7 Easter/the Sunday after the Acension

May 17, 2026

  Acts 1.6-14

+ At our Wednesday evening Eucharist, we celebrate the eve of the Ascension, as we always do at this time of the year.

 And as we celebrated, we discussed the fact that the Ascension feels kind of anticlimactic.

 It’s always one of the strangest feasts in the Christian calendar.

 It doesn’t have the emotional clarity of Easter.

 It doesn’t carry the tenderness of Christmas or the fire of Pentecost, which we celebrate next week.

  Instead, it gives us one of those strange in-between moments that scripture so often lingers on.

 Christ has risen.

 The tomb is empty.

 Hell itself has been harrowed and broken open.

 Death is defeated.

 And yet the Church is not quite born.

 The Spirit has not yet descended.

 That’s next Sunday.

 For the moment, Jesus is ascending, disappearing from the sight of the disciples and they are left standing there staring upward into the sky.

 Ascension is a story about waiting.

 And not graceful waiting, either.

 Not peaceful, contemplative, monastic waiting.

 This is anxious waiting.

 Uncertain waiting.

 The kind of waiting where you don’t know what comes next and you can’t go backward.

 The disciples still don’t understand what kind of kindom Jesus is bringing into the world.

 “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

 Even now, even after the resurrection and all they have encountered since then,  they are still imagining some sort of political restoration.

 Can we really blame them?

 Isn’t that what we’re hoping in and anxiously awaiting as well?

 Still, they  want certainty.

 They still want a timeline.

 They still want God to finally make things neat and tidy.

 And Jesus refuses to give them what they want, as Jesus does.

 “It is not for you to know the times or periods.”

 Which is one of the most frustrating sentences in all of scripture.

 Because human beings desperately want to know the times and periods.

 We want charts.

 We want explanations.

 We want. . . certainty.

 We want to know whether history bends upward or downward.

 We want reassurance that our losses actually mean something.

 We want guarantees that justice will come soon enough to actually matter.

 We want to know whether the world is healing or unraveling.

 We want to know whether democracy survives.

 We want to know whether the Church survives.

 We want to know whether our grief will ever loosen its grip on us.

 And Christ gives none of that.

 Instead, he gives them what?

 He gives them. . . .vocation.

 A calling

 “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses.”

 Not priests.

 Not deacons.

 Not bishops.

 Not business leaders or bankers or politicians.

 But witnesses.

 There is something profoundly humble about that word.

 A witness is simply someone who tells the truth about what they have seen.

 Nothing more.

 Nothing less.

 And what have these disciples seen?

 They have seen death and resurrection.

 They have seen betrayal and forgiveness.

 Empire and mercy colliding head-on.

 They have seen Jesus kneeling to wash feet.

 They have seen him touch lepers and eat with outcasts and forgive his executioners while hanging from a Roman cross.

 They have seen love refuse to become hatred even while suffering.

 That is what they are sent to bear witness to.

 Not domination.

 Not religious control.

 Not certainty.

 Witness.

 And then Jesus leaves them.

 He ascends.

 I’ve struggled a bit with this because emotionally it feels like a kind of abandonment.

 The disciples finally begin to understand him and now he is leaving.

 Again.

 But the Ascension isn’t about Christ escaping the world.

 It’s Christ filling all things.

 The early Church understood this deeply.

 Christ ascends not to become absent, but to become present even more.

 Everywhere.

 No longer confined to one body in one place in Galilee 2,000 years.

 But now present in bread broken and a cup given to all.

 Present in the poor.

 Present in the stranger.

 Present in the gathered community.

 Present in the grief-stricken.

 Present in the homeless

 Present in the wounded body of this world.

 And maybe that is why the angels interrupt the disciples while they are staring upward.

 “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

 In other words: stop looking up.

 Don’t spend your life gazing into abstractions while the living body of Christ waits to be loved right here in front of you.

 Because the Church has become very skilled at staring upward.

 At wringing its hands and lamenting, and leaving it right there.

 We stare upward into ideology.

 We stare into nostalgia and into the way we used to do things.

 Meanwhile Christ keeps appearing down here.

 In hospital rooms and exhausted caregivers.

 In refugees and lonely neighbors,

 In frightened children and broken people just trying to survive another week.

 In broken political and religious systems that seem to produce more and more injustice in this world.

 The Ascension calls the Church back down here, to earth.

 Not because heaven is unreal, but because heaven has already begun breaking into this wounded world.

 And then the author of the book of Acts gives us this beautiful final image.

 The disciples are gathered together in prayer with the women, and with Mary the mother of Jesus.

 Doing what?

 Waiting together.

 Christianity is not an individual heroic quest.

 The Church is born in community, in uncertainty, in shared prayer, in the shared meal of the Eucharist, in mutual dependence.

 Before Pentecost comes this fragile little gathering of frightened people simply remains together longing enough for God to do something new among them. 

And honestly, that probably is the hardest spiritual discipline of all.

 To remain.

 To stay with one another through confusion and disappointment and uncertainty.

 To keep praying when no answer has arrived yet.

 To keep loving the world when everything feels unbearable.

 To keep witnessing to resurrection even when death still appears to rule so much around us.

 The Church today lives in another in-between moment.

 Old certainties are collapsing.

 The old way of doing things don’t work like they used to.

Many people stand staring upward, hoping for escape, or for easy answers, or for some final restoration of a world that no longer exists.

 And there’s a lot of temptation right now to trade witness for control.

 To trade compassion for outrage.

 To trade the Gospel for fear.

But perhaps the calling remains the same as it was for those first followers.

 Not certainty.

 But witness.

 To witness to compassion in a cruel age.

 To mercy in a culture of humiliation.

 To human dignity in a world addicted to disposable people.

 To resurrection in the midst of grief and violence and despair.

 And maybe most importantly---- to wait together without giving up on one another.

 Because the Holy Spirit so often arrives right there—in that fragile gathered community that has almost lost hope but keeps gathering and praying anyway in the name of the risen and ascended Christ, who remains more present to us in this world than we can possibly ever imagine.

 Amen.

 

6 Easter

May 10, 2026

John 14.15-21

 + I was having a conversation this week with someone and it came up that today is Mother’s Day.

 I responded by saying, “Wow! That slipped my mind.”

 This friend then said, “it’s strange being a fifty-something-year-=old orphan isn’t it?”

 That hit me hard.

 Orphan? I thought.

 That’s a word we don’t use much anymore.

 It has become somewhat archaic.

 I don’t know why.

 Because orphans are still very much a thing.

 Any of us who have lost parents—no matter at what age—are orphans.

 I remember my mother saying that when her mother died.

 And I definitely thought about that a lot in my own grief process following my own mother’s death.

 There is something very sobering about that fact that we can be orphans as adults.

 And I think being orphan has a major tie-in to the general pandemic of loneliness our culture is experiencing right now.

 Watch any film brought out by the A24 Studio.  

 There is an epidemic of loneliness in our world right now.

 For those of us who work with people on a regular basis, who actually help people in their emotional and spiritual pains, loneliness is a big thing.

 And sometimes it’s a thing people don’t often identify.

 Like being an orphan.

 Or a widow or widower.

 In our Gospel reading for today some of these issues, I think, are addressed.

 But first, we hear Jesus say something that we have heard a thousand times,

 Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

 Now, most of us might be reassured by that statement.

 But I think some of us hear that the way we hear most religious language: as pressure.

 As obligation.

 As some impossible thing.

 We hear “keep my commandments” and immediately our minds start hearing rules and regulations.  

 We start imagining Christianity as a kind of spiritual performance review conducted by a disappointed supervisor in the sky.

 I want to stress that God is not a disapproving supervisor in the sky.

 But it’s important for us to remind our selves that,  in John’s Gospel, Jesus is not standing over the disciples with a clipboard.

 He is speaking to frightened people.

 Lonely people.

 People who are about to be orphaned in a very real way.

 And that matters.

 This whole section of John happens on the edge of loss.

 Judas has gone out into the night.

 Peter is about to fall apart.

 Jesus keeps talking about leaving them, and they do not know how to imagine a world in which the center of gravity of their lives is suddenly gone.

 And into that fear Jesus says: “I will not leave you orphaned.”

 I will not abandon you.

 I will not discard you.

 You will not be spiritually homeless.

 “I will not leave you orphaned.”

 Which means Christianity begins not with commandment, but with what?

 It begins in relationship.

 The commandments are not the price of admission to God’s love.

 They are what love starts to look like once it enters the bloodstream.

 Now, that’s different.

 Because there are forms of religion that are fundamentally transactional.

 Behave correctly, believe correctly, suffer correctly, and perhaps, if you did it all perfectly, correctly, maybe God will tolerate your existence.

 But Jesus never says, “If you perform adequately, THEN I will love you.”

 Rather what does he say?

 He says,  “I am with you. I will always be in you. I will never leave you alone.”

 And only then does he begin speaking about love that manifests itself in the world.

 Christianity is not merely saying the Creed correctly while ignoring the human being collapsing beside you.

 Jesus never says:

“They will know you are my disciples by your ability to win arguments online.”

 He speaks instead about love embodied.

 Love enacted.

 Love that takes on flesh.

 And consequence.

 And that kind of love is difficult because it keeps refusing abstraction.

 It is much easier to love humanity as a whole than to love actual humans.

 Humanity is theoretical.

 Actual people interrupt us.

 They irritate us.

 Or hurt us.

 Actual people are needy and contradictory and wounded and exhausting and occasionally very strange.

 Which means the commandments of Jesus are not really about moral bookkeeping.

 They are about participating in the life of God itself.

 To love the lonely.

 To forgive when every instinct screams otherwise.

 To tell the truth.

 To stand up and speak out.

 To protect the vulnerable.

 To refuse cruelty in a culture increasingly organized around it.

 To insist that no human being is disposable.

 That is not being sentimental.

 It is resistance.

 And Jesus promises that we do not do this alone.

 “I will ask the Father, and [God] will give you another Advocate.”

 The Greek word there is Paraclete.

 Comforter.

 Advocate.

 The One who stands beside you.

 The One who stands up for you.

 Not a distant force.

 Not vague positivity.

 Not some kind of religious mood lighting.

 God beside you.

 God accompanying you through grief and doubt and failure and all the bewildering terrain of being alive.

 And honestly, I think many of us live as functional orphans spiritually.

 Even in the Church.

 We carry the deep suspicion that we have somehow exhausted God’s patience.

 That eventually God will discover who we really are and quietly back away in disappointment.

 But the Gospel says the exact opposite.

 The Gospel says God moves toward us.

 Again and again.

 God moves toward frightened disciples.

 Toward betrayers.

 Toward deniers.

 Toward the grieving.

 Toward people whose prayers barely hold together.

 Toward people who are trying very hard to believe and people who are too tired to try at all.

 Toward the lonely.

 Toward the orphans and the widows.

 “I will not leave you orphaned.”

 And maybe that is the word some of us need today.

 Not advice.

 Not correction.

 Not another impossible burden.

 Just you are not abandoned.

 Not by God.

 Not in your grief.

 Not in your confusion.

 Not in your loneliness.

 Not even in your failures.

 Christ remains.

 Quietly.

 Persistently.

 Sometimes almost hidden beneath the noise of the world, but still…. there.

 Alive in acts of mercy.

 Alive in bread broken and shared.

 Alive in the cup given and received.

 Alive in communities that refuse despair.

 Alive in the stubborn insistence that love is stronger than death, even when death appears to be winning.

 “In a little while the world will no longer see me,” Jesus says, “but you will see me.”

 And perhaps that is the task of the Church—for us who are followers of Jesus—right now.

 To become people who learn how to see Christ still moving through the world.

 In tenderness.

 In justice.

 In compassion.

 In endurance.

 In the holy refusal to give up on one another.

 Because resurrection is not merely something that happened to Jesus once, way back then.

 It is something God keeps trying to do everywhere.

 Even here.

 Even now.

 Even in us.