Just One Thing

The early Celtic people in Ireland and Scotland believed that you could go to certain places to be closer to God. They called these places “thin places” – geographical locations where a person experiences only a very thin divide between the past, present, and future.

They were fascinated by shorelines where water met the land, by wells where water bubbled up from deep below, by doorways where the outside and inside met. They experienced thin places at thresholds – places of transitions from one state to another, “where the veil between this world and the next is so sheer you can almost step through.”

When Christianity spread into the British Isles, Celtic Christians’ understanding of thin places broadened to encompass not only geographical places, but also moments when the holy became visible to the eyes of the human spirit, when the veil between the person and God so sheer you know that God is near.

Tom Bender, an American architect, writes and speaks about the power of places. “What is significant about sacred places turns out not to be the places themselves,” he says, “Their power lies within their role in marshaling our inner resources and binding us to our beliefs.”

Thin places are places that marshal our inner resources and bind us to our beliefs.

Last week, I said that throughout this series on the Beatitudes we would need to remember what “blessed” literally means. “Makarios,” blessed, literally means “God makes large his grace.”

We are blessed in thin places that marshal our inner resources and bind us to our beliefs, as we experience being within the expanse of God’s grace.

Jesus begins teaching with these words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

One commentary suggests that a proper printing of the Beatitudes would have this one centered as a header because it summarizes them all. Biblical scholars point out that the first and last Beatitudes form bookends, the scholarly term is an inclusion, Blessed are the poor in spirit and blessed are those who are persecuted are both couched in the present tense, ”for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The other Beatitudes promise a kingdom that is now and not yet with full realization coming in the future tense, “for they shall.”

The poor in spirit marshal their inner resources and cling to their beliefs, seeking the expanse of God’s grace now. The poor in spirit are not satisfied with themselves. They come to God with empty hands seeking to be filled; they trust God to supply what they need each day.

Rev. Dr. Tom Long says that Jesus could be paraphrased, Blessed are the “spiritual beggars. This beatitude indicates that those who have come to the end of their own resources, who know that they cannot sustain hope and purpose out of their own strength, and who have thrown themselves on the mercy of God will not be abandoned.”

Blessed are those who cry out like the Psalm we read this morning:
I have asked one thing from the LORD— it’s all I seek: to live in the LORD’s house all the days of my life because he will shelter me in his own dwelling during troubling times, he will hide me in a secret place in his own tent; he will set me up high, safe on a rock. Come, my heart says, seek God’s face. LORD, I do seek your face!”

In Eugene Peterson’s The Message version of the Bible, he puts Jesus’ teaching in contemporary language this way, “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope.” Another contemporary version, the Cotton Patch Gospel by Clarence Jordan, puts is this way, “God does not force his kingdom upon anybody but gladly gives it to all who know they’re losers without him and humbly seek his help.”

Some commentators suggest that Jesus’ second teaching “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” is closely linked to the blessing of those who are poor in spirit, and refers to those who know their spiritual poverty and mourn their own sinfulness. But I don’t see the evidence for understanding Jesus’ words in that way. It makes it easier to hear, perhaps, but I don’t think it is what Jesus meant. Remember, Jesus is drew away to the mountainside with his disciples because he saw the crowds.

He saw their need. He saw their hunger. He saw their struggle. He saw their desire. And he is responding and teaching the disciples.

Those who mourn shall be comforted, because they will marshal their inner resources, they will be bound to what they believe, and they will experience being within the expanse of God’s grace.

Presbyterian pastor, Carol Howard Merritt, reflected on this Beatitude as her father was on hospice care. He had fallen and broken his hip and was in great pain. So, the doctors were preparing to do surgery, hoping to relieve the pain, but unsure of his body’s strength to survive surgery. She wrote, “I am having a difficult time sitting up straight. My body longs for sleep, almost around the clock. I do drift off, for long hours, and yet I wake up needing even more. I’m ready for my father’s eventual death. I’m sure that I am, but the sadness, grief, and mourning–they’re just so complicated–and on this day when the cacophony of feelings arise, I’m sorting through them and reading how Jesus seems to be saying to me, “You are blessed.”
Why would Jesus have the audacity to say this? Where is the blessing in this raw, open wound? Is the blessing upon those who mourn simply hinged upon this future hope that they will be comforted? Or is there, somehow, a blessing in the midst of it? Is there some blessing in the grief and the sadness that washes over me?

Of course, Jesus knew about grief. Even in this small account, Jesus had come from healing. The crowds surrounded him, they pulled upon him, and he saw the broken and the wounded. He saw the mothers with dying children and the children who had been left parentless. We know some things about how Jesus felt in these circumstances. We know that when Jesus healed, he could feel a bit of power leaving him. And when we read that Jesus bore the sins of the world, I imagine they weighed heavily upon him–the crushing burden of our cruelty toward one another. And in this moment when this teaching rises up from him, I wondered, did it emerge from his powerless, burdened mourning? Did he feel that exhaustion and that bit of pain creeping into his joints? Is that why he left the crowds and sat down? Did he just need to gather with his friends and reflect on how upside down the world seemed to him at that moment? It is as if in these words, he sees the needs–the hunger, the thirst, the longing–and, somehow, he sees blessing in all of it.

Perhaps we can’t even understand these words until we become poor or meek or contrite. Perhaps we don’t know what they mean until our stomachs ache with a roaring hunger and our tongues stick to the roof of our mouths with thirst. Maybe, maybe we cannot understand the words when we feel the most blest. Perhaps they only make sense to us when we hit rock-bottom….When we are about to lose the home we are raising our children in. When we finally realize that we have no control over our addiction. When we are in such mourning, that we stare at the ground as we walk and we cannot look up.

Could it be that there is some sort of favor, some sort of protection that comes, even in this loss? Could it be that there is something good in the anguish and grief in the valley of the shadow of death? The problem with a person’s death is that you don’t just lose the flesh and the bones, but it’s also all of the hopes and dreams that you have for that person, that you have for your relationship.

Yet, in the absence of a loved one, there is love there. When we are facing a chasm of great magnitude, there is the possibility of a different sort of reconciliation, forgiveness, and peace.

We don’t like this. We don’t walk through the valley of the shadow of death in our culture. We like to run through it quickly. We use Kubler Ross’ steps of grief as hurdles that we can bound over if we run fast enough, and people ask us why we haven’t “gotten over it yet.” I don’t think we’ve take the time to stop, to appreciate the blessings of our mourning.

But they are there. They are there with the widow who sits in the Lazyboy where her husband used to relax, just so she can remember the sweetness of his presence. The blessings are there, when we are sorting through clothes, and we suddenly are enveloped with a waft of perfume that reminds us of Christmas with our mom… The blessings are there in the facts that the ways in which we hurt each other seem to fade, and the resentment is replaced with understanding. The blessings are there, as we defrost the homemade casseroles that the church-ladies delivered. And they are there, as we eat fried chicken and tell each other stories until our sides ache with laughter as well as pain.

These words.” reflects Rev. Carol Howard Merritt as she waits for the call that the doctors have begun surgery, “They have traveled a long a way to greet me today, in my bitter, angry grief. And yet, somehow, they have never been so comforting. And I know that I am blessed.”

As we realize that our hands are empty, as we grieve the emptiness we feel as we mourn, we are blessed in that thin place as we seek just one thing,that we might dwell in the house of the Lord.