It has been a while, but I had the privilege this past Sunday at my home church: St. Stephen’s Episcopal in Lubbock, TX. The video is available here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=search&v=7196564427042468.
My sermon starts around the 23:00 mark, and I talk until about 32:10.
Now, if you would prefer a text version of the sermon, then just keep reading —
Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost
October 29, 2023
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Lubbock, Texas
Readings: Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
It was a dark and lonely night. She stood just below a full moon that somehow didn’t give much light and absolutely no warmth. Her blood ran cold, as she saw a dense fog roll out from the entrance to the cemetery, seemingly defying physical laws. As she struggled to remain calm and force in her next breath, her eye caught an almost imperceptible movement just behind a gravestone. And her heart pounded BOOM, BOOM, BOOM and then…
Well, and then, what? What did she do next?
That’s the set up for many a terrifying tale or scary movie. As we are coming up on the “spooky” holiday of Halloween, I thought we might spend a little time talking about dread, wonder, and the concept of liminal space.
What is liminal space, you might ask?
Liminal space is a place of transition – which may be physical (like a doorway) or psychological (like the transition from childhood to adulthood) or metaphysical (like the space between the material and the spiritual)
Actually, my son Clark and I were talking about that very thing a little while ago. He asked me if I knew what “liminal space” was because he had been introduced to the unsettling spaces of eerie hallway mazes like in video games such as The Backrooms, or from a horror movie like the hotel in The Shining (which he has not seen, by the way), but I have spent a lot of time with the concept of liminal space in mystical theology where it is the space between knowing and not-knowing, the place of there possibly being more than meets the eye. In fact, my most recent book is about entering this type of conceptual liminal space through sayings. [You can order it here: https://www.amazon.com/Word-Song-Mystical-Dann-Wigner/dp/1666739340/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2BDDTMK3ZWBHF&keywords=word+song+a+mystical+theology&qid=1698777792&sprefix=word+song+a+mystical+theology%2Caps%2C110&sr=8-1]
When reading today’s passage from Deuteronomy, we see Moses and the people of Israel at a liminal space – the cusp of the Promised Land – a liminal space that Moses would not be able to cross – even though he had crossed another liminal space that most of us would say is far more difficult – the distance between God and humanity – because, as the text says, “Moses, [was the one] whom the Lord knew face to face.”
All of us reach periods of transition from time-to-time – and at those times – like Moses, or like our opening protagonist in the graveyard – we have a choice to move away or to move toward.
What will you do next?
You see in a liminal moment – like those in a horror movie – the expected emotional response is dread. We need to back away – to leave the matter alone. Something “Other” to our familiar, “trusted” experience is happening.
And, it’s scary. It’s dangerous.
Of course, when thought of from a slightly different angle, this backing away is a way of “setting apart” that which we dread – which is what the term holy actually means – setting apart, even if it might be through fear.
Yet…
In another type of liminal moment – like those in a mystical experience, like finding yourself in the presence of God – the expected emotional response is wonder. We need to move toward – to access our curiosity and move toward with interest and a desire to understand.
And, those movements of backing away in dread or moving toward in wonder, bring us to a man named Rudolf Otto. He wrote a very influential book called The Idea of the Holy, and in that book he articulated a concept which he called the mysterium tremendum
Which we can define as an “awe-inspiring mystery” – such as we see in today’s Psalm celebrating the transcendent awesomeness – and Otherness – of God.
Otto incisively understood that our religious relationship with God is actually BOTH. Both dread and wonder at the same time. The impulse leading to religious experience of the Divine is a combination of two responses to a liminal event.
It is seeing the burning bush – It is being afraid and curious at the same time – of reaching behind our common dualities – and DECIDING CONSCIOUSLY to turn aside.
While today’s Deuteronomy passage is the liminal space at the end of Moses’ life, his long journey starts with this “turning aside” to see the burning bush. If Moses hadn’t turned aside, nothing that follows in the Bible would have happened – at least not in the way it did happen. And none of us would be here.
So, on Halloween, if you find yourself watching a horror movie in which some idiot teenagers – who should have backed away at that liminal moment – went forward instead. Maybe, they only mistook dread for wonder. Maybe, they hoped there might be something more. Something more than what they could see with their own two eyes.
So, perhaps, we should not judge them too harshly.
Also, in a few moments, we’ll all enter a liminal space ourselves — in the Eucharist, in the Eucharist, we enter a time in which the God of heaven joins us HERE on earth in the practice inaugurated by His Son Jesus – that as we share in the bread and wine – we connect back across time and space to the sacrifice of Jesus and forward across time and space with every other Christian yet to come.
Might even seem a little “spooky,” when you think about it?
A liminal space…every time we meet to share one bread and one cup in order to become one body, the body of Christ.
Will you move away or move toward?
Encounter this liminal space in dread or wonder?
What will YOU do NEXT?
Amen.