Props/Visuals: You may want to use visuals of mountains or misty seas, or you may want to use the painting by Caspar David Friedrich, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” or other paintings by Friedich.
The Celtic Christian spiritual tradition has always noted the existence of something they call “thin places.”
If you travel to Ireland or Scotland, especially to places like the Isle of Iona, you can’t help but realize how those ancient Christians came to think about “thin places.” Both countries boast exquisitely beautiful landscapes that look practically heaven kissed.
But a thin place doesn’t just have to be in nature, although it can be. A thin place is anywhere in which the “distance between heaven and earth collapses and we can catch glimpses of the divine or transcendent or infinite.”** A thin place is a place of revelation, of communication between God and one of us, in which we are bared before God, and somehow transfigured in God’s presence.
Looking at those beautiful Celtic landscapes, it isn’t hard to see how a “thin space” could represent a place where the boundary between heaven and earth becomes especially “thin.” Imagine that instead of a wall, that wall becomes so thin that it becomes transparent in one place, so that you can look in and get a little glimpse of something beyond your ken. In “thin places,” we can sense the divine, even if “through a glass darkly.” We can feel the presence of God, and experience God’s transfigurative power working within us even as our eyes are fixed upon that visage. In some cases, it is merely a sense we get in a certain place.
We see many spaces like this, God moments in scripture –the burning bush, Mt. Sinai, the wilderness, the tabernacle, the tent of meeting, the foggy Sea of Galilee, the Mt. of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane. But we also see I think a “thin space” in the encounter between Mary and the angel Gabriel in our scripture for today.
Mary is alone in her darkened room, probably at night, in Nazareth, a miniscule village off the beaten track in the vicinity of Sepphoris. It’s a rural farming community with few residents. And it’s lying just outside of Roman central jurisdiction. It’s essentially a “liminal” space.
Breaking though into that space, we find the messenger of God, the angel Gabriel. Gabriel only appears to three people in scripture, to Daniel, to Zechariah announcing the birth of John, and to young Mary. In all three cases, the shock of the angel seems to stun them, and their lives are inescapably changed by the message delivered. Gabriel is an angel of prophecy, and his presence inaugurates a major God event. The prophetic message to Mary is God’s promise which is to be fulfilled through her womb. God’s voice essentially creates that promise within her. In that moment, God has “broken through” from heaven into the world, into time and space, and has impregnated the world with new hope.
Within a world that is marked by Roman rule, difficulty, oppression, and pain, God begins change, and installs within our world a “pregnant hope.” In this, Mary becomes the message.
She is transfixed and transfigured within that suspension of time and space moment in which she encounters God through Gabriel, and God’s dream for humanity is begun with a tiny seed. Once God breaks through from heaven into earth time and space, God’s “Word” will no longer be contained. As that pregnant moment grows and expands, miracles will happen, and nothing can stop the spread of God dream space into the civilized world.
Thin spaces are liminal spaces, where time and space are suspended just enough for God to intervene. Liminal space is transitional space, in which the secular world experiences a sacred moment, a sacred space. This is a God encounter.
What Mary experiences changes her completely, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually, as she answers a “call” from God to be God’s “pregnant” miracle. For in a God encounter, anything can happen.
A God encounter is a space of expectation. Once God’s power breaks through and incarnates into the world, it will move uncontrollably forward and nothing can stand in its way. For it IS a way.
“Prepare the Way of the Lord,” John will declare! The “Way” in the wilderness, that metaphorical road of journey will call all of God’s children to “turn” (repent) and follow the Son down that Way that leads back to God, into the realm of the sacred.
For all of Jesus’ followers will encounter God on their “road,” their own “Emmaus.”
God’s “pregnant” promise that Mary will carry from Nazareth to the hills of Jerusalem, back to Nazareth, and finally to Bethlehem will chart a journey of prophetic promise. When that promise is born into the world, God’s “Way” will invade and pervade the world with a new kind of covenant, and the “Way” in the wilderness will become the Way of Jesus, not merely a place, but an entire people of God.
You are part of that Way. You all may sometime in your lives experience a God Encounter. The question is, will you recognize it when you see it? Are you in tune with the pregnant possibility that God offers you in your own journey of discipleship and identity?
John Wesley strongly believed that the best way to experience those kinds of God encounters was to engage in what he called “means of grace.” Each person may find their own “thin place” in one of those “means of grace.” Some may experience God in prayer or meditation, some in music and song, some in the beauty of art or liturgical dance, some in holy communion, some in reading the scriptures, some in walking through the woods on a misty morning.
Jesus loved to go to the mountains, the gardens, the desert, or the sea to pray, and we know He must have experienced many sacred moments in His life, in which He continued to be changed and renewed, refreshed, and refueled.
As advent begins, and the busyness of our civilized world starts to overtake us, we all need those thin spaces. We all need to make time for God encounters.
And when you do, no matter what else you are dealing with in your life, that encounter with God will change you, instill in you a sense of promise, of peace, of vision, of God’s sacred dream. And you will emerge, different. You will be…different.
For God’s promise is a promise of difference –a firm promise that nothing will be the same again, but will change you and everything around you. And you in turn, or in your turning, will help change the world. For you are part of God’s Dream, God’s message of hope. You in your encounter become yourself, a Thin and Sacred Space with potential you cannot even imagine.
Where God has broken into the world, the darkness can never again overcome.
This is the promise. This is the celebration. This is your story. And this is your song.
Rejoice!
He is coming.
*The photo for this sermon comes from El Tibor at http://puertadeltibor.com/en/tibor-light/item/344-god-like-consciousness-in-science-fiction-a-strange-encounter
**See NY York Times article on Thin Places.
Based on the Story Lectionary
Major Text
Luke’s Statement of Purpose and Mary’s Encounter with Gabriel in Nazareth (Luke 1:1-4; 26-38)
Minor Text
Handmaiden Hagar and Ishmael, Her Son, Sent Into the Wilderness, Encounter God (Genesis 16:1-14)
Handmaidens Bilhah and Zilpah Bear Sons Who Will Become Lost Tribes of Israel (Genesis 30)
Psalm 34: I Will Glory in the Lord
Psalm 63: You God are my God
Psalm 73: Surely God is Good to those Pure in Heart
Psalm 121: The Lord Will Watch Over You
Psalm 139: Lord, You Know Me
The People Walking in Darkness Have Seen a Great Light (Isaiah 9)
My Servant in Whom I Delight, My Chosen One (Isaiah 42)
Your Light Has Come (Isaiah 60)
Faith and Witness (Hebrews 11-12)
Faith in the Witness (1 John 5)