Everywhere Is Jerusalem: Experiencing the Holy Then and Now

INTRODUCTION

Everywhere Is the Holy Land

All my life I’ve been itching to go someplace, and after I go I’m compelled to tell about it. I also love to take people along; I take immense pleasure in showing people places that matter to me and to the church and world. I’m even full of recommendations of sights to see and restaurants to frequent if you’re heading somewhere I’ve been. This book is the overflow from the many hundreds of people I’ve led on dozens of pilgrimages, and seen their minds blown.

With regard to our questions about God, I love to remind folks that we don’t have a batch of ethereal, metaphysical truths that float about in the stratosphere of the mind. Everything we believe, the answers to our wonderings, have some real address on planet Earth. And where things happen matters, providing a rich, real world, a real-life context.

Location matters. Jesus wasn’t born in some intangible spirituality of heaven, or on a small island in the Pacific, but at the crossroads of the continents. Jesus called his disciples, not in some ivory tower of a university, but when they were busy at work by the edge of a little lake.

St. Francis became St. Francis, instead of just Francis, because he heard God’s call, not in the wealthy, safe confines of the walled city of Assisi, but outside the walls, down a steep hill, in a broken-down place in the vicinity of the leper colony everybody else avoided.

Come on a Journey with Me

I can talk Bible with you in a classroom in a church building (or now online!) all day—and it’s great fun. But when people trust me enough to go to Israel, to the shore of Galilee, to the wilderness where Jesus was tested, to Caesarea where Paul was imprisoned, to that broken-down place in Assisi where Francis heard God’s call, or closer to my home, across the bridge where John Lewis was nearly beaten to death, or where Martin Luther King Jr. couldn’t sleep one night, something magical, transformative, mind-boggling happens.

And when we go, we join a holy throng of pilgrims over the centuries who saved for years, then left family and their livelihoods, enduring hardship and facing intense peril to walk, physically, into sacred places, from Jerusalem to Rome, from Santiago de Compostela at the end of the fabled Camino to the healing waters of Lourdes in France, from Canterbury to Iona. When they got home, I doubt any said, Check, done that. For the rest of their lives, they interacted very differently with their family and friends, their chores, the weather, and the lanes of their villages. Jerusalem was, forever in them, everywhere.

I try to picture the homecoming for those pilgrims centuries ago. The elderly, the infirm, the destitute must have rejoiced on their arrival, and then sat spellbound, hanging on every word from the pilgrims who surely realized they had seen everything twice: once for themselves and once for the beloved back home.

For we can’t all make such journeys, and for so many reasons. So let me in these chapters take you to some places that are sacred, unforgettable, life-changing. It’s not tourism or sightseeing. It’s thinking ourselves into a real place where the rest of the world changed—and it might just touch us, virtually, at a distance. In this book, if you’ll trust me, I’ll take you on a spiritual pilgrimage to significant places in the ongoing story of the Christian faith. We’ll go from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, from the Jordan River to Assisi, from the Sea of Galilee to Montgomery, Alabama. Along the way, you’ll discover the profound connections between the biblical stories and the places where they happened. You’ll see how Christians throughout history have brought their faith to life across the world, in their own cities and communities. And you’ll find God calling you to bring your own faith to life right where you are, right now.

To grow in faith and holiness, for you to hear God’s call and fulfill God’s will, you simply must get up and out of the familiar comforts of your home or even your church and go, not to a posh resort or a fun park, but to sacred places where God burst unexpectedly and boldly on the scene and nothing was ever the same.

I even harbor a firm belief that for you to grow in faith and holiness, for you to hear God’s call and fulfill God’s will, you simply must get up and out of the familiar comforts of your home or even your church and go, not to a posh resort or a fun park, but to sacred places where God burst unexpectedly and boldly on the scene and nothing was ever the same. Maybe due to personal circumstances you can’t go; but you can make the armchair journey with me and see if God materializes for you in imaginative ways.

So this book is part travelogue, but also part Bible study, with meanderings through the history of amazing things God has been doing with amazing people in varied locations. My dream is that, through it all, you will discover that the most important place of all is the place where you are, right now—or that the holy happenings in sacred places might just happen where you happen to be. My journeys can become your journey, to sacred places in your mind and heart, and most importantly, into the mind and heart of God, and thus into the wounds and dreams of God’s world.

Everywhere Is … Bethlehem

We begin where Christianity began: in Bethlehem, which reappears in church Christmas pageants and in the mangers in your front yard. But do you know when history’s first manger scene actually happened? It took Christianity more than one thousand, two hundred years to witness its first manger scene. And it was none other than the holy, joyful St. Francis of Assisi who figured out how to make Bethlehem real everywhere.

Why was Jesus born in Bethlehem? It was the hometown of Jesus’s famous ancestor, Israel’s first great king, David. It’s just out in the country from the big capital city of Jerusalem—sort of God’s typical joke on powerful insiders, using the diminutive, unlikely outsiders. The village’s name means house of bread, which is so fitting. Bethlehem is situated at the crossroads of the continents. Small, accessible, believable. A little town, maybe like one you know.

Driving into Bethlehem today is harrowing. Instead of cruising under strung colored lights and past pretty decorated trees, you cower a bit under heavily armed guard towers, through checkpoints with rifle-toting soldiers. A tall, thick wall dressed with barbed wire reveals intense human fears and our inability to make and keep peace. There are slum-like refugee camps, fitting somehow for the birthplace of Jesus, whose family was immediately on the run, but grievous just the same. Souvenir shops and street hawkers, haggling over little wooden holy trinkets, underline how we delight in making profound religious truths cute and manageable.

Into such a place, plagued by wars, with various invaders jockeying for territory, Jesus came. I love Madeleine L’Engle’s thought that when Jesus came, that was

no time [or place!] for a child to be born,

With the earth betrayed by war and hate … ¹

Far from sweet, God’s answer to the crushing powers, to the fear and armed guards, and all the kitsch is a small, vulnerable child who can’t talk. He can only cry and coo. He can’t be feared or co-opted. He can only be loved and embraced tenderly.

Francis of Assisi intuited all this before anyone else. He asked a friend in the village of Greccio to create history’s first manger scene: a straw crib, oxen, donkeys, and an image of the infant Jesus. The townspeople gathered on Christmas Eve, bearing torches. The friars sang hymns, medieval carols, and Francis preached. Listeners said his voice sounded like the bleating of a lamb.

He picked up the infant figure, held it in his arms, and some said they thought they saw the child come to life. Francis’s first biographer captured the moment in an elegant phrase: Out of Greccio is made a new Bethlehem.² Before we exhale a sentimental sigh, notice the political weight of the manger scene: Crusaders were at that very moment campaigning to crush those who occupied the Holy Land; they wanted to control Bethlehem militarily. But since Bethlehem now can be anywhere, even in Italy, then there is no longer any need to travel to the Holy Land to fight for it.

We Are Mothers of God

And so all our manger scenes, in your den or front yard, make the original "O Little Town of Bethlehem" virtually present. Perfect love casts out fear—and any desire to control anybody else. At Greccio today, there is perhaps the world’s greatest collection of Nativity sets and manger scenes, from every culture, all over the world. Some are gorgeous. Some are laughably tacky. Aren’t we always both? Where is the manger right now? Since it was originally a stone feeding trough that served as Jesus’s crib, any place where people hunger for hope, love, and purpose: there’s the manger. And what are the swaddling clothes right now? The Bible (as Martin Luther loved to say) and all glimpses and signs of God’s presence among us.

And who is Mary right now? Not just the one who trudged wearily into Bethlehem to labor in a cow stall, and not all the Marys of paintings, sculptures, anthems, and stained glass. Mary? That would be me, and you, and our church, right now, as the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart explained:

We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I also do not give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time. When the Son of God is begotten in us.³

And in Bethlehem. And Greccio. And wherever you are reading this. And in all the broken, crushing places too.

Bethlehem is in the Middle East, as it was when Jesus was born there—but Bethlehem can be anywhere. And we are all asked, like Mary, to make our own journey to Bethlehem and there to bear and birth the reality of God. And so in this book we will look at water and baptism, God’s call, courage and taking a stand, prayer and finding home, and finally our death and resurrection, in light of what happened in those locations, locations, locations, and how we find our way to God in the location in which we find ourselves right now.

CHAPTER 1

Everywhere Is Galilee

The Downward Call

When I take groups to Israel, we often arrive after dark, which gives them the giddy delight of waking the next morning to sunrise over the Sea of Galilee. How could any sight be more beautiful?

A signature moment comes later that day when we walk out onto the pier at Kibbutz Ginosar and board a large wooden boat, a bit creaky but solid enough, and venture out onto the Sea of Galilee. It’s out and back, so we’re not going anywhere. It’s a spiritual excursion. The waves rock the boat—usually gently, although occasionally, just as we read in the Bible, a squall storms in quickly. My pilgrims scurry for cover, and I get to remind them that this is the real Bible experience.

You catch glimpses of the little villages on the shoreline where most of the Gospels happened, with mountains looming like guardians behind them. When we get to roughly the middle of the eight-mile-wide sea, the captain asks me Now? and turns off the engine. After a short reading about Jesus stilling the storm (Mark 4), and Be still, and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10), we simply rest together on the water. The boat bobs a little, the waves rhythmically brushing the sides of the boat; a gentle breeze courses through. Too soon the reverie ends as the motor roars into gear to take us back to shore. Beautiful. Moving.

Usually. Riskier than the sudden arrival of a storm is the chance of the silence being shattered by another boatload of believers nearby—who seem to believe the Psalm says Make noise and know that I am God, with pop Christian music blaring on the loudspeaker. Nothing ruins our relationship with God quite like other believers, right?

And then, while I never bring up the subject while we’re floating on Galilee, I worry about the ways a spiritual excursion, either our quiet, pensive experience, or the higher volume singing of the other guys, can serve as a shiny, emotional substitute for what happened with the original disciples in their boats on that same sea. It was hardly a spiritual rush for them. They found themselves asking, as we hesitate to ask, not What do I want to do? or even What do I want to do for God? but What does God want me