Mtr. Holly's Farewell Sermon - "The Lord is in this place, and I did not know it."
Mtr. Holly’s farewell sermon, preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on July 19, 2026.
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In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“Surely God is in this place and I did not know it!” Jacob wakes from his dream knowing he has been sleeping on holy ground in a place where angels ascend and descend, connecting heaven to earth and earth to heaven. Jacob sets the stone he’d been using as his pillow up on its end as a pillar to mark this holy spot where his eyes saw God’s glory.
In downtown Louisville, Kentucky, on a street corner between Fourth Street and what is now Muhammad Ali Boulevard, there is a memorial plaque that stands as pillar of sorts, marking a modern-day Jacob moment that could be taken from the pages of Genesis. While living in the nearby Trappist monastery Abbey of Gethsemani, Thomas Merton (the monk, writer, and peace activist) was running some errands in 1958 when the heavens opened for him. Here's what he writes in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness….
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other [people], that I am only a [human being] among others.” … There are no strangers! …if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun….
…It was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time.
…I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.” (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp. 153–154)
Merton sees that these perfect strangers passing by are his kin, and so the gate of heaven is everywhere. Surely God is in this place! There is no place where we are away from God’s presence. As the hymn says, “You who long for days of fullness, all around us is your food.” God’s good Word has been seeded in all the world and so “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God;” as Elizabeth Barrett Browning puts it. “But,” she adds, “only he who sees, takes off his shoes.”
We don’t always see so clearly. We usually deal in spiritual binaries of the holy and the ordinary, heaven and earth, God’s presence and God’s absence, good and evil. Jesus warns about these kinds of simple dualities in the parable of the wheat and the weeds we just heard. “Let them grow together,” the landowner says. Uprooting the one plant will kill the other; so wait and watch and let the harvest sort it out. The weeds in question are tares, or “false wheat,” a plant that looks very much like the good grain. When we go rooting through our own lives or our neighbors’ lives trying to pluck out the weeds, we’re just as likely to pull up the good seed God has planted. There are no strangers in God’s eyes. The angels flow between heaven and earth in an effortless exchange; Jacob’s ladder is not one we need to climb step by step by step to heaven with trudging burdensome effort of extraction. That would be a tower of Babel. Grace is given generously to everyone, unearned. God will set us right. The gate of heaven is everywhere, and there are no strangers in God’s eyes.
And there are no weeds, as wise gardeners know, just good plants growing in the wrong place. I’ll never forget a friend describing the dandelions coming up in her yard as perfect gold coins waiting to be discovered in the front lawn. Everything we try to rip up from our hearts comes back to bite us when we approach ourselves with that violent impulse to eliminate. And we turn the same violent logic onto our neighbors, as we draw lines between who’s in and who’s out, which kind of people really count and which can be disposed of. But in God’s eyes there are no strangers, only beloved children.
Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is like wheat and weeds growing together, and then he doubles down, following it up with the parable about one big weed, better known as the parable of the mustard seed. “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” Mustard plants were weeds, hardly something you would plant on purpose. The kingdom flourishes from one tiny seed buried in the field, unseen until it flourishes as a massive bush disrupting the neat garden rows, where it offers an unlikely landing spot for all of Jesus’s strange-feathered friends.
Our tiny self-offering of openhanded trust is enough; faith like a mustard seed flowers in radical hospitality and receptiveness to the spirit of God. Jesus’s saving death like one grain of wheat or a tiny seed falling to the ground is a treasure hidden in a field, leaven hidden in the whole lump of dough, and so earth is crammed with heaven. John the Beloved elaborates on Jacob’s dream when he sees the spirit descend on Jesus from above at his baptism. The fluid movement between heaven and earth is fulfilled and realized in the Incarnation as God comes to be with us in the flesh. The nativity joins earth to heaven and heaven to earth inseparably.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes about God’s unshakable love for this little and contingent world. He says, “God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings AS THEY ARE; not an ideal world, but the REAL WORLD. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love. God establishes a most intimate unity with this. God becomes human, a real human being. While we exert ourselves to grow beyond our humanity, to leave the human behind us, GOD BECOMES HUMAN; and we must recognize that God wills that we be human, real human beings. While we distinguish between pious and godless, good and evil, noble and base, God loves REAL PEOPLE without distinction. God has no patience with our dividing the world and humanity according to our standards and imposing ourselves as judges over them. God leads us into absurdity by becoming a real human being and a companion of sinners, thereby forcing us to become the judges of God. God stands beside the real human being and the real world against ALL THEIR ACCUSERS. So God becomes accused along with human beings and the world, and thus the judges become the accused.” (Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Touchstone, 1995), p. 66-68, 84-85)
God loves this little and contingent world. God loves real human beings as we are, to the point of becoming one of us. In Jesus God takes up our human nature and embraces it whole-heartedly showing us that the world is “charged with the grandeur of God,” and that each person we’ve ever met radiates with divinity. God’s goodness is meant for each of us and by grace it will spring up in field of our lives unexpectedly until it’s large enough and hairy enough to play host to every kind of bird, each one finding their home in its shaggy branches.
In Christ we find our home and our rest. We find our true life, allowing everything to be just as it is, springing up fresh each day from the word God has planted in our hearts. The kingdom of heaven has come very near. God is loving us into loving, calling all of us forth as beloved children even in the midst of this suffering, groaning, travailing world. No weeds and no strangers. God will see us reconciled, that’s a promise, and with patience and unseen hope we wait for the revelation of God’s kingdom, which is already now hidden in all creation like a tiny seed. Surely God is in this place! We watch, we look, trusting that the gate of heaven is everywhere.
Lord, open our eyes! There is nowhere we can go apart from your presence. Heaven and earth are full of your glory! Whether we climb up to heaven or make the grave our bed or dwell in the utter most parts of the sea—you are there also, and nothing can separate us from your love.
People of St. Mark’s, it's been a gift to watch with you for God’s presence in this place. What a privilege to share so many joys and sorrows and to find the divine presence shining through them all like the sun. I will leave you with a passage from Rev. Austin Farrer, the Oxford theologian and wit, adapted for our church (and forgive the masculine pronouns).
“Here in [St. Mark’s Cathedral] in the place that [people] have built and dedicated, God desires to be at home with you. God is not content to be the God of the world, or to be the God of highest heaven, he [or she] must also be your God and inhabit where you have built. Now everything that God desires he desires with the whole of his heart. God has not got a mere corner of his heart for this corner of the world which is called [St. Mark’s Cathedral], for that is not what God is like. God’s caring for one thing does not get in the way of his caring for another thing: all the world is in God’s heart, and yet God loves every part of it with all his heart. He desires to dwell in every corner and cranny of his creation, and his whole heart is in every such desire. … God is whole, and God is one, and his heart is set on dwelling with you here, and being at home with you here. … God’s presence, spirit, power and love are poured into [this] church, into your bodies and your souls, like wine into cups, as much as they will contain, and then overflows. All the room you give, God will fill.” (Austin Farrer, “Human and Divine Habitations,” The End of Man, pp. 166–167)
My love and prayers are with you, and my every confidence is that God will continue to pour out presence, spirit, power, and love on you here. Let us receive that overflowing love, freely given, and then pour it out again for our neighbors. “Surely God is in this place!”
Amen.