Sermon February 19, 2012

2 Kings 2:1-12

Psalm 50:1-6

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

Mark 9:2-9

“Thin Places”

The title for today's sermon, “Thin Places,” is a Celtic term for places in the world where people have experienced visions, heard music, felt changes or been transformed by the influence of another world beyond this one. The Celts, early people of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England, had a keen sense for thin places. Biblically, places like a mountaintop were thin places, though they certainly weren't the only ones—places like rivers, lakes, bases of mountains, and broad valleys were also places where people were transported or experienced God quite vividly. They revealed God's call toward what came next—for Moses, for Elijah, for Jesus, Peter James and John and perhaps for each one of us who follow in their footsteps.

When Peter and James and John went up to a mountain with Jesus, they were probably knowingly approaching a thin place. They knew the stories of the mountaintop and how God was often encountered there.

If you think back to the lives of Moses and Elijah, the mountaintop was where they had vividly, actively and fully known God's presence in their lives. Moses first encountered God at the foot of Mount Horeb in a burning bush, but then during the journey through the wilderness, he visited, spoke, communed, and otherwise experienced God at the top of the same, Mount Sinai or Horeb.

When Elijah had killed the prophet priests of Ba'al, after Ahab and Jezebel had been killing the prophets of Yahweh, the Lord God, he ran to escape their vengeance, eventually ending up in a cave at the top of Mount Horeb. And he was told to wait for God there, eventually hearing God in “a sound of sheer silence.” —or as the King James says, in a “still small voice.”

The mountaintop was a thin place—a place where God's presence peaked out of eternity and into the temporal and limited place of humanity. As one author describes it, “Truth abides in thin places; naked, raw, hard to face truth. Yet the comfort, safety and strength to face that truth also abides there. Thin places captivate our imagination, yet diminish our existence. We become very small, yet we gain connection and become part of something larger than we can perceive. The human spirit is awakened and will grow if the body and mind allow it.”¹

Moses represented the iconic lawgiver, though he was a prophet and leader of the whole nation of Israel, his presence, his name represents the Torah, not just the rules, but the God's word of law itself, written and unwritten. Elijah is seen as the symbol of the prophet, though he was a passionate upholder of God's law, too. He represented the power of the prophet to speak against the power of the king and the queen, any ruler who ruled unjustly and without righteousness.

The story we heard this morning from 2 Kings describes the power that Elijah—and is the seed of the idea that because Elijah did not die, his presence heralds the coming of the Messiah to the Jewish people.

So when Peter, James and John were led up a “high mountain apart. . .” as Mark describes it, we are supposed to remember these stories from the mountaintops, these memories of the thin places where God has been experienced in faith history. And once they are there, the three disciples knew that something incredible was happening—the location would have been convincing evidence alongside their experience and their eyewitness. Jesus' presence and conversation with the personified Law and Prophet, was a revelation even before the voice from the cloud proclaimed him as God's Beloved Son.

It isn't often in Mark's gospel that Jesus proclaims his own identity—the title he gives himself almost exclusively is Son of Man, which can simply mean “human being,” but it is also a title for the Messiah, God's chosen or anointed one. In the telling of this story, as Mark describes Jesus alongside the Law and the Prophet, he takes his place within that tradition—and as a new word given by God. He is revealed as a continuation of God's revelation, as he said, “until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”

Peter and James and John were chosen, it seems, as particular witnesses, to remember this moment and take not of it within his whole life among them.

All three of these disciples come to moments in this gospel where we know they struggle, as we do, with how to be faithful. Just before this event in the gospel, Peter questions Jesus' decision to go to Jerusalem because Jesus has just told them it means he will die. Shortly after this event, James and John ask to stand at his right and left hands in his coming kingdom. It may be this reason that Jesus calls them to wait until they experience the crucifixion and resurrection for themselves before they try to express what they had just seen.

If these thin places reveal the truth, the cold, uncomfortable truth, then they reveal it about God, the eternal certainly and they reveal it about ourselves. In Peter, we hear his misunderstanding continuing, as in the previous chapter, he doesn't understand that the end of Jesus' story, the death and resurrection are necessary to understand the rest of Jesus' story. So he wants to make this glorious visual experience the ultimate meaning—like the festival of the booths that celebrates the Jewish journey in the wilderness—because he doesn't yet know the rest of the story. In his eyes and in the throne and crown filled eyes of James and John, Messiah was meant to destroy their most recent oppressors, the Romans, but the meaning of a crucified Messiah had to be demonstrated. It had to be real, really real.

The glory of Jesus' life and his story would be set among the word of God, the Law and the Prophets as God's very own Word, God's very own Son, but that glory would come in humility and it would come through a demonstration of God's power over violence. It would not come, as they would someday learn, through a violence work of vengeance, but that in the reality that the life God gave Jesus could not be defeated.

And we learn, through our experience of the holy, eternal God, that we are valuable, beloved daughters and sons of God, and yet small parts of the infinite whole that is all that God has in store for God's church. Our own desires have to be set within the life and purpose of all creation.

We aren't to build memorials to one experience or to one another—and just stay there—our experiences of God must move us, shake us and take us forward. We are fed and encouraged by the thin places, urged toward transformation and energized toward the purposes that God gives—and each one of us fits within the whole universe of what God has in store.

To God's glory—on the mountaintop and on the cross. Amen.

1http://www.thinplaces.net/openingarticle.htm by Mindie Burgoyne