally kill Muslims and Jews and others who were considered by the empire to be other-than-Christian or other-than-Catholic.
Literally, this was Francis’ context.
And In contrast to it,
Francis preached what the Incarnation of Christ and the mission of Jesus had already revealed:
Despite the rhetoric of those in power
there are none who are profane.
And certainly there are none who are deserving of death.
There is neither Christian nor Jew,
Muslim nor Gnostic.
Rather, we are one as God’s creation.
With the trees and the animals and the atmosphere, we are one.
We are creation, beloved by and shot-through with the presence and promise of God.
To injure another (especially in the name of God)
is to injure Christ whose message,
before and above anything else was to love,
and who indeed taught that God is Love.
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Today, in Francis’ memory, we do something cute and something playful, something that may seem silly and even profane to some:
As Francis preached to the birds,
so we bring our animals companions into our sacred spaces
and we bless them.
But this is not just silly, cute, fun play. (Though it is that, too).
Because
in blessing these, those we love (and are those we are called to love across--in this case--species-lines), we are affirming that ancient truth:
That: indeed, contrary to our fears and exclusions,
God’s love is always expanding beyond our limitations
and our bounds.
God’s love is always transgressing out limits
our definitions, and our delineations.
And in blessing these,
We hear again the prophetic call:
As we cross these constructs
of species
to bless these we love,
where are those we are still excluding?
Still isolating?
Where are those we hate and so hide away?
Where are those we dehumanize and marginalize?
The locked up and the left out?
And how will we change the world and our lives so that they, too, might be blessed?
How will we be playful, freeing the world and all of us from the ways we’ve been separated and defined so that we might be freed for joy and freed (again and again) to become something new?
Amen.
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