The Wild Goose is Flying

Spread Your Wings

“Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it.”

Genesis 28:16

The Wild Goose Festival is over for another year. What an event—thirty-five hundred people sweating like wrestlers in a dusty camp ground by the side of the French Broad river. It was hot and holy. There was a heatwave in the mountains of North Carolina so humid that you literally had to peel your clothes off at the end of the day because they were glued to your skin. Barbara Brown Taylor took a blue cotton hanky from her bag to mop sweat from her face while she preached. She recalled something her granny said about preachers: “If he ain't sweatin', I ain't listenin'!” Amy Grant had a swarm of moths flying around her face as she sang. She said, “Yum, bugs—protein!” There was singing, and dancing and preaching so hard that I worried the Rev. Otis Moss, III would faint from oxygen deprivation—when does he breathe! Surely God was in that place and we all knew it.

Barbara Brown Taylor used the story of Jacob from Genesis for her sermon on Friday morning. After Jacob had blackmailed his brother, Esau, to give up his birthright for a bowl of stew, and then tricked his blind father, Isaac, into blessing him, he fled for his life into the wilderness. On the first night out, in the middle of nowhere, he dreamed the heavens opened, a ladder was set up on the earth and angels traveled up and down on it. God spoke to him and promised to give him and his many descendants the land on which he lay and to be with him and bless him forever. Jacob blessed the place and made a stone altar there on which he poured oil; he named the spot Bethel and called it the house of God. But then Jacob did what all of us try to do—he tried to bribe God. “If God will bless me, and keep me in this way that I am going, and give me bread to eat and clothing to put on so that I come back to my father's house in peace, THEN the Lord shall be my God...” Oh, my goodness—such a human!

Here's the deal—Bethel is everywhere and we are all exactly like Jacob. We are all human beings set on having things our own way, of making deals that favor us and promote our interests. We encounter the holy every day and don't even know it, because the holy is right here on my porch, it's in the heat, and in the ants I found crawling around in my kitchen when I returned. And it's wherever you are, and in whatever you are doing. Unless we get our heads out of the sand and make our altar in this world, in this moment, in this place, we will miss God's presence altogether. Because, the Divine is not off in the stratosphere somewhere; God is in the midst of us and we are in the midst of God. Surely God is in this place, and now we know it—how, then, shall we live?

                                                            In the Spirit,

                                                               Jane