Loading...About 10 years ago I went to Ireland with Kara.
We were going to hike everywhere.
We were going to use busses and trains to get around.
We were going to soak up everything we could in Ireland –
culture, spirituality, adventure, food, and at least one pint of Guiness.
And we did:
Ancient passage tombs, beautiful hikes complete with sheep,
the Hills of Tara, dry stack buildings, cathedrals, and castles.
But we also found Fungi the dolphin of Dingle Bay
and a somewhat lonely shepherd who’d come down from the hills who ended
up asking me if I’d like to join him up in the hills.
“Uh, no,” as I fell off my bar stool in an effort to scramble away.
I’m not sure about Kara’s ulterior motive,
but mine was to find, encounter, com upon, or be surprised by “thin places”.
In Celtic Spirituality, thin places are spots where
the distance between the finite and material world,
and God’s eternal and spiritual reality collapse, shrink, and disappear.
These places are places where
the veil between this world and God’s world “drops”.
Have y’all ever experienced this?
Maybe in worship
(after all, they are places set aside for an encounter with the divine!).
But in other places? Garden, beach, hike, or other spots of nature.
The Celts would often speak of water sources (such as wells) as thin places.
Do you think of other thin places?
playground, around a dining room table, playing music, reading with a child.
Really, any place, any time, anyone (or no one else) around can be a thin place –
where you encounter the grace, love, embrace, acceptance, and welcome of our Triune God.
~~~~~~~~~~~
As the Gospel writer John tells it,
one day, early in his “public ministry,’
just after turning water into wine at a wedding,
Jesus goes up to THE Temple –
the heart place of worship
the thin place for Jewish worshipers for generations.
It’s just before Passover and there are pilgrims everywhere.
He sees money changers (the faithful from all over need to change their coinage into shekels so that they can give their offerings).
He sees animals of all sacrifice and price levels.
And Jesus says, “Nope, with a side of Nope-sauce!
This isn’t it. This isn’t necessary.
This is not the way to encounter, meet, or be in relationship with God!”
He makes a whip of cords to drive the animals out,
he tells the birds’ keepers to take the birds away,
he turns over the tables (and not just the literal tables of the money changers!)
He turns everything topsy turvy.
For generations, the people had been told and learn that they needed to follow these “words” of God as recorded in our Exodus reading.
For generations, the people had been told that they needed to come to the Temple to meet YHWH and to offer animal sacrifices to connect with God.
For generations, the people had learned that God was their God and that they were in covenant relationship with God.
But all kinds of “stuff” had gotten in the way.
Then Jesus came along and threw it all out.
They whole system.
He didn’t just clean out the rusty, calcified pipes and joints of the system,
he ripped them out of the house.
“You don’t need the animal sacrifice.
You don’t need the journey to the Temple.
You don’t need all the intermediaries.”
The way to connect with God,
to be in relationship with God,
to live in the covenant with God
is not about keeping the law, being moral, worshiping the right way,
or other things that you need to do correctly!
Those are all external things.
To connect with God and to be in relationship is
to recognize God’s presence already in you,
to recognize God’s presence in the people around you
especially the stranger, and REALLY especially the enemy,
to recognize God’s presence in the community,
to recognize God’s presence in nature, everywhere.
To connect with God and to be in relationship is to recognize the Temple is not just a building – or a worship space – but all place, all people, all communities because the presence of God is already there,
set loose in the world in Jesus
blown into all corners in the Spirit.
~~~~~~~~~
We cannot listen to this story
nor read this part of Paul’s letter and think:
that was a problem of animal sacrifice in the Temple, or
that was a problem that people long ago had to wrestle with.
This is a story for us.
As society – or individually – we have to be asking these rhetorical questions:
•Can God be relegated to only certain places?
-Worship spaces (“the house of God”), but not in the world?
-Beautiful places of nature, but not in the not-so-beautiful or so-called “god-forsaken” places?
•Can God only be sought by those who “pass”?
-who dress right, act right, say the right things?
-or, as Jesus railed against, who worshiped in the “right” way?
~~~~~~~~~~
When Paul wrote to the Corinthians, a very fractious bunch of people,
he wasn’t trying to convince them, convert them, or invite them to believe Jesus.
They already believed.
They had already entered into this life-giving, foolish, scandalous relationship with the One who used the “foolishness: of the cross to show love.
As one writer put it, “[Paul] didn’t need to lead them into accepting it. The problem was a translation issue.”
Because it’s not just the individual relationship with God.
This topsy-turvy, foolish, table-turning love is for the whole world.
And the Corinthians
(and can we say American Christianity!?!)
were failing to love one another.
In their group,
social and class divisions were evident;
the “haves” and the “have nots” were obvious,
not in how they looked so much as how they treated one another.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The truth is, it’s difficult for the “haves” to give something up.
We get used to the things, privileges, power, and status we have,
and when we lose them we become unhappy and even angry.
But, Paul is addressing this head-on;
Jesus is turning over this table:
To be following the Way of Jesus, the Way of God’s kingdom
to be part of God’s vision for the world,
we have to give up what we think is
ours by right,
or that we have earned.
In other words, we have to give up what the world thinks is important.
This is part of the foolishness of the cross:
God in Jesus chose the path of foolishness and “shame”
“because the values with which the world operates – where some have privilege and status [and wealth] at the expense of others – looks nothing like God’s reign.” (Clara Works in Working Preacher)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
So.
What does God’s wisdom look like in daily life?
• kindness and love in unexpected places to those who’ve not active in kind and loving ways (e.g. bullies, enemies, cruel-acting folks);
• non-violence even when faced with violence, and everyone else screams “revenge”;
• choosing a neighborhood that is “porch front” rather than “garage front”;
• staying in a school, neighborhood, city, or other group even if others bail out because “it’s not good enough”;
• intentionally reaching out to, learning from, and befriending people very different from you in terms of race, culture, age, socio-economic group, education level, work, etc.
• being curious, learning, being creative, sitting or being in silence even in the midst of noise.
What does God’s wisdom look like in daily life?
It looks like people who expect “thin” places, where they will encounter God, everywhere
in every interaction with every person.
Because that’s where we find God,
and where God finds us.
Amen
