John 17:1-11
Acts 1:3-14
Every once in a while, all of the forces in the universe seem to align to send you just the right message, the message that you need to hear at a very specific time and place in your life. Some people might refer to this as serendipity, others as divine providence, still others as simply random chance. I’ve been known to refer to this as the “omigod my mother was right after all” phenomenon. You know, it’s when your friends, your partner, your therapist, your pastor, everyone in your life is telling you the same thing your mother is saying, and when THAT happens, you know you better pay attention!
Well, my mother didn’t give me the message for today, but I did experience a kind of cosmic alignment of factors as I was thinking about this week’s sermon, that all seemed to point in a similar direction. The convergence I’m speaking of has to do with the interplay of text, context, and a third intangible element I’d call “grace.” Let me explain.
A sermon is borne out of the encounter of a particular scripture or set of scriptures—that is, a text—with a particular set of circumstances or concerns or questions that arise out of our lived experience—our context. This week, we have a very special convergence of themes in our lectionary texts for the day and the context in which our church finds itself at this particular moment. Our gospel lesson comes from a part of the book of John called “the farewell discourse.” Essentially, this is the part of the story of Jesus that recounts his long goodbye to his disciples—his final words to them as he prepares for his anticipated death and resurrection. The portion we heard today from John is actually a prayer—it’s John’s description of Jesus’ final prayer for his disciples as he entrusts their well-being and their future into the hands of God, to whom he is going.
The other scripture we heard, from the book of Acts, picks up the story of Jesus after the resurrection, and describes Jesus’ final appearance to the disciples and what has come to be known as his “ascension” into heaven. We read this story today because according to Acts, Jesus ascended to heaven 40 days after his resurrection, and Ascension Day, the day that falls 40 days after Easter, was on Thursday. So, liturgically speaking, today is Ascension Sunday. So our texts for today focus upon the historical moment when Jesus said goodbye to his disciples and prepared them for the time when he would no longer be a physical presence in their lives. From this point on, the life of this community of disciples would be different-- in some ways, radically different, and yet the outlines of what the community would become were not yet clear. In fact, the passage from Acts is like a snapshot of a unique moment in the history of the followers of Jesus—the moment immediately after Jesus’ physical departure and right before the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which we will celebrate next week.
Let’s take a look, for just a moment, at that snapshot. Jesus rises up into heaven—a mystical experience that the disciples have which has no scientific basis in our contemporary worldview—and yet all we really need to take away from that experience is the fact of Jesus’ sudden absence after his living, vital, embodied presence. Jesus’ departure tears a hole in the fabric of the community. The disciples return, dejectedly, one might imagine, to the room in Jerusalem where they were staying, and they gathered together with the small band of Jesus’ followers that remained. What’s noteworthy about this group is that the list of the apostles is incomplete. Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, is gone, and only 11 apostles remain. The incompleteness in this community is new, and unsettling. They have said goodbye to Jesus, but the Holy Spirit has not yet come upon them, and they have not yet chosen a successor to fill Judas’ place.
Now let’s set this snapshot of our texts for today next to our context as a faith community. Three weeks ago we said goodbye to Chuck and Anne Wildman, or rather, we finished saying goodbye to them, after what you might call a series of farewell discourses! After almost 20 years as the senior pastor at Rock Spring, Chuck is suddenly, simply, gone. Not gone from our hearts, of course, and unlike Jesus, most definitely still alive and kicking in the flesh! But gone from our physical presence and from our communal life just the same. And our congregation feels somewhat incomplete, in this moment, doesn’t it? We are betwixt and between—in the empty space after Chuck’s departure and before the arrival of our interim senior pastor in a couple of months. Now when I pointed out this convergence of themes between our texts for the day and our context at the lectionary bible study last week, one of our members quipped: so who are you comparing Chuck to: Jesus or Judas?
Well….neither, actually! And yet there is something about that image of the incomplete circle, and the unsettling and disorienting hiatus in the life of Jesus’ followers, that illuminates for me this moment in the life of our congregation. And that’s where the grace comes in. You didn’t forget about the grace, did you? At the beginning of the sermon, I mentioned that a convergence of factors had inspired today’s sermon, and that those factors included text, context, and an intangible element that I would call “grace.” I just spent the last two days with an absolutely remarkable group of about 45 women from our church at the annual Women’s Retreat. And our retreat leader was an equally remarkable woman named Dirkje Legerstee, who’s here with us this morning. And you know what we did? We PLAYED! We didn’t study, and we didn’t work, and we didn’t process, or plan; we engaged in what I can only call “holy play.” The theme of the retreat was “Finding Joy in our Hellos and Goodbyes through the Spirit of Play.” Can you hear the echoes to our text and our context?
Now I can’t speak for everyone, but I know that when I arrived at the retreat on Friday, I was feeling pretty tired, and stressed, and depleted. Uppermost in my mind was my unfinished list of tasks for the week, including the sermon that I hadn’t written yet. But then I was drawn into this warm and loving circle of women and led in song by Dirkje, as we stood outdoors in the grass in the early evening air, and I began to feel a little lighter, and a little less stressed. And we began our retreat by learning a new word: “Exformation.” It’s now officially my favorite new word. Exformation refers to the process of reversing the information overload we’re all suffering from in today’s society. Dirkje talked about how we’re all constantly bombarded by a stream of information that comes at us from all directions. And all of this information makes demands on us, fills our brains with chatter, and causes stress. We need information, but we also need to make time for exformation—for letting go of our task list, or our internet and email addictions, or our perfectionism, or anything else that clogs our minds, and making space for Spirit, for creativity, for stillness, and PLAY!
Now, having just learned this fabulous new word, I was fascinated to actually see it being embodied over the next 24 hours of our time together at the retreat. I can’t really begin to describe to you the kind of holy play that we engaged in right now, but I encourage you to pigeonhole a woman who went to the retreat and ask her about hand dancing, or ask her to sing her name, and you’ll get a glimpse of what I’m talking about. A lot of it felt like silliness, to be honest. For those of us who are Type A, task-focused people who spend our lives in Serious Work (capital S, capital W), it was a little hard at first to switch gears, and give ourselves over to holy play. But in that holy silliness, we discovered the seeds of grace. And in that experience of grace, I found the final inspiration I needed for this sermon! So I want to conclude today by sharing with you a little bit about grace and how it might manifest itself in our community at this moment in time.
Grace is the experience of being witnessed by another—seen and accepted in our broken and our strong places, without judgment. Grace is a dance of giving and receiving that sparks soul connection between people. Grace is allowing oneself to rest in the tender love of another person or of God and feeling free from stress and demands. Grace is guilt-free! Grace is looking into the eyes of another human being and seeing reflected there the love of Christ for us, just as we are in that moment. It’s a deep relaxation and exhalation, a letting go into the infinite ocean of love that is God, and in that moment, knowing that we are enough, we have enough, and we do enough.
As we live through this period of betwixt and between-ness at Rock Spring, we have a unique opportunity to rediscover grace. Because in the moment of Jesus’ farewell, he didn’t give them a task list, he prayed for them. As NT scholar Gail O’Day writes about our John text, “In this prayer…Jesus places the church’s future in the hands of God and invites the church to listen in on that conversation. The church’s future is shown to be God’s, not ours. That is, the future of the church does not depend on or derive from the church’s own work, but rests with God. When contemporary readers overhear this prayer, they are brought face to face with the sovereign grace of God.”
At this moment, when we pause between our goodbye to Chuck and Anne and our hello to whatever our future holds, my prayer for us is that we will receive the grace of God and be a vessel of grace for one another. Plenty of tasks await us when the new interim arrives. But for now, we can pause in the space of this emptiness, this gap between the just past and the not yet come, and we can rest for a moment. Like the disciples in the story in Acts, we can simply gather together as a community that prays and plays and finds joy in each other’s company.
I leave you with Dirkje’s last words to us at the retreat: “Jesus’ goodbye is God’s new beginning in Christ’s resurrection, a hello heard by Mary in the garden beyond the cross, and so to all those who seek the Risen One as well. As a people of God on the journey of faith, we can trust that every goodbye can create a potent emptiness for new life in Christ to rise up and surprise us with a holy presence here and now.” May it be so. Amen.
1. Gail R. O’Day, “The Gospel of John: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, vol. IX (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995): 797.