THIN PLACES February 22, 2009, Transfiguration of ... - Brick Church

THIN PLACES
February 22, 2009, Transfiguration of the Lord
Mark 9: 2-9
Michael Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York
Theme: The “thin places” are right under our noses.
O God of restless souls and seekers of Spirit: refresh us on our way, trusting that
we are not alone after all, but travel the days in your company. Bless the ancient
words of Scripture we have heard to our hearing so that their truth might bridge the
centuries and find us here, now. And now may the words of my mouth and the
meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my
Redeemer. Amen.
I love it when you suggest books for me to read. Mind you, I can’t read all of
them, at least not all of them all the way through, but I always try to spend some
time with every book one of you suggests. It becomes a sort of literary
conversation. I read books I’d never have found otherwise and I learn a lot about
you – what you read and think about and care about.
After my “Potato – Potahto” sermon a couple weeks ago, one of you came through
the greeting line, suggested a book, and then took the trouble to go to The Corner
Book Store and buy a copy. The book is From This Holy Mountain, by William
Dalrymple. I haven’t been able to put it down. It’s a travelogue, not usually my
cup of tea, but it’s a travelogue with a twist. The twist is that Dalrymple travels in
the tracks of a much earlier travelogue writer, one John Moschos who wrote about
his circumambulation of the Byzantine Empire in the year 587. In Dalrymple’s
book, you meet both the strange Christian world of the Middle East in the late
Sixth Century and the fractious world of the Middle East in the late Twentieth
Century. I learned a lot of things in my reading; there’s one I want to tell you
about.
In the 6 th Century, Christians in the Middle East were big into monks, especially
hermits, monks who lived alone instead of in monasteries. I learned that these
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* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

Byzantine hermit monks voluntarily imposed all variety of bizarre physical
disciplines on themselves in their quest to become close to God in a deeply
mystically sense. Some of them spent years in tiny cells. One hermit decided that
he would spend his life standing up.
One of the most popular of these radical privations was for the hermit to live on a
little platform on top of a pillar. These lofty hermits – they were twenty, forty,
sixty feet up in-the-air – were called “stylites” after the Greek word for pillar.
They almost never came down from their perches. People brought them food and
clothes, but more importantly, people came to these air-borne spiritual athletes for
advice, for “counseling” we would call it. People came to hear stylites preach
sermons and to hear them offer spiritual commentary on politics, current events,
and the moral state of affairs. Stylites were understood to be human windows into
the divine. They were mortal connections to God. They were mystics who linked
our world to the reality beyond our world.
Stylites even became oddly fashionable. Every city and village in the Byzantine
world wanted its own local stylite. Just like modern municipalities lure companies
with tax abatements, Byzantine towns tried to lure stylites. They were doubtless
good for the tourist trade, but it was more than that. They were windows into
heaven, connections to the eternal – right here in our grimy little corner of Anatolia
or Syria.
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In a far distant corner of the Christian world, in the Celtic reaches of northwestern
Europe, Ireland and Scotland especially, they still talk about what they call “the
thin places.” These are places, not people, but geographical places where the
scrim separating the temporal for the eternal, the human from the divine, is
somehow thinner. There is a Celtic mantra to the effect that heaven and earth are
only three feet apart, but in the thin places, it’s even closer.
Perhaps the most famous of the Celtic thin places is the tiny island of Iona in the
Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. It was to Iona that the Irish monk, St. Columba, came
in 563, just five years after John Moschos hiked the Byzantine world of stylites. It
* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

was from Iona that Columba brought the Christian faith to the heathen Scots. It
was on Iona that a great Benedictine monastery rose; and it is to Iona and its
modern ecumenical Christian community that thousands of Twenty-first Century
pilgrims come yet today. And there on Iona, in the mists of stark and windswept
remoteness, many sense the proximity of the Divine. They sense God to be
somehow more proximate in this thin place than in the thicker places from which
they have come.
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In the story of the Transfiguration that Kent read from Mark’s Gospel, Jesus and
three of his disciples have come to what the Celts would have called a “thin place,”
the top of some unnamed mountain. On that mountain top, Peter and James and
John and of course, Jesus, pass through what we could call a “mystical
experience.” Like all such things, whatever it was that happened on that mountain
slips through the fingers of mortal words. Jesus is transfigured, whatever that may
mean. They all see Moses and Elijah, emblems respectively of the Law and the
Prophets, embodied symbols of divine truth. The three of them and Jesus are, in
that moment, mystics, as we might call them, mystics in a thin place, mystics not
unlike those stylites perched on their pillars.
Byzantine stylites, Celtic thin places, the baffling story of the Transfiguration may
be curiously intriguing to people like you and me, but honestly, such things feel
utterly distant to most of us, cocooned as we are in our post-Enlightenment
empiricism. Hermits may be historically interesting, but New York City is not
going to lure a stylite to set up his pillar in Times Square, intriguing as that picture
may be. Most of us will never get to Iona or any such thin places, and even if we
did, we might find it no more than wet, cold, and hard-to-get-to. And whatever
happened on the Mount of the Transfiguration is probably not the kind of thing
that’s ever going to happen to the likes of you or me.
I’m not a mystic, at least not in way most people think of mystics. I have seen no
visions as such, known no spiritual ecstasies, heard no voices. Some of you are
blessed with the mystical turn, I know, but not many. So the question for most of
us is this: “How is it that the rest of us can know the presence of God?” We’re not
* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

hermit monks. We don’t live in a Celtic thin place. We have not seen the likes of
Transfiguration. “Is there a mysticism for the earth-bound rest of us?”
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Yes. At the center of the Gospel story, at the center of the enigmatic tale of the
Transfiguration, stands the same bold Christian affirmation, the incarnation. The
incarnation is a core affirmation of the Christian faith. The incarnation insists that
somehow, somehow Eternity entered time and space in the person of Jesus Christ.
And here’s why incarnation matters so much. It means that God is not “above” or
“beyond,” but that somehow, God has trespassed our space and time and is “down
here,” “with us,” “among us,” even “in us.”
This means that God is to be found not so much in the remote or the extraordinary,
not so much in the exceptional or wondrous, but rather that God can be discerned
right here, right here under our noses, in what is outwardly ordinary. The
theologian, Belden Lane put it this way: "The one great practical truth of the
incarnation is that the ordinary is no longer at all what it appears. Common things,
common actions, common relationships are all granted new definition because the
holy has once and for all become ordinary in Jesus Christ."
The great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, “insisted that God's naked, awful
majesty could never be pursued directly.” So, he said, “in order to shield human
beings from the unapproachable light of God's glory, God always remains hidden
by a mask...” It is because our mortality cannot abide the brilliance of pure
divinity, Luther said, that God put on the mask of the ordinary, and was born into
the world you and I can comprehend. And God still wears the mask of the
ordinary because, perhaps, the human eye dare not behold raw God.
All of this may be the poetry of hyperbole, but it reminds us that we can
comprehend only what lies within the parameters of our understanding. We are
human and finite, so we must understand the Eternal in our terms, the human and
finite.
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* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

Which is exactly Luther's point. God is masked in all the ordinary around us. God
wears the mask of creation. God wears the mask of our loved ones and our
neighbors. God wears the mask of all the simple movements and encounters of
day-to-day life. The poets have often said this better than the theologians. And to
my ear, no poet better than Francis Thompson, and no poem more eloquently
incarnational than his "The Kingdom of God: In No Strange Land," which you
have come to know is a favorite of mine:
“Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air –
That we ask the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?"
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars! –
The drift of pinions, would we harken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors."
"The drift of pinions" – angel wings – "would we harken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors."
So the question in Thompson’s words is this: “How then do we open the clayshuttered
doors of our souls?”
Or to ask it in Luther’s terms, “How do we see God behind the mask of the
ordinary?”
This may be the essential religious question. If God is not “beyond,” but “here,” if
God is not “then” but “now,” how do we recognize divinity in the ordinary?
Belden Lane, whom I quoted earlier, hints at the best answer I know. He says that
any quest to see the divine hidden in the ordinary requires of us two things:
attention and love, love and attention: to pay close and faithful attention to the
ordinary around us, and to see it all with the eyes of great love.
Let me leave you with a riddle-clue. “A woman walks into a large, crowed room.
In one hand, she holds a stick with long horse hairs stretched from one end to the
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* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

other. In her other hand, she holds an oddly shaped wooden contraption over
which have been stretched attenuated catgut shaped into long strands. She rubs the
stick and the wooden contraption together and shortly, all the people in the room
find their hearts lifted; their spirits soar, sorrow, joy, tears, an invocation of the
Divine.
What a mystery it is that something as ordinary as wood, horsehair and catgut
making noise can move souls. It’s nothing but pieces of a tree, cat, and horse
making sound waves at certain pitches. But these sound waves strike our ears,
enter our minds and somehow become utterly sublime, transcendent, even divine.
These perfectly earthly things – I mean just a violin playing Mozart – become,
somehow, a window into the eternal.
So it is with all the ordinary stuff of your life and mine, the wood and the horsehair
and sound waves of our days…
work,
friends,
family,
a good laugh,
dinner and Shakespeare with friends,
the Thursday Bible Study,
an embrace,
conversation that goes deep,
hymns that bring tears,
prayers that are just words but so much more,
bread and wine that are not just bread and wine.
Love and attention to the ordinary.
Look here, in your immediate vicinity,
at the people around you.
Watch them around the dinner table.
Watch the faces of the children.
Look long at the old and life-seasoned faces.
Look closely at the movement of the things that weave your life.
Look into the eye of it.
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* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

Listen to the sound of it.
Look there with great attention.
Look there with great love.
The thin place is where you are.
The thin place is right under your nose.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Sprit. Amen.
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* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.