Between and Beyond the Boundaries: Sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year B

Early in the first Lord of the Rings movie, there’s a lovely little scene where one of the characters, named Sam, who is about to follow his beloved friend on a most unlikely and dangerous quest, suddenly stops dead in between two corn fields not far from their home.

“This is it,” Sam states with a bit of apprehension.

His friend Frodo, who has continued on a few steps ahead, stops at these words. “This is what?” he asks, confused.

“If I take one more step,” Sam states nervously, “it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.” And he’s rooted indecisively to the spot.

His friend Frodo comes back to stand alongside him. “Come on Sam,” he says encouragingly. 

And Sam finds the strength to take that next step, and the two friends go off to face the great unknown-- together.

In this week's readings, there is a similar feeling of being stuck in place by the uncertain future that lies ahead for Jesus’s disciples. We are almost at the end of the Fifty Great Days of Easter, the principal feast in the Christian calendar. Just seven weeks ago we celebrated Easter Day, our alleluias joyfully set free as we welcomed the news of the Resurrected Jesus coming mere days after the devastation of the cross. But no sooner have the alleluias returned but Jesus finished up his final instructions and then ascended into heaven. The highs and the lows come fast and furious. Things are more uncertain than ever.

In the story of the launching of the Church, we see the disciples caught in a transitional time, a time where the memories of the past are still fresh, but the future has become as unpredictable as the dark side of the Moon. The disciples’ hearts are filled with a mixture of wonder and ache because Jesus has ascended, but the Holy Spirit has not poured over them and yet taken hold of them, heart and soul. They are in the time between the promise and the fulfillment.

Their time with Jesus was puzzling, often frustrating and at the end downright scary. Jesus often led those disciples to places they really did not want to go, but now he had come back only to leave again, and in their minds’ eyes they could still see his feet vanishing into a cloud like two tail lights on a 1959 Cadillac DeVille.

 Just like those disciples, we too live in a transitional time, both as a society and as a parish. As a society, we live in a very different context now as Christians than our parents and grandparents experienced. The number of people who profess faith in anything at all is shrinking with a vengeance. No longer can we assume that people we meet know the basics of ANY religious faith, not just Christianity.

The early Church was given the challenge to proclaim Christ as Savior to a world that had never heard of him, or of God. In our time, we still sometimes encounter that same issue, but, increasingly commonly, we actually face an additional challenge. I don’t know about you, but it’s one that I encounter frequently. Often, it’s not that people I meet have NO knowledge of Christianity, but rather that they have a skewed one. I meet many people who were brought up in the church, but who were hurt by it, or made to feel unwelcome, or even condemned by people who clothed that condemnation in the name of Jesus. Having a bad experience with self-proclaimed faithful people is much worse than having no experience of faith. It’s really hard to overcome a bad first impression.

So that’s another liminal space that the Church occupies. Because while it is absolutely to be Christ’s Body on Earth, there are also times when it is all too painfully obvious that the Church is also made up of fragile and even fallible people. The Church is both the communion of the saints and a hospital for the worst parts of our battered little psyches, and we fail to live up at times to the charge we have been given.

These are then also the times when we are called to confession, and to seek reconciliation. To remember that we are ever strengthened in our witness to the world by God’s unfailing grace respond to those the hurts in the world with grace, mercy, and love-- NOT anger and division.

The disciples faced many of those same challenges. In just a few short weeks, they had experienced losing their Messiah to death on a cross, only to learn three days later he had risen. For forty days they were taught further by him, only to watch him appear to leave them again. Through all these changes, their numbers had decreased until it seems there were only a few dozen disciples left perhaps 120 as our account in Acts suggests.

Like Sam, they could have stopped dead in their tracks and refused to move on into the unfamiliar future. But that’s not what they did. Instead, under the awning of Jesus’s continued intercession for them echoing from that prayer he had prayed for them before his crucifixion, they took the first brave step out into the liminal space between what was familiar and what was terrifying. And as Jesus had done on the night he was arrested, they too turned to prayer as the best way to try to discern what they should do next, especially as they considered how to fill their leadership needs.

That’s a powerful reminder for us as we try to discern our way through transitional times as a community, both on the parish level and as the global, capital C-Church. There are many lessons we can draw from their example as we confront times of change in our parish communities, especially in times when we are searching for new leaders. There are attitudes we can emulate from that time of Christian marginalization to our own time of discernment and change, as we try to make sense of this post-Christian landscape we inhabit between the Church we proclaim and the Church we are. And one of those most important, yet easily omitted attitudes, is prayer.

As our gospel reading reminds us, Jesus did not abandon them without a thought. Even on the night before his crucifixion, he stopped all that he was doing and prayed for his beloved disciples. And the central thing he prays for is for his disciples to be unified. Not uniform, but unified. Jesus prays for them to protected from the forces of division and fear that could break them apart.

And this is a precious realization for us today, too. As Christians, we pray to Jesus because he continues to intercede for us and to strengthen us in the work he has given us to do as the risen Son of God who knows all our challenges. As we work together to build up and strengthen the bonds of fellowship and service that bind us together, we are blessed and shielded that prayer of protection Jesus continues to pray for us. Calling us to renewal. Still calling us to do our best to discern God’s will in our lives, and seek unity in faithfulness and love that we may engage in humble listening to God in our responding prayer as we discern how to worship and witness.

Have you ever known you were being prayed for by someone else? It’s a powerful feeling of being tenderly cared for and cherished. Our readings today remind us of how important prayer is to help center and ground us in what really matters: the love of God. Prayer is the heart of our seeking, the first impulse of faith, opening ourselves up to the guidance of God, placing our needs before God who knows us completely and yet loves us completely. This is especially important in times of change, in transitional times. In our gospel reading, Jesus prays for his disciples, that they develop into leaders in their own right as he looks toward his eventual time of leave-taking from them.

Peter too, in our reading from Acts, centers the minds of the gathered disciples through asking God’s guidance in his prayer before making an important decision in a time of preparation and discernment. By doing so as well, we like Peter acknowledge and trust in God’s intimate knowledge of our hearts and minds.

Jesus’s prayer in our gospel, one we could really call "The Lord's Prayer,"  also reminds us that we have to adapt to changes in order to do our work of discipleship—that what worked at one point will not always work in the future.

Evidence of this is buried in the Book of Acts itself. The full title of the book is “The Acts of the Apostles.” Yet, more accurately, the book of Acts is the story of how the Holy Spirit worked through ordinary people to shine her light into the world. With the exception of Peter, most of the people whom Jesus had chosen as his inner circle, those known as the apostles, fade from prominence by the middle of the book.

Even Matthias and Justus, the two candidates to replace Judas, are not mentioned again after this scene in our first reading.

Instead, much of the last half of the Book of Acts is taken up telling the story of the missionary journeys of a guy who first makes his appearance not as a disciple much less as a self-proclaimed apostle, but as a persecutor of the early Church. And along the way, some of the best work accomplished in converting people and caring for the marginalized is actually done by people who were not officially considered to be leaders, but were instead ordinary people, people whose hearts were converted by love that shone in a harsh world like the sun at midday. By ordinary people who placed their trust in God’s guidance and protection, from all we can tell, people like Philip, and Lydia, and unnamed others from around the Mediterranean shore. People just like you and me, who have been saved by the love of God so that we can channel God’s love and grace through the testimony of our everyday lives.

Led by the power of the Holy Spirit, these disciples were able to embrace the liminal, transitional space that they found themselves in. Their joy was a witness to the world, and ours can be too. They were able to develop into mature leaders as they sought their way after the resurrection because they rested upon the power of the Holy Spirit to lead them in faithfulness and hope that shone in the darkest of times.

Instead of stopping dead in that boundary space on the edge of the familiar, these few brave men and women embarked on a great campaign to proclaim Jesus’s gospel everywhere, from the neighborhood to exotic lands. And look around. We share in the same situation they faced. And we can learn from the best things they exemplified, because we are disciples, too.

In a few moments, we will observe Rogation Sunday, a time when the boundaries of the parish were blessed and prayed over just as Jesus prayed over his disciples.

Yet as we walk these grounds, may we also remember that through God’s grace and love, this parish actually has no boundaries at all, because it is called to embody God’s love in the world, and God’s love itself has no boundaries. That, too, is the testimony we are called to proclaim to the world.

As we stand at the edge of what has gone before, we can rest in the assurance that the love and fellowship of Christ and all the saints equip us for the work God has given us to do, and we can find the courage and joy to prayerfully and eagerly step out into the future together, upheld by our mutual love and witness.

Amen.


Preached at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Town and Country, at 10:00 am.

Readings:
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26, Psalm 1, 1 John 5:9-13, John 17:6-19

Images:
(1) and (2) screen shots from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
(3) Depiction of the Ascension in the Chapel of Our Lady of Walsingham, United Kingdom.
(4) Jesus praying for unity among his disciples.
(5) Peter among the disciples.
(6) The anointing of Matthias.
(7) Rogation procession and blessing of the grounds, Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, May 13, 2018. Photo by Bill Scoopmire.