Sermon 674+November 6, 2011

All Saints’ Sunday
Twenty-first Week after Pentecost
814th Week as Priest
640th Week at St Dunstan’s

Thin Spaces and Holy Places

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

I am here tonight to bring you good news. The gospel, which literally means, “the good news,” is just as Jesus of Nazareth announced it at the very beginning of Mark’s Gospel:

Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.”

This was a radical new announcement in that day. A man appears practically out of nowhere—just after John the Baptist has been arrested and thrown into prison. People from Jerusalem and throughout Judea had been baptized by John, and they have stayed in the place near the Jordan River. Now Jesus of Nazareth comes from the hill country of Galilee and he is telling them that good news has finally arrived. The time has come, the moment that they have been waiting for all these years. The kingdom of God is at hand! But what could that mean? What is this “kingdom of God”?

That’s why I am here—to tell you that you are living in the kingdom of God right now. God’s kingdom is at hand, and we are all a part of it. Sin and death are conquered in Christ’s crucifixion. We are living the good news.

In the ancient Celtic tradition, the Christianity of Ireland and Scotland and Wales before it was absorbed by the Roman Church, “Thin Places” were spaces where the spiritual and the natural world were believed to come together. A Thin Place, then, is a place where it is possible to find yourself very near to God. “Thin Spaces” are those rare moments when we experience a deep sense of God’s presence in our everyday lives.

In my imagination, such a Thin Space would be a moment you might find yourself in the company of the saints. As the Eucharistic prayer says, “with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.” You’re not seeing ghosts, and you’re not going crazy … you are experiencing the holy. Like John of Patmos, you are experiencing a revelation, a vision, in which you see “with an eye made quiet by the power of joy and the deep power of love.” As Wordsworth said, you “see into the life of things.”

I have a similar fullness-of-time experience from time to time at St Dunstan’s. I think about the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been in this holy place, this Thin Place, over a period of a hundred years; and all of the prayers that have been prayed here; and the children baptized, young people married, old people buried from this church. The smell of incense reminds me of those prayers. It is much like coming to a place for the first time and feeling that you have been there before. T.S. Eliot speaks of this feeling at the end of his poem, “Little Gidding,”

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

There are certain types of music that recall these Thin Places, as well. When I hear bluegrass, or Irish music, or an old hymn, there is something in me that remembers a place I’ve never been before. Marion Hatchett, my major professor at Sewanee, called it anamnesis, which literally means “not forgetting.” It is as though time and space are inconsequential; and past, present, and future have all come to a single moment which is now.

The aged disciple John, writing near the end of his long life at the close of the First Century Anno Domine, knew the same anamnesis. The revelation came to him nearly seventy years after Christ’s death and resurrection. But it was a vision of the end times, which have not come in two thousand years, and may not come for many millennia. Past, present, and future all came together for John of Patmos in the thinnest of spaces where he saw a vision of a new heaven and a new earth.

This “not forgetting” is also the experience of the Holy Eucharist, when we recall, we re-member, the sacrifice of Jesus of his own Body and Blood, and it is the same as if it were happening all over again. Again it is a Thin Place where the natural world and spiritual world seem very close to each other, and we can all but touch the hand of Christ.

If you have experienced the death of a loved one, or you have lost family members and friends over the years, I hope that this good news is a hope and a comfort to you. The kingdom of God is at hand. The space between God’s kingdom and our world is rather thin right here, right now. We are gathered with angels and archangels, with saints and martyrs, with all the company of heaven, and with those who have come before and live both in heaven and in the brightness of our own memories. In a little while, we will sing,

 Holy, holy, holy Lord.
 God of power and might.
 Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
 Hosanna in the highest!

We will eat the Bread of Heaven. We will drink from the Cup of Salvation. And we will live forever with the saints in heaven. Amen. Alleluia!

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