Thin Places

Rev. Sam Alexander

November 30, 2003

Sermon 371

  Our New Testament lesson comes from the gospel of St. Luke, the 21^st Chapter.  The bulletin says verses 25-28.  I am going to begin my reading, however, with Verse 5 for it is, really, the beginning of what Jesus is saying here.  This is apocalyptic language which means it has fantastic imagery, and as Jesus speaks these words he has one set of things in mind.  When Luke put them in this gospel he had his eye on what was going on around in 70 A.D. when the temple was destroyed. But this apocalyptic language that talks about the pattern of God’s way in the world is true in every point in history and will one day come completely true, I believe.  Would you listen, please, to the Word of God.

“When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, Jesus said, “As for these things that you see the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another.  All will be thrown down.”

 So they asked him, “Rabbi, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this about to take place?”  And Jesus said, “Beware that you are not led astray, for many will come in my name and say I am he.  The time is near.  Don’t go after them.  When you hear of wars and insurrections do not be terrified, for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.”  Then Jesus said to them, “Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.  There will be great earthquakes and in various places famines and plagues, and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.

But before all this occurs they will arrest you, and they will persecute you.  They will hand you over to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name.  This will give you an opportunity to testify, so make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance, for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.  You will be betrayed, even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death.  You will be hated.  You will be hated by all because of my name, but not a hair on your head will perish.  By your endurance you will gain your souls. 

“When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that it’s desolation has come near.  Then those in Judea must flee to the mountains, and those inside the city must leave it, and those in the country must not enter it, for these are the days of vengeance as a fulfillment of all that is written.  Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days, for there will be great distress on the earth and wrath against the people.  They will fall by the edge of the sword and be taken away as captives among all nations, and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. 

There will be signs in the sun and in moon and the stars and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.  People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.  But then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.  And when these things begin to take place, stand up, raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near!”

This is the Word of the Lord.  Thanks be to God.

My father tells me that a title should never be put on a sermon until the sermon is finished.  I, however, have to put my sermon titles in the bulletin by Thursday, so I just thought I’d tell you that the title of this sermon is, “Thin Places”.  I would like you to keep that in the back of your mind.

Would you pray with me?

“Spirit of the living God, as these first words go forth from this pulpit, let them reach into every one of our hearts that we may be enlivened and enriched by them, that they will enable us to speak new words of grace.  In Christ’s name we pray, Amen.”

Thin places.  This is an idea that came out of Celtic Christianity, a mystical movement of Christianity between the 5^th and the 12^th centuries in what is now the British Isles.  Thin places.  This movement sought a kind of mystical connection to the divine.  They wanted to reach behind what is the reality of this world to that world behind the world, to that movement of Grace behind all that is.  They wanted to touch that divine one in whom we live and move and have our being.  So they talked about thin places, thin places between this world and that world of grace that surrounds us, holds us, creates us.  Thin places are those places and occasions when you can just touch the grace of God, when you know that God is present to you, a thin place, a thin veil between us and the grace of God.

Sometimes these were actual places they talked about, thin places; a shrine, or perhaps a cathedral or perhaps a room in a home, a place where somehow God was present for you.

At the Peniel Bible Conference, which I know I have mentioned before from this pulpit, not five or six years ago a woman came who had been coming there for some time to a minister’s conference, and she came carrying an intense burden.  She had in her younger years been abused really by an unusual cult, and she was carrying this deep pain inside herself.  She carried it in shame for a long, long time.  She was a little girl when it happened, and it wasn’t something that had even made it into her conscious mind, but when she came that summer she said it was beginning to emerge, and she wasn’t going to talk about it until she got to Peniel, because Peniel was a safe place.  It was a place where the Spirit of God lived.  She had that sense that it was a thin place, for her a place where she could feel enveloped by the grace of God.

Not all the thin places that were talked about are that.  Sometimes it is a place in time.  Consider the moments in time when you have felt like God has reached inside your heart.  Times of birth, times of crisis, moments of hurt and loss; those can be moments that are thin places, moments of joy and hope, thin places where it is as though you can touch the presence of God.  Sometimes it’s a person.  Certainly Jesus is the ultimate thin place, the place where we can reach out and touch and hold the presence of God, be changed by it.

But not only Jesus. Think of the people you know.  Whenever I think of a thin place inside of a person where I feel as though I can touch the presence of God, I automatically think of my wife.  She has been the grace of God moving me forward in many ways over these last years.  Who are the people you know that do that for you?  Thin places that come in relationships, in communities, places where the love of God and the grace of God shine through the veil between this world and the next, places that get so thin we can see through them.  There are also thin places inside our hearts and inside our souls and so we enter prayer rituals.  Some people stay in silence, and some people chant.  Some people walk a labyrinth.  All of this to find that thin place in our souls where the grace of God can touch us and hold us.

You know, that is really what we are about right here.  When we come to worship, when we enter into the ritual and go through the movements of worship, we are trying to place ourselves in that thin spot where the love and the grace of God can flood into us.  We don’t say the Lord’s Prayer in a situation like this necessarily because we want to think of the words, but because that experience, that faithfulness of repeating over and over allows our souls that place in our souls to grow thin, that the love and the grace of God can flow through.

Now this term Thin Places, belongs to one part of Christianity, but it is hardly a brand new idea.  It is hardly a brand new idea that there are places on the inside, or places on the outside where we feel just a little bit closer to God than we do in other places, other moods, other times.  It’s not even unique to Christianity.  Carl Jung, for instance, was really sensitive to this idea that somehow down deep in our souls there was a well and a spring that connected all the other springs of life that were flowing through us, a thin place in our hearts where we could be nourished by this living water that flowed throughout the world.  One of his students, a man named Ira Progoff who recently died, did a lot of work with meditation and journaling.  He had a meditation, a guided one that he used.  I’d like to read just a little piece from it. 

“Many have made the journey into the well, the well of our self, the well beyond self into the moving waters of an underground stream, downward and upward, inward again we are here in the waters beyond the well.  Many awarenesses have been given to us in the waters beyond the well, symbols have opened to us, riddles of life, visions of things to come.  Here in the underground stream we realize that many others in earlier times have entered their wells and have gone inward until they have reached the waters beyond the well.  In ancient days Jacob went down into his well, and when he returned he placed a stone for remembrance.  In his way, Moses went down and Isaiah and Ezekiel, Lutze and Zoroaster.  Jesus of Nazareth, Theresa, and Juliana, George Fox, Walt Whitman and many others have gone down in their wells to the underground stream, and when they came back they placed a stone for remembrance as Jacob had done.”

We have those stones, too, those gems, those things we bring back from an encounter with the Divine, those moments of hope, moments where we have learned realizations that come because the veil has gotten thin, and God has touched us.  God’s grace has changed us.  This nation and its founding was in a thin place, a place where it’s imagination could run wild and think of freedom and opportunity and hope and growth, and we have a stone that we keep from that, a Constitution that is alive and forms our government and our ways.  The Church, too.  We have stones.  We have our creeds and our confessions.  We have our institutions and our patterns of worship, all things that came to us when we were in a thin place, when the grace of God was touching us and holding us and moving us. So we have these stones, these gems that we can hold close to us.

It is true of this congregation as well, isn’t it?  The friendships and the traditions, the long history of care for other people, the way we are with each other.  Stones that come from those moments when the divine has reached into this community and drawn this community closer to one another.  All these stones.  Many have placed their stones together, as Progoff says, one building upon the other until soon a magnificent cathedral is produced.  The beautiful stones, those remembrances and hopes and memories that we have drawn out of a live experience, are the stones that build a temple.

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But, so often,  Christians have so tried to codify and strengthen them that the cathedral or temple can cover the well that gives life. The stones we Christians bring back from our meaningful encounters can tend to cover over, to block the stream, to form a wall between us and the divine.  They honor God while shutting God out.  These stones, valuable and precious though they have been in our lives, can become the things that we use to shut God out instead of inviting God in.  Jacob had his wrestling.  Moses had his burning bush.  Ezekiel saw a flying throne.  They all built the Temple, those ideas.  Those ideas all built the Temple.

Now in Luke’s Gospel Jesus is in a battle for the life of the Temple, he is in a battle for control of the Temple.  And when we come to this passage in Luke Jesus has taken over.  After he tossed out the moneychangers, (I often used to think of that as – well -- Jesus went in, tossed the moneychangers out, and then took off), there was a period of time, a period of days during which Jesus would go back into the Temple and teach and go out from the Temple, back and forth, always in the midst of controversy with the Elders and the Chief Priests of this Temple. He was fighting for the life of the Temple, in order that it would not just be stones covering up a well, but would, in fact, be a place where new life could come, a thin place where the love of God could be brought.

The more he went in, the more he taught.  The more disturbed he became as he saw it as a place that took advantage of people, a place where a widow would be asked to give the last mite.  This is what the memory of Jacob and Moses and Ezekiel had become, a frozen place covered over with a thick screen and the grace of God.  “Look at the beautiful stones!” said the people.  “Not one will be left on top of another!” said our Lord.

What signs will there be?  What signs will there be, the disciples wonder, so that we will know when everything is going to come crashing down, when all that we thought we had built is going to crumble and fall, what signs will there be?  What signs will there be that our beautiful dreams, our wonderful memories will have to go?  “Wars and insurrections”, said Jesus.  “Those things will certainly come.  Persecution and betrayal, yes those things will be there!  The Temple will be surrounded, the dreams will be under threat.  You will feel them begin to crumble.  The foundations will crumble.  The waters will rage.  Terror will be the order of the day, but then portents in the heavens.  The sun, moon and stars will provide signs, but the Temple is about to fall.” 

I think that is Jesus’ way of saying that forces beyond the veil, the forces that lay behind what is will begin to shape and strain and push so that the world that we create begins to crumble and makes room for a new world. For as things get distorted, as this world begins to be pulled and tugged, a tear will come in the veil, and the Son of Man will arrive upon a cloud.  A vision to be sure, a hopeful thought, but that is a thin place that Jesus sees.  The Son of Man coming on a cloud in the midst of struggle and difficulty.  God always moving towards us who have erected buildings of great stones to keep God out.  This is the power and the strength of the divine.  This is the power and the strength that drives Jesus and Jesus’ mission in this Temple.  Portents in the heavens, hope will come.  The veil becomes thin, and the love and the life of God begin to move in.  This is a prophetic text. 

We have been talking some in the preaching class at the seminary that I am helping teach, about the fact that a sermon coming from a text needs to reflect what that text is about.  As this text brought challenge to the people who first read it, so it brings a word of challenge to us today.  Will we admire the stones?  Will we admire the stones and the memories, the systems and the styles that have come from real encounters with the Divine in our past? Or will we seek the life and the grace that is in those thin places?  That is the choice this text presents.  Will we keep our heads up looking for the Son of Man in the clouds or will we hunker down and try and build up those foundations of old? 

What of our nation?  Shall we admire the stones?  Shall we admire the economic system and the power that we have been able to garner?  Or shall we look for the thin places where justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream?  Will we look at the thin places that the grace of God can move strong into this world, or are we going to hold tight to what we’ve got?

How about the Church?  Are we going to admire the stones, the social programs we have been able to develop, the helping opportunities that we give to the city around us?  Are we going to admire those stones?  Are we going to admire the stones of the beautiful music and the worship patterns that have helped us be alive in the past? Or -- are we going to seek that thin place, that new place, where God tears open a little bit of the veil and moves God’s grace in to change us?  Admire the stones or seek the thin place, so that God’s grace can flow through us into a world that is tremendously in need, a world terrified, a world that feels sometimes hopeless.  Admire the stones or seek the thin place.

And how about you?  How about each of you, or how about me?  Shall we admire the stones?  Shall we admire the gifts of hope that God’s has offered us in the past?  Shall we simply try to bolster those things that have fed us and kept us, growing us, or shall we strive to seek those thin places in our life, the places where the strength and the power and the creative word of God will turn us upside down and transform our lives again and again. 

There is good news in this passage.  Yes, the Temple will fall.  Yes, there will be no stone left upon another, but always and forever the veil will shred, and the power and the grace of God will flood in.  Can you see it?  Keep your heads up!  The grace of God is yours! Lay hold!  Share with all around you!

 Amen.

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