Title: The Threshold and the Path
John 14:23-29, The Book of Acts 1: 11
Whether we are on a pilgrimage or on a day trip, we soon learn that no journey is complete if we simply stop at one or two viewpoints and call it a day. My family recently took a tour of the Butchart Gardens in Victoria. It was so beautiful, and so big! We learned that if we only remained near the gate of each garden and didn’t enter it, we would never know what the path ahead would reveal to us at the end. The Sunken Garden was a good example - we were struck with the surprising beauty and the richness on the hill before we got down to the bottom.
I really liked Marian’s report for our annual congregational meeting in February. It began, “This has been a year of unexpected changes [for our Chemainus congregation]. When we were on a pilgrimage in Ireland we were walking in the fog; the early pilgrims had erected signposts to enable them to keep on the path. These signposts were just far enough apart so that as you left one, you could almost see the next one in the distance. Our church has journeyed a winding pathway finding God’s grace and guidance at signposts along the way.”
This was written in February, and we entered May this week. During the past 3 months, we have continued on that pilgrimage, remembering each signpost we have encountered along the way: Palm/Passion Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday (the Sabbath day on which Fran rested), the first Sunday, and the following Sundays, of Easter. Today is the Fifth Easter Sunday; we have one more Easter Sunday left. The Easter pilgrimage of 40 days is close to its end.
The number 40 symbolizes spiritual completion. It’s a good length of time for a pilgrimage for each season. Lent is 40 days long, Easter is 40 days long. Lent is a time for joining Christ’s suffering. Easter is a time for assimilating the astonishing newness brought by Christ’s triumph over the power of death.
Everything created on earth has an end. Lent has it. Easter ends next Sunday. This Sunday leads us to the edge, the threshold; something that Suzanne Guthrie refers to as “Ascension’s night of the soul.” In the Christian year, this coming Thursday is Ascension Day.
Guthrie reflects, “Jesus will take the disciples once again to the Mount of Olives, that threshold between desert and city, the sacred and the profane, where the cloud of Divine Presence will absorb the risen Lord and leave his friends bereft once more.”
Just as Palm Sunday can be combined with Christ’s passion, (I have emphasized often in recent days the coexistence and dissonance of the great joy and exultation of palm waving with the suffering and passion that followed), this fifth Easter Sunday can be combined with Jesus’s ascension. On this Sunday, we hear conflicting messages – the message of Easter – “The risen Christ is with us.” – and the message of Ascension; in today’s Gospel, the resurrected Jesus says to the disciples, “I am going away.”
I wonder how the disciples felt when they heard Jesus say “I am departing from you.”
The disciples had just gotten used to recognizing him again. He was teaching and breaking bread with them at Emmaus, appearing suddenly in the Upper Room, showing his wounds to Thomas. On the Sea of Galilee he called out to the disciples, the fishermen, to “try the other side of the boat.” He cooked a campfire breakfast for them. Finally, after 40 days, they were getting used to his presence among them again. Then Jesus said, “I am going away.” It must have been a blow to their spirits.
What I see in today’s story and the story we remember on Ascension Day is that Easter does end. Like everything created in life has its end, Easter does ends. Every liturgical season and day in the Christian year mirrors our own life passages. Birth, growing joys and growing pains, suffering and aching loss, absence of loved ones... Life teaches us that those passages end, after all, and new ones begin. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” And in John 16, Jesus says, “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor (the Advocate) will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” (John 16:7).
What Jesus promises to us and teaches us here is that we must go on. There is more. You are not finished with your journey. Anticipate the Pentecost; await the time when the Holy Spirit will give you understanding.
Easter ends, but Easter is not the end. Easter is not the final destination for the disciples, and not the final destination of the soul. Nor is Easter the final destination of the church or the final destination of our congregation. Easter opens to the next phase; today we are invited to step over the threshold of Ascension day, which means we need to go once more through emptiness, once more through loss, before we reach the day of Pentecost; the day of the Holy Spirit, the day of understanding.
The sense of absence may hit us. The sense of unresolved, remaining lumps of grief may amaze us. But the wisdom of the ascension story assures us that grief is not the end point; it is the bridge. The grieving process is a hard journey; it makes us go through uncomfortable and aching places, revisit wounds that are still raw. But it is not the end point. Grieving makes us live at the edge, in between. It is a threshold.
Some liberal Christian denominations, like our own, don’t seem to remember the Ascension in their observance of the Christian year. Ascension may sound too mystical and strange to post-enlightenment Christians, too different from our earthy concept of Jesus. Jesus being taken up into heaven, literally, his feet floating up in the air, to be concealed in the clouds, while the disciples watch him until he’s out of their sight, until their eyes can’t bear the sun’s full hot glare anymore, frozen in place, amazed. Can you really believe that Jesus was bodily taken up to Heaven? Our modern, rational, enlightened understanding of how nature works doesn’t allows us to favour the idea that anyone, even the Son of God, could move against gravity.
But I don’t want to dismiss the Ascension. I want to delve into its meaning, because I know how profound that imagery and meaning is for all Christians and every sojourner of life on earth; I have remembered since I was young, the picture of Jesus’s ascension and his disciples watching his departure, and the words below, in one old children’s Bible; “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” (Book of Acts, 1:11) Then the disciples returned to Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, a sabbath day’s journey away. When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs and stayed, until the Jewish day of Pentecost was coming. What happened is that on that day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came upon the company of the disciples in the upper room.
Maybe in many corners of our lives, we may feel we are stuck between hard rocks, losses, griefs, disappointments, an overwhelming sense of being lost. But those times, those dark days may also have been the times of the threshold of fulfillment. The path of Advent leads to incarnation. The path of Lent leads to resurrection. The path of the Ascension leads to the coming of the Holy Spirit. All of these events, these marked times on the Christian Calendar, are not just viewpoints - not simply places you can look at from the outside. They are paths - and you have to walk them, to follow through the dips and rises, to see the full extent of the garden God has laid out for each of us.
BENEDICTION
Whenever we live in this world, may we open our eyes to see the holiness in it.
(I changed the words above when I actually offered the benediction in the worship as follows;
inspired by the last hymn: "Shall we Gather at the River")
As we have gathered at this beautiful, beautiful river - this sanctuary - and as we go out again,
In God's love and saving power, we have everything we need to begin.
Remember what Jesus says,
"Peace I leave with you;
my peace I give to you.
I do not give to you as the world gives.
Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid."
Go in Peace.
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