Thin Places (Part III)
More hectic than holy?
If you visit Bethlehem today, you’ll find that it doesn’t have the same kind of pastoral, quiet and mystical aura of a thin place like Iona. There’s jostling with a long line of pilgrims waiting to get into the Church of the Nativity, monks yelling instructions to be quiet, cameras flashing, security officers mulling about — all for people to get one chance to touch the star in the cave below that church that marks the traditional site of Jesus’ birth. It’s more hectic than holy in there on any given day, which makes it hard to fathom that whole idea of a “Silent Night.”
But before Christmas, it’s not the Bethlehem of modern-day Israel that we need to pilgrimage to in order to experience the thin place of Jesus’ birth. We can do that right where we are by simply focusing ourselves on the humble, obscure and yet powerful way in which God chooses to bridge the gap between heaven and Earth. He doesn’t come with chariots rolling or guns blazing, but in the soft skin and helpless posture of a baby, born to a family who number themselves among the poorest of the poor. Life was thin for Mary and Joseph, but the life Mary brought forth in the manger was full of more than God’s people and, indeed, the whole world could have ever imagined.
In Jesus, God broke through the barriers between himself and humanity by becoming one of us. We don’t worship a God who is distant, cloaked in clouds, and oblivious to our world. Instead, we worship a God who has deigned to humble himself, as Paul says in Philippians 2, and take the road to a cross. This is a God we can know because he has a human face and in him the best of heaven and Earth come together and show us what is possible for us and for the world.
So, as you prepare for Christmas, perhaps the best preparation is to take some time to go to a quiet place and consider that God is not far away, that the king is quite near and his kingdom is at hand. Allow yourself to five in the reality of who God is and what God has done in Jesus. Take a pilgrimage into the heart of the biblical story of Christmas and read it as if you’re seeing it for the first time. Serve someone who needs to experience the reality that God has come to give them real hope.
A thin place, according to the ancients, was the small space between heaven and Earth, and if you could find such a space, you were indeed blessed. Was — is — Bethlehem such a place?
May your Christmas be thin!
~Mark Roberts, “Thin Places,” a 2012 blog entry on patheos.com, retrieved in Homiletics, November/December 2012, Volume 24, Number 6
