"Thin Places" July 17, 2011

Genesis 28:10-ff
Luke 8:26-ff
In Ireland, they have a name for places like where Jacob slept and dreamed of the Ladder between Heaven and Earth, places like where the one whose identity was Mob/ Legion/ Demoniac met Jesus. They call these “THIN PLACES,” locations where the separation between heaven and earth are thin.

In our Feng Shui, Martha Stewart obsessed desire for perfection, we imagine places where we would meet God as being perfection. Where grass would not crunch beneath our steps from dryness, gardens would be immaculate without a weed, woodland creatures would be called Flower and Thumper, and rather than the sound of traffic, we would hear the rhythm of wind through leaves and the melody of water spilling over a brook. But the Bible is not pristine and composed, those who have shared their faith here know that life is messy and often times brutal. Thin Places more often are desolate, harsh, places of banishment where uncontrolled persons would be put away as if dead. Both passages this week are of these Thin Places, Places of Banishment, Places where Heaven and Earth meet, where we most often encounter God.

In order to receive what is here, we need to grasp what it is to be banished. In our Family Systems, our sense of Normal, when there is that which is a violation, abhorrent, something we cannot accept or tolerate, we execute a Cut-Off, we Banish. In a time in human societies when union between people of the same sex is legalized, when dictators are overthrown without being put to death, it is hard to imagine that only a generation ago for a Catholic to marry a Protestant would have been grounds for the family to never speak to their son or daughter again. Quite possibly, while televised coverage and the legalization of human rights have created safeties, prejudice and hostility are the more dangerous because they are less visible, more subversive. When Isaac realized that Jacob had tricked his Father into giving Jacob everything, when Esau knew that his own brother Jacob had stolen the blessings of his inheritance from his father, Isaac sent Jacob away.

In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is banished for the accidental killing of Juliet's cousin. Romeo describes that to be banished is worse than the punishment of Execution; to be kept alive, but sent away from everyone and everything you love, never to be able to go home, never again to embrace or simply be with your family, never again to do what is normal what was taken for granted. Imagine a family genealogy, in which there are those whom the family does not claim as being one of us.

By stealing the birthright, by claiming what was not his, by tricking everyone, Jacob has cut himself off and now as one without Country, without Family, without place or heir, he wanders through a place unknown, and exhausted lays down to sleep. We have to be careful in interpreting Holy Scripture from our contemporary understandings. We read of a son who was loved by his mother more than she loved anyone else, and we jump to Sigmund Freud; we read of Jacob having a dream of God and having been influenced by Carl Jung we look for Symbols and Archetypes behind every image. Before we suggest electro-shock therapy or lythium for the one Jesus encountered, we need to accept the importance of what is described to people of faith in their own time. This dream was not a working out of Jacob's oedipal complex. This dream was not a desire to kill his father. This dream Jacob saw as an encounter with God, as real and tangible as Moses' Burning Bush, or the parting of the Red Sea, or Isaiah having his unclean lips cauterized by a flying Seraphim. The importance of this being a Dream is simply that Jac ob could no longer control and manipulate outcomes. This is who Jacob had been, he manipulated his brother into selling his birthrights, he controlled and manipulated his father into giving him the family blessing and promise, but in our dreams we are witnesses not manipulators in control.

What Jacob witnessed, when he was not in control, is that rather than God being the Judge he anticipated, sitting in a far off Heaven, Earth and Heaven are connected. Not only is there a web of ladders connecting us, but as isolated and cut-off as he was, still God was present with him. In essence, by his trickery and manipulation, by the sins of his life, Jacob had created for himself the identity God knew Abraham and Isaac to have had. Read in this way, I am not certain Abraham or Isaac had ever claimed in their own identity that they were without Nation, without Family, without Home, without … because they had had the Promise, they were with God. What Jacob witnessed was the reality of the Incarnation, GOD IS WITH US, even when Banished, cut off, isolated and absolutely alone, without the ability to communicate or make connections, still God is with us.

In this dream, God vows three things: God re-establishes the PROMISE given to Abraham, and the INCARNATION that eventually would be promised in Jesus Christ that the Lord would be with us, but ALSO Jacob is given Hope in a future HOMECOMING. The Banished, Those in Exile, The Lost would eventually be redeemed. There is a subtlety here, that Almighty God, Eternal and Everlasting Creator, Redeemer and Judge, vows all this to Jacob, and in reply Jacob says IF, IF you will, then I vow. Imagine on your Wedding Day being invited to share your vows of Commitment, Fidelity and Loyalty and Love, and in response to the other professing For Better and Worse, Richer and Poorer, In Sickness and in Health AS LONG as we both shall ever live, you respond IF YOU DO, THEN I WILL. A Vow is not a contract, not even a Sacred promise or Covenant. A Vow is a YIELDING of our Self, rather than claiming our wants or our needs, or our desires, rather than seizing the day, and going for the gusto, a vow places ourself in relationship to fulfillment of the other's needs and wants.

The one Jesus encounters, on the other side, no longer is claimed as a human being, in his raging, in his torment, his family, friends, neighbors have found the only means they thought they could of coping. They chained him to the tombs of the dead. This is a scene filled with images. He is dead to them. Like Eve and Adam after being found sinful, he is Naked and knows he is Mortal, Sinful and LOST from God. But Jesus does not banish this one. Jesus sits down with him, treating him as a man. Ironically, here we have tried to describe him as “One” rather than The Person, or The Man, because his Town and Village and Family no longer claim him as being a person, a human being, and yet when asked his identity, this one claims so many voices in head that he is a MOB, a Military Legion of Rome WARRING inside him. The difficulty of Mental Illness is that it would be far easier if like this one, the person knew and claimed the desire to yield, but instead when a person is raging they want the rest of the world to change to fit them. Increasingly, I think our whole world is ill believing everyone and everything can be manipulated and controlled and made to fit our individual realities. The Rupert Murdocks and Bernie Madoffs, truly believe they have done nothing wrong, they each have created ethical constructs in which they are the center of their world, they are God and there can be no other. The most difficult part of this story, is not that the Savior healed this man, but that the town and village and his family preferred he had stayed as he was, because they knew how to respond to that. Accepting him as a Man, yielding to trust him again as a whole person, especially when the cure had cost them the sacrifice of a whole herd of livestock is a risk.

But the THIN PLACES of life, the SANCTUARIES are not Ivory Towers with Majestic Pipe Organs. In another church, in an earlier time, we had a man come to worship one day, saying that years ago he and his wife had lived in this community. He had devoted himself to his business and had no time for anything else. Now he was retired and she had passed, their children had their own lives. SO he wanted to make a gift to the Church. Seeing the Sanctuary had solid Oak Pews, he volunteered to donate the upholstering of cushions to make the pews more comfortable. It took the congregation 6 months and the appointing of two committees to decide to accept the gift, because they were not certain they should be comfortable in the Sanctuary, they sort of appreciated the discomfort of the hard Oak Pews.

The hardest part of REDEMPTION, the HOMECOMING promised to Jacob, is letting go our “IF-s” and choosing that we can yield to the wants and needs and desires of Vows to others.