On the border between Berkeley and Oakland, there is a public art installation that consists of eight foot tall steel letters that spell “here” and “there”. Berkeley being the here, and Oakland being the there. Perhaps it was meant as a rejoinder to Gertrude Stein’s famous statement about Oakland: “there’s no there there”. But the artist is silent about the matter, letting us project our own meaning onto the here and there of our mental geography.
The letters face each other like sentinels, silently proclaiming a boundary that is otherwise impossible to see. Of course that installation could be anywhere in the contiguous urban Bay Area. Unless we’ve lived here a long time, we can’t really tell where Sunnyvale ends and Santa Clara begins. We don’t know if Cupertino is here or if Saratoga is there. While all of these cities are different, they become less so as transportation and the Internet connects us, and a transient residential population loses its memory of their distinct histories.
But if you’ve come here tonight, you’re someone who pays attention to history. To the very particular histories of God’s people, lived out in places as distinct as emperor’s palaces from which decrees are issued, to small towns where the census is taken, and to the pastoral countryside where sheep graze. Our sacred history unfolds in places like earthly fields and the heavenly realms from which the singing hosts come and go in light. For angels, who’ve been appearing all over the place on our Advent lessons—in the bedroom of a teenage girl, in the dreams of a reluctant stepfather—I’m not sure there actually is a here and a there. Angels seem to be equally at home everywhere.
It’s not always so easy for us. Even if we move freely around the familiar neighborhoods that we consider to be “here”, I bet we can all still identify a “there” that is harder to visit. You know where it is; the place you don’t feel safe to walk at night, where your class or age or color leave you feeling unwelcome. There are political “theres”, like prisons and well-policed international borders that require documentation. There are invisible social “theres” where it is hard for a person with a disability or a gender non-conforming person to go.
Sometimes “there” has a physical boundary—if not eight foot steel letters—but sometimes “there” is known to my heart alone. There is the place where my breath shortens and my muscles clench a bit. There is the place where I don’t know the rules, where I have less power, where I feel ashamed, where I have to reckon with my human vulnerability. I’m pretty good at building border walls around my inner “theres.”
As our scriptures tell it, God’s people have always been on the road from here to there. The familiar Christmas story of a family on the move to Bethlehem echoes the journey stories of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Aaron and Miriam, Ruth and Naomi. A common denominator in all these stories being people who moved from the familiar here to the unfamiliar there, from the places of comfort and stability to the places where there was good reason for fear. But the angels… they just kept showing up to say “be not afraid.”
It seems that our God has a preference for the geography of the risky “there”. While emperors made proclamations from palaces, the word of God came to John not in his father Zechariah’s office in the Temple but out in the wilderness. And the angel’s announcement of the fulfillment of prophecy went not to kings in palaces but to shepherds living out their precarious itinerant vocations in fields around Bethlehem.
While they were there, the scripture says plainly, the time came for her to deliver her child. When the time came for God’s very self to dwell on earth, Jesus Christ came enfleshed to the geographic there, to a village far from the center of power and to a family without so much as hotel room. And that is how he comes to us still, on the far side of whatever our comfortable here may be, wherever and whenever we need him the most.
What that means is that he is surely already there, in the neglected corners of our city, inviting our love as for the marginalized as for a vulnerable child. And he is also here. Here, where we confidently speak his name in worship and sing songs of praise, and equally here if we are grieving or doubting or only came to church tonight to please our parents. God, who comes first to the forgotten places on earth, also comes first to the neglected and lonely parts of ourselves. That’s because, in God’s geography, there actually is no there there. God comes to us, wherever we find ourselves, in order to claim all of our inner and outer landscapes as God’s own habitation. As the God’s eternal and boundaryless here.
And so we rejoice, even when times are hard and boundaries seem rigid. RS Thomas, a 20th century Anglican priest, well-acquainted with the geography of human despair, also knew the God who looked with compassion upon the whole world and our whole selves. In his poem “The Coming,” he imagined the incarnation of Jesus as it might have looked in his native Wales—
And God held
in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
