Sermon Blog

Patch Adams encountered a thin place.  He had found himself in a difficult place.  He and his friends, including his girlfriend, had committed their lives as doctors helping the less fortunate.  In the midst of their service, in a tragic situation, his fiancé is murdered by a mentally ill patient.  In anger and desperation, he cries out to God…and in a thin place, in a very thin place, God responds, making his presence known. What is a thin place?  The idea of a “thin places” is a Celtic notion.  Where often we think of Heaven as being “up there somewhere” the Celts thought of the distance between Earth and Heaven as being “three feet apart.”  They felt that there were places on earth where that distance narrowed and where we could experience the meeting of heaven and earth.  One of the places they felt this happed was in Iona [i] .  While I have never been to Iona, I have a couple of friends who have been there as part of a spiritual r...

Today we conclude our journey through the “I Am” statements of Jesus.  We have tried to recapture significance of the impact that these statements would have had on the listeners, as well as understand what they mean for us today.  We recognized that in saying “I Am,” Jesus, blasphemously in the ears of his contemporaries, was claiming equality with God…for He was claiming the name God used to refer to himself when Moses questioned God’s name at the burning bush, with God responding, “I Am that I Am” and “this will be my name through all generations.”  The controversy of Jesus claiming identity/oneness with God is not controversial for us, because we, on this side of the resurrection, understand (well “understand” may be a strong word), know that Jesus, as God the Son, God the Father, and God the Spirit, are all aspects of our One True God.  For us, the controversy for some, is that the statements that Jesus made about Himself apply to us, as the church.  We...