5/13/18 “Thin Places” by Nancy Petty
Text: John 17:6-19
We do not live in a moral nation. This is a jarring statement and one that may seem hyperbolic. We are immersed through the media and our telling of our history, and our holidays in the narrative propaganda of a moral America. And yet, in recent weeks, a number of incidents around the U.S. have involved white people calling the police on black people and other people of color for activities such as sitting at Starbucks, staying at an Airbnb, taking a nap in a college apartment common area (the napper was a student at the prestigious university), not playing fast enough on a golf course, and participating in a college campus tour. Last month a white woman even called the police on a black family at Lake Merritt in Oakland, California, while they were setting up for a day at the park. Their crime, according to the unidentified woman, was grilling in one of the park’s designated barbecue zones using a charcoal grill, instead of a “non-charcoal” grill.
Racial profiling is only but one area where our nation’s morality comes up short. We have become a country where we no longer care for our elders with respect and dignity. We cut funding for resources that aid their quality of life. We increase prescription costs such that many of them have to choose between their medicine, sold for profit, and enough food to sustain them. We do no better when it comes to a moral conscience in caring for our children. It is a national disgrace that there are 14.7 million children and 6.5 million extremely poor children in the United States of America—the world’s largest economy. Millions of children in this country and around the world are homeless, lack adequate food and housing, and do not have access to quality education. In many of our communities, it is more likely that teenagers will end up in prison than graduate from high school.
I keep asking myself and the institution I represent in this world, the church, where is the moral response when in the United States women held in local jails are the fastest-growing segment of incarcerated people in the United States, and the majority of them are black or Latino? In our country, women are more likely to live in poverty. Economic gender equality is getting worse in the United States not better. Women earn 79 cents to a man’s dollar. Ten million women a year are victims of domestic violence. If we want to honor our mothers, then maybe we should start protecting them and their children from violence.
And I keep asking myself and the institution I represent in this world, the church, where is the moral response when our nation has turned a blind eye to the injustices of militarism and gun violence? When $630 billion dollars is designated for the military while only $183 billion is spent on education, jobs, housing, and other basic human needs there is a moral problem. And the sad truth is that the problems we face are not due to a lack of resources in this country, but rather a misallocation of resources.
Where is the moral response when we know that pollution and climate change negatively affect people’s health and quality of life? Hundreds of studies have documented that people of color, people of lower socioeconomic status, indigenous and immigrant populations, and other marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by ecologically harmful infrastructures, such as landfills, mines, incinerators, polluting factories, and destructive transportation systems.
And I keep asking myself and my faith, what is the moral response to the problems of this world, or at least to our nation’s problems?
For the 44 million Americans who are carrying the burden of $1.34 trillion dollars in student debt, what are we to do? For the 3.5 million people sleeping in shelters every year and the 7.4 million who are on the brink of homelessness—the majority of whom are white and up to 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQIA—what are we to do? When three individuals in the U.S. have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of all Americans combined, what are we to do? How can we live in a world like this? When 38% of American households—primarily black and Latino families—have a net worth of zero dollars, what are we to do as people of faith and if not as people of faith, at least as moral people?
Our text from the gospel of John asks this question: What does it mean to be in this world that is ever so flawed, but not belong to it? It seems this was the question on Jesus’ mind when he thought of his disciples trying to live in a world whose ways are not caring and compassionate for all people. It was so much on his mind that he turned to God in prayer. That is what John 17:6-19 is: it is a pastoral prayer uttered by Jesus for his disciples as he prepares to leave them in this world.
Let me stop here and say if you have ever felt insecure in your praying you should find great comfort when reading Jesus’ prayer in John 17. It is about as clear as mud. That is until you read it slowly and feel the concern Jesus has for his disciples living in a world that didn’t value a moral or loving agenda. I wonder if Jesus was praying this prayer today what it might sound like. I wonder if it would sound something like this.
God, these people—your people—that I have been on this journey with for these past three years are good people. They know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this stuff of justice-love and forgiveness and compassion and inclusiveness that I’ve been teaching is the real stuff or your ways. I have done my best teaching them what you taught me—to love you with all their heart and soul and strength and to love one another. They get it and they have been trying their best to live it. But it’s hard in the world they are trying to navigate. A world plagued by racial inequality, gun violence, greed and power; a world that has lost its way in taking care of one another; a world that is more determined to stomp on the lowly than to lift them up; a consumer world that is focused on an economy of extraction for a few rather than an economy of extravagance for all. And so I pray for them.
God, I’m not praying for this world that rejects you and your justice-love. I’m praying for my people. So please God, guard them. Guard them as they march in the streets and as they stand up against violence; guard them as they teach our children in public schools and care for our elders who are sick and dying. I have tried to take care of them as best I could. I stayed up at night to watch over them. But now I will be leaving them. And I leave them knowing that the world rejects your values and therefore their values of love and grace and justice and loving one another. They have stayed strong and not joined the world’s ways but it’s hard and it is getting harder. I’m not asking you to take them out of the world, no, the world needs them. But could you please watch over them. Remind them daily that they are not defined by this world. Remind them that they are in the world and they have work to do in the world but they do not belong to this world’s ways. And finally, God, give them the strength and courage they need to be in this world but to never forget that they belong to your kingdom. God have mercy on my sisters and brothers, your people.
How do we live this prayer as moral, faith-centered people? How can we be in this world—live in this world—with all its God-rejecting ways and not become attached to it in such a way that we start belonging to it ways? How can we live in the world and rather belong to justice-love, to compassion for our fellow human beings, to sharing our resources, to seeing our connection one to another, to using less so others might have enough? How do we live in this world and have our belonging in God ways?
As I have been wrestling with these basic faith and moral questions of how we live in this world without belonging to it, I remembered sitting in lectionary this past week a conversation I had with a mentor years ago about, what the Celtic people call, “thin places.” “The ancient pagan Celts, and later, Christians, used the term to describe mesmerizing places like the wind-swept isle of Iona (now part of Scotland) or the rocky peaks of Croagh Patrick. Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places and thin times that distance is even shorter.” (Eric Weiner, Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer)
In a 2012 article in the New York Times titled When Heaven and Earth Come Closer, Eric Weiner writes: [these thin places are] “where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpse of the divine…thin places does not necessarily lead to anything as grandiose as a “spiritual breakthrough,” whatever that means, but it does disorient. It confuses. We lose our bearings and find new ones. Or not. Either way, we are jolted out of old ways of seeing the world, and therein lies the transformative magic of” [thin places].
He goes on to say, “So what exactly makes a place thin? It’s easier to say what a thin place is not. A thin place is not necessarily a tranquil place, or a fun one, or even a beautiful one, though it may be all of those things too. Disney World is not a thin place. Nor is Cancún. Thin places relax us, yes, but they also transform us — or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves.” Another person writes of thin places, “they are where the veil between this world and the next is so sheer you can almost step through.”
I believe we are living in a world and at a time in our nation’s history that is unmasking us and waiting to see if we will be transformed. Living in this world while not belonging to this world is about finding the thin places and then risking stepping through them.
Celtic Christians preserved the ancient reverence for thin places, allowing for an encounter with the holy in their everyday lives. Finding the thin places where we are transformed and unmasked cannot be reserved for exotic and magical places. The thin places have to show up in our everyday ordinary lives: on our crowded streets, in our public school classrooms, in our hospital waiting rooms and in our back door parking lots. We must be present in this world. We must be present to the ways that jolt us out of old ways of seeing and being in this world and into morally just and loving ways.
We do not live on the wind-swept isle of Iona. And yet we are called to recognize the thin places all around us. The places where the opportunity to speak and act prophetically are right in front of us, where the space between an amoral world and the kingdom of God is razor thin. I would argue that where racism is, there is a thin place. Where poverty is, there is a thin place. Where heartbreak is, there is a thin place.
But living in a thin place calls us not just to rail against the wrongs, but to hold tenderly our belonging to the world we inhabit as, itself, sacred and part of the kingdom. As Richard Rohr writes:
The edge of things is a liminal space — a very sacred place where guardian angels are especially available and needed. The edge is a holy place, or as the Celts called it, “a thin place” and you have to be taught how to live there. To take your position on the spiritual edge of things is to learn how to move safely in and out, back and forth, across and return. It is a prophetic position, not a rebellious or antisocial one. When you live on the edge of anything with respect and honor, you are in a very auspicious position. You are free from its central
seductions, but also free to hear its core message in very new and creative ways. When you are at the center of something, you usually confuse the essentials with the non-essentials and get tied down by trivia, loyalty tests, and job security. Not much truth can happen there.
And so, I invite us or rather the prayer of Jesus invites us to live on the holy edge, the thin place, of our world with respect and honor, with strength and courage. To recognize that it is a sacred task to be the keepers of these thin places. And to understand that our actions and our presence at those edges are vital to the justice love we seek. As people of faith, or if you rather, as moral people, we must resist belonging to this world’s ways. AND, we must never tire of living in this world offering God’s mercy and justice-love. There are thin places all around you every single day. May each of us have the wisdom and faithfulness to step through them and trust God with the outcome.
