Sermons
March 2, 2025
Thin places
Luke 9:28-45
Have you ever heard of thin places?
Or thin times, perhaps?
What does it mean for a time or a place to be thin?
The Scottish folk singer Dougie MacLean introduces his song called “Feel So Near” by relating a conversation he had with a man on the Isle of Lewis off the northwestern coast of Scotland.
The old fellow apparently said, describing this place where he lived, that it was endless thin.
Now I’m reasonably sure that Dougie himself knows what that means, because it’s a fairly familiar thing in Celtic Christianity, or, actually, in Celtic thought even before Christianity came to the British Isles.
A thin place is a holy place.
It’s a place where we are able to recognize that God is with us in a way that we might not be able to in other places.
It was very common at the camp where I used to counsel when I lived in Iowa to refer to our campground as “holy ground.”
Camp, especially the nightly gatherings around the campfire, is a thin place.
We may not come right out and say Camp Galilee, where we hold Faith Adventures Camp every summer, is holy ground like we did the Christian Conference Center in Iowa, but it is; it’s a thin place.
It’s a place where young people and their adult leaders go, seeking to be in God’s presence in a way that they aren’t at home.
For some people, although I daresay not all, a church sanctuary is meant to be a thin place.
We, of course, know that God is present with us wherever we are, but it seems like when we set apart a particular place specifically for God, we expect it to be a place where we encounter God in a way that is different from the way that we know God is with us all the time.
Several times of the year are considered to be thin times in Celtic thought.
These are times when the barrier between, shall we say, the material world and the spiritual world becomes permeable.
One of these thin times before Christianity was called Samhain, and ancient Irish people would carve scary faces into vegetables, and then put lights inside of them, with the idea that they might scare beings from the other side of that barrier away, just in case they were seeking to do damage.
That might sound familiar to you, although the ancient Irish people did not have pumpkins, so they carved these scary faces into other vegetables like turnips.
The turning of seasons, especially the winter solstice, which happens late in December in the Northern Hemisphere, is especially thin.
People all over the British Isles and much of Europe[1] had celebrations at the winter solstice, and there are many ancient structures, like Newgrange in Ireland and Stonehenge, where the sun shines into the structure in a certain place on the winter solstice and at no other time during the year, and people to this day gather to see that happen.
It’s a thin time.
Today’s story talks about a thin time, and event that takes place at what the ancients would have recognized as a thin place.
Ancient peoples tended to see mountain tops as thin places.
Because oftentimes they thought of God as living in the sky, and mountains held up the sky, if you went to the top of a mountain you were closer to God.
So today’s story takes place in a thin place, and what happens there makes clear that it is a thin time as well.
The church has for centuries celebrated the Feast of the Transfiguration on the Sunday before Lent begins as a thin time, a time when we at least think about what it might be like to be in God’s presence in a particular way, and perhaps hope that it might happen to us.
But does it?
Take a moment to think about it: can you remember a time when you particularly felt God present with you at church?
Peter, James, and John didn’t go to church to encounter God.
Jesus took them with him to a mountaintop.
It says they were going up there to pray.
And at that place, Jesus, who was their teacher, their leader, and their friend, suddenly became so much more.
His clothes and his appearance became dazzlingly bright, and suddenly there appeared with him two long dead figures from their history.
Remember that a thin place is a place where there isn’t much of a boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
Moses and Elijah are there to talk with Jesus about what in Greek is called his Exodus—his departure.
We know from those fearsome faces carved into vegetables at the time we know as Halloween, a thin place can be a frightening place.
When that veil between here and the hereafter gets lifted, we don’t always know what might come through.
And so we can kind of forgive Peter for babbling at that moment.
And of course we can understand the impulse that Peter had, to build dwelling places perhaps to cause Jesus, moses, and Elijah to settle down in that one place, where they could be visited, where people could go to remember that day.
That’s what we do at thin places.
But it wasn’t what God wanted to have happen in that place, at that time.
And I wonder what that means for us.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with having thin places or observing thin times.
I think this story tells us that the problem isn’t that we have them, but that we assume those are the only places where we can find ourselves in the presence of the Divine.
As soon as this is over with, Jesus and the three go down the mountain, and we learn that the next day the disciples are quite unable to perform a healing that they had been able to perform before.
We assume that the disciples who aren’t able to perform this healing are not the three that were up on the mountain with Jesus, but it doesn’t really say one way or the other.
But in that place, faced with a child who suffered with seizures, they could do nothing, could not heal something that they had previously been able to heal.
Why is that?
Maybe it’s because, as they focused on those certain places where they knew God could be encountered, such as at the temple, or on a mountaintop, they let it slip from their minds that God can be encountered anywhere.
They let it slip from their minds that any place can be a thin place, and any moment can be a thin time.
Of course places such as mountain tops or camp or the church sanctuary might be thin places.
But what about the passenger seat of a dirty car sitting on the side of the road?
What about a hospital room?
Or a classroom?
Or a wheat field?
Or a booth in a crowded restaurant, maybe even in the dishroom of that same restaurant?
Or the lake?
Or your living room?
Could it be that the disciples weren’t able to use their God-given power to heal because they didn’t expect God’s presence and God’s power to be where they were?
What difference would it make in your life if you saw every place as a potential thin place, every moment as a potential thin time?
[1] I’m only leaving out mention of Asia here because I am not familiar with what Asian cultures might or might not do at the solstices.