The Spirituality of Place

Sermon from October 15, 2024

Written by Rich Tafel

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been filling up bags and boxes as I’m leaving old spaces behind. As I helped clean out my father’s apartment, I returned to D.C. only to have to clean out my office here. God is not being subtle with me about experiencing a time of beginnings and endings and the spiritually of place.

Saying goodbye to old places is like saying goodbye to old dear friends. Each paper you pick up reminds you of a lovely story as you painstakingly decide, what do I keep and what can I throw away. Does throwing it away disrespect the love it is tied to?

Today is the last day for our Swedenborgian community praying, preaching, and sharing in this space of 1611 16^th Street, we say goodbye and thank you to an old friend as we seek God’s guidance imaging what’s next.

Jesus teaches us a profound lesson about beginnings and endings. Though we seek to cling to the past, there come times to say goodbye to old wineskins to hold new wine. The challenge of our time is knowing what new wineskins looks like.

What does it mean to create a spirituality of place for the next generation? A generation that lives in a radically secular time—a generation that faces an epidemic of loneliness.

Our U.S. surgeon general has issued an advisory outlining the devastating health effects of loneliness and isolation that is literally killing us. Our current political crisis is downstream from our loneliness crisis. Whatever the results of the election may be, there are storm clouds ahead.

We are losing places we all once gathered for human nourishment and community. Your presence in this church service today puts you outside the norm. Church services like this remain one of the last places where you gather with others outside your family across different generations or world views. 

Spiritual spaces have always been created to match the needs of a particular time. The Bible teaches us about the evolution of holy spaces. In the Old Testament, God gives Abraham land and a temple and ultimately a kingdom, but this all falls into ruin as Israel is conquered. You cannot begin to understand current events today in the Middle East until you understand the power of physical spiritual spaces of the Jewish and Muslim people.

In Jesus’s time, the spiritual space is back in the temple in Jerusalem now under Roman occupation. The Jewish people want their spiritual space back, and long for a messiah leader who will defeat Rome and restore their land.

Jesus honors holy spaces and preaches in the temple yet offers an evolved view of spiritual space telling his disciples, “Birds have nests, foxes have holes, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” He is teaching us that there will always be something new. Change is constant. We need to adjust our institutions, our sacred spaces, and meet the need of the new wine shifting to our developing inner space. 

Over the coming centuries, Christian spiritual places evolve to meet the needs of the age. Beautiful cathedrals were created where the attendees could stand and listen to the priest speak in Latin a language they did not understand. When the communion was performed a bell needed to be rung to get the attention of the congregants chatting with one another during the service.

Teaching to an illiterate congregation came through images in stained glass a new technology to provide the new wine with new wineskins.

After the reformation, congregants came to read the Bible themselves, and the stained glass moved from practical to beautiful. Holy spaces focused on the pulpit where the wise pastor could pontificate. The new technology of the printing press emerged, printing Bibles and scholarly preachers adapted as their spaces developed reading rooms and libraries to meet the needs of the time. 

By 1894, the Church of the Holy City imagined meeting the needs of their current time. The stained glass and architecture represented beauty. People no longer relied on the stained glass alone to tell a story. They had the library which had open visiting hours during the day when local people could come to borrow hard-to-find expensive books. 

The large pulpit represented a congregation who looked at the scholar pastor to teach them. The parish house offered classrooms and places to gather socially. For the people of the early 1900s, this combination was their new wineskins for new wine.

At each evolution, faith communities tend to try to hold onto the old wineskins. Like our favorite shoe or sweater, we have a nostalgic feel to the comfort we experience in it. We resist letting it go.  So, we keep trying patch the old wineskins for the new wine—though the wine leaks—we hang on.

I shared in my sermon a few weeks back that at one point I sat alone in the sanctuary asking for guidance what to do about this building. I walked around to each window and read the names of long dead members aloud. When I returned to my seat they spoke to me. 

“We built this for our time. What are you building for your time?”

That’s the challenge for this community and all of Christianity. The old is passing away. Old wineskins are leaking. Nostalgia and comfort will keep from resisting this reality as many seek to hold onto the past. 

The challenge of our moment is a challenge of spiritual imagination. What do we need to build?

Our ancestors in the Washington Society of the New Jerusalem imagined they would be the torch bearers of a new church in the world. They gathered first in people’s homes, renting church halls, libraries, and other public venues finally first building on a property owned by the former president George Washington where today the Senate Office building sits. 

With funding from prominent families like the Fairfax of VA and Duponts of Dupont Circle fame, they funded their New Church Temple, that ultimately burned down. Again, the group moved from location to location when they got the idea of building a national cathedral for Swedenborgians on the outskirts of town on 16^th Street at the 1611 street location. Over a decade later, they built the parish house next door.

This space combined beauty, scholarship and a place for people to gather. This holy space offered new wineskins for new wine of their time. Their mission was successful.

Recently, I attended a wedding here at the church. It was as lovely and beautiful as the couple. Jimmy Cox, who has managed weddings here for over thirty years, was here to providing his magic and love for this holy space. As I sat watching, I could only imagine how many people celebrated the most important day of their life here in this space. How many weddings? How many memorial services? How many were baptized? How many found guidance in a sermon, or found inspiration from a concert, or a hug during the coffee hour, or a new friend? In my nine years pastoring here, I’ve experienced so many of these events myself that is beyond my imagination the tens of thousands of souls who tasted new wine in this wonderful wineskin.

By the time I took over, almost nine years ago as pastor, the congregation was down to a handful of stalwart leaders: Elfa Halloway, Malcolm Peck, Adrian Black, and Helen Sioris. Each worked to save it for another day. The building had fallen on hard times after years of winds, rains, and even earthquakes.

Elfa shared this message from Germany: “I’m sad for being unable to be present on this important day. This church has been my home for many years. It is also where my husband, Rashid Halloway, received his resurrection service and where my son, Hillel, went to Sunday School. It is with gratitude in my heart to all who sustain the church community and church work and I look forward to a new era for Church of the Holy City in Washington D.C.”

How could we meet the needs in a new era? When I first began leading worship, we had formal old English liturgy, and I preached in a white robe from the large pulpit often to only three people and pianist. We asked attendees and those we met, what can we do to meet you on your spiritual path wherever that may be? They asked us, this: Can you make the language more relevant? Can you make the service more understandable? Is there a way we can ask questions in the service time? Can it be less formal? 

When I asked young people what the biggest barrier to them was coming to church, they often responded, “church.” The building that so many found magnetic, now frightened some and they asked, “Could you hold events outside of church time?”

As the Church of the Holy City and the Washington Society of the New Jerusalem makes its third major journey, we leave behind this lovely space that served so many for so long. We leave in gratitude thanking it for being there for us. We ask God’s blessing on future congregations.

We now face the exciting challenge of creating new spiritual space in our tumultuous times. Where can we serve the needs of the rising generation that is more isolated and lonely? What can we do to providing healing to a country where half the people in each political party wish those in the opposing party were dead?

Secular materialism with its focus on personal success, wealth, and status has had over a century of dominance and it has left people craving something more. They seek to feed their soul, and they don’t know where they can find it. They are not interested in church from the past. They don’t want to go back.

Young people rarely ask me about questions of doctrine, but they do ask why so many churches exclude LGBTQ, women, and condemn people of other religions to hell. They want more inclusion. They find the message of Jesus profound and refreshing but are repelled by those who claim to speak in his name. 

Today, a generation that wasn’t raised in much of any spirituality is asking profound questions. What is the purpose of life? What happens when we die? How do we pray? How do we grow our inner life? What is a good life? Am I included? Do my thoughts matter? Is it safe to ask questions here? 

This new wine is demanding new wineskins. 

We can build on what we’ve learned in this space.

Earlier churches used the technologies of their time, such as, stained glass to teach visually, libraries to engage the mind, preaching to explain, and social events to build community.  All of these are still valuable to the next evolution of spiritual spaces. We can harness today’s new technologies in helping create our new space.

Swedenborg teaches us that church is not a building but a state of being. It’s tempting to fall in love with spaces, but that misses the point. Even the holy space of our bodies will fail us one day and only our spirits continue on.

On his visits to heaven and hell, he reports on time and space in heaven.  There, your feelings and thoughts of someone immediately allowed them to be right there with you. Time and space are transcended by feelings. We experience virtual space.

When I was young, this concept was hard for me in this materialistic plane to comprehend, but as our world evolves, I’m beginning to experience it. 

During the pandemic, this congregation was forced in one week to shift from physical space and into a virtual one. We broadcast online. Since we’ve done that, we have had attendees from over forty states and people around the world who join our worship or listen to the sermon. There are many people in this congregation who I have never physically met nor had the chance to give a hug, yet I feel I know them deeply, more deeply than most people I meet on a regular day. 

At my dad’s funeral, I shared that one of the great blessings of the pandemic was going online and having him be part of our church community for the last four years. Some of you were able to experience his service online. When I posted on Facebook the news of my father’s death, hundreds of old friends sent me messages. Though virtual, I could feel the love and concern in each message. I was transcending time and space and feeling love and support.

Our new online technologies bring us closer to Swedenborg’s view of the spiritual space. This is something we must incorporate in our new space. So, what must we build?

We need to create a home an urban sanctuary where big questions can be asked and discussed. Where no one is shamed. A spiritual space where everyone is welcome across generations. A place to help us improve our skills engaging those from other perspectives. A place that teaches how we develop compassion over contempt. A place that meets you wherever you are on your spiritual pilgrimage to experience God’s love.

We must use the cutting technologies of Zoom, podcasts, and YouTube to provide a broadcasting space, while creating a warm loving physical space where humans can discuss important topics over meals, receive hugs, and find encouragement. We need a space where members can escape the chaos that is Washington D.C. and their busy lives. This is the great challenge of our times. 

How can each of us play our role in providing new wineskins for this new wine? It will require courage and imagination to grow beyond our comfort zones. But we must work together to answer the question of our elders posed to me when they said, “We built this for our time. What are you going to build for yours?” Our answer to this question offers all of us the chance to co-create with the divine to create a new spiritual space in service to humanity. 

Read the full issue of the November/December 2024 Messenger