If you have ever traveled to Machu Picchu in Peru or to the town of Taos, New Mexico … Or, if you have visited the ancient ruins of Stonehenge in England or ever walked on the Isle of Iona in Scotland, you have been to a thin place. In Celtic spirituality a thin place is a place where the veil between this world and the divine – between ourselves and God – is the sheerest or thinnest. Such thin places enable the two worlds – material and spiritual, temporal and eternal – to come in contact.

But you need not travel to a distant land to experience a thin place.

To build a church is to create something that can become a thin place for many. Our forebears planted a thin place right here when they built this sanctuary. It is our privilege and responsibility to maintain the thinness of this place … to ensure that it is, indeed, a place where God can be found and experienced.

It may seem odd to describe this solid, heavy building, as a thin place. It is thicker, heavier, larger and darker than our former home, the Old South Meeting House. And yet, despite the solidity of stone and wood, the art, architecture and symbols that surround us are all designed to point beyond themselves and bring us into communion with the holy and eternal.

Every day people enter this building to seek God. Every day, all day long and into the evening, passers-by enter this place to sit here for a while, to pray or meditate. Periodically a visitor will ask for a minister, or a priest, or even “the father”.

This past Friday a person came in asking for “the father”. He was soaking wet from the rain and tears were streaming down his face. He wanted to make a confession – which, as many of you know is not really our tradition … although we strive to be flexible and accommodating. In the absence of an available minister, our Senior Church Administrator, Helen McCrady, responded. She informed the person she was not “the father” – although I think he had picked up on that. She offered to listen to him and pray with him. Which is what she did. Having been listened to and prayed with and for, he hugged Helen, said that he felt much relieved, and left.

This visitor, one of many to whom this sanctuary gives welcome each day, recognized in this church the possibility of a thin place and entered to seek God. What he experienced was a sanctuary where he could name his sins and his fears, where he was heard, where his pain was acknowledged.

And if this was already a thin place by architectural design, it was made even more transparent, by the pastoral ministrations of our Senior Church Administrator.

Keeping this sanctuary open to the public seven days a week is one of the ministries of Old South Church. Ours is a ministry very few churches in Boston are able or willing to sustain these days. Keeping the church open is one thing. Maintaining it as a thin place – a place where God is encountered – is something else again. It is a ministry and a labor of love.

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This weekend much of the Christian world will pause to acknowledge the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer … a German Christian theologian, pastor, and martyr.

Bonhoeffer’s life carried him into varied and challenging places, both thick and thin. One of Bonhoeffer’s great contributions was his conviction that wherever we are, that is the place in which we are called to exercise the ministry God has given us. Bonhoeffer managed to do so from some of the thickest and most foreboding of places.

Born in 1906 to an intellectual German family, Bonhoeffer pursued a call to ministry. In 1933 he found himself serving as a pastor to two congregations.

It was during this time that the church in Germany was engaged in a life-and-death struggle for its very soul. The national church in Germany supported Hitler. Lutheran and Catholic church leaders – bishops and pastors – accommodated the Nazi ideology, allowing Nazism to use the church to further its programs.

The result is that churches – once thin places, became thick, profane places … places of racism and an unholy ideology.

But even as this was happening, another church was being born in Germany: the “confessing” church, so called because it confessed that there could be only one Fuehrer or leader for Christians; that leader was decidedly not Hitler.

Leadership in the confessing church was desperately needed and Dietrich Bonhoeffer responded. He risked his life by teaching at an underground seminary. If there was no room for God in the traditional churches of Germany, the confessing church designed new places: hidden, underground. Places made sacred not by their architecture, but by faith and prayer … places where God could be met and found.

Bonhoeffer was a pacifist. But over the course of time, he came to believe that Hitler had to be removed. He came to believe that the evil Hitler wrought was worse than the evil of murder. Bonhoeffer became part of a plot to assassinate the German leader. The plot was discovered, however, and Bonhoeffer was arrested.

As soon as he arrived in the prison Bonhoeffer began ministering to inmates and guards alike. It was said of him that he brought God and the comfort of the gospel into the prison … especially to those awaiting execution. Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the thickest of places – even prison – thin.

He spent two years in prison, and was then hanged by the Nazi regime in 1944.

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The story from Mark’s gospel that we heard this morning begins and ends in a thin place, a synagogue. But in this brief story, Jesus and his disciples traverse a variety of landscapes. Departing the synagogue, Jesus and the disciples enter the home of Simon and Andrew. There, Jesus ministers to Simon’s mother-in-law, healing her fever. She, in turn, begins to minister to them, serving them food and refreshments. Hearing of Jesus’ whereabouts, crowds gather in and around the home and Jesus tends to them, healing their diseases. In the early morning, while it is still dark, Jesus slips out on his own and he finds a deserted place to pray. He is discovered there and then leads the disciples throughout Galilee, stopping in synagogues, in those deliberately created thin places, to heal and to teach.

In this brief passage and, indeed, throughout Mark’s gospel, Jesus is constantly on the move, from outdoor locations to indoor, from private visits to public appearances, from community to solitariness, from engagement with the world to withdrawal from the world.

In each instance, Jesus makes ordinary places extraordinary; he makes thick places thin, as he carries God with him and makes God available to the people to whom he ministers.

Before his death, Jesus and his closest companions gather in an upper room in Jerusalem. He takes the meal – bread and cup – and by word and gesture and attitude, he transforms them into vehicles for communion with the sacred. Jesus makes an ordinary place, a thick place, thin.

Today, in memory of that supper, we too transform the thickness of bread and cup into something beyond themselves. The bread in our mouths and the liquid in our throats become time machines: carrying us back to the first supper in Jerusalem. Time collapses – past, present and future merge and we find ourselves sharing at the same table with Jesus, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and with all the saints who came before us.

This act – this ritual – also collapses differences among us … old and young, rich and poor, black, brown, yellow, red, white, sick and well, hearty and fragile, lost and found, saint and sinner, immigrant and citizen … differences disappear as, equal before God, we taste the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation.

This sanctuary, and what we do here, are in startling contrast to the ways of the world. It is the place that gives voice to the possibility for ministry by placing us in touch with God … a God who frees slaves, a God who melts weapons of war into tools for planting and harvesting, a God who imagines lions and lambs laying down together and a time and a place where there is neither pain nor weeping … a God who, when the world is dazzled by the rich and famous, can be found ministering to the poor and destitute.

Today, after worship, members of this church will assemble upstairs to convene the 336th Annual Meeting of the Old South Church in Boston. We take it as our sacred obligation to maintain this as thin place … a place where God is met and found … a place where the love and mercy of God are proclaimed and lived … a place where anyone can come in to find shelter and healing.

This solid sanctuary is made thin by the congregation that gathers here, by what we do and say here, by what we hope and imagine here. It is made thin by our prayer and praise, by our baptizing and our communion, by our tears and our laughter, by our marrying and our burying, by our teaching, our preaching and our listening, by our healing and by the mercy we extend to one another in the name of God.

Like Jesus, we return here, over and over and over, to be inspired for ministry … to bring a bit of God from this sanctuary out into the world, to make thick places thin.

As we begin our 337th year of ministry together, may God be with us. May God help us.