Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 20, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

In our reading this morning from Genesis the Patriarch Jacob has an epiphany. You know epiphanies, those sudden brilliant insights, those unexpected manifestations of the presence of God that you sometimes hear about. Jacob’s comes in a dream, as they sometimes do. In his dream he sees a ladder extending from earth up to heaven with angels on it moving easily back and forth between heaven and earth. Then he sees his God Yahweh, in our translation called “the LORD,” standing beside him. That’s an epiphany, a manifestation of God. Yahweh repeats to Jacob the promise he had made several times to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham that he would inherit the land of Canaan and become the ancestor of a multitude of people. Then Jacob wakes up and says: “Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it.” So he builds an altar there to Yahweh and names the place Bethel, which in Hebrew means the house of God.

The question I want to ask this morning is how we are to understand Jacob’s exclamation “Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it.” We could understand it to mean that God is in that place because God is in every place. This understanding says that our problem isn’t that God isn’t present with us wherever we are, our problem is that we don’t know that God is with us wherever we are. That, of course, is true, and three years ago when these same texts came up in the lectionary that’s what I preached. And I preached essentially the same thing six years ago on this Sunday in the three year lectionary cycle. I may preach it three years from now, when these texts come up again. Who knows.

This year, however, I was struck by another way of looking at this story. This year the story reminded me of thin places. Now, unless you’ve read and remembered Marcus Borg’s book The Heart of Christianity, you’re probably wondering what in heaven’s name thin places are. Is he talking about Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig? Those are places where people get thin, or at least try to. Well, let me assure you that I’m not talking about Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig, as badly as I may need to avail myself of their services. No, the concept “thin places” comes from the spirituality of Celtic Christianity. The idea is that most of the time we perceive that there is some kind of barrier between us and God. We see before us a veil that conceals God from us. That veil seems to us so thick that we simply can’t see God through it, and we conclude that God is not present with us at all.

Celtic spirituality, as it is taught and practiced at places like the Isle of Iona in Scotland, says that there are places where the veil that most of the time seems to separate us from God grows thin. It grows so thin that it virtually disappears. Thin places are places where we experience the presence of God more easily, more directly, than we do in other places. In a thin place we don’t get thin, whatever it is that we think separates us from God does. A thin place is a place of epiphany, a place where God becomes manifest to us in an unusual, immediate way.

One way to understand Jacob’s experience of the presence of God at the place he named Bethel is that he had inadvertently discovered a thin place. He had bedded down for the night—if you can call lying on the ground with a rock for a pillow bedding down—on a thin place, a place where the veil between God and him was easily parted and epiphanies were easy. A place where a ladder could easily span the gap between heaven and earth. And he exclaimed: “Surely the LORD was in this place—and I did not know it.” We don’t have to understand that to mean that God is in every place, although God is in every place as Psalm 139 says. We can understand it to mean that Bethel was a thin place, a place where for mysterious reasons the veil is especially likely to part and God is especially likely to appear. We might even characterize as a thin place a place that causes us to exclaim with Jacob Surely God is in this place—and I did not know it.

Now, I imagine that the notion that there are physical places, geographic location, where experiences of the presence of God are more likely to occur than they are in other places is pretty foreign to most of you. We are, after all, rationalistic Protestants. We don’t much go in for mysticism. If it doesn’t make sense to us, if we can’t explain it, we have trouble believing it. Yet human cultures around the globe and across the ages have had notions similar to the Celtic notion of thin places. Religions of all sorts have their holy places, their shrines, their places of pilgrimage. Think, for example. of Mecca, the ultimate place of pilgrimage for Muslims. Mecca is the primary Moslem thin place. Or think of places like Lourdes for Catholic Christians, places where the Virgin Mary is believed to have appeared. Lourdes is a thin place for Catholics. The examples could go on and on. Thin places are common in every religion.

Yet we don’t have them in that sense in our version of Christianity, which is one way in which Protestantism is spiritually impoverished. We have no Mecca, no Lourdes. In the UCC we don’t even have an Isle of Iona, the primary thin place for Celtic Christianity. So we can’t go someplace and expect to have an epiphany, or at least expect to feel a spiritual power that we don’t feel in other places.

So does that mean that the concept thin places has no meaning for us? Well, no it doesn’t mean that. For one thing, we can open ourselves to the spiritual power of other people’s thin places. We can’t go to Mecca. The Saudis won’t let us because we aren’t Muslims. We can however go to Iona, at least if we have the financial resources to pay for the trip. A lot of our fellow Protestants are doing that these days. But here’s another thing to keep in mind: A thin place doesn’t have to be a specific place at all. For many people nature generally is a thin place. Many of us have experienced God in the mountains or on the waters of our beautiful Pacific Northwest. And a thin place doesn’t even have to be a place at all. It can be an object. For many Christians the Bible is a thin place, a place where they encounter God—or parts of it are anyway. For some people another person may be a thin place. Or music can be a thin place. It is for many of us. Really unexpected things can be thin places. One of the most powerful thin places in my life has been grief, deep, overwhelming grief. In the midst of tremendous grief I had the most powerful epiphany of my life. Maybe worship is a thin place for you. I certainly hope that it is at least some of the time.

So this morning I want to invite you to consider what your thin places are. Where have you experienced the presence of God. Has any experience you’ve had ever caused you to exclaim: Surely God is in this place, and I did not know it? Maybe so. If so, return to that experience if you can. Of course, I don’t recommend seeking out grief just so you can have an epiphany as I once did in my grief. But if grief is where you are, embrace it as a thin place, a place where the consoling, sustaining, presence of God can become manifest to you. If you’ve never had a “Surely God is in this place—and I did not know it” experience, I urge you to seek one. Try different kinds of prayer. Try communing with nature. Try reading up on different spiritual traditions. Approach worship with a greater openness to the presence of God.

Because you see, there is no better experience in life than the experience of a thin place. There is no better experience in life than the experience of the presence of God. Thin place experiences confirm the reality of the spiritual. When I had mine in the midst of my grief I exclaimed: Oh, all that stuff I’m always talking about really is real! Thin place experiences lift us up, inspire us, console us, and challenge us like nothing else in life does or can. For most of us they are rare at best, but they are worth seeking.

So this morning I invite you to seek out your thin places. It may take a while to find them. Thin place experiences don’t happen to any of us very often. One thing is certain, though. Thin place experiences don’t happen to us at all if we aren’t open to the possibility of their happening. And it is also certain that if we are open to them, if we seek out our thin places conscientiously and with an open spirit, we will find them—or they will find us. Then we too will exclaim with Jacob “Surely the LORD was in this place—and I did not know it.” Amen.