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It's my great pleasure this morning to introduce our first lecture of the day for the Robert F. Jones Lectures, Dr. Dorothy Bass. Dorothy is currently the director of the Valve Paraiso Project on the Education Formation of People in Faith, a Lilly Endowment project that develops resources to help contemporary people live the Christian faith with vitality and integrity in changing times.

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Dorothy has provided scholarly leadership at several institutions, including the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John's in Minnesota, Chicago Theological Seminary, University of Chicago, Brown University, Harvard Divinity School, Wellesley College, and several other divinity schools and seminaries. As our president, Ted Wardlaw reported last night Dorothy earned her PhD in American Civilization at Brown University, an MA from Union Theological Seminary in Columbia University, and a BA from Wellesley.

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Dorothy has written or co-written five books, including a forthcoming book with Craig Dykstra for Life Abundant, Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry. and has written a recent book, Leading Lives That Matter, What We Should Do and Who We Should Be, with her husband, Mark Schwang, who teaches at Valparaiso. Dorothy is the mother of two brilliant and gifted college students, John and Martha, one of whom, Martha, was on our campus last year for an FTE conference. There are some things, these are some of the things that you might learn about Dorothy from her vita.

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But the significance of Dorothy's work is much more difficult to articulate. If you have passed a church in recent years bearing a sign, announcing a sermon series or study group exploring Christian practices, if your church or denomination is exploring concrete ways to practice hospitality, care of the earth, seeking justice, keeping the Sabbath, or giving testimony, then you should know that to some degree, some great degree, Dorothy Bass is to thank. Dorothy is a central figure in a movement to help congregations reclaim a way of life that chooses life, that resists the cultural religion of consumerism, a rhythm of life that is responsive to God and which meets God in the practical otherness of the stranger, the earth,

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God and the deeper streams of our own lives. While Christian practices are ancient, they represent a distinctively important possibility for congregations to remain vital. As her sister-in-law, Diana Butler Bass, observes in her recent writings, the way of embodied Christian practice represents a third way between rigid traditionalism and popular consumerist styles of church. Dorothy's own and her edited work have provided a solid, theoretical, and accessible foundation for the future of Christian formation.

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The importance for this work cannot be overstated, as my students know. I met Dorothy about nine years ago following the release of the groundbreaking first volume of the series, Practicing Our Faith. Dorothy and Don Richter convened a small group of young scholars in the field of youth ministry to help write a book articulating Christian practices for teenagers, which became the book Way to Live.

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For over 2 years, we met in several different, I believe five or six different cities, including Chicago and San Francisco and San Antonio, and finally at Holden Village in Washington, to talk and to think and to write together about Christian practices. Now what was special about this process was that each of us co-authored our chapters with a teenage writer, me with my 14-year-old nephew, Matthew. We, over these two years, listened to teenagers tell us stories about their practices, where they find life. And we told our stories, and together we learned of ancient stories of how Christians have practiced faith over the centuries.

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It was an extraordinary group of young people and an extraordinary process. I must confess that as an academic, I'm used to not being the smartest person in the room, but it was quite disturbing to know that the brightest people were only 14. So for over 2 years, Dorothy convened this motley group and herded us around the country to the mountains of Washington, Holden Village, an intentional Lutheran community. But I want to make a couple of observations

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about today's lecture that grow from my experience over these two years. First of all, Dorothy is deeply concerned about how people learn, how people grow in faith. Secondly, she has a deep respect for young people. She cares for them deeply.

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Thirdly, and most significantly, although she is an excellent scholar, a good thinker, and a crisp, clear writer, her work exists not as a tenure requirement or intellectual exercise, but flows from Dorothy's own love for the church. You will know this too in a few minutes. Finally, I want to alert you that Dorothy has gone to great lengths to be with us this morning.

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Her flight last evening, yesterday morning, was canceled out of Chicago. She was able to catch a flight to Houston, but drove from Houston and got here in Austin around 10 o'clock last evening. In addition, her luggage was lost and has not yet been delivered. So I want to invite you to join me today and tomorrow in extending an extra measure of hospitality to Dorothy.

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These are not things we count on when we travel. Join me this morning in welcoming Dr. Dorothy Bass as our Jones lecturer. Thank you so much, David, for that generous introduction and for your hospitality.

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Already, during the few hours that I've been here, I always say it's great to be here, but this time even more so after the ordeal of getting here. But there's another special reason that I'm especially delighted to be giving these lectures in this place. My parents first met just a few blocks from here, at the University of Texas, and one of the members of the women's group of First Presbyterian Church in Fort Worth, which funded this lecture, was my maternal grandmother.

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So, and actually the lecture was founded in the summer of the year in which Dr. Jones baptized me. So I'm as old as this lecture series. But it's a wonderful opportunity to be grateful for the care that the Christian community has given to me over the course of my life.

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A few days after my baptism, my parents and I moved to Newport News, Virginia, in the first of nine moves we would make before I went off to college. I've made at least that many moves since that time. I gladly embraced some of these moves, but others felt like going into exile. Leaving our home of four years in Northern California at the age of nine felt like being driven out of the garden.

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Attending four different schools in 4th and 5th grades felt like wandering in the wilderness. Moving to New York to start seminary felt like going up to Jerusalem. The Navy families expect to move and have a good deal of support in doing so, and so do those who continue long in higher education and enter the academic life as I did. But this experience of mobility

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belongs to many other people as well. Even though the root of the word parish means those who dwell nearby, the pressure on ministers, as on other professionals, is to allow one's career trajectory, which is in itself an interesting word, to determine one's location. And for others, for those who scramble for jobs instead of pursuing a career, the forces of dislocation are stronger and even more wrenching. Today, almost every place contains persons from many places, immigrants, exiles, refugees, migrant workers.

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In all likelihood, some are still transient, some are happily settled, and some are yearning in ministry for homes they will never see again. This phenomenon is multiplied in cities all over the world. And some culture critics argue, in fact, that displacement or rootlessness is the characteristic feature of our age, the signal marker of post-modernity. Contemporary people in North America and elsewhere live increasingly in what the historian William Leach calls a vast landscape of the temporary.

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people with floating executives and temporary workers, all unable or unwilling to make lasting commitments to specific places. More and more of our time is spent in anonymous spaces designed for mobility or profit. Airports, my own experience yesterday, shopping malls, freeways, supermarkets. Even in this beautiful part of Texas,

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There are long stretches of road that could be anywhere, lined with fast food franchises and big box retailers that could be anywhere, serving consumers who live in new homes that could be anywhere, and that's also true in Maine and Oregon. Sustaining the itinerant inhabitants of these homogenized landscapes are food and fuel, and often even water, that have traveled great distances too. damaging the environment. of specific places and of the earth as a whole in the process.

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Certain advantages come to many from the changes that are reconfiguring place. Even so, humankind as a whole needs to be wary, I think, of the ways in which the erosion of place and the increasing tenuousness of human attachment to place may lead us into taking up with the world, may lead us into a way of life that injures both human beings and the earth. And this is especially so for those of us whose way of life does the most injury, including mine.

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Dislocation has very different sources and results for venture capitalists and for migrant workers, of course. But in both cases, dislocation breaks community. whether with members of one's own family or with those who grow the food we eat. For those who are privileged, learning to dwell more faithfully in place, learning to put our bare feet on specific spots of ground and to know these spots as God's creation, is a needed discipline by which to learn

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to resist some of the things that we've addressed in the book that David mentioned and in all of our work on Christian practices, to resist the commodification of everything, to resist a sheerly utilitarian approach to the natural world and to one another, to appreciate the love that farmers and refugees have for their home places, to resist settling for shallow forms of engagement with one another and the world. Learning these things will be good for those of us who already know them, but who don't have the freedom to live in accord with that knowledge. So in these lectures, I want to explore the significance of embodied engagement with actual places on this earth as a dimension of the Christian life.

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And this grows partly out of a conviction I had two or three years ago that I wanted to include care for the earth more thoroughly in the way of life comprised of Christian practices that we've been developing over the years. Place is one of the few dimensions of human existence that's so basic, so indispensable to our experience as embodied beings, that it serves as an element within any way of life. In previous work, I explored, for example, another dimension, time, part of every way of life, right?

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And argued that the practices that shape the temporal lives of Christian people are crucial to our formation in Christian faith, receiving each day as gift in morning and evening prayer, keeping Sabbath and celebrating Christ's resurrection each week, observing the fasts and feasts of the Christian year. Participating in these practices addresses fundamental human needs for rest and renewal. But beyond that, and even more importantly, participating in these practices forms Christian people in a habitus of gratitude, reminds us of our mortality and our dependence on God, and helps us to hear the stories of God as the stories of our own lives. that we might walk in the newness of life given in baptism.

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So living in time in certain ways, we resist a 24/7 culture that claims that time is money and encourages us only to use and be used by it. Living in time in certain ways, we are formed as God's people. So just as I began to study Christian practices for living in time, because I needed a better way of living in time than the culture offered, what I found there was a beautiful and powerful pattern of formation in Christ. And likewise, I take up the topic of life in place, partly out of my own need, my own history of mobility, which has given me both empathy with the pains of dislocation

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and restlessness now about staying put in the small city in Indiana where I ended up. But I also take up this topic out of concern that so many places and the earth as a whole are today threatened by harmful patterns of use. So my hope is not so much to develop rules for life in place, and our practices have never been trying to lay down laws, but to stir our imagination, to conceive of place as a matter of practical and theological concern, a crucial step in challenging the diminished care for place in the contemporary world.

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So, a definition of place, as I understand it. Place is located, but not everywhere is a place. Space, and you wouldn't believe the amount of theoretical literature there is on this question. It's very interesting and historical.

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Historical and philosophical literature, very interesting space can be measured in cubic feet or square. miles. But place is thick and embodied, inhabited and known. As I use the term, a place is a specific convergence of people, story, and earth.

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You can know the precise latitude and longitude of somewhere without knowing it as a place. Lines and numbers don't get at the realities of sociability, meaning, and material density. that make the difference between place and space. A place is known most fully from within, as an integrated, multifaceted surround received through bodily experience and shared interpretation.

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In Christian faith, we have been made a people of memory and hope. We tell stories that clothe places with meaning. And we know the earth not as a mere trove of natural resources, but as God's creation, and ourselves as part of that creation.

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Attending to actual places is a matter of honoring the incarnate, embodied character of Christian faith and discipleship, and also a way of responding to the needs of actual landscapes and the earth as a whole for care. Now, there's a lot of throat clearing. One more preliminary. Many of us late modern Protestants have been deeply shaped by awareness that the triune God is one who acts in history, in time.

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And this is indeed an enduring emphasis of Christian tradition. Early Christians perplexed their pagan neighbors when they rejected cults centered on places associated with gods or spirits. As the great Orthodox scholar Alexander Schmemann noted, the apostles traveled into all the world with the message that the living Christ could be encountered there. Later, of course, and it seems to be just a human constant, many Christians did come to see specific places as especially holy, as they say at Iona, thin places.

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But never in a way that denied that God was everywhere, right? The tendency to emphasize history or time rather than earth or place was reinvigorated in recent decades, the biblical scholar Terence Fretheim argues, by theologians horrified by Nazi theologies of the land. In our own time of environmental crisis, however, Fretheim and many others are insisting that we need to expand our awareness of the triune God's deep engagement in and for creation in all its earthy materiality.

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Scripture and tradition bear much wisdom about earth, land, and place that is not at all of the Nazi kind. Indeed, it's becoming increasingly clear that justice in history and the well-being of creation are closely linked. So, I'm going to attempt now a sketch of a practical theology of place, crafted for the sake of creation, for the sake of faithful living, for the sake of the dislocated, poor, and dispossessed.

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And I have four big points and seven little ones. First big point. Dislocation is not strange or new to Jews and Christians. Rather, it resonates deeply with central themes in both traditions.

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The narratives of human origins in Genesis 2 to 11 acknowledge displacement as a fundamental human reality and portray the earliest human beings as men and women on the move. People cast again and again into unfamiliar territory. banished from a garden, exiled for a brother's murder, flooded off their farms, scattered across the earth after the collapse of a big tower. These narratives offer a profound insight.

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Our species has been on the move for as long as it has existed. Scientists come to the same conclusion after tracing evidence found in our genes or in prehistoric bones and pottery fragments. and recorded history confirms a similar picture. Mobility, even painful, wrenching mobility, is part of the human condition.

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Hebrew and Christian scriptures do not simply identify this aspect of the human condition, both also go on to make the human capacity for dislocation an opportunity for God's saving work. When Abraham answers God's call, leaving a familiar home to undertake a long journey to an unknown land of promise, he initiates a pattern that will recur again and again. And ever after, Jews will be rejoined to remember that a wandering Aramaean was my ancestor. In the letter to the Hebrews, Christians, too, will find in Abraham's journey a model for their own.

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And, indeed, highways and byways often turn out to be settings of transformation. The Rd. becomes liminal space, a site of instability that can become a place of healing. Only after 40 years of wandering are the children of Israel ready to enter the promised land.

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Much later, it's on the road that Saul of Tarsus meets the risen Christ. As Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, he will spend the rest of his life moving from city to city, sharing the good news, until finally he settles in Rome and opens what sounds like a hostel for those who are traveling to see him. Transformative mobility has also appeared again and again in the history of Christian spirituality and ministry. The life of wandering undertaken by medieval Celtic peregrinis, such as St.

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Columbanus, imitated the faith of Abraham and the example of Jesus. Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. This is the foundation for a rigorous form of asceticism in Celtic spirituality. Later, St.

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Francis and other mendicants renounced the comforts of home in order to forge lives of apostolic witness in proximity to the poor, who were themselves being uprooted by economic changes of the time. During the Age of Discovery, the Jesuits described themselves literally as travelers for Christ and proved themselves willing to go wherever they might be sent. More recently, as our own country was settled by European Americans, Protestant churches also sent itinerants to serve and to tame the nominally Christian pioneers. Methodism, which was arguably the most successful of the frontier churches, ordained ministers as itinerants to allow the church to adapt quickly to changing conditions and to prevent the captivity of ministers to local cultures.

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And the stream of Christian tradition that embraces mobility continues to play an important role in the contemporary North American churches. In an era when Christianity is truly global, many U.S. Christians have learned to see their home places differently and to pray and work for conversion of life for themselves and others in the so-called first world through experiences of international study, short-term mission and service trips, and ongoing exchanges with sister parishes or partner synods overseas.

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In addition, we continue to act, with good reason, I believe, as if Abraham and Sarah's journey provides A normative model of mobility. I sometimes think of this when young people ask, and they really are worried about this. youngster just out of college, for example, where should I live? Shall I pull up stakes and move?

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If restlessness or a desire to consume experiences or a desire to escape from some difficulty or motives, I think the faithful answer is no. If, however, a proposed move is a response to God's call or is linked to a serious effort to discern a vocation, then I say, go. Of course, this requires lots of discernment telling the difference. In our society, however, vocation is so often equated only with job, which means that employment can overwhelm other considerations.

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Sometimes vocations to marriage or friendship should also impel or forestall a move. In spite of its liberating potential, however, mobility can easily devolve into a disengaged form of existence that is difficult to sustain. It's exhausting, and even more difficult to defend as a way of life. Human beings, and especially we Americans, often bolt rather than come to terms with the legitimate demands of specific people and places.

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Give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above, you know, or Daniel Boone, you should move as soon as you see the smoke from the next cabin. This can be the ditty of a joyful vagabond, but it might also be this theme song of an absent father and husband. For this reason, one strong and constant voice within the Christian tradition has affirmed that faithfulness usually requires settling down and staying put. So second big point.

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Alongside appreciation for the redemptive possibilities of life on the road, Scripture and tradition also incorporate powerful images of life in place, affirm the human longing for home, and encourage care for place. In the biblical narratives that have shaped Jewish and Christian worldviews, before the first human beings were set on the road, they were placed on the land. Both of the Genesis creation stories affirm that this placement was a perfect fit.

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In A profoundly reciprocal relationship, the earth creature of Genesis 2 is created precisely in order to till and keep the garden, just as this creature needs the garden for sustenance, so the flourishing of the garden depends on this creature's labor. And this creature was formed not just from dust, as we'll remember tomorrow on Ash Wednesday, but from arable soil. This is the connection between, in English, between humus and human.

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As with the mobility narratives, one does not have to take this literally to acknowledge profound insight into human capacities, the central role of agriculture in human well-being, and the damage that ensues when human beings abandon forms of tilling and keeping commensurate with the well-being of the land itself. A similar image of reciprocity appears in an ancient saying of the desert monastics. If a man settles in a certain place and does not bring forth the fruit of that place, the place itself casts him out as one who has not borne its fruit. Yearning to return to the original garden or something like it resurfaces over the centuries in monastic, communitarian, and utopian movements.

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The promise of a land of milk and honey and the image of God's people as a flourishing vineyard also articulate the persistent human yearning for a fruitful place in which to work, rest, and thrive. Over time, and especially after the destruction of the temple in 587 BCE, another place also emerges as a focus for Jewish, and later in a different way for Christian, yearning for home, Jerusalem. Neither biblical narrative nor actual history ever allow for permanent and untroubled possession of these beloved places.

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But even so, it is right and good, even godly, to long for them. For more than 1,500 years, Benedictines have been the leading Christian advocates of long-term commitment to place. arguing in words and with their lives that a few humble acres can be as fruitful a site for spiritual transformation as any road trip. When St.

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Benedict wrote the rule for a way of life that would draw the members of a Christian community closer to one another and to God, he criticized monks who moved from place to place and declared that, quote, The workshop where we are to toil faithfully at all these tasks that is the tasks of prayer and work, is the enclosure of the monastery and stability in the community. The contemporary Benedictine Joan Chidester has explained that stability says that where I am is where God is for me. Those who commit to stability renounce fantasies about the next town, the better job, the more attractive landscape, the more supportive community.

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Stability says, Chittister continues, that we have an obligation to see things through until we have done for them what can be done, and no less important, until they have done for us what can be done as well. We thus encounter, Chittister says, the love of God in the here and now and the them and those. Claire Matthews McGinnis, a married laywoman who teaches at Loyola College of Maryland, has drawn on this heritage in a fascinating way in an essay on the meaning of the academic life and tenure, the great elusive prize. Thinking of this long-term commitment as a kind of stability, she says, engenders, here's this wonderful quote, a willingness to bear from day-to-day

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the inevitable trials and disappointments of living and working in a particular setting, based on an acceptance that, for me, at this particular time, this place, and these people, this and no other, is the way to God. Matthew's embrace of stability resists the one-foot-out-the-door careerism that undermines the quality of learning and community for so many academics today as they struggle with mounting pressures to do most of their conversing in cyberspace and to find their closest colleagues in specialized international guilds far from home. And I think it's a very interesting image for the pastoral life as well.

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the embrace of the these and those, these particular people, as the place where God is present for us. In the present context of global dislocation and homogenization, we need to listen with special attention to those who treasure particular places and seek ways to nurture abundant life there. However, we need to do this without denying, first, The irreducible presence of mobility in the human condition and in the Christian tradition, and this is a corrective to all to nostalgias of place, and secondly, the...

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negative tendencies inherent in deep attachment to locale. It's no accident that the adjective linked to perish is parochial, which also connotes narrowness of vision. Those who stay put can become sticks in the mud, or worse, territorial bullies. So, we're heading into a paradox.

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The search for ways to enhance, we need, this is my third big point. The search for ways to enhance commitment to place without becoming sticks in the mud or worse, territorial bullies. If a place is a local convergence of earth, people, and story, then inhabiting a place faithfully requires us to ask about the quality and character of all three. Is the story told about a place a true story?

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In almost every case, we will discover that many stories overlap and compete, sometimes in ways that lead to violence. What people are welcome in the place and what people are not? And is Earth respected here as humankind's reciprocal partner? After devising my definition of place as the local convergence of earth, people, and story, I briefly considered organizing this lecture by exploring each of these elements in turn.

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What soon became evident, however, is that it is impossible to offer an account of one without constantly including the other two. Human beings don't come raw and culturally naked to a stretch of land or water or pavement. Rather, we arrive with our minds and our muscles already stocked with stories. Stories that over time can expand or contract or even change altogether.

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But stories that already and always shape how we understand and inhabit particular patches of earth. Belden Lane, a path-breaking student of the spirituality of place, puts this well. Every habitat, he writes, is approached by means of a particular habitus, a way of reading the natural world that has accumulated over time. This is a claim for the power of culture, of course, but it's not a claim that culture is all-powerful.

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It's striking that most scholars of place, including Lane, attribute to nature itself considerable eloquence and influence in the storied negotiations between Earth and people, that result in farms, cities, shrines, and other specific places. It's not difficult to think of terrains where Earth's eloquence and influence have been stifled, paved over, or dried up, or polluted with chemicals. But even in such places, the natural world will finally have its say.

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It's just that what it has to say will not be pleasing. Today, the most prominent and promising proposals to strengthen the well-being of place for the good of both the earth and the human community are the Agrarian Renewal Movement, whose chief voice is Wendell Berry. How many of you know the work of Berry? It's pretty well known.

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I'll tell you some. I won't assume that you do. And secondly, the architectural and ecological movement known as the New Urbanism. Both are intensely committed to promoting forms of fruitful reciprocity between people and earth, and both challenge contemporary people to revise the storied imaginations we bring to these different settings by deconstructing the damaging stories that are overwhelming the American urban and rural landscape.

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Think of some of the stories about these places that are out there. The story of the unstoppable march of progress. The story of unlimited economic expansion. The story wherein everything becomes a commodity.

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Barry, a poet, essayist, and novelist whose home is a small working farm in Kentucky, is our leading contemporary advocate for local culture, a rich phrase by which Barry refers to the nature of face-to-face human communities, patient and respectful tilling of the soil, and to the life-giving symbiosis between the two of these. Berry's work exposes the harm done by the powerful economic, social, and ideological forces that destroy rural communities by undermining human attachment to place. And it also portrays the virtues and benefits that accrue when local culture is strong.

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For Barry, a community is, this is a definition of community, a placed people. I think that's a nice phrase. Beyond this, a healthy community is, and I quote, a neighborhood of humans in a place, plus the place itself. It's soil, it's water,

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water, its air, and all the families and tribes of the non-human creatures that belong to it. If the place is well preserved, if its entire membership, natural and human, is present in it, and if the human economy is in practical harmony with the nature of the place, then the community is healthy. Berry makes his most powerful case for local culture in his novels. which narrate the different ways in which people of the fictional village of Port William foster practical harmony with the nature of the place, or not.

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For example, the eponymous narrator of Barry's 2000 novel, Jaber Crow, comments trenchantly on agricultural methods that simultaneously destroy practical harmony with nature and poison human community. The villain is the land-grabbing and debt-dependent, excuse me, he criticizes the methods that destroy practical harmony with nature, most notably the land-grabbing and debt-dependent methods of the greedy Troy Chatham, who devastates with chemicals and monoculture the rich bottom land his wife inherited from her father. And Troy does not husband his wife well either, which is the a very important part of a love story in this novel.

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Nathan and Hannah Coulter, two more fictional characters in other novels, are very different. They provide positive examples. Nathan and Hannah cultivate a good marriage, good farms, and good neighborhoods. At the end of Hannah Coulter, however, and I think this is Berry's most recent novel,

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Grave doubt exists about whether folks like the Coulters will be able to persevere in this wholesome way of life. Not because of global economic pressures, which Barry would do well to mention more frequently, but because their college-educated children do not choose to return to the farm. Every farm, Hannah muses at one point, should be run by the children of the people who farmed it before. Now, Barry has many appreciative readers in urban and suburban areas, readers attracted as I am to his advocacy of simple living, face-to-face community, and ecological responsibility.

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At the same time, however, a different and more contextually helpful approach to the renewal of place is also gaining strength, the new urbanism. How many of you know about the new urbanism? I'll tell you about this too. Now this movement first emerged among architects, ecologists, and city planners who began to recognize the human and environmental damage done by patterns of residential development that took off after World War II.

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Patterns based on an American dream of single-family home ownership on a sizable piece of land. As the architects of this dream were actually, as the artifacts of this dream were actually constructed on the ever-expanding edges of cities all over the continent. The separation of home places from workplaces and the apparently unending extension of roads and shopping areas rapidly homogenized much of the American landscape.

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Both in the sense that The land use was homogenous at any given site. You put the poor people over here, the workplaces there, the wealthy people here, the old people there, the young people there, right? A homogenization of space in that sense.

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But also in the sense that the suburbs, all these suburbs started looking a whole lot like one another, wherever they might be. These same patterns of residential, commercial, and transportation design eroded face-to-face contact among human beings. Now perhaps, as I just did, perhaps our minds are racing to consider the suburbs and especially the new exurbs. But notice also that this pattern had some of its most harmful effects in cities, where those who could not afford the suburban dream were increasingly cut off from jobs, corner grocery stores, and safe public space.

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The new urbanism pursues a much different pattern of development that tries to foster face-to-face communities by including things like front porches, walkable streets where people actually need, and streets that go places that people actually need to go. Shops, schools, the post office. Careful attention to the placement of plentiful, attractive, and open public space, and resistance to segregation of every sort.

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Racial, class, age, work and home, and so on. Now, both of these two very thoughtful rural and urban responses to the crisis of place foster depth of engagement with the earth and within human communities, and they resist, in important ways, the harmful stories about place that dominate the global economy. At the same time, it's clear that neither of these movements carries us all the way to a Christian practice of life and place. Barry's unwillingness to honor

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the enduring and sometimes transformative importance of mobility in human affairs is a problem. I'm just not convinced that it would be better to keep our children home rather than sending them off to college, as Hannah Coulter suggests. Are we raising our children for ourselves or for the world? This bias also leads Barry to tell a story about the land that is at least partly false.

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Along the Ohio River, it's not so many generations since founders of the families that he hopes will farm this land in perpetuity displaced a prior human community. Contests between the powerful and the dispossessed also plague the growth of the new urbanism. In a market economy, what begins as a proposal for interracial, intergenerational renewal all too easily ends as mere gentrification. These are concerns that those who follow a Nazarene who was born in a stable and crucified outside the city walls cannot ignore.

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When we think about place and when we live in a place, it's part of our call always to look to the boundaries. Even as Christian communities address the needs of this historical moment to care more faithfully for place, therefore, We need also to remain open to the transformative potential of mobility, both hitting the road ourselves when called to do so, and receiving generously those who find their way to our home places. And we need also to cultivate, in place or on the road, a spirit of repentance for the ecological violation, the social exclusions,

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and the self-serving falsehoods that have too often shaped our life in place. This is a form of cultivation that can only take place on a geography of grace, a geography infused with the presence of the triune God, a geography on which we do, in fact, dwell if only we would see it. Fourth big point. When people, earth, and story are joined in ways that witness to the transforming presence of the crucified and risen Lord, places become sacramental, signs and vehicles of God's grace for the good of the church and for the life of the world.

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Initiation into what I'm calling the geography of grace is enacted in every celebration of holy baptism. This sacrament is offered to one who is held in the arms of specific adults, if an infant, excuse me, surrounded by a specific assembly, whether they're young or old, washed by a specific minister who speaks in the language and accent of a specific region, using common water from a nearby source. Here are people, the assembly, earth, the water, story, The baptismal prayer from the movement of the Spirit over the face of the deep, through the flood and the Red Sea, across the Jordan River to this very font, where the dying and rising of this one will be joined to the dying and rising of Jesus Christ.

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The baptism of this one embodied person is as local a convergence as there can be. but it also transcends the local to situate those who are gathered in the cosmos. This embodied local celebration grafts the new Christian into a larger body of others, a body that encompasses many distinct individuals who are together known as the body of Christ, the Church. This body exists both within a specific assembly and also as a global transgenerational company of saints.

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And that is not all. Both this finite individual and the birthing, living, dying body of the Church as a whole are united with Christ's own living and dying for the sake of the whole world, and empowered by and sharing in Christ's own rising. In his marvelous book, Holy Ground, a Liturgical Cosmology, The Lutheran theologian Gordon Lathrop explores what he calls the locative and the liberative dimensions of baptism.

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This language can help us to recognize one of the central and most generative features of Christian faith and life, a dynamic that applies not only to baptism, but also to the other shared activities that shape the life together of any Christian community. Christian practices are locative. orienting us to worthy life in this place. And they're also liberative, breaking through the constraints and idolatries of every place.

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Both dimensions are present whenever we proclaim the word or gather at the table, but also when we practice prayer, catechesis, gift-giving, and more. Consider first the local dimension. Christian faith does not acquire pilgrimage to a distant holy site.

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Instead, it requires attendance at a table where bread is passed from hand to hand. As part of a parish, congregation, or monastic community, Christians take on the joys and the aggravation of a specific local membership. And perhaps we also begin to discover the great wisdom of living within limits as we delve deep, rather than chasing ever-new companions and experiences.

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Here in this place, we take on an identity that has shape. Here we learn to walk through the world in specific ways. Here we come to count on others to pray for us by name. Boundaried, identified, we know who we are and whose we are.

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We also know where we are and when. On the other hand, life in this local place liberates those who are gathered for faithful living beyond the constraints of this or any other human location. And the wonderful saying of the theologian Duane Priebe, Draw any line that includes us and excludes many others, and Jesus Christ is always on the other side of the line. When someone joins a specific parish or congregational family, he or she also acquires siblings in every land and race.

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The assembly's urgent prayers are for those distant ones, and not only for itself. So locative, liberative, Christian practices are both, and as Christians, we walk on the edge of the two all our lives long. In one sense, Each one of us walks this edge, discerning where to be.

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But more truly, I think, we do this as church, with some members putting down roots and others traveling the many roads of ministry in the wide world, as individual gifts and God's call determine. Now, seven little points. Suggestions for living on the geography of grace. Seven immodest proposals for Christian education and formation.

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for life in place and on the road. First, we need to be and to teach mindfulness of the place or places where we live. Try to meet the whole membership, natural and human, of which the congregation is a part. Understand that our identity includes where we are as well as who and when, so take a good look and give thanks.

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My own congregation, one of my favorite church meetings I've been to lately was with a person, we're right by the dunes on the very bottom of Lake Michigan. It's an area where actually the environmental movement started in efforts to save those dunes that are on the south of the sand dunes on the south side of Lake Michigan. And now there's an ecological organization that cares for and has federal funding to care for the watershed of our area. And the person who leads that came and talked with us as we were considering what kind of new building or addition to add.

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Learned so much. Anyway, so learn about that. Secondly, lean into the tension between the locative and the liberative into which you have been baptized. Now, there are many implications of this admonition.

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I want to lift up just one. God-saving work in the world, looked at in this way, is said first of all in the local and global dimensions of human community, as opposed to the national. This primacy is embedded in liturgy, local and global. not national.

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And Earth is also trying to teach us this lesson, as climate change caused by emissions in one locale affect the entire biosphere. A powerful recent call for Christians to reimagine the world in this way comes in William Cavanaugh's book. Do you know him? A new young theologian I admire very much, a book called Theopolitical Imagination, Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in the Age of Global Consumerism.

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Third, we need to keep on honoring the human body as God's gift and a precious site of connection to others. I haven't spoken about cyberspace, which is clearly one of the spaces into which embodied people are falling, as we lose contact with the dear particularities of actual places. But as cyberspace encroaches on many areas of life, you could get a college degree without ever holding a book or sitting next to a peer or looking into the eyes of a teacher.

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One of the gifts of Christian people to the world is our continuing insistence on the tactile, the embodied, and the face-to-face. We need to live and study and worship in buildings that honor the earth and welcome people of all abilities. with fonts that are big and brimming with real water, and tables that are laden with produce we acknowledge as God's gift and the fruit of human labor. At this moment in history, we must continue to surround one another with touch and taste, sight and sound and smell.

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Fourth, we need to acknowledge that all human possession of place is temporary. No one owns a piece of land or a house or even a backpack forever. If we're not summoned away by vocation or historical change, we finally abandon all of these in death. From earliest times, the holy places venerated by Christians have been places with bones, tombs of martyrs and saints whose resting bodies simultaneously sanctified a place

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and acknowledged that the human hold on even that place was limited. Even as we foster care for place, a care blessed and based in love, we also confess then, Lord, you have been our dwelling place in every generation. As with our other loving relationships, we need to commit ourselves to the care and well-being of that which is mortal. In this case, land, house, place.

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while loving it in God rather than as an expression of our own desires. Fifth, we need to try to tell truthful stories about place. When people inhabit a patch of earth and clothe it with story, it matters immensely what stories we tell. Are these stories honest?

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Do they tell the truth? Are they full of life, or do they narrate a way of death? Who gets to tell them? The small city in Indiana where I live can tell its story in a number of ways.

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In one, Valparaiso means veil of paradise. In another, Valparaiso is a historical stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan. Neither of these stories is adequate. When we listen to other voices and dig down a few layers, the story becomes, always becomes complex.

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and a narrative begins to emerge that names horrible deeds as well as remarkable acts of kindness. But this story will never be told in perfect truth either. Fortunately, on the geography of grace, this story is intertwined with another story, the historical and transhistorical local and global story of Jesus Christ, which alone can unite the tax collector, the honest fisherman, and the woman caught in adultery, or the racist and the dispossessed of Valparaiso, Indiana.

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Six, wherever you live, live near the boundaries. Boundaries are the places of Christian work, and their displacements are the result of this work, writes Michel de Certeau, a French theorist. An example of Certeau's point is a Catholic worker house. a specific site that offers welcome to those with no place, while also becoming a place of class, spiritual, and actual dislocation for those who voluntarily call it their home.

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Place is indispensable to the apostolic work of this house, but this place, a house, is a place that dislodges the boundaries that usually define place. And even if you and I are not Catholic Workers, there are plenty of other boundaries near our homes, I'm sure. And 7th, don't try to engage the challenges of life in place and life on the road all by yourself. Christian congregations in a mobile world can be places

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where we find others with whom to discern a call to stay put or to hit the road, and to make connections locally and globally. They can also be places from which to head out onto the geography of grace, where every place is strange, but no place is finally alien, whether it lies across the seas or in your own backyard. I want to conclude with one more image of my mobile, Texas-born parents. As they moved again and again, with one, then two, three, finally four children, they did not skim the surface of the places where they lived.

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They put down roots in place after place. Before unpacking, my mother would locate the public library and the Presbyterian church. And we would be active members of both until our last day in town. My father chaired a building committee of a new congregation in New Jersey, even though he knew we would stay barely long enough to sit in the pews.

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They planted gardens and they made friends. The recent death of a neighbor in Vallejo, California, which we left in 1958, saddened them deeply. Now in their mid-80s, they're aware that their hold on their present home isn't going to last forever either. And yet here, too, in a retirement community, they create welcome for others and contribute with amazing generosity to the shared civic and spiritual life of their congregation, city, and building.

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And I'm sure that each of you know similar people in your own familiar congregations, or in your own families, congregations, or communities. And I think there's something of the Paschal ministry in that kind of life. All human life happens in place, sometimes stationary and sometimes on the road.

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When we put on Christ, when this human life is transformed by union with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we become free to pour ourselves out for others wherever we may be, and even if we're not planning to stay there very long. Putting on Christ, we're called to love our neighbors even though we or they might move away, and even though we and they will surely die. For them that we're also called to love them, even though we're likely to be stuck with them for decades to come, and maybe for eternity as well.

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When we're on the road, a vulnerable place to be, we nonetheless take the risk of giving and receiving love. And when we stay put, which is a dangerous place in its own way, we're called to do so knowing that the neighbor is not only the one who's close at hand, but also the one who is far off, in a place for which we yearn, or in a place we fear as enemy territory. Thanks.