Ancient Celtic spirituality has given us a term that I want to share with you today: “a thin place”.
A thin place has been described as those rare locales in our lives “where the distance between heaven and earth collapses” (Eric Weiner in his spirituality travelogue). The Grand Canyon, the wind-bashed cliffs of western Ireland, St. Peter’s basilica, your favorite Monet or Michelangelo could be examples.
But a thin place isn’t just an exotic destination. In fact, sometimes the weight of the frenzy can suck the holiness right out of the room and only thicken the space. (My favorite example of that was this picture I took of the Mona Lisa last April from the back of the room, packed with people and cameras and selfie sticks and plexiglass.) A thin place actually has nothing to do with tourism and all to do with your current state of mind. If our minds are crowded with cameras and plexiglass, we’ll never arrive at the thin place, even if we’re standing at the Taj Mahal or the Cistine chapel. On the other hand, you can be in a thin place any time: a walk in a park, a hymn in the church, a long dinner with old friends. It takes openness from within and some combination of mystery and beauty from without to discover the thin place. The distance between heaven and earth collapse.
It’s not just a place of ecstasy either. Thin places are discomforting. A change is happening within you. I’ve heard about thin place as that place where the “mask comes off,” the shiny veneer melts away, and a certain nakedness just washes over you. Some have talked about an airport as a thin place. People coming and going, the strange limbo that we feel there, neither in one place nor the other. The unfolding of life, transitions, anxieties, reflections.
Airports are getting more and more crowded with selfie sticks and plexiglass now too -- thick places -- as we stuff our heads with sounds and images from a screen, as we “mask up”. But, when the battery on your gadget runs out, I think the airport experience is still a thin place. A change is happening, a shedding, even a calling. The “mask comes off” as you’re seated next to and find yourself in a conversation with a total stranger. The shiny veneer comes down and a certain nakedness just washes over you as you gaze down at the tiny cities from a cruising altitude... [pause]
Moses was at a cruising altitude at Mount Horeb, where our text for today takes place. Where the burning bush was revealed and not consumed. Heaven an earth crashing into one another. God’s voice amid the peacefulness of the grazing herds. The mask comes off: the bleating of the sheep echo the cries of the Israelites back in Egypt. God’s voice disquiets. A change is happening. A certain beauty and mystery from without...and Moses‘ openness from within.
He could have just ignored that burning bush, and gone back to his quiet life of shepherding. But God’s fire for justice and peace for the oppressed was too hot, burning and living at the same time, and Moses was strangely warmed, drawn in, even in the midst of his fear and uncertainty.
Watch out for thin places, sisters and brothers in Christ. They usually surprise you. They’re never something that you are expecting or that you set out to find. It does require a certain openness to God’s voice and God’s fire for justice and peace. And it’s just as easy to go back to your flocks, your affairs. It’s just as easy to charge your battery up again and put the headphones back on.
But we are invited this day, sisters and brothers in Christ, to go the pain. Go to where God is calling you. Go to where God needs you. Go to hopeless, go to the grieving, go to the lost, go to the oppressed, go to the poor, go to the immigrant, the strangers in a strange land, go to the outcast, go to the hungry, go to the lonely. God hears their cry -- God hears our cry -- and points us back there. “Let my people go.” Ours is a God of freedom and liberation...freedom from that which chains us!
Maybe that’s even a call to tend to our selves.
So often we can hide in the crowd...from our truest selves, sometimes even by helping so many others. For some of us, God is pointing us right back at us. God is calling to you and offering you freedom today, freedom from the chains of guilt or hopelessness, the bondage of sin. For others, God is calling us out of ourselves, out of our self-centeredness, and into the world back where we came from. Into the violence and the chaos, right into the courts of our modern-day Pharaohs -- the forces and the trends that rule and oppress. Pharaoh is not a person; Pharaoh is a state, a system, a principality, an ethos. Let my people go, God says.
Go back to the pain -- whether that’s within or without.
“Enter the fray,” God says, “because I’ll be there with you -- the cry of the poor is my ultimate concern -- I’ll give you the words, I’ll find you the support, and I’ll love you all along.”
The thin place can be terrifying, but it is holy ground, this transformation, this resurrection. It is God-with-us, it is heaven and earth colliding. And it’s happening right now. Here we are. Here Christ is. Thanks be to God. AMEN.
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