The story of the ten lepers in the Book of Luke takes place on a threshold that may not be immediately recognizable. The narrative tells us how Jesus is on his way from his homeland of Galilee, in the north of what is now Israel, toward Jerusalem in the south. He is in the area between Galilee and Samaria, and you’ll recall that the inhabitants of Samaria, called Samaritans, were people who worshipped God the wrong way, and good Jews considered them pariahs and outcasts.
But if you look at a map of first-century Israel, you’ll see that there actually isn’t any “area between Samaria and Galilee.” They share a border, like British Columbia and Washington. That village that Jesus passes through could be in Galilee, could be in Samaria, could be right on the line between.
So this story of radical healing actually happens in a liminal space—a place that is neither here nor there. It’s a place we move through on our way to somewhere else—like a hallway—or a place where we are forced to wait—like a hospital waiting room, or an airport.
The word “liminal” comes from the Latin word for a threshhold: limin. Liminal spaces are not particularly pleasant, and they’re often really uncomfortable. In these spaces and times, the past is gone—unretrievable—and the future is uncertain. We find ourselves asking questions like “What just happened?” “Where are we?” “What comes next?”
The Catholic theologian Richard Rohr describes this state of being:
Liminal spaces, therefore, are a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them. It is when you have left the 'tried and true' but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run…anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing.
Rohr also says:
Here we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown. There alone is our old world left behind, while we are not yet sure of the new existence. That’s a good space where genuine newness can begin. Get there often and stay as long as you can by whatever means possible…This is the sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed. If we don’t encounter liminal space in our lives, we start idealizing normalcy.
Hello, Prospect, and welcome to liminal space and time.
Last week we celebrated a 14-year relationship that has now come to an end. Meighan Pritchard, our minister since 2012, walked with us through COVID, the increasingly dramatic consequences of global warming, and three national elections, and steered us toward a new focus on environmental justice.
So this is a time to grieve our loss of a passionate, loving, spiritual, deeply committed leader. Liminal time and space offers us an opportunity to grieve what has been lost, before we leap back into hoping and planning for the future. We can use this time to support each other as we remember the best of our relationship with Meighan in our prayers and conversations. Doing this conscious work of loss will help prepare us for our new life with whomever we call to be our next pastor.
And at the same time, we look forward to an interim period that can eventually lead to a new permanent minister, and a renewed purpose and meaning as a church. And in this time between ministers, we are looking carefully at our church, at this community of seekers, and asking what is working and what we could change for the better.
We are not alone in liminal time and space. The Bible is full of stories about people in holding patterns, waiting to move to whatever comes next. Every time the Bible mentions 40 days, or 40 years, we are looking at a threshold where people are looking back at what was and preparing themselves for a new way of experiencing the Holy in their lives. Remember Noah, standing in the rain on the deck of the Ark, wondering if he would ever again see dry land. Remember the Israelites, recently escaped from 400 years of slavery, complaining about the loss of the luxuries they claimed to remember, as they wandered toward an unseen promised land. Remember Elijah lying under a thorn bush in the wilderness, too depressed even to feed himself. Remember Jesus after an ecstatic experience of baptism, fighting off the temptation to claim power, wealth, and worship. Remember the apostles, waiting together on Pentecost morning for inspiration and guidance after Jesus’s death and resurrection.
Liminal time in the Bible has several functions. The first is to move us out of what is normal and accustomed, so we are compelled to see the world and ourselves with new vision, and to let in new ideas. Nothing is permanent, so everything seems possible.
Liminal time is also a time to practice patience and careful listening, and to acknowledge the reality of our situation and our feelings about it. Are we afraid? Are we depressed? Are we relieved that the old ways are over? Do we feel newly free, or newly constrained? Are we excited about what might come?
Liminal time prepares us to step out into a new way of being with God and with each other, with renewed faith and hope.
And finally, liminal spaces and times are also where miracles happen.
What can happen there? Start with small daily miracles of survival. The ten sick men in that nowhere village in the story live a liminal existence. Their disease cuts them off from the rest of humanity so that they are neither alive nor dead. There is a Samaritan among this group of Jews that approaches Jesus. In any other circumstance, his companions would be avoiding any contact with his unclean self. But in this borderland, “orthodox” and “heretic” are meaningless in the daily struggle to stay alive. This tiny community of damaged men support each other, share the food they can beg or forage, and offer each other what comfort they can, like the mutual support that happens in some homeless camps.
Back in 2011, Prospect spent several months without a pastor before we even began our search for an interim. We discovered then that several persons in the congregation had potential sermons they were willing to present, and we found that these were good and thoughtful speakers. We learned that some of the governing structures we had lived by for decades were no longer useful, and we experimented with some new ways of living as a church—forming flexible teams rather than elected committees, for example. We learned that pastoral care was not something we could leave exclusively up to the pastor—rather, we took care of one another.
We also discovered that there were important tasks only the pastor could do. We thought briefly about continuing on as a congregation completely self-led, but that liminal time confirmed for us that we really did need to call a pastor to guide the continued life of our church.
All of this is to say that as challenging as this in-between time feels, we can also look forward to new energy and ideas to rise up, to renew and refresh us. And this is already happening. Already, our young people are dreaming dreams, and our elders are having visions about what Prospect can be and become in the next phase of its life as a community built on love and justice. People are stepping forward to take on as many as possible of the tasks of maintaining the church. And they are bringing new and fresh ideas.
Robin Russell, Sue Erber, and Addie Harrington have a plan for a monthly family Sunday—starting in September!—that people with children can count on and plan for. The Pacific Northwest Conference of the UCC is helping us find creative ways to have communion when we don’t have an ordained or authorized minister. Plans are in place to find tenants for all the offices on the 3rd floor.
Isaiah writes God’s words, for us:
Do not remember the former things
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.
In this liminal time, we can live in a way that expresses and supports our core beliefs—that we follow Jesus in his life of radical love in action, and that we trust the Holy Spirit to inspire us to new lives that can surprise us with joy.
Amen