Originally broadcast on the Bobs Your Uncle Podcast, Season 1, Episode 17. To be aired: 21 June 2022.
In the promos of our podcast, we say this, “Each week, Bob Mendelsohn will take us on a journey, 18 minutes of time together, learning and laughing and feeling what's going on in the world around us. Topics include sports, books, religion, and words themselves-- people though are our #1 concern. Broadcast each TUESDAY from his home in Sydney, Australia.“
Today will be no different. I’m going to take you on a journey, to see something in the world around us. But first, a bit of early, ancient history.
The Garden of Eden is not where Adam was created. OK, get over that shock, if you are a Bible student. Every kid in Sunday school learns that Adam and Eve started there, and they had fig leaves covering their private parts and God and they were happy in the Garden. But that’s not the case. Oh, the happiness is true and maybe even the leaves, but the location shows something different. Listen to this pair of verses from the Bible’s book of Genesis chapter 2:
7 Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. 8 The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed.
Before Peter Sellers starred in the movie “Being There” as the soft-spoken Chauncy “Gardener,” before the French Versailles was laid out with its impeccable series of gardens, long before the Floriade was on display here in Australia’s capital, God planted a garden, east, in Eden. And after he designed and planted the whole garden, he placed Adam, whom he had already formed elsewhere, inside that Edenic Garden.
Eden is the Hebrew word for ‘pleasure’ and I’m guessing that the garden there was a delight to the eyes and to the senses. It would have been awesome and gorgeous and aromatic and a joy through which to walk.
According to later verses in Genesis 2, the Tree of Life was there in the Garden, and a river of life flowed into the Garden and then split into four major rivers. If you have ever stood like I have at Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River in Zambia/ Zimbabwe or at Niagara Falls between Buffalo, New York and Toronto, Canada, you will know the power of a single river that becomes a mighty flow.
The four rivers covered Cush (that’s Ethiopia) and included the Tigris and the Euphrates. That’s a lot of water!
After God put Adam there, he gave him an assignment, to cultivate and to keep it. The Hebrew words are AVAD (meaning to work) and SHAMAR (meaning to guard) the garden. Adam was going to be busy! It didn’t take long for him to fall away from God’s plans and to be exiled from the Garden, banished is the good Sunday school word, and if I were to wax eloquently, I would say with Joni Mitchell that we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.
It wasn’t long before the Almighty chose others to represent him on Earth, and each had its strengths and weaknesses. I get that. Everyone I know has both strengths and weaknesses. And everyone I know is looking for someplace to call home, too.
OK, so in both antediluvian and postdiluvian times there was a description of the people of the day, and some interesting episodes with them. Finally, in about 2,000 BCE, a man named Abraham rocks up on the biblical scene. He is later called Abram the Hebrew, and later again, the Friend of God. That’s a cool title to have. Of interest to me in this podcast, today is the notion of Sacred Space. What did Abraham have to do with this topic? He was living in a village named Ur, which in itself is a very funny name for a town.
According to the Scriptures, the Almighty told him to get up and leave his town and go to a place, undefined and barely described, and God would “show him” once he got there. That’s it. No GPS. No Triple-A map guides. No star of Bethlehem. Just get up and go. And Abraham got up and went.
He travelled for decades. He had a wife and substance. He was a wealthy man, but he wasn’t yet at home.
He’s travelling in the region of Canaan, and God either iterates or reiterates his promises to Abram, then we read this in Genesis 12:
The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your descendants, I will give this land.” So Abram built an altar there to the LORD who had appeared to him.”
That’s fairly cut-and-dried. God showed up, gave Abram cause to relax, and Abram built the first of four altars he will build in his life, “to the Lord.”
The Bible keeps showing the travel log of the patriarch beginning in verse 7, and we read then in verse 8:
8 Then he proceeded from there to the mountain on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethell on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the LORD and called upon the name of the LORD.”
Once again, he kept certain villages and natural landscapes in mind and pitched his tent, set up camp, and with equal commitment, he built an altar of some kind, again ‘to the Lord’ and then used the occasion to “call upon the name of the Lord.” Some would say this 2nd altar was not only an altar for performing animal sacrifice but also an altar of prayer.
He still didn’t know he was already there, but God told him, great, you made it. We read it in Genesis 13, still early in the Abraham story. As soon as he and his nephew Lot separated, and by the way Lot is the Hebrew word for ‘veil’, when the veil was lifted, Abraham was told to look, to lift up his eyes
Gen. 13:14 The LORD said to Abram after Lot had separated from him, “Now lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; 15 for all the land which you see, I will give it to you and to your seed forever.”
Abram had arrived; he was in the Promised Land, and what was one of, if not the first, the action he took?
We read it in verse
18 Then Abram moved his tent and came and dwelt by the oaks of Mamre, which are in Hebron, and there he built an altar to the LORD.”
He built God in the 3rd place. Abram set up a sacred space, for some religious purpose, I guess. His personal space was the dwelling by the oaks of Mamre in Hebron in Judea’s south, and he also built some kind of place, some structure, some location that would be marked as sacred “to the Lord.”
I tell you these three altar stories for two reasons. One, the Bible includes them fairly quick smart, and without any commentary. As I ponder sacred space, I should see these as something our Father Abraham took on board, nothing he took for granted, and which helped him later in his long life.
You see, without the training of the first three altars, I don’t believe Abraham would have had the chutzpah and the strength to obey God’s command to offer his only son on the 4th altar.
The story is found in Genesis 22, and in a famous painting by Marc Chagall. To read much more about this story, nicknamed AKEDAH (https://bit.ly/3Akedah ) check out that URL article from my friend Rich Robinson. Here then is the painting,
This 4th altar is the place of sacrifice of Abraham’s son, the son he loved, and even Isaac. Unless Abraham had been through a series of devotional stops along the way, he could never have complied with the horrible and bone-chilling command to take his son to the top of Mt Moriah (atop modern Jerusalem) and offer him to the Lord.
But he did.
How? By already having given everything he had and all he was to the plans and purposes of God. That may sound strange, but it’s the way sacred space works.
Later, the Jewish people were released from slavery under Moses and in short order, they built a travelling tent which was mammoth and had all kinds of bizarre furniture and also had an altar or two. But this tabernacle itself was the dedicated space to God.
King David lived 500 years after Moses and he wanted to build a more permanent facility to honour the Lord. It was not his to accomplish, though, and his son, Solomon, ended up building the Holy Temple, again with odd furniture and altars to boot.
Each of these represents sacred space.
Now you know people can misuse sacred/ dedicated space.
Mark Aarons is an Australian journalist who wrote a book (1990) about Nazi fugitives in Australia forty years after the war ended. In “Sanctuary” Aarons showcases the slippery nature of these Nazis and the new system of welcoming our country extended to Europeans. His outing of the perpetrators is clear, yet they found sanctuary and sacred space among us. Konrad Kalejs was among his notables who were not caught and extradited until 1999, but he was returned to face the justice system he fled.
Earlier I said, “I’m going to take you on a journey, to see something in the world around us.”
Now that we’ve looked at the Scriptures and are pondering the theme of sacred space, can I ask you if you have such a place in your world? Is there a sanctuary in your backyard or in a nearby park, where you often can feel safe, where you can speak at times out loud, and you won’t be thought mad? Is there a special chair in your home, where you only sit on special occasions, and where you read specialty books or journals? I’m trying to help you find this altar; I’m not trying to create one for you.
Sacred means holy and I mean it… this is a sacred obligation and something other religions have long ago learned. During the prayer services of our Jewish people, during the Amidah, nothing should interrupt the pray-er. And during the Kedusha particularly, feet together, facing East, kavanah is at work. Where is your sacred space?
You can light a candle there. You can have gentle music playing. You can wear headphones and have silence. It’s up to you and the Almighty, but you need sacred space.
John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress, and the entire devotion of the newborn Christian was to get himself to the Celestial City, that place of heavenly bliss. It’s the New Jerusalem. It’s the heavenly Jerusalem.
And every day you live, you can create a bit of this. Thanks, Belinda Carlisle, heaven can be a place on earth. And our using sacred space, in a real, and seems unusual, but practised way, that will be to God’s pleasure, and honestly, you can be strengthened there to whatever tough program or enterprise the Lord has for you down the proverbial road.
Can you write to me about your sacred space?
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