Since September
we have watched K. Gibbony, our stone mason,
working with great skill and dedication
on our Cemetery West Wall.
That wall does honor to those
who have died.
It is a good wall.

K. just finished it today
after countless hours of labor
spanning 6 months of continuous effort.

It takes a lot to build a wall.

Tonight, I want to talk about walls - other walls.

Think of the walls in the stories you have read
or in the travels you have undertaken:

The fortifications and ramparts of Europe,
Hadrian's Wall dividing England
from the unruly Scot,
The Great Wall of China.

Such walls are usually built by slaves
and at cost so great as to bankrupt nations.
Walls of that kind are built of fear.
They serve to separate, alienate, divide.

We have just participated in Lent
and Holy Week.
a time when we recognize
the walls humankind erects:
the things, ideas, prejudices
fear, envy, and discord
that afflict the human heart.

Tonight, I want to talk
about walls; those walls.

At this Great Vigil
the journey of Lent, just concluded,
here on the very edge of Easter,
we have read the stories
of barriers, walls,
which people have built in ages past.
between themselves
and between themselves and God.

God overcame the seething plasma
of primeval chaos of Genesis
only to find Cane and Abel at murderous odds.

Then came the reading of exile in Exodus,
as the Egyptians used the Israelites as slaves
to build their walls
at Pithom and Rameses.
There was the Great Valley, Jesreel of Ezekiel,
full of the dry bones
of warriors fallen;
the bones symbolize, says God,
the separation from life,
the separation from God,
the dryness and death inside
of his people.

We read in Zephaniah
of a people no longer called, "The Gathered",
but, rather, "The Scattered",
scattered from one another
and from God,
and lame at that.

All of these stories
are about our estrangement, loneliness,
mistrust, and pain.

They are about the walls we build,
and the terrible cost of their building.

When I have the privilege of listening
to some folks in my work
who are experiencing pain and alienation
in their relationships,

It is almost always true
that they have participated
in building walls and separating themselves.
We do it, not because we want to,
but because we are afraid not to.

We do it by not listening to others,
but only to our hurt.
We do it by being so worried about ourselves -
and concerned about being sorely wounded
that we can't see offers of friendship, freely given.
We do it by deadly silence
and by not being open and honest
with one another.

We do it out of fear,
and the cost would bankrupt a nation.

Tonight, I want to talk about walls.

Look at them, my friends,
look at what we pay
to construct them.

We often pay with everything we have -
that is worth anything at all.

But, God is at work.

God spent his son
to lead us past our isolation and fear
into intimacy with him
and to show us how to abandon wall building,
establish contact, trust, love,
and to be humans together
perhaps for the first time.

And, tonight,
we have this moment
when we can feel and discern
the reality of this intimacy,
the sense that God is palpably real
and very near.

I recently received a letter
from the College of Preachers
at the National Cathedral in Washington.

There is a quotation in it
by a faculty member, Herbert O'Driscoll
whom I have met.

He wrote,
"There are times and places
which are uniquely Othin'.
- places where suddenly we awaken
and discover that a bush is burning
without being consumed;
places where the tissue
dividing common earthly reality
from the unseen reality of Spirit
is so Othin'
as to seem virtually non-existent"

Herb says
that Celtic Christians
used to speak of these places
in time and space
as Othin'.

They are sacred, magical, holy places,
places where we are touched by the other,
and our lives are enriched, by God.

As Isaiah was touched
by the burning stone from the altar of God,
so might we be forever transformed
by the thin ness of this holy place.

This place, here,
This time, here,
this liturgy, this sacrament,
by God's intervention,
constitutes a thin place,
a magical interface
between God and his creature,
where we can dare trust
the heart of God
and be filled with hope.

This is the place and time
when our confusion
is compared to that of primeval chaos
and God said,
"Let there be light."
This is the place and time
where our addictions and slavery,
our worry about who we are
and how worthy we are,
can be seen alongside
that of the Israelite slaves
, and God said,
"Let my people go."

This is that thin place
where God got involved
and the people followed the pillar of cloud by day
and fire by night;
they followed the vision of God
through the wilderness of life
long enough
that they became holy
and discovered that they were
no longer slaves
but had arrived in the Promised Land.

This is a place
where we feel at times
that our very bones have been stomped
into the floor of the great dry valley,
but God said,
"Breathe into these bones,"
and, lo, they rose
a mighty army for Israel.

And this is that place of God's abiding
where our estrangement from one another
and our separation from him
(or, lets call it what it is,
our lack of trust
our dis-belief in God),
is such
that our walls reach to the glowering sky
and threaten to fall upon us.

and yet, Zephaniah said,
"Do not fear, O Zion,
the Lord your God
is very near to you
and will restore you
before your very eyes."

This evening,
I want to talk about walls;

God is about breaking them down
on this very, magical, "thin" night,
when God is very near
and hope breaks in.

For after the Sabbath,
at dawn,
on that first day of the week,
two battered, whip-lashed,
exhausted, beaten women
named Mary
went to the tomb
where the disfigured body of Jesus
had been placed.

and God shook the earth
at the unacceptability of it all;
the walls tottered
and the stone, the door in the wall
that separated them, and us,
from the Lord
was rolled away.

The Marys turned to flee
and ran right into the arms of Jesus;
- a thin moment, if there ever was one.
for, nothing separated them from him:

not death, not life,
not principalities or powers,
not things high or things low,
not things present or things to come,
nothing in all creation
separated them
from their Lord.

This is a very thin time and place,
my friends.

This is a very thin night.
God is near,
and we know ourselves again
to be holy people;

Alleluia, Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.