Day

Dear People of Christ Church,
In my sermon on Sunday I was thinking with you about the uncertainty of Ascensiontide. Not like “tide” like waves, but like time (—in the church we just stick “tide” as a suffix to whatever we want to extend past its traditional expiration date). The disciples experience Jesus as having been lifted away from them, literally into the sky. Renaissance paintings just show feet at the top of the canvas. However that spatial metaphor works or doesn’t, I said, in my sermon, there is something decidedly new in the disciples’ experience. Jesus was with them in the post resurrection experiences, and then he wasn’t. He stopped showing up with breakfast on the beach, stopped walking along with them pretending to be a stranger, stopped telling them not to be afraid. All of that just stopped. In our Gospel for Sunday we hear Jesus talking about sending the Holy Spirit, that he has to leave for it Spirit to show up. The Greek word is “advocate”—the Paraclete.

Easter season might be the liturgical season for joy, but if there were a liturgical season for uncertainty, ascensiontide would be it. In our lives, uncertainty doesn’t have a season. There is always plenty of it to go around, anytime. Just like you don’t need Lent to realize your distance from God, you don’t need a painting of the tips of Jesus’ feet to know ambiguity. The invitation to think about it in an intentional way comes from the disciples—this time of year we are trying to hang out with them for a while in this in- between space.

We’ve been doing a lot of that in Easter season, just hanging out with the disciples and seeing what’s going on. I think of that as one of the goals of preaching—to bring us all into the text and see what’s happening, listen in on those long-ago conversations and see what’s there for us. Taking the disciples up on their invitation can feel kind of like a strange choice to make, admittedly. It takes a certain willingness to suspend disbelief, not to know the answers ahead of time about what you’ll find, and just jump in. The past is the past, but through Scripture it’s a living past that touches the present in an unexpected way. We are in community with those disciples and with Jesus as we are in community with each other.

What are you finding in this season of uncertainty? Pentecost is coming up on Sunday and we turn toward the Holy Spirit, her rushing wind and tongues of fire. But we have a few more days of quiet. What have you heard here?

Blessings,
Sara+