Everywhere Is Thin

Everywhere Is Thin--May 14, 2018

The woman said to [Jesus], "Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place were people must worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." [John 4:19-24]

Good news! It was never about the soil.  It was never about the GPS coordinates.  It was never about the particular spot on earth, the presence or absence of a steeple or an altar or even an uncomfortable pew.  Connection and worship of God are possible in all places, not just in one church, or in one temple, or one city, or one land.   The God to whom Jesus bears witness is Spirit... which means among, other things, that God is present to every hill, every valley, every office, every school, every building, every empty field, and every congested highway.

That's important to hear from Jesus, because without that insight we humans have this fascinating ability to imagine that some places are holier than others, or that some locations give us better access to God than others. In the old Celtic spirituality, they used to talk about "thin places," those spots on Earth where it seemed, they felt, that the boundaries between heaven and earth, the divine and the human, the numinous and the normal, were "thinner," and thus where people could commune with God (or the gods or the spirits or the universe, or what-have-you).  And sure, I should be honest that there is something about a glorious May sunset on a western Pennsylvania hilltop that seems more conducive to prayerful reflection than the clearance rack at Wal-mart.  There are, you could say, fewer distractions where nobody is selling anything.  But that doesn't mean that there's only one "right" location for communing, connecting, worshiping, and praying to God.  And that's our recurring religious mistake.

The quest to declare a "right" or "holy" place is, whether we realize we are doing it or not, an attempt to put God within in a box or a building or a border, which we can then control.

You can hear that same religious tendency here in this snippet of conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well here in John 4.  She is changing the subject away from herself (because she is not crazy about how perceptive Jesus is, and she's worried he's going to judge or condemn her like everybody else in town is), but she opens up a whole can of worms on the subject of worship and location.  "Our ancestors worshiped here on this mountain," she says, and then contrasts that with the Jewish insistence on worshipping in the Jerusalem Temple.  And it was true, of course, that there had been quite a bit of argument, propaganda, and official religious and political proclamation over the centuries between the Judeans in the south and the Samaritans in the north over what the "right" and God-ordained location for worship was.  The nitty gritty of that debate is probably a conversation for another day, but what's noteworthy to me is the way Jesus responds.

The woman has set up the debate as an either/or:  which is the one "right" place to worship--Jerusalem or Mt. Gerizim in Samaria?  One or the other, one "correct" and one "incorrect," one a "holy" place and one a "profane" place.  She wants an answer to the question of which one is the right box to put God in, and Jesus responds by undermining the premise of the whole set-up.  

"The hour is coming, and now is here," Jesus says, when it won't be about a mountain or a sacred shrine or a holy land, because God has never been bound to the soil or to the GPS coordinates.  Worship of God is not a matter of possessing territory or making sure God stays cordoned off within velvet ropes or construction fencing.  Because God is Spirit, Jesus says, the thing that matters in worship is truthfulness--honesty, authenticity, and being real before the Creator of the universe--and that can happen anywhere.  It's not about whose mountain is the right one.  It's not about what lovely stream or hilltop or steeple marks a "thinner" boundary between the human and the divine.  To hear Jesus tell it, everywhere is thin.  All ground is holy, in the sense that the whole earth is present to the reality of God.

We get it all wrong, then, when we imagine that there are some locations about which God cares more than others.  We even do something of a disservice to the land where Jesus lived by calling it "the Holy Land," when Jesus himself makes a point of saying that God is present to all of creation.  Part of what it means to be dwelt by the Holy Spirit, according to the New Testament writers, is that we become the dwelling place of God, that we are the living temple wherein God chooses to be found. 

And truthfully, Jesus' point that it's not about Jerusalem or Mt. Gerizim is really just expounding on the truth of Israel's own history.  Jerusalem wasn't always the location of the Temple of Israel's God--for a long time, it been a town called Shiloh before that, and before then, God's symbolic dwelling called the tabernacle had just been a movable tent that went wherever the people went.  When the great kings of Israel proposed the idea of building a single location for worship, God seemed ambivalent at best about the idea, in fact, because God knows our habit of turning worship locations into "Holy Ground," and then we get territorial and controlling over who gets to "own" or control "access" to the s0-called holy places.  In fact, the whole story of Israel is the story of a God who went with the people into seemingly unholy places--slavery in Egypt, exile in Babylon, and the emptiness of the wilderness.  The most important moments of God's story with the people have no shrines or temples to mark them--and seemingly, that is by God's choice.

So for us today, the question is not about how to get ourselves to the right "location," or about who controls this or that piece of ground, but about how to be truthful and authentic before the living God everywhere--wherever we find ourselves.   Jerusalem is not holier ground than Mt. Gerizim, according to Jesus, and neither of them are closer to God than right where you are right now.  Calling some spot of territory "Holy Land" makes an idol out of the dirt and attempts to force God to reside behind a border wall somewhere, and the living God stubbornly refuses to be confined into a box of our making.

Right where you are is a thin place.  Right where you are is the presence of God.  It's the God's-honest truth.

Spirit of God, open our eyes to see your presence here now and always.