Seventh Sunday of Easter
Penelope Bridges
As you may know, a faithful group of parishioners gathers online six days a week for Morning and Evening Prayer. Anyone can join us, by the way, just go to the link on the church calendar on our website. Our custom is to pause after the Scripture readings and invite questions and comments. Recently we’ve been pondering the parables of Jesus, and wondering why he wrapped so much of his teaching in stories that the disciples struggled to understand. The fact is that, just as some medicines are better absorbed with food, some teachings are better absorbed when they come at us sideways, wrapped in a story. Jesus knew the power of story.
Stories carry history and identity forward. Stories stay with us when instruction has long faded from memory. Stories make sense of our lives: spiritual autobiography is a valuable community-building practice that St. Paul’s has long embraced. Luke is a master of story-telling, both in his Gospel and in its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles.
Today we stand between the Ascension of Jesus, celebrated last Thursday, and the feast of Pentecost, coming next Sunday. And this is where Luke’s Volume one ends and Volume two begins, as the disciples gaze into heaven after Jesus has left them for ever. It feels like the end of the story. Jesus has promised his friends that they will not be left alone: the Holy Spirit will come to accompany them and fill them with power.
Inevitably the disciples don’t get it. They hear “power” and they imagine emperors and armies, the kind of power that the Roman Empire uses to keep them down. Maybe this power will bring about God’s Kingdom for Israel, they think. They are as wide of the mark as today’s so-called Christian Nationalists who equate the coming of God’s kingdom with the forcible reshaping of America into a narrow-minded theocracy.
The coming of God’s kingdom has nothing to do with earthly power, because it is a kingdom based on love, and love cannot be imposed by force. The vision of the disciples is much too small; God’s Kingdom is not limited to Israel, or to any one sect, culture or nation.
Jesus ascends into heaven, leaving the future of his revolution in imperfect human hands. And the Acts of the Apostles will take up the story and broaden it out as the church is born and the good news of the Gospel ultimately stretches to the ends of the earth.
The story goes on, regardless of the players at any given moment. Each successive generation weaves a new chapter. The stories we have of the saints, of our own denomination’s development, of the founding of this parish and of its continued growth inspire us, attract new disciples, and comfort us in times of turbulence and change.
Acts offers us a rather amusing image of the disciples staring up at the sky with a big question mark hanging over their heads. The angelic messengers rally the troops: what are you waiting for? They say. Time to get on with the work God has given you to do. And so the time that we call “already but not yet” begins: the time between Jesus’s inauguration of the Kingdom and its still yet to come full implementation.
We are all waiting for something: the gubernatorial election, better economic times, the next dean. We live in an in-between time, as Christians have done for 2,000 years. That’s life. And it’s hard. We want instant gratification. Are we there yet? Is this the time? Like the disciples, we crave resolution of life’s uncertainties. We want to know what comes next. We want a clear view of the road ahead. But the road has curves and corners, and it’s not always possible to see into the distance.
A few years ago I reached an age that meant I would no longer be a viable candidate for another position in the church: given the mandatory retirement age of 72, most churches and dioceses are going to want candidates who are at least theoretically capable of staying for a decade. For a while I felt great relief: I don’t have to do discernment any more. Discernment is that hard spiritual work of listening for God’s voice, listening for the call of the Holy Spirit to the next thing. But to my dismay, it finally dawned on me that even in retirement, discernment won’t end. As long as we have agency over our own movements, there will always be decisions to be made about how to exercise our gifts and how best to spend our time and resources. And so discernment continues. St. Paul’s is entering into a time of particularly focused discernment, as a community. You are going to be having a lot of conversations about what you might want the next chapter of your story to be.
The best discernment happens in the context of community, and its success will partly depend on the cohesion of that community. So this is a good time to take your cue from St. Luke and hone the art of sharing your own story. As you share your story with others, as you allow yourself to be known, relationships will grow and strengthen, and together you will be better able to listen for the Spirit’s voice in your midst. This is how the church began: the community of grieving disciples hanging out together, sharing the stories of Jesus and using them as guideposts for the next step; and those stories being shared with the wider community, and eventually the stories reaching Luke’s ears and Luke writing them down, so that one day we would be able to hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them in our turn.
While the writer of John’s Gospel has saved up a whole lot of collected words of Jesus for his final speech (four chapters long!), I’m pretty sure that the message Jesus shares with his disciples in this farewell discourse is no different from what he has said to them on a daily basis throughout his ministry. He has made God known to the disciples through the miraculous signs of feeding and healing. He has shown them how to care for each other and for those who are marginalized or suffering. He has taught them that it’s possible to start over, to be born again in the Spirit, to experience the abundance of life that comes with committing themselves to a way of love and generosity.
The book of Acts describes the closeness of that first Christian community as they learned how to live without the physical presence of Jesus. They were only able to do what they did through the power of the Holy Spirit, the advocate and companion that Jesus had promised them, the abiding presence of God that dwelt within the hearts of the disciples and now dwells within us as the church.
Unlike the people who first read St Peter’s letter, we don’t really know what it means to suffer for our Christian faith. But if we allow ourselves to identify with other Christians across the world, we might find the grace to feel pain in solidarity with them, as members of the one body that is the whole Church universal. Our faith is not purely individual: it is corporate. When one suffers, all are wounded. This is why gathering on a regular basis is critical. This is why we say “WE believe in one God”. This is why we share the one bread broken for all of us.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus has a lot to say about eternal life. The writer Frederick Buechner says that when we think of eternal life, we tend to think of it as what happens when life ends. We would do better, he says, to think of it as what happens when life begins. True life, eternal life, is life lived fully and abundantly in the love of God, to be one in Christ with our neighbors, to allow ourselves to feel fully.
As uncomfortable and draining as it may be to feel the grief of our brothers and sisters in Christ, it is built into the practice of our faith. The cost of love is pain: it just is, whether that is the pain of losing a loved one, or the pain of change, or the pain of injustice, or the pain of knowing that good people far away or next door are suffering.
So, as we bring our focus down from gazing into heaven, as we look for the coming of the Spirit, we will share our stories, we will come together around God’s table, we will grieve for the pain of the world, and we will rejoice in the gift of Christ’s presence in us and among us, as we do our part to continue the great story of salvation.
Amen.
