Seventh Sunday of Easter - Sunday, June 2, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Seventh Sunday of Easter - Sunday, June 2, 2019

Acts 16:16-34
Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21
John 17:20-26

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega:

All times belong to him and all the ages.

To him be glory and power through every age for ever. Amen.

This prayer is familiar to many who attended the Easter Vigil.  It is the prayer commonly used while the priest blesses the Paschal Candle at the very start of the service and, taking its light from the new fire, heralds our Lord's Resurrection.  Here at Holy Cross Monastery it was particularly striking this year. Due to the liturgical equivalent of a “wardrobe malfunction” the fire never caught on. But our nimble altar party managed to get the candle blessed and lighted and we were off once again with our Easter observance.  Of course Christ's Resurrection did not and does not depend on our ritual actions. As Rowan Williams once said:  “No matter how early you get to the tomb, God has already been there first.”

I find myself regularly praying this formula of blessing from the Easter Vigil liturgy.  It is a bracing reminder that the course of this world and our life together in it is ultimately in the hands of Someone greater and more enduring than we are.  The whole cosmic story stretches from before the primordial beginning to the very end of time. And at the beginning of it and at the end of it and at all the times and seasons between, there is Christ, the eternal Word, creating, reconciling, healing, redeeming, transforming.  It is a prayer of a big faith, fitting our small stories into a cosmic setting and helping us make  sense of our life and times.

It is also a prayer which captures the message of the Book of Revelation, that mysterious final book of the New Testament also known as the Apocalypse of John, that is, the great unveiling.  We have, in fact, been hearing every Sunday since Easter portions of this book.  Admittedly they are the passages focused on the promise of life and light and a new heaven and a new earth and of the universal invitation to all who are thirsty to come and drink.  The sections having to do with the seven plagues and the moon turning to blood and the four horsemen riding over the earth and the bottomless pit and the bowls of the wrath of God—all the really dramatic parts—are left for another time...usually for the office of matins at seven o'clock in the morning. But whatever else it may be, the Book of Revelation assure us that God is in charge and that we can hope...for a new age and a new order of justice and peace.  It is a hope that gives us the courage to work for just such an age and such an order.


We find ourselves today in a strange period in the church year.  On Thursday we celebrated the feast of the Ascension of our Lord. Christ has returned to his Father's side, his disciples have witnessed his departure, they return to Jerusalem and they worship and they wait. What next? What happens now? What do we dare hope for or fear?  Where shall we go? What shall we do? Who are we? We are all familiar with these questions. They are constants in our human condition when we feel in between or fall between the cracks of life.  It's a situation that recurs regularly.

I want to share with you two vignettes about this experience, the experience of those first disciples in the days after the Ascension and in our own day.

The first has to do with a story that I have related many times. It's actually not my story but comes from our late Br. Andrew Colquhoun, that beloved, curmudgeonly Scotsman.  He told of one of his aunts who had a tendency toward malapropisms, getting words ever so slightly wrong with rather humorous results.  In one instance, in an effort to console someone who had suffered a difficult setback in her life, Andrew's aunt tenderly said: “God doesn't shut one door but he closes another.”  We can laugh at this, of course. But you know, this sounds pretty accurate in many cases.  How many of us know people or have ourselves been in situations where not just one but several doors closed almost simultaneously, whether they be doors of financial or educational or romantic opportunity or of physical or emotional health or of spiritual aliveness?  But it is also a truth that folks who experience this closing of the doors learn, if they are resilient and circumstances of life do not overwhelm them.  And that is that when the doors close and we are exiled to the hallway, we discover that life goes on even there.  It may take time for our inner eyes to adjust to this new and unfamiliar environment.  But we find that we are not alone there and that the conditions, while far from our dreams or desires, are bearable and sometimes even interesting in new and unexpected ways.

I wonder if this was the experience of that apostolic band of men and women who were disoriented and perhaps left bereft and grieving by the exquisite absence of Jesus from  their lives and who yet, as Luke says, “were continually in the temple blessing God.”  The doors, it seems, were closed.  All the doors. God had tantalized them and captured their hearts and minds, and fired their spirits in and through Jesus. And now they were left in the lurch...waiting. Yet even in their waiting—in their waiting together—they found the way to form a community and to worship God and nurture hope in each other.  It was a hope that was richly rewarded.  Yes, sometimes: “God doesn't shut one door but he closes another.”  But that's never the end of the story, not for those early followers of Jesus and not for us.

The second vignette is a bit more personal.  As I reflected on the Ascension this week and looked at various icons and images of the passing of Jesus into the havens, I was struck by how the men and women stand there gazing up, just as we hear described  in the Acts of the Apostles.  What were they experiencing, feeling, perceiving?  As I reflected I was taken back to 1968 when I was nineteen years old and went away to Europe for a Junior Year Abroad.  I had lived at home for my first two years of college and hearing the adventures of my high school friends now away at college or university, I was envious and longed to escape and share in similar adventures.  I saved up my money from part time jobs and summer labors and scraped together enough to live on the cheap in Belgium while studying at a venerable university.

I booked passage on a small student ocean liner, and my parents went with me to New York City to see me off.  I was standing on the ship's deck waving to them and they were on the dock waving to me.  It was just like in the movies.  And then the horns blew and suddenly I noticed that they were getting smaller and smaller.  Seriously, I don't know what I expected, but to use the language in St. Luke's account of the Ascension, they withdrew from my sight. It was so disorienting.  And at once I felt a great fear and a great freedom.  I was on my own at last.  And it felt...well, scary and full of possibilities I couldn't even imagine.

I wonder now if the experience of those early disciples wasn't something like my experience on a small ship slowly moving away from New York.  It was I that was moving, not my parents who were still there on the dock waving until I couldn't see them any longer.   And I wonder: maybe it wasn't Jesus who moved at all or ascended. Maybe it was disciples who moved..moved away from their Risen Lord so that they could experience both the challenge and the freedom and the joyous possibility of becoming the new born people of God.   What if Jesus in some real sense is still there on the Mount of the Ascension, waving to us and saying to our hearts: “Don't be afraid. I'm still with you. I'm always with you.  Now go out. Go out into the world. Go on. It's OK. Be my church. Be my body in the world. Be alive. Be the Good news that you proclaim?”

Well, this is a bit of stretch perhaps. But it seems to me that God is always stretching us to take our place in the cosmic story and to make our mark, however large and small, in the world.  And in this liminal period between the feast of the Ascension and celebration next Sunday of Holy Pentecost just as in all the in-between or liminal spaces of our little lives and our corporate history as a people and species, we are reminded: the story is larger than us and wider than us and far more vast than we can imagine.  And at its beginning and at its end and at every moment and every place in between, there is Christ, our courteous Lord...dwelling in the hallways with those for whom so many doors have been closed and waving at us from the dock.  And speaking softly to our hearts saying: “It's OK. I am with you to the end of the ages. Now go live.”

And so we pray again:

Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega:

All times belong to him and all the ages.

To him be glory and power through every age for ever. Amen.