Rev. Stephen McKinney-Whitaker • Pastor

Throughout the season of Lent, we talked about listening to the heart of God through a better understanding of Celtic spirituality. The celts of the British Isles believed God could be found in anything and anyone, that God was all around us. God comes to us.

As Christians, we believe God most profoundly comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ. But people killed God among us. We often destroy what is good and what is beautiful and who tells us the truth. We celebrate Easter because that doesn’t keep God from remaining with us, coming back to us again in human form. Easter is finding God even in death… and therefore finding love and life even in death. On Easter the veil is torn between life and death, just as the curtain in the temple was torn on Good Friday. The veil is torn, the boundary is broken, and Jesus comes back—to life, in life, with life for all. 

The early Celtic people who lived in the British Isles believed that you could go to certain places to be closer to God. These places have long been called “thin places.” Thin places are geographic locations scattered throughout Ireland and Scotland where a person experiences only a very thin divide between the past, present, and future — even between worlds, between earth and heaven. These places spoke of meeting, of transitions from one state to another, “where the veil between this world and the next is so sheer you can almost step through.”

Have you ever experienced a thin place? The Isle of Iona, where St. Columba set up a monastery, which we’ll talk more about next week, is said to be a thin place. I found Glendalough, another monastic community south of Dublin, Ireland, to be a thin place, and Inchcolm Island in the middle of the Firth of Forth, within view of Edinburgh.  But I’ve also experienced them in the mountains of Colorado and a stream in the Adirondacks. 

Easter morning is a thin place. Our natural and ordinary world comes close to God this Sunday morning. Two thousand years ago, in ancient Israel, the tomb for a renegade prophet became a thin place. When Jesus was laid in that tomb, his friends and his family, his followers and lovers and devotees, were distraught. It appeared that hope was lost. 

So many of our weak hopes go unfulfilled. The death of those hopes is one of the most common of human experiences. But there is another hope.

On the morning of the resurrection, at the edge of night and day, at the edge of despair, in the thin place that we call dawn, God delivers hope. God says, “I have known the suffering and pain of the world, because I have known them in Jesus the Christ. I have buried that suffering and death in the grave, and I have caused a new life to arise.”

The thin place of Easter proclaims death is not the victor. We are not forever lost. God loves us too much to let death keep us from God. 

May you be drawn into resurrection hope and life this Sunday morning and every morning. May you see the life and love of God at work in the world. May you feel God’s presence in all and through all. And may the Kingdom of God come closer in and through you.