Holy Ground: The world ablaze with God

Holy Ground: The world ablaze with God

Holy Ground

The World Ablaze with God

August 30, 2026

Good morning.

My name is Sophie. I am so grateful to be a friend of St. John’s, and honored to be welcomed back this Sunday morning. My apologies for the kind of scratchy voice. I all week was like, “Please have a voice by Sunday. Please have a voice by Sunday.” So this is as good as we’ve got, but better than it was yesterday, so grateful for that.

I’m curious if you’ve had a moment lately that has stopped you in your tracks. Has anything made you gasp with awe, or a pretty sound or music that catches your ears, or tasted something that made you sigh with delight? What has caused you to notice the world around you a bit differently?

For me, a friend was visiting from out of town this week, and we were sitting on my couch eating popcorn and catching up, and she said, “Have you heard about this lunar eclipse?” And I actually had not, and so very grateful to her. And so we stepped out into the front yard and glanced up and saw a bite taken out of the moon. Did anyone else see this? Yes. And it was so strange, right? So otherworldly and inspiring to see something that we witness every day, the moon in the night sky, but different, transforming right before our eyes. And I remain fairly unaware of how the solar system works beyond like science fair model. So predicting or understanding a lunar eclipse is well beyond my scientific skillset, but the delight and the awe was right there in front of me.

As we marveled at the eclipse, we wondered what it would’ve been like for people centuries ago to look up and see the moon looking like that. We wondered what it must have been like thousands of years ago to not understand how or why this was happening in the sky, and marveled at the ancient astronomers and the skills and the knowledge that they developed so long ago.

And so no wonder that there are stories upon stories upon stories trying to make sense not only of the ground we walk upon, but of the sky and the stars and the sun and the moon.

This Exodus passage is a famous story, well known beyond the average churchgoer, but still leaves so much to unpack. It’s a passage that for as much explaining and conversation as God does, it still leaves a lot of room for mystery.

Moses is out tending his father-in-law’s sheep, going about his daily work, the chores he would do every day, and he stumbles upon the presence of God, and suddenly it is not just an average work day.

Still, he doesn’t yet know that this is about to be a moment of revelation that will impact not only his calling and his work and his family, but the trajectory of his community and all their descendants, and the understandings of who God is for centuries to come.

First, Moses simply stops. He notices. He sees a bush that is blazing without being consumed, and he turns aside to witness this marvel in front of him.

And when the Lord saw that Moses had turned aside, God speaks to Moses, and his first instruction is to stop. Come no closer. It’s a pause, a noticing, a moment of reverent attention before anything else unfolds. And God tells Moses to remove the sandals from his feet, for you are standing on holy ground.

Okay, so to understand today’s passage, I need everyone here to start taking your shoes off. No? No, I’m just saying, I would never do that to you. How uncomfortable did everyone just feel about that, right? There is some thought about walking into a sanctuary barefoot, especially in a group, that is a little unnerving, maybe unsanitary. Like that’s not how we go about our day-to-day work, is taking our shoes off.

But there’s something profound about the image, right? Because being barefoot can be uncomfortable, and it’s risky, and it’s taking off a layer of protection between yourself and the world around you. And it’s much harder to ignore the connections between our bodies and the earth when we are barefoot. When you feel the soil beneath us, soil that God used to form humans, and imbued with this dynamic microbial network that sustains all of life. Soil is so holy. The ground we walk on every day is so holy.

I love this word grounding. We use it to describe being present, becoming aware, a returning to ourselves. And this is the instruction that God gives Moses, to literally ground himself. Pay attention. You are standing on holy ground. A revelation is about to come.

And in today’s gospel reading, Jesus also offers a revelation. He tells the disciples more about who he really is and what is coming ahead with the crucifixion and the resurrection. He’s speaking of suffering and death and rejection, and these are not words that the disciples are ready to hear.

In the verses immediately prior to this passage, Peter has correctly identified Jesus as Messiah. Peter has been paying attention, and he gets it right for about a minute.

It’s a pretty abrupt disappointment now that they know that Jesus is the Messiah to be told he’s going to die.

The disciples are expecting salvation, rescue from oppression, hoping maybe for revolution. And yet Jesus is speaking of death at the hands of the political and religious leaders.

The scholar Richard Rohr—different scholar— says this is just too much for Peter. His first act as leader-in-waiting for the Jesus movement is to say no to Jesus. Saying no to Jesus will become a habit for the church. Too often when Jesus says cross, the church votes crown.

In the background of this scene is the time Jesus spent in the wilderness, and he said no to the temptations of imperial power. All the kingdoms of this world and all their splendor are offered, as told in Matthew 4:8, if Jesus would just bow down, not to God’s way, but to Satan’s.

And now in the scene of Peter pulling Jesus aside to counsel him, Jesus says, “Oh, I’ve been here before,” and responds with such force that Peter has to step back.

It feels like a strong rebuke because Jesus needed it to be a strong rebuke.

Peter wants Jesus to be the kind of Messiah that conquers through power, and Jesus rebukes him because that type of power gets in the way of God’s way.

Jesus is not going to establish God’s kingdom through imperial violence. He will reveal the God of the universe through suffering with love.

Peter gets it wrong here, and he’s going to get it wrong again. He’s going to refuse when Jesus offers to wash his feet. He will boast his confidence in Jesus, and then deny him three times. He’s going to keep getting it wrong.

And still, after the resurrection, Jesus will meet him on a beach with breakfast and feed him and bring him back into the community of God yet again.

And Peter will go on to be a humble leader of the Jesus movement, a movement that reflects this upside-down kingdom that Jesus is talking about, where the way of the cross, the way of following Jesus, is to deny oneself and instead follow the way of the suffering servant. The way of Jesus where you find your life by giving up claims to power. The way of Jesus where our compassion and love and solidarity reveals the absurdity and temporary and humanness of political violence. It’s a movement in which Pharaoh’s power can’t stand up to God’s liberation.

On the mountain when Moses asks, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” God actually does not answer his question. He doesn’t give Moses a pep talk or say, “You’re actually stronger and braver and more wise than you think you are.” God gives an answer that is an answer for us today as well, “I will be with you.”

And when Moses asks who he should say sent him, God gives this mysterious name, “I AM.” “I am who I am.” Or another way of translating it is, I am the one who causes all things, the one that is before and after, everlasting.

What we see in the story of Moses is this is not some abstract God in the sky occasionally dropping down here to intervene. It’s a God whose presence permeates all of creation and all of human history. A God who speaks from a bush and meets Moses in the dirt and is revealed in the way of suffering love.

I think sometimes we imagine a divide between the sacred and the secular, or places where God is or places where God is not. Holy ground and the rest of it.

And Jesus here does warn Peter, “You’re setting your mind on human things, not divine things.” But Jesus here isn’t reinforcing a binary between human and divine or sacred and secular. Instead, he’s expanding our imagination, saying, “Don’t get caught up in the temporary hierarchies of human making, because the God of creation is doing a bigger work, a liberating work, something that goes beyond what we have the capacity to fully see or understand in our own time.”

We can be so focused on a vertical theology and thinking God is somewhere else that we sometimes forget about a horizontal theology. A reminder that God is with us in all of creation, working out this upside-down kingdom.

Another name for God that I love is the ground of all being, the foundation from which all life flows. A God who’s encountered in relationships and creation, in our neighbors, in the ordinary places where we go about our days. A God who births the entire cosmos and then meets us in our gardens. A God who set the solar system in motion, and yet is next to us while we watch the eclipse with a friend. A God who knows every person and yet reminds me, “I am with you.”

I’ll close with a brief poem.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote these verses in a much longer work. “Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God,” But only he who sees takes off his shoes. The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries, And daub their natural faces unaware.

The world is afire. And we will be unaware sometimes, maybe most of the time.

But occasionally the Spirit will surprise us and ground us and open our senses to witness this sanctuary where we gather, holy ground.

The fellowship hall on fire nights, holy ground.

Packing groceries at First Nation’s Kitchen, holy ground.

The lake area at Bandshell where strangers dance and eat ice cream, holy ground.

Your backyard with the tomatoes growing bountifully, holy ground.

The hospital room where the emergency surgery takes place, holy ground.

The sidewalk where you walk your dog and meet your neighbors, holy ground. The classroom you’re about to enter this year, holy ground.

The table where you feed your kids, holy ground.

The boundary waters, holy ground.

The therapist’s office, holy ground.

Your friend’s cabin, holy ground.

The lines at the state fair, holy ground.

That path you like to wander that takes you deep into that quiet place, holy ground.

The board meeting, the art museum, the game night, the voting booth, the city bus, the grocery store, the playground.

Holy, holy, holy. Take off your shoes and see the world is ablaze with God. Amen.

10am Service