God Is in This Place

God Is in This Place

Genesis 21:8-21; 28:10-17

Maybe it was because he used a rock for a pillow, or maybe not. Either way one night Jacob had a dream. He saw a ladder stretching between earth and heaven. Angels were coming and going up and down the ladder. Hence the song “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.” The Lord, that is Jacob’s God Yahweh, stood beside him and him that he, Yahweh, would give the land where Jacob lay to him and his descendants, who would be as thick as the dust of the earth there would be so many of them. When Jacob woke up he said “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” He named the place Bethel, which means House of God.

Many people today are quite taken with Celtic spirituality—for all the right reasons. Celtic spirituality is deep, gentle, and moving. I’m no expert on it, but I know of one of its powerful principles. Celtic spirituality speaks of what it calls “thin places.” A thin place is a physical location where the physical barrier between God and believers becomes thin or at least thinner than it is elsewhere. In a thin place a believer is more likely to experience the presence of God than the believer is in other places. Somehow in a thin place God is nearer and easier to reach than God is elsewhere. Any place can be a thin place. A church can be a thin place, but so can beach or a quiet corner in your home. For many people mountains are thin places. Any place that holds special memories for you or has special meaning in your life can be a thin place.

For a place to be thin for us we must be open to the possibility of a place being thin. For me a city with all its noise and bustle is unlikely to be a thin place. I’m not likely to be very open to God there. A freeway jammed with traffic is unlikely to be a thin place. I’m not likely to be very open to God there either. Every time I read the story of Jacob’s dream at Bethel I think of the concept of the thin place. For Jacob the hard ground and a rock under his head became a thin place where God appeared to him in a dream. I think lying on the hard ground with a rock under my head would just make by back ache and my head sore, but then I’m not Jacob. Where he slept became a thin place for him. He experienced God there.

Thinking about thin places is one way that I react to the story of Jacob’s dream at Bethel, but I have a second way as well. I think wait a minute. Jacob says God was in that place, but isn’t God in every place? Our faith tradition has always called God omnipresent. That means present everywhere. So would Jacob say only that God was in that one place? Why would Celtic spirituality talk about thin places? Isn’t every place a thin place where we can encounter God? Maybe we wouldn’t use the term thin place for a lot of places, but can’t we meet God anywhere? I think the answer to that question has to be yes, yet I also think that the concept of the thin place has merit. Yes, God is everywhere, but there are places and circumstances in which we are more likely to experience God’s presence than we are in other places or circumstances.

Sometimes those places and circumstances aren’t exactly friendly or peaceful. Consider the story of Hagar and Ishmael at Genesis 21:8-21. Abraham has had a son with the Egyptian slave woman Hagar. The boy’s name is Ishmael. Even though Abraham’s wife Sarah is the one who set up the sexual meeting between Abraham and Hagar, about which Hagar almost certainly had no say, when Sarah sees Ishmael playing with her son Isaac, who was born after Ishmael, Sarah tells Abraham to send Hagar and her son, who of course was also Abraham’s son, away. Abraham is reluctant to do it, presumably because he knew that they lived in a harsh and arid place and that sending Hagar and Ishmael away was almost certainly sending them to their deaths. God however tells Abraham to do what Sarah wants, so he does. He gives Hagar one skin of water and sends her with her son off into the barren wilderness.

Soon the one skin of water Abraham had given Hagar ran out. There was no more water anywhere. So Hagar put Ishmael under a bush and went a good distance away from him so she would not have to watch him die. Then against anyone’s reasonable expectations the wilderness turned into a thin place for Hagar. An angel called to her from heaven because God had heard the boy crying. Miraculously a well appears, Hagar draws water from it, and she and Ishmael survive. Arabs say that he became the progenitor of their people. They see their connection with Abraham through him rather than through Isaac the way the Jews do. Hagar and Ishmael were stranded in the wilderness waiting to die of thirst, and the wilderness became a thin place for her.

Any place can be a thin place because God is everywhere, not just at Bethel where Jacob said God was or in the Judean wilderness where Hagar encountered God. That doesn’t mean however that God is necessarily equally accessible everywhere. There is no way to know if a place is a thin place for you until you open yourself up to the presence of God there. Testimony by others that a place was a thin place for them might direct you to a spot that might work that way for you, but here’s the thing. The main reason we so rarely experience the presence of God isn’t because we aren’t in a thin place most of the time. It’s because we don’t open ourselves to the possibility of meeting God wherever we happen to be. God appeared to Jacob in a dream perhaps because when he was asleep his defenses against an appearance of God were down. God appeared to Hagar in the wilderness because she was desperate and cried out to God. God often comes to us in the worst times of our lives. God once did that for me. God once did it for my late wife as she was dying of cancer.

We can encounter God in stillness and quiet when we still the judgmental voice that’s always yammering in our heads. We can encounter God in meditation and in prayer. Perhaps some places are thin the way Celtic spirituality says they are. Perhaps God is nearer to us in some places than in others. If you know a place where someone else encountered God go there, but wherever you are be still. Quiet your mind. Open yourself to God’s presence. Who knows? Perhaps you will encounter God there. Try it. It just could happen.