Revealed

Mark 9:2-9

While we lived in Pennsylvania, we discovered certain places that became special to our family, places we enjoyed spending time, and one of these was a state park called World’s End. Interesting name, right? The place at the end of the world.

Sometimes we would drive up to World’s End on a whim, on a summer day when we had no commitments and felt the desire to do more than the usual routines. It took a little over an hour to get there. We would drive up to about the highest point on the mountain and turn left into the park. We would park our car and get out. Now, you could walk over a little way to the left and there was a swimming hole that was very popular. It was a dammed area of the river, and in the summertime there were always people there. But when we got out of our car, we preferred to go over to the right.

When you walked a little way to the right there was the river heading down the mountain – here, only a narrow, shallow stream. Never crowded, sometimes we were the only ones there. Clear water, rocky ground, there were little areas where the water moved rapidly over the rocks, creating some fun for the kids. Find the right spot and sit back in the water and take a little ride. I mostly sat on the flat rocks at the river’s edge and watched the kids play. It felt extraordinary, like I was in a thin place.

Do you know what a thin place is? I’ll tell you what it is not. It’s not a place where you find Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies. It’s not a place for thin people. It’s not a long narrow stretch of land. A thin place is a place where you are more likely to notice God.

It is a term that seems to have originated in Celtic spirituality. They have a saying: heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in thin places the distance is even shorter.

You stumble into a thin place. They aren’t marked by signs or labeled on maps; they don’t have predictable common characteristics. I found them beside the stream at World’s End and also in the busy, tourist-filled Sacre Coeur Basilica at the top of Montmartre in Paris. You are as likely to stumble on a thin place in a city park as in a cathedral. One never knows when or where the spirit of God is likely to press against the invisible membrane separating heaven and earth.

I think you have to be ready to experience a thin place, but that doesn’t mean you need to prepare yourself for it. On the contrary, you don’t go in with expectations; you simply enter it open to any experience. And when you do enter a thin place, simply being there, you experience a sort of jolt – not like an electric surge, but just a sudden awareness of otherness all around you. A thin place changes the way you think, the way you feel, the way you are – it is transformative. And it is a place you want to go back to, you long to be there again.

In the story of Jacob in Genesis, on his journey to Laban when he stopped for the night in the middle of nowhere, and he rested his head on a rock for a pillow, he dreamed of angels climbing up and down a staircase between heaven and earth. In the morning he marked the place by setting his stone pillow upright as a pillar. He called the place Bethel – house of God. Surely, this was a thin place.

When Moses was tending his father-in-law’s sheep at Horeb, also called Sinai, and something caught his eye, he approached what looked to be a bush on fire. He heard a voice speaking to him saying, “remove the sandals from your feet, for you are standing on holy ground.” Surely, this was a thin place.

At this particular thin place, centuries later, Jesus brought his friends, Peter, James, and John. He led them up the high mountain and at the top he was, as the text says, transfigured. He was transformed. He was revealed to them.

And Moses and Elijah, the twin pillars of Israel, stood on either side of him. At this thin place, where the membrane was stretched so thin Peter James and John could see right through it, they witnessed the divinity of Jesus. And they heard a voice from heaven saying to them, “This is my beloved Son – listen to him!”

And Peter was jolted by the experience, knowing something was wholly different, but not knowing what to make of it. He opened his mouth and said something about erecting structures to house these three holy relics of Israel – Elijah, Moses, and Jesus. Was he out of his mind? Maybe just disoriented – very disoriented.

But he was really just expressing that desire any one of us would have, to hold on to this experience. I wish I could bottle the essence of that gentle spot at World’s End Park and carry it with me. I wish I could have put the feeling of Sacre Coeur in a scrap book and revisit it now and then. The memories of these thin places fill me with longing.

Perhaps that is exactly what they should be doing.

For the experience one has at a thin place is the privilege of glimpsing the glory of God. It is the foretaste of the joy to come when we cross that barrier. It is the assurance that God is, indeed, very close at all times.

The thin places offer us a revelation of God, showing us that there is holiness, there is goodness, there is mystery and divinity all over the world, really, if we have the vision to see it. Thin places, when we step into them, show us that there is a different way of living and being, seeing and hearing, in the world. It is a testament to the rightness and goodness of these thin-place experiences that they leave us with such yearning. We cannot stay in these places, but we can carry the essence, the power of them with us in all that we do.

The voice spoke to Peter, James, and John saying, “This is my beloved Son – listen to him!” and we ought to hear this message too. It is a message for us: listen to him.

When you are in a thin place, you become more aware of your surroundings. Your senses are heightened a little bit, or maybe a lot. Even someone like me, who usually goes around with my head in the clouds, lost in thought, enters a thin place and suddenly sees and hears and smells and feels all that there is to see and hear and smell and feel. And we say, “there is something about this place. Could it be that God is in this place?”

My friends, God is indeed in those thin places, but God is in every place. The experience of thin places may help us to keep our eyes and ears and all our senses open and attentive, knowing that God is present, God desires us to be near, and God will be revealed not only in the thin places but in everyplace where we carry the desire to be in God’s holy presence.

May Christ be revealed to you anew each day, so that you may reveal the light of his glory wherever you go.

photo: Worlds End State Park - By Ruhrfisch, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1456158 

Tikkun Olam

Isaiah 40:21-31  

Mark 1:29-39    

There are many stories of creation, coming from a variety of different cultural and religious traditions. We know best the two creation stories in Genesis. And we know them in a different way than we might know others, outside our religious tradition. But they are stories, like the others. And the reason we need such stories is simply because a story can contain greater, deeper truth sometimes than a whole pile of factual statements.  There’s the old saying, a picture paints a thousand words. I think of stories as word pictures. They use words imaginatively to paint pictures that help us understand who we are and where we came from, and why we are here.

The two stories in Genesis about how the world came into being, the story in chapter one, about the seven days of creation, and the story in chapter 2, about Adam and Eve, both come from Jewish tradition. But they are not the only creation stories in Jewish tradition. There is another one I want to tell you.

You could start this story the same way such stories often start: In the beginning … When God began creating the heavens and the earth,

But here is where it begins to differ, in that before it can tell us about the world that God created it needs to tell us something about the God who created it; the God who existed before the creation of the world.

Where was God before the creation of the world? God was everywhere. God was infinitely expansive, there was no place where God was not. God was so much in everyplace that there was no place for God to create. So God had to sort of withdraw God’s self, make a little space. God drew in God’s vast girth, and used that new empty space to create a world.

God created something new in the empty space God had cleared out. It was a new thing, but God put something of God’s self into it. A stream of the divine light poured into this new thing God made – the earth itself and the first human God made, called Adam, which means man, or human. The divine light shone through them.

But the divine light was too strong, too powerful, for these creations, and it destroyed them. A violent explosion occurred. Everything shattered apart in a million pieces, bits of the divine light, sparks, scattered everywhere. And this shattering, this separation, created an opportunity for evil to move into the world God created. It did, swarming everywhere.

Evil, however, didn’t have a life-force of its own. It was a parasite, in a sense. To survive, evil needed to capture some of the divine light, and so it did. With the divine light shattered into millions of tiny pieces it wasn’t that hard for evil to grab hold of a piece, borrowing its life energy. It is how evil continues to survive in the world even today, by attaching itself to good.

We might end this story the same way so many stories end, saying, “So that is how it came to be that evil co-exists in the world with good.” Or “That is how God’s good creation got spoiled, broken.” We can say that, but of course this is not the end of the story. It is only the beginning.

The story goes on to talk about the work of repairing this broken world, tikkun olam. The way this world will be repaired is for all the fragments of goodness that are scattered around the world to be gathered back together. When all the God-pieces are put back together, evil will be gone, goodness and light will be restored. The world will, once again, be whole. Shalom.

According to the tradition, every time a human being performs a mitzvah, an act of obedience to God, a spark of divine light is restored to its place. Every good deed is like a stitch in the cosmic mending. Each act of love brings some healing to the world. Hence we seek to be obedient to God’s word not just for ourselves, but for the sake of God’s world.

It’s a story that speaks profoundly to the notion that we are co-creators, partners, with God in this world. God depends on us to do our part. And, of course, we cannot do it without God. God shows us the direction to go, and gives us the means with which to act.

The scriptures today are both kinds of healing stories, words of hope and encouragement to a people in exile. For all the people who have ever lived who felt like they are somehow separated from God, for everyone who ever felt like they had been abandoned by God, these stories say no – that is not true. God is always with you.

As the prophet Isaiah said, “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless…those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.” God is always with you; God will never leave you.

As the gospel of Mark tells us, Jesus went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out evil; bearing the message: God is always with you. God will never leave you. God is at work, even now, repairing the world.

This is what I tell the children in our preschool more than anything else: God is always with you. God will never leave you. They need to hear it; you need to hear it; the whole world needs to hear it.

The world is broken. The goodness of God has been shattered, scattered in pieces all over, pieces so small it is sometimes hard to recognize them. But they are there, because God is there, ready to do mending and caring and healing work wherever it is needed. And God calls us to be a part of that work too.

Wait. As the prophet Isaiah says, wait. Listen. Devote yourself to prayer and good deeds, as Jesus himself did. Speak words of hope, sharing the message of Jesus Christ wherever you are. Be a part of the work of restoring the world. Tikkun Olam.