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Palm Sunday is a Thin Place
A Sermon Preached
by Dr. James Flamming
First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
March 20, 2005
Mark 11:1-11
One particularly bright and brilliant morning in an early
spring past, the sky was clear blue, the morning crisp, and the daffodils were
vibrant. A building superintendent in one of our Retirement Center’s, was making
his morning rounds. He came across a lady who was looking out the window at the
spring flowers. She looked so downcast and so discouraged that he stopped to
talk. The lady looked up, recognized him and said, “I know you can fix just
about anything. Do you have a fix for depression?” He thought a minute and then
said, “Maybe, just maybe I do.” He went out into the flower garden and returned
with a handful of daffodils. He handed them to her and said, “Here’s my cure.
See the wonderful things that God gives to us that we didn’t have anything to do
with but he gives them to us anyway. Put your attention on what you have been
given, not on what you feel you have lost.” She looked at the daffodils and
held them close to her as she said with a tear in her eye. “I was looking at
them but I didn’t see them,” she said. “I missed what they were all about. It
took you to give them to me and make the difference.”
How often we look but we don’t really see! A few weeks ago
during our Journey to the Cross services, Lynn Turner used the expression
Thin Places. I had never heard that expression before. So I did little
reading. In the Celtic Christianity of Scotland and Wales, a Thin Place
was where the physical world and the spiritual world merged. Instead of just
seeing something, you saw God through that something. It is like a scrim in the
theater, a curtain so thin that you can see through it.
A spiritual scrim is a Thin Place. Paul said that
the things we can see are temporary, but what is invisible is eternal. Marcus
Borg speaks of Thin Places as places where the veil momentarily lifts,
and we behold God through something we used to overlook.
I believe Palm Sunday is a Thin Place if we will let
it be. Look for God in the palms, the celebration, the hosannas and the parade.
Experiencing God
A Thin Place is where you suddenly experience God. I
believe many of those who lined the parade route that day experienced God. For
those who could see with the eyes of their hearts, something was happening more
than a parade. God was breaking in. They felt one with God and God with them.
The veil was lifted.
This is what happens when we become Christians. It isn’t
that God hasn’t been there all along. It isn’t that God suddenly appears from
nowhere. What happens is that suddenly we see. It is break-through time. It is
like Jesus riding into our hearts. We didn’t expect it. We didn’t plan it. We
didn’t think it into being. Jesus arrives. He opens the doors of our hearts and
takes the blinders from our eyes.
Heart is a word the Bible uses over 1000 times. Sometimes
it uses the phrase, “the eyes of our hearts.” It doesn’t mean our physical
hearts. It doesn’t mean emotion, or love, or an attitude. The closest word we
have for what they meant by heart is our word self – our inmost self. When the
Bible speaks of the eyes of our hearts, it is about seeing God in our inmost
self.
When we become connected with God through Jesus our Lord,
it is as if Jesus comes riding into our inmost selves, quietly, sometimes
unexpectedly, and in that moment the eyes of our hearts see what we’ve been
missing all along. It is a Thin Place when you see God in what is
happening to you.
If we had time we could listen to person after person who
would tell us that in a worship time just like this, in a church service just
like this one, the Lord Christ invisibly but certainly rode into their hearts
and his presence and their willingness changed everything. It is a Thin Place
when you can see what God is doing in his world and in your life.
Thomas Merton, that great spirit of last century, never
used the phrase Thin Place. But he could have. Listen to what he wrote:
“Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is
absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not
just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and
forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows
himself everywhere, in everything – in people and in things and in nature and in
events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we
cannot be without Him. . .The only thing is that we don’t see it.”
You have your own Palm Sunday when you suddenly experience
God. If you have never experienced God in this way, may he ride into your heart
this morning. His transforming Spirit and your spirit will begin or continue the
faith journey.
Celebrate the Temporary
Look at another Thin Place on Palm Sunday. Palm
Sunday is a parade. Amazingly, if we look closely, we can see God celebrating
the temporary. In a few days God’s Son and our Savior will be going through
unthinkable torture and die on a cross. Our Lord Jesus knows this will happen
and yet – can you believe this – he arranges for a celebration. The One who
knows the beginning and the ending as one, lifts the screen and says, “learn how
to celebrate the right now, whatever happens tomorrow.”
I must confess that I am awed by our Lord as he climbs on
the donkey colt and rides into the parade path.
This One who will die on a cross, takes time to
celebrate the now.
He knows Simon will betray him, but he as he
passes him by on the
parade route, he loves him anyway.
He knows there will be those who turn against
him, hate him, curse
him. But for now, he will
celebrate with his friends.
He knows his disciples will
desert him when he needs them most,
but now he celebrates
their devotion.
He smiles at the palms the people
are waving even though he knows
his palms will
be nail-pierced before long.
Palm Sunday is a time to celebrate the temporary with the
Savior.
Dr. Craig Barnes is senior pastor of the National
Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C. In his book, Sacred Thirst, he
noted that every Sunday in his congregation some of the nation’s leaders come to
worship. “Why?” he asks. “Because they need a transcendent word from God – a
word that can never be reduced to a political process.” “They come,” he says,
“to have their vision renewed, and to rekindle their hope that God has not
abandoned the world to the politicians.”
In the words of Scottish Christians of another century,
they come to experience a Thin Place, a place to see through the
maneuverings of political power and glimpse again the presence of Almighty God.
The Lord Needs It
Return yet once more to Palm Sunday. What about the donkey
colt? Picture it with me will you. They are approaching the village outskirts of
Jerusalem. There, tied up, is a donkey colt that has never been used. They were
to untie it and prepare it because the Lord needed it. Simple enough. Untie the
colt. If anyone asked what they were doing they were to say, “The Lord needs
it.”
This, friends, is a picture of us. When you get right down
to it, serving the Lord is untying our talents, our time, our treasures and
putting it to use because the Lord needs it. The Lord needs it, so untie it and
let it go. You say to me, “I couldn’t do anything. Not me. I have no talent.”
How much skill does it take to untie a donkey colt because the Lord needs it?
Let me mention a real need we have right now.
You want to help the Lord and help the needy, join those
volunteers among us, in love with our Lord Jesus, who help the ones in our
community who need a lift and need some love. Some are hungry, some are cold,
some sleep outside and our ladies make sleeping bags, some just need a shower to
clean up. Some come to worship God. Our volunteers do a marvelous even
incredible job. But they are so shorthanded. How about untying something within
you and volunteering to help because the Lord needs you. Just give Steve
Blanchard or Brenda a call and they will put you to work right away.
You say, “But that is such a small thing.” Since the
beginning God has chosen the tiny over the large: David over Goliath, Elijah by
himself against the 400 prophets of Baal; five loaves and two fish to feed a
multitude of 5000; the Shepherd looking for one sheep instead of worrying about
the ninety-nine.
It is easy for us to get the impression that God has the
core values of our culture – big, spectacular, capturing the headlines,
thousands responding. But Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God being like a mustard
seed, the tiniest of seeds. The spiritual life is a tiny life, filled with
little daily decisions, tiny steps toward God, tiny glimpses of his presence,
tiny but transforming changes.
Stuck in Mark’s gospel is a four-verse story that carries
the gospel in miniature. Jesus has been shaking his head and pointing his finger
at arrogant and showy religion. Then from the shadows comes a widow, worn by
the years, worn down by her poverty. Her clothes come from piles of throw-aways,
layered to keep her warm. Shuffling along the temple grounds she makes her way
to the collection boxes and drops two thin coins in the box. Nobody noticed and
nobody cared, nobody except Jesus. But for Jesus those thin coins became a
Thin Place, a place where God’s love merged with the response of a poverty
stricken widow. A Thin Place, you see, is a place where God’s love and
your response merge and suddenly you see, you see through the eyes of your
heart.
What are you holding back? Untie it. Let it loose. The Lord
needs it and the Lord needs you.
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