A lot of my life has been spent thriving on commotion.  Put on the headphones and go hard/rock heavy metal and get things done.  Bet you didn’t know that you can write a sermon to the thunder of drums and overdriven guitars turned up to ten, because unfortunately, it doesn’t go louder.   Over the years and seeing the practices of “Spirituality”, prayer labyrinths, quiet time, meditation, centering prayer and a host of others have left me with the sinking feeling that I am not a very spiritual person.  My internal tolerance for sitting quietly is just not very good. When I was little there were two essential books in my life.  My mom would tell me that one of them was “A Quiet Place”.  It was about a little girl named Grace going to a place of solitude.  I think that that book was a piece of wishful thinking on my mom’s part instead of one of my actual favorites.  I remember my favorite being  “Wrong-way Howie Learns to Slide”, the young me considered it a literary masterpiece full of reflection on the human condition and cosmic intrigue.  Howie plays baseball and he can’t for the life of him slide.  He gets all tangled up, battered and bruised.  People pull for him but it just doesn’t get better.  Failure is at his doorstep as he’s going to have to slide in a big game.  I can’t remember all the details, but for some reason hornets are chasing him down the third baseline and to get away, he slides.  Not as riveting now, but it fills me with joy, nostalgia, and now that I think about it, questions.  Why did sliding save him from hornets?  And if it did, why is the ending not, and Howie was safe, but the catcher and umpire were severely stung and had to go to the hospital.  The End.  And now you see why my son has “an interesting” sense of humor.  Howie and the hornets is more the metaphor for my life.  My wife points out that I do my best work under pressure.  I don’t like being chased by hornets, but it gets me out of my head and in the proper posture to slide home.  That just doesn’t seem like the people that folks call spiritual.   All of this came up because I read a pretty simple question.  This is the Sunday that the Holy Spirit was sent to us and a commentator suggested that there were so many in the pews, pulpits and world wonder, “OK, so what?”  It’s not a flippant question.   Spirituality is a huge deal now.  Is it a catch all?  Many say they are very spiritual but not religious.  Ok, fair enough, but what is it?  Really?  Is it for everyone?  I hope so, but what about the fact that the closest I get to calm, quiet and contemplative- that is all three together- is when I stand in the dark in the shower for ten minutes when all of the information that I’ve studied and gathered for a sermon won’t come together and I can’t even start.  I don’t think that counts.  This week, this time, this year I was really confronted by those questions, and I want to help those that long to understand the role of the third person of the Trinity and how to engage spirituality.  First of all, don’t panic.  For those of us that feel that we are on the fringes of the full Christian experience, I think that we’ve sort of been sold a bill of goods.  In my study, I found one small question, one small suggestion that really excited me and helped me to realize that I haven’t missed the boat and that quietness, stillness, serenity and tranquility are not prerequisites for spirituality or engagement with the Holy Spirit.  First of all look at how the coming of the Holy Spirit is described.  A rush of a mighty wind, tongues of fire and something like a dove.  Then it sounds like a lot of sound, people taking in different languages and at the same time being understood.   I started thinking about a term that I heard a few years ago.  The term is “Thin Place”.  I knew it had to do with spirituality, and if I had heard it once I had heard it a hundred more times, but I wasn’t getting it.  I did a little research. The Rev. Dr. Mark D. Roberts wrote, “The woman who introduced me to the phrase “thin place” explained its meaning in this way. “A thin place,” she said, “is a place where the boundary between heaven and earth is especially thin. It’s a place where we can sense the divine more readily.”  I’ve noticed that when I hear or read about thin places, they are those stereotypical quite places.  Roberts even comments, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone refer to his or her workplace as a thin place (not counting those of us who work at retreat centers!)”  and it leaves me wondering, why not?  Now we are to the question that started it all for me.  The moment that ignited excitement and set me on the road to the personal answer to “So What?”  Roberts asked, “What if we thought of ourselves as thin places?”  We are told that Jesus shared the Spirit of God with us and that it rests upon us.  I’m not talking about turning inward to ourselves though.  Think of that long ago story at Babel.  The people were so hungry for power that the big separation happened.  The people are divided and they cease to understand one another.  It is at pentecost that the Spirit reunites what was broken.  It is the Spirit that draws us from our isolation and fear into community and understanding.  It’s not our location, the beauty of our surroundings, our meditative mood.  I’m reminded of that time in the book of Mark where Jesus and the disciples are leaving the Temple and one of the disciples remarks on the beauty and grandeur of the structure.  Jesus immediately responds with the fact that one day will come when not one stone will be on another.  The thin place is not building and the beauty.  It’s the fact that it happened immediately after he had pointed to the woman that gave all that she had to live on to that place.  The ramifications of that is that she will starve and no one notices.  It is for us to draw near to her.  The point of the story is not her valor, which I will say is absolutely admirable, but the point is the travesty of the splendor leaving her in the wake.  She’s seemingly stuck in a very beautiful, very thick place with a lot of thick people.  Reimagine that moment in the light of the Holy Spirit’s propulsion and power.  Imagine those called, driven, propelled by the fire and wind of the Spirit to refuse to allow her to suffer and starve, to be the church, to be the feet, hands and heart of the body of Christ.  Eric Weiner points out that thin places are disorienting and not just comforting. When we are in them, we “are jolted out of old ways of seeing the world.” So, a thin place isn’t simply a cozy hug from God.  We remember that Jesus did take some moments away.  Those moments of quite like Jesus going away to pray, prepare us, enliven us, steel us, kind of like clearing and organizing out thoughts in the darkness for the work ahead.  Saint Augustine once said, “Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.”  We say God’s work, Our Hands. Our hands at the job that no one considers a thin place, our hands on that noisy street, God’s work in our workplacce, our hands performing surgery, landing a plane, tilling the soil, hammering a nail, baking bread, penning notes, changing oil, consoling, feeding, carrying, comforting, rejoicing, grieving and fighting for justice.  We see these things happening.  When we join together, When we join our hands, that’s the Holy Spirit, God’s presence among us, breathing life, fire and energy into our hearts, into the noisy, the fidgety, the unfocused, the classical music enthusiasts, the country and bluegrass enthusiasts, the headbangers, rap fans and dubsteppers, the gay, the straight, the neurotypical, the neuro diverse, those sure of themselves and those who are lost, black, brown, white  united by the one Spirit,  the Spirit of Truth that rests upon all us, the very breath of God empowering us to unity.  When we are drawn together, that’s the Holy Spirit, and that is the Spirit that we celebrate today.  If you are called to the quiet place or have a hive of hornets on your tail you are a spiritual being because God’s spirit rests on you, that same spirit of Christ for whom, the barrier between heaven and earth wasn’t just thin, it was completely non-existent. It is the work of the Spirit to unite us with God and with one another to bring to fulfillment the words of the old camp song.  We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord And we pray that our unity will one day be restored And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.  Amen. Come, Holy Spirit