Thin Places

There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in the “thin places,” they are even closer than that. The term, “thin places,” often associated with the Christian Celtic tradition describes holy or sacred places, often places of great beauty in nature or places where feelings of transcendence are evoked by architecture or other forms of art. Perhaps you have such a place in your life — from some sacred moment in your life. A place you’ve visited. A place where beauty or creativity has transfixed you. Had a meaningful spiritual experience. A place where heaven seems to be just a little closer. I want to invite you to share that place with us on Facebook or YouTube comments.

In our Old Testament lesson today, we have a story of a thin place. Jacob, who up to this point, has been something of a jerk in the story — tricking his brother out of his birthright, deceiving his father, and generally acting entitled, enabled by his protective mother, Rebekah. Somehow, even Jacob has his world pierced by God in this place. His mother wasn’t keen on the idea of Jacob taking a wife from the local area, populated by Hittite women, so she encouraged him to go and choose a wife from among the children of Laban, which would have been Jacob’s cousin. And it is on that journey to find a wife that Jacob stops in a certain place and has a dream. The details of the text lead us to believe that it is what happens in his dream that cause this certain place to be a thin place, rather than any particular natural beauty he found there.

In Jacob’s encounter at Bethel, not only are we given a sense that this is a sacred place, but through this ladder in Jacob’s dream, we are given the very real sense that indeed, here heaven and earth are only thinly separated. For this ladder enabled seamless transport to the angels up and down between heaven and earth. And Jacob is able to hear a promise from God that the land he is on will be given to him and his ancestors, just as God had promised his father Isaac before him and his grandfather, Abraham. Indeed, this is a thin place.

In our New Testament lesson, we have a parable about the very opposite of a thin place — a parable of weeds. Rather than a portal that opens earth up to heaven, here, hell, so to speak, has a prominent and privileged place on earth. If there are such places as thin places, perhaps, so too, there are thick places. Places where one cannot see the bigger picture. Places where there is little resistance to evil or distinction between the wheat and the weeds. Places of frozen, arrested development, where the weeds choke out the wheat. Places that no longer surprise, induce awe, or provoke wonder. Stuck places. Perhaps you have these places in your life too. And thick places or thin places may be more than just geographical. It may be in the presence of certain people. It may be in the presence or following certain habits you engage in — good or bad. It may be a season of your life or era of our shared social life. Our personal thin and thick places are not necessarily geographic, though they certainly can be.

So what can we learn about this thin place that Jacob encountered — Bethel? Our Scripture certainly seems to highlight this as a sacred place, where Jacob has a theophany — a vision and encounter with God. And Jacob memorializes that place with a pillar of stones. And indeed there is archeological evidence of just such a stone pillar. But there is also other archeological evidence. Evidence of an open air shrine. Scholars believe with a high degree of confidence that Bethel was a “sacred Canaanite site before and during the patriarchal period.” In other words, Bethel was a thin place to a rival religion before Jacob’s encounter there. Furthermore, while the name Bethel, in Hebrew literally and simply means “House of God,” there are signicant and multiple references to dieties that share the name Bethel. The JPS Torah Commentary, the gold-standard in Jewish Biblical interpretation, states, “The existence of a god named Bethel is known from Mesopotamia, northern Syria, Phoenicia, Israel, and Egypt….Bethel had a long pagan cultic history behind it in Jacob’s time. To know this is to understand the details of the story of Jacob at Bethel in an entirely new light.” Following Jacob’s encounter at Bethel, the site became a religious center that rivaled Jerusalem. It gained prestige by hosting the Ark of the Covenant and was the base of Phinehas, grandson of Aaron. It was home to a school of prophets in the days of Elisha. Yet, in the time of King David, as the temple in Jerusalem was built, the importance of Bethel declined. Later, in the 8th century BCE, the prophets Amos and Hosea would harshly criticize Bethel after King Jeroboam I placed a golden calf in Bethel to serve as a replacement for the Jerusalem temple during the time when Israel was divided into Northern and Southern kingdoms due to internal Jewish politics. Northern Israel would fall to the Assyrians during this time, yet the priesthood at Bethel continued until nearly a century later when King Josiah destroyed it as part of his cultic reforms to remove the “high places” from throughout the area, destroying places of worship that had association with foreign deities. At this point, Bethel is no longer considered a thin place — quite the opposite — a place where the weeds outnumbers the wheat.

Now, why do I bother to go through all this history? It is to point out that “thin places” are not “frozen places.” Quite the opposite. In fact, it is precisely when Bethel started to become a frozen place that the prophets started to criticize it. The prophet Amos proclaimed, “Come to Bethel and transgress…bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days…for so you love to do, O people of Israel….yet you did not return to me.” And so during the course of the Old Testament, Bethel goes from sacred site of a pagan God to a holy site where the core promise of God to the Jewish people is repeated to Jacob, grows in importance as a worship site, declines under King David, then is criticized by the prophets, and finally destroyed by King Josiah. It is the most frequently occurring place name in the Old Testament besides Jerusalem. It is a dynamic place, alternating between thick and thin status.

I suspect, if you stay around any place long enough, you see places that were important, even sacred to you change. For those of you who have been around Huntsville for a long time — perhaps you can think of significant places that you once loved that have come and gone or changed significantly. I’m not as old as some of you, but I’ve seen my high school, Grissom, recently relocated. My beloved golf course, Municipal Golf Course, be turned into some kind of dirt bike track. That was an abomination unto the Lord, as far as I am concerned. In this area, I can recall places like Eunice’s Country Kitchen or Mullins restaurants being part of this community. What are some of the places that you once loved that are no longer here anymore or have changed so much? Tell us in the comments. About a year ago, our JOY group took a trip to a place that many Methodists hold as a thin place — Camp Sumatanga. Along the way, Donnie Ballance told us that she heard a rumor that there was a new restaurant within a Texaco gas station on South Parkway that had revived a long extinct relic of a sacred spot within Northeast Huntsville. Perhaps some of you remember Zesto’s and their famous dip-dogs. Back in the corner of this Texaco, in one of those gas station kitchens, we heard rumors about a new thin place. A place where dip dogs lived again. And so on our way home from Sumatanga, we pulled into the Texaco and attempted to pay homage. But, alas, they were closed. The sacred shrine had been cut off, at least for now.

If a thin place does not always remain a thin place forever, there must be something other than its geography that makes it a thin place. Thin places facilitate bringing heaven, or God’s reign, directly into our world. They are like portals, into which the goodness of God, shines in extraordinary ways into our world. And that sort of thing changes over time. Circumstances, such as wars or rules inside Ancient Israel, changed the course of Bethel, as they do with all thin places, over time. But friends, here is what so often happens when thin places change — we do not change with them. It doesn’t take much to turn fond nostalgia about a place or situation into a bitter “you kids get off my lawn” type of attitude when places change. Some people of faith turn their sanctuaries into mausoleums by refusing to allow flexibility in their thin places.

And so, the first lesson I want to leave you with today is that sacred places, thin places, are not frozen. Sometimes they aren’t even places at all. And it is when we hold them as frozen, that they truly cease to become thin places, but rather sites of empty religion. We must have, deep within us, an openness to an encounter with God, a certain flexibility, a willingness to be surprised to allow for new thin places to emerge, as Jacob did at Bethel.

And here, I want to give you a complement as your pastor. I’m told that in the yesteryear of Epworth, making any changes within the sanctuary would have caused quite the controversy. Specifically, I was told that there was quite a bit of resistance to installing the speakers that now sit atop the edge walls of the sanctuary — that was decades ago. Yet, since I have been here as your pastor, at times, I’ve found myself wishing we had some kind of screen where we could show videos or other graphics as part of our worship experience. The Trustees talked it over and eventually decided to mount this screen on the back wall of the chancel area. I did not decide on the TV’s location. And when I came into to see where it was installed one day, I instantly thought — Oh, Lord, I’m going to hear about this. It isn’t symmetrical. Even, I, an aesthetically challenged man who rarely cares about the way things look, could see that the television was the obvious standout if you were to play a game of “which one of these things does not belong” with a picture of our chancel area. I was just certain that there would be an outcry and we’d have to relocate the television. I took solace only in the fact that I did not choose the television’s location, the Trustees did. Upon receiving any complaints, I could simply blame the Trustees. How’s that for pastoral courage? But, alas, I did not hear a single complaint about the television. Perhaps you’ve been muttering about it behind my back, but I sense, rather, that a certain flexiblity has developed in this space. It is not a frozen space. But a thin place. And I know you all long to return to it. It may feel different when you do. Jacob would later return to Bethel too. In Genesis 35, upon Jacob’s return, he would rename Bethel to El-Bethel. It had found new meaning again. Thin places are flexible places.

Here’s the second lesson, deeply entwined with the first lesson, that I want to leave you with today about thin places. Thin places are places that surprise. They captivate. Inspire awe. Breed creativity. They are generative in nature. Thin places surprise. And for thin places to surprise, there must be a willingness internally to receive with grace and wonder something outside our own field of vision. Surprises, by definition, are things we did not see coming. Jacob didn’t plan to stop at Bethel, nor did he expect to receive a dream that served as a thin place. After his encounter, he reveals his surprise, saying, “Surely the Lord is in this place — and I did not know it!” In his openness to journey away to another land, serendipity found him and broke into our world, as angels made their way up and down the ladder in Jacob’s dreams.

Consider this — nostalgia is often rooted in our childhood and younger years. Certainly many have had difficult upbringings, but these not withstanding, thin places tend to abound in our younger years. Every era speaks of their own “good old days.” Yet, young people today, will have their good ol’ days in the times that many of us are stuck in a nostalgic posture that assumes the world is in steep decline. Kids these days. All the thin places are gone. Perhaps that isn’t the case. Perhaps young people are just better wired to receive surprise, wonder, and awe. Perhaps this is why Jesus says that to enter into the kingdom of heaven, we must do so as a child. As we become adults, it is easy to lose that childlike wonder. To feel a deep sense of loss when our thin places are taken away, no longer having the spiritual tools within us to dream new dreams, as Jacob did, and let new thin places take shape. We assume the weeds have taken over.

Friends, I believe we’re in an era, when the world is turning. The Coronavirus as well as other social factors are remaking our world. Some businesses and institutions will be different or may not even survive. We’re about to see what public school is like in the quarantine era. All of this is to say, some thin places will probably fall away. Yet, new ones will emerge. We have an opportunity, to be like Jacob and find ourselves surprised by new dreams. To, at this juncture, when it is so difficult to know what is what and what will change, what will survive, what will die, what will stay the same — to allow the wheat to grow along with the weeds, trusting that a harvest is coming in which there is an appropriate release of weeds that were once seeds of potential along with a harvest of new, life-giving thin places.

Friends, may you be the kind of people who still hold within you some sense of childlike wonder.

May you not be so jaded and bitter that you’re still able to be surprised.

May you let wonder, curiosity and awe take you to new places.

May you open your grip on the thin places you’ve held onto, so you can dream new dreams and hear God’s voice anew.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.