Thin Places

Known By Our Love
July 24, 2016
Peter the Disciple Part I
August 7, 2016
“Thin Places”
 
There is an old story, and oldie but a goody, about two men on a camping trip.   One was a simple but practical man and the other an intellectual.   In the middle of the night the simple man woke up and gave the intellectual a nudge and said, “Look up in the sky and tell me what you see.” “I see millions of stars,” says the intellectual “And what do you think about from that?” asked the simple man. The intellectual said, “Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies, weather wise, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow and theologically, I think there is a God.  What does it tell you?” The simple man responded, “It tells me someone has stolen our tent!” 
 
What do we see when we look up to the sky?  The prophet Isaiah asks it this way, “Who do you think made all of these stars?”
 
For Isaiah, the night sky was what might be called a “thin place,” a place to feel close to God.  Perhaps God has a thin place for you to draw near to Godself and your best self this summer.  Let us pray.  Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us, open to us meaning of word and reality of love for each of us.  Amen. 
 
In Celtic spirituality, “thin places” are those places where very little separates heaven and earth.  Where the line between heaven and earth are especially thin.  Where nothing separates us from feeling close to God.  
 
The search for thin places is a historic one.  The Hebrew Bible tells us God chose Solomon to build a Temple in Jerusalem, where God was said to live on earth.  The Psalms tell us God resided there on earth.  The Temple in Jerusalem was a thin place.  There people learned about God, sacrificed to God, prayed to God, felt close to God.  
 
In the 6th century, however, the Israelites were invaded, defeated and taken from their home in Jerusalem, far away to Babylon.  
 
They felt God was in their Temple, but now the temple was far away.  Like the writers of today’s anthem, they longed to cross over the River Jordan and return home.  
 
They wondered if God still cared about them in exile.  Isaiah provided comfort saying that they should look up to the sky for their answer.  That from the sky they could know God is in control, is dependable and never loses sight of us. 
 
Looking up to the sky became a thin place for the exiled Israelites.
 
Humans in many culture have looked to the sky to find God.  Our hymns speak of God who stretched the spangled heavens, who reigns above the swirling planets, the worlds God’s hands have made.  In Isaiah’s time, our galaxy was thought to be a relatively intimate place.  Before Copernicus, earth was seen as the center of the universe.  The clouds were not that far out of reach.  That is where God was.  The planets and stars seemed close.  When humans realized that the sun was at the center of the galaxy and that the universe was huge, it changed how humans viewed the cosmos.  For one thing it changed where God and heaven were thought to be.  God wasn’t so distant when the heavens were thought to be up in the clouds.  But the more humans learned about the universe, the bigger it seemed.   In recent years, data from spacecraft and powerful new telescopes allow humans to determine that the universe is significantly larger than humans had thought.  In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble determined that the universe was not static but indeed expanding.  This helped give rise to the big bang theory, but also anxiety.  I think of the young, distraught Woody Allen in the movie Annie Hall whose worried mother takes him to the doctor.  The doctor asks Woody’s character what is wrong and the boy complains that the universe is expanding and someday would break apart and that would be the end of everything.   The doctor consoles him saying that that’s not for millions of years and our job is to do our best here. But if God is above the ever expanding skies, is God distant?  If God is moving away from us, maybe God doesn’t care.  
 
Given the issues of our time, a time of great political, racial and religious division, economic uncertainty, terrorism and growing fears, the world needs us to be our best selves in the face of temptations to fear, calls to exclude and hate and fractured relationships.  How do we do our best in a difficult world if God keeps moving farther away? 
 
Thin places help us know God is real and still near.  They help us feel God’s presence.  They remind us to be our best selves.
 
As Steve mentioned, a group of Bradley Hills members traveled to Scotland last month.  A mentor of mine warned me before I went to be careful because Scotland is a thin place, a portal to heaven.  It is said that when a Scot dies they return to Scotland before going to the afterlife.  This idea is expressed in the famous song, “you take the high road and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll get to Scotland before ye.”  The low road in one battle interpretation of the song is the path one travels through the underworld to get to Scotland before going to the afterlife.
 
One of the special places we visited was the Island of Iona on the western coast.  St. Columba first brought Christianity to Scotland at Iona in the 6th century.  The founder of what today is known as the Iona community, George MacLeod, famously said that Iona is a “thin place where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual.” 
 
Maybe you have a thin place in your life.  Summer is a time when many of us go to thin places.  Many of you have gone to a special place already, or will in August.  A places where God is close.  Where we feel the presence of the Lord.  Where you feel hope.
Jesus went to quiet places to be close to God in prayer.  The Israelites could look to the sky and see evidence of God.  That is harder to do with the urban light in Bethesda.  Perhaps this summer you will breath fresh air and look up at a sky and sense God.  Much like the Israelites’ temple, the church has often been thought to be a thin place, a sanctuary, a place we go to find God near.  Just sitting in this or other sanctuaries may be a thin place for you.  When I think of thin places at BHPC I think of Betty Hansen and our labyrinth, which for me and for many a truly thin place. 
 
Eric Weiner wrote in a March 2012 New York Times article that thin places don’t describe skinny nations on a map, like Chile, nor cities perhaps populated by thin people, like perhaps Los Angeles.
 
Thin places run much deeper, they are places where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine so that we are jolted out of our old ways of seeing the world.  
 
Weiner writes that thin places transform us, unmask us, so that we become our more essential selves.
 
Thin places give us a glimpse of not only heaven but earth as it should be. 
 
Weiner concludes that perhaps many parts of our world are thin, but maybe we’re too thick to recognize them.  
 
For we get stuck.  Whenever I get stuck in life in some difficult place, a thin place experience always helps me.  We often get stuck in life.  Being in a thin place changes our perspective and can help get us unstuck.
 
The Israelites in Babylon were stuck and needed help.
 
This is perhaps why in our lesson Isaiah suggests the Israelites stop complaining and start seeing the world as it should be.  Stop whining and start finding the sacred in exile.  
In the face of the problems of our time, where are your thin places?  Where you see the world as it should be? Places where you are your better self?  
 
I took our sons on the Scotland trip.  They did really well.  When we got back, we asked our boys what they remembered most about it.  The first thing one of our sons said was that when he takes his kids to Scotland someday he will tell them not to eat the vanilla ice cream.  They didn’t like the vanilla ice cream, or haggis or much of the food.   
 
On the last night of the trip, the boys didn’t like the dinner so I went out to get them some sushi, which they like, and brought it back to the banquet. 
 
But when I was buying the sushi, as it was the last night in Scotland, I was short on money, on pounds.  The woman at the sushi restaurant said, “Don’t worry about it, if you find a ten-pound note, send it to me.”  What trust.  At the hotel wouldn’t you know it, I found a ten pound note.  When we got back to Bethesda the boys and I mailed the 10 pound note back to the woman at the restaurant.  Now I’d like to think I’ve got friends in thin places, with apologies to Garth Brooks.  A thin place brings out good qualities.  Our world at this times needs generosity, compassion and trust.  
 
The question Isaiah ultimately is after is does God care?  That is what the exiled Israelites were worried about.  Had God abandoned them in Babylon?   
 
Many people wonder that too.  The great philosopher Paul Tillich was known for the complexity of his lectures.  Once after a particularly difficult lecture a man stood up to ask, “Professor Tillich, I appreciated your statement that faith is the ultimate concern of life, but what I really want to know is, do you think the ultimate is concerned about me?” In other words, “Does God care?”
 
The Apostle Paul had something to say about that.  He wrote to an anxious church at Rome that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  
 
For Christians, thin places are often less about geography and more about spirituality.  If thin places are places where very little separates us from God, God’s love in Christ is the ultimate thin place.  For nothing separates us from that.
 
If you believe Jesus gives us a path to God, then God is molding you to be more like Christ, and a thin place is wherever you are becoming more like your savior.  For a thin place removes that which keeps us from being our most holy and authentic selves.    
God so loved the world that he sent his only son.  Through Christ, the separation between God and us is now thin.  God is there.  God does care.  Look up to the sky.  Have hope.  You are not alone. 
 
Last fall I spent several nights sleeping on a pulled out chair in the pediatric unit at Suburban hospital in Bethesda.   I have visited people at that hospital a lot, but when one of our four year olds came down with double pneumonia I became a concerned parent.  As I slept on the chair next to Ellie’s bed, frequency awakened by her coughs, machine beeps or medical personnel visits, I stared up at the ceiling.  The night sky for me was a ceiling.
 
When you are staring at a hospital ceiling at midnight you are forced to take a leap of faith.   You are putting your trust in things beyond you.  Science, caring and healing beyond our understanding.   You are placing your trust in the predictability of creation.   That medicine will work for this next person the same as it did for the last.   Eventually you have to put your trust in the spirit.   My daughter has a serious respiratory infection. The word pneumo in pneumonia means breath or spirit.  That is what is lacking when the lungs are filled with bacteria. What was not lacking in the fight of this four-year-old was spirit.  As I lay there I thought of the last time I had slept right next to Ellie.  
 
 
Last August I bought an REI base 6 tent and one night the week after church Bible Music Camp we all went camping in the backyard.  It was a clear night but a hot one so we removed the tent cover, opened the vents and looked up at the open sky.  As we looked up our children, who had learned a lot of songs at church camp the week before, began to sing the song, Spirit of the Living God.  “Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.  Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.  Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me. Spirit of the living God.  Fall afresh on me.”  You know you are seeing God around you when you are learning about the Almighty from your children.  The kids were particularly interested in teaching me the hand motions from camp, which was difficult as it was dark.   But with the tent open we had enough light from the stars in the heavens above to illuminate their hands.  By star light, Ellie and the others taught me the hand signs for spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me and made the promise of those words real.
 
So when I stared up at the hospital ceiling, I remembered what it was like to stare at stars.  And the memory of one thin place, made another place, thick with anxiety, a little thinner.  It must have been the same for Isaiah and his people as they looked up to the stars. 
 
What do you see when you lift your eyes to the horizon before you?   
 
The distance between God and us is thinner than we know.  Our caring God, and thus our best selves, are not far away.  
 
Seek out and be open to the thin places in life.  Find yours and let the presence of the Lord draw you home.  Amen.