Philippians 3.17 – 4.1, Luke 13.31-35
The Second Sunday of Lent, 16 March 2025, Austwick
I used to live just around the corner from a place which has the most-often-stolen street sign in the UK, if not in the world: can you guess what street it is?
It’s Penny Lane, made famous of course by The Beatles. What is remarkable about Paul McCartney’s song is that it is not a celebration of a world heritage site, but a description of a very ordinary street, and the people who spend their days ‘there beneath the blue suburban skies’.
Penny Lane has changed a bit since the Beatles released the song in 1967, though not that much. There’s still a ‘barber showing photographs / of every head he’s had the pleasure to know’. What’s different now is that the barber’s shop sign is written in the same typeface as The Beatles used on their records, and displays the playful strap-line ‘Above us only hair’.
Take a moment to picture a place which is special to you. It could be very ordinary and close to home, a place which may be unremarkable to the outsider, but is special to you because of the memories it holds, the associations it has for you, or simply because it’s what you regard as home.
Or you might picture somewhere far away from here, a favourite holiday destination, maybe, or the place you spent your childhood.
We all have places which are special to us – it’s interesting to consider why we feel that way about them. The theologian Walter Brueggemann says that it’s not so much about the place itself, but what’s happened to us there:
Place is space which has historical meaning, where some things have happened which are now remembered and which provide continuity and identity across generations. Place is space in which important words have been spoken which have established identity, defined vocation and envisioned destiny. [1]
Thus my grandmother’s kitchen where you always felt held and nurtured by family; the church where you made your marriage vows; the burial ground you visit: I’d imagine that these unremarkable looking places hold as much value – no, likely far more value – to you as the exotic cities you stopped at during that one-time sunshine cruise.
In our mental-health-conscious society people talk a lot about going to their ‘happy place’, which can be a physical space or could just be a place within their heart and mind which lifts their spirit. The term ‘happy place’ was popularised by the BBC radio broadcaster Jordan North when in the jungle on I’m A Celebrity, he overcame his fear of snakes by chanting about his ‘happy place’ – Burnley FC’s Turf Moor stadium. Not the obvious choice for most of us, but right for him.
‘Penny Lane’ is a good example of how music often helps us recall or celebrate our special places. There are countless other songs which do it – on the B-side of the Penny Lane 45 was Strawberry Fields Forever, John Lennon singing about the place where he played as a child with his friends. There’s plenty of songs which might come to mind to those who love these Yorkshire Dales: from ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ to ‘On Ilkley Moor Baht ‘at’; from ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’ to ‘Jerusalem’…
The hymn ‘Jerusalem’ reminds us that sometimes we use places to describe our values or our visions, our hopes and our intentions. William Blake lived virtually his entire life within a small area of London, but his words, popularised in Charles Hubert Parry’s hymn, are universal – they envision God living among the English in the shape of the holiest of world cities, Jerusalem, being ‘builded here / among those dark Satanic Mills’.
Jerusalem must be high up, if not top, of the list all the places in the world which people regard as special. It has holy significance to the world’s 16 million Jews, two-and-a-half billion Christians, and 1.9 billion Muslims. It’s a place visited by the devout seeking special blessing for their faith; and to the many more who never get to go there the very name Jerusalem symbolises something profound about the dwelling of God among people.
When Jerusalem inspires awe, wonder and praise, it represents the best of places; when it becomes a battlefield, as it so often does, it looks like the worst.
Jesus revered the city, and loved its people as a hen loves her brood, but he also knew that ‘Jerusalem kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it’, and that it would be the place where he would meet his end.
Jesus’ crucifixion at the hands of Jerusalem’s masters represents the awful things that happen when our sense of place gets bound up with what we might call a ‘negative nationalism’, an exclusiveness among a place’s insiders whereby they cast out or punish the outsider.
Jesus’ suffering represents the suffering of anyone who has ever been rejected from a place because they’re deemed by the occupants to not belong there; to not fit in.
This is why Paul is keen to remind the believers that “our citizenship is in heaven” – we have our time of belonging on earth, and it is a time we’re given to enjoy, but we must always remember where our true and ultimate home is.
When we do this, it frees us to thank God for the places which are special to us here, in unselfish appreciation of them; and this draws us closer in love and joy to Him who gives them to us.
Notes
[1] Walter Brueggemann: The Land – Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith.
