6-easter-grace-camden-2 1.md

Easter 6

Grace Church, Camden
05/27/2019

Easter tide is turning into Ascension tide this week

We are echoing in the passage of our Church year a series of transitions we feel in the world around us. Memorial Day is a traditional marker separating Spring from Summer. The hotel we stayed at in Atlanta advertised that the pool was open from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Unfortunately the person who checked us in apologized for it still being closed on Thursday, saying, “We can’t anticipate you know.”
Mary Pat did observe to me the other day that it seems like we never had Spring – at least it really Whooshed by.
Back when I was first ordained, the rector I worked for explicitly planned his ministry around the pace of the school year. Back in those days, attendance at church tended to fade in the summer when folks did “wintering” in the South or Southwest.
In different parts of the country the migration happens in different directions. From South Carolina some folks “summer” in Minnesota. But we’re right at the cusp of that happening. This weekend is the pivot. We move from one kind of time to another.
The season of the church year memorializes, sacramentalizes, a similar kind of transition. Easter makes sacred the remembering the time when Jesus’ followers experienced, first hand, the Risen Lord. They ate fish on shore with him.
This Thursday is Ascension Day. Like the Easter season, Ascension tide marks a time when the earliest followers of Jesus began to make a transition. From a time you could have brunch with Jesus and a time when that was no longer possible. Those followers, as we remember from the upcoming feast of Pentecost, recognized that they couldn’t have brunch with Jesus, but they experienced his presence in a new and powerful way, empowered by the Spirit.

Liminal time

Ascension marks the transition from one period to the next. ing, and appearing --From revealing, manifest to hiding, fading into the background, seemingly absent – but no longer as present but, present in a new way.
Eugene Peterson, who gave us The Message of the Bible, translates vs. 23 of John’s 14th chapter this way:
23 “Because a loveless world,” said Jesus, "is a sightless world. If anyone loves me, he will carefully keep my word and my Father will love him - we’ll move right into the neighborhood!
We mark the in-between time of Ascension-tide, beginning this week, and extending through to Pentecost.
Students of religion have for a long time known that there was a special dynamic in the structure of ritual. The kind of ritual we find all over the place: in Baptism or Bar Mitzvah; in Weddings; in coming of age ceremonies around the world; in sacred passages of all kinds. There is a time when one is still in the old reality. Ritual happens and one is in the new reality. But the most important time in a sacred ritual is in the in-between time – in the time when one is neither one nor the other. The technical term for it is liminal time.
It is in the in-between times that the most profound manifestations of the sacred happen. It is the time when God seems to break in. It is the reason, I think, that I have always felt that the funerals were among my favorite times in my ministry. Not that they are “happy” times, but they are “liminal” times. God seems to speak especially loud and clear to folks during funeral times. The person who has died is no longer present, but we have not moved past to the time when they are “past tense.”
We mark a time like that in the Church Year.

Presence and Absence

Seeing ghosts by throwing flour at them?
(Posted 18 July 2005 - 07:06 AM) I was watching an old video this weekend (circa 1978), related to death but not the paranormal. At the end, there was a brief clip on a couple ghost hunters who were researching a haunting by a man’s deceased wife. One of their methods was sprinkling flour across the floor in a room where there was a lot of activity. The idea was to catch ghost “footprints”. Now, they said their experiment was successful, and they showed barefoot tracks in the flour supposedly made by this ghost…?1
Have you seen it? I remember it from my elementary school days, how fascinated I was
Iron flecks revealing the magnetic forces. https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2010/start-seeing-magnetic-fields/

These are crude approximations of what we are about at this “in-between” time. But what we are looking for is not ghosts. It is God. God is present. All the time. Everywhere. But so much of the time we utterly unaware, utterly unresponsive, utterly blithe.

How does one pass on the insight that the sacred (Holy) is all around?

If there were such a method, I would suggest using it. There’s not. But what God has provided is the Spirit.
Only by the Spirit is the holiness of the world made visible.
Our lives are long enough to learn what we need to learn, but not long enough to change anything. That is our flaw. Each age must learn everything afresh. Such waste!
Such waste – making all the mistakes once and again, each generation making the same mistakes, fumbling in ignorance and darkness.
This oak was already old when I was born.
Now I am old and soon to die, and this tree grows strong still.
We are small creatures.
Our lives are not long,
but long enough to learn. 2

God’s love everywhere in plain sight

In The Shack – both the book and the movie – the figure of God the Father very intentionally persuades the narrator that God is “especially fond of him.” Only gradually as the truth of that soaks in, do we begin to realize that God is “especially fond” of everyone – indeed of all of God’s creation. God is so lavish with love it permeates the cosmos.
Whichever way we turn, O God, there is your face in the light of the moon and patterns of stars in scarred mountain rifts and ancient groves in mighty seas and creatures of the deep. Whichever way we turn, O God, there is your face in the light of eyes we love in the salt of tears we have tasted in weathered countenances east and west in the soft skin glow of the child everywhere. Whichever way we turn, O God, there is your face there is your face among us.3
Thomas Merton put it this way:
Life is simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows Himself everywhere, in everything – in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. It’s impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it. 4
Ascension Tide invites us to look at the world around us with new eyes, to hear with new ears, and to love with new heartcp. “a loveless world is a sightless world.”
Seeing ghosts by throwing flour at them? Iron flecks revealing the magnetic forces.
http://www.paranormalsoup.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=10524
Posted 18 July 2005 - 07:06 AM
I was watching an old video this weekend (circa 1978), related to death but not the paranormal. At the end, there was a brief clip on a couple ghost hunters who were researching a haunting by a man’s deceased wife. One of their methods was sprinkling flour across the floor in a room where there was a lot of activity. The idea was to catch ghost “footprints”. Now, they said their experiment was successful, and they showed barefoot tracks in the flour supposedly made by this ghost…?
https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2010/start-seeing-magnetic-fields/
iron specks

How does one pass on the insight that the sacred (Holy) is all around?

Only by the Spirit is the holiness of the world made visible
Our lives are long enough to learn what we need to learn, but not long enough to change anything. That is our flaw. Each age must learn everything afresh. Such waste!
Such waste – making all the mistakes once and again, each generation making the same mistakes, fumbling in ignorance and darkness.
This oak was already old when I was born.
Now I am old and soon to die, and this tree grows strong still.
We are small creatures.
Our lives are not long,
but long enough to learn. 2

God’s love everywhere in plain sight

In The Shack the figure of God the Father very intentionally persuades the narrator that God is “especially fond of him.” Only gradually as the truth of that soaks in, do we begin to realize that God is “especially fond” of everyone – indeed of all of God’s creation. God is so lavish with love it permeates the cosmos.

Notes

lectionary
The Sixth Sunday of Easter Color: White Assigned Readings Lesson 1: Acts 16:9-15 Psalm: 67 Lesson 2: Revelation 21:10,22-22:5 Gospel: John 14:23-29 or John 5:1-9
Themes:
  • Lydia and her household baptized (female head) … a vision sent them on voyage to Macedonia
  • Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of the clouds. … the river of the water of life…
  • Jesus (cp. early John Easter appearance) Peace I give you.
    Or
    John 5 … healing at the pool by the Sheep Gate
  • Gospel (MSG) 23-24 “Because a loveless world,” said Jesus, “is a sightless world. If anyone loves me, he will carefully keep my word and my Father will love him—we’ll move right into the neighborhood! Not loving me means not keeping my words. The message you are hearing isn’t mine. It’s the message of the Father who sent me.
25-27 “I’m telling you these things while I’m still living with you. The Friend, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send at my request, will make everything plain to you. He will remind you of all the things I have told you. I’m leaving you well and whole. That’s my parting gift to you. Peace. I don’t leave you the way you’re used to being left—feeling abandoned, bereft. So don’t be upset. Don’t be distraught.
28 “You’ve heard me tell you, ‘I’m going away, and I’m coming back.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I’m on my way to the Father because the Father is the goal and purpose of my life.
29-31 “I’ve told you this ahead of time, before it happens, so that when it does happen, the confirmation will deepen your belief in me.
  • Ascension is the following Thursday
During week
  • Mon, May 27, 2019
    • | Day | Holy Day |Assigned Readings |
      |----|----|-----|
      | Mon, Tue, Wed: | Rogation Day| Day | Holy Day |Assigned Readings |
      | ---- | ---- | ----- |
      | Mon, Tue, Wed: | Rogation Day | |
      |Thurs | Ascension Day| Lesson 1: Acts 1:1-11 Psalm: 47 or 93 Lesson 2: Ephesians 1:15-23 Gospel: Luke 24:44-53|
      | Friday | The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary | Lesson 1: 1 Samuel 2:1-1 Psalm: 113 Lesson 2: Romans 12:9-16b Gospel: Luke 1:39-57 |

  1. http://www.paranormalsoup.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=10524 ↩︎
  2. Stephen Lawhead via Northumbrian Community ↩︎ ↩︎
  3. John Philip Newell, Praying With the Earth (Eerdmans: Michigan) 23. Photo courtesy of Jacob Ruff. ↩︎
  4. from Thomas Merton via Celtic Daily Prayer ↩︎

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