Seventh Sunday of Easter: May 8, 2005.Acts 1:6-14 Psalm 68:1-10; 33-36 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11 John 17:1-11 K: Well, Tim, we are back where we started. It has taken us seven weeks, but here we are, standing on the threshold of something just about to happen. Nothing is as it seems to be today. In our Acts reading, Jesus tells the disciples that they are about to embark on something new and that they themselves will be something new. Then, with a bit of razzle-dazzle, he leaves. Surprising? Yes. But the real surprise seems to be the extent of responsibility that Jesus placed on all of us before his departure. Jesus made it clear: We are empowered to do God's work in the world. I wonder if the upper room seemed the same when the disciples returned. Jesus was gone again. Did it make a difference that he left this time in glory? Or is his absence just as profoundly empty? The difference this time is that they filled up their time with prayer. God had made them promises. Listen, and you can hear the psalmist psalm·ist n. A writer or composer of psalms. psalmist Noun a writer of psalms Noun 1. shout it. Last time they were in this room, the disciples were shells of the living. This time, they were alive with prayer. T: Yes, we're back where we started. But, like the disciples, we too have been changed forever. The landscape may be similar, but there's a big difference: now, the tomb is vacated, not unused. K: As the Easter season The new liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church, which took effect in 1970 following its earlier approval by the Second Vatican Council changed the "Sundays after unfolded, our lens broadened. During Holy Week we were tightly focused on one person and one mission, Jesus and the cross. We have been pulling ever so slowly back, looking at the early church and ourselves in the story of the Acts of the Apostles APOSTLES. In the British courts of admiralty, when a party appeals from a decision made against him, he prays apostles from the judge, which are brief letters of dismission, stating the case, and declaring that the record will be transmitted. 2 Brown's Civ. and Adm. Law, 438; Dig. 49. 6. . We see today a fuller picture of the story. We are empowered to do God's work in the world, because the story travels through Acts into the greater world. A life lived within roughly eighty miles, an event that happened on three square feet of soil, reached out and encompassed the entire world. T: That is the trajectory Trajectory The curve described by a body moving through space, as of a meteor through the atmosphere, a planet around the Sun, a projectile fired from a gun, or a rocket in flight. of Holy Week and the Easter season: Holy Week is all about God and God's activity, because it's beyond us and anything we can imagine. All we can do in Holy Week is to stand, open-mouthed and empty-handed, saying to ourselves, "This cannot be." Yet the miracle of the Easter season is that it is anyway. Once we get past Easter Sunday, we slowly become part of the story again, until with Pentecost we are truly given our marching orders Noun 1. marching order - equipage for marching; "the company was dressed in full marching order" equipage, materiel - equipment and supplies of a military force (and the ammunition to carry them out): head out into the world, from Jerusalem to Judea to the ends of the earth To the Ends of the Earth is a trilogy of novels by William Golding, consisting of Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989). , and let them know what God has done! K: One could get heady head·y adj. head·i·er, head·i·est 1. a. Intoxicating or stupefying: heady liqueur. b. from all of this God-entrusted power if not for the sobering reminder in 1 Peter that this is dangerous work. We stand against the ways of the world. No punches are pulled when we are told to expect persecution Persecution Albigenses medieval sect suppressed by a crusade, wars, and the Inquisition. [Fr. Hist.: NCE, 53] Camisards uprising of Protestant peasantry after the revocation of Edict of Nantes in 1685 was brutally suppressed by the in life-threatening big ways and in confidence-chipping small ways. Countercultural revelation by Christians was difficult and dangerous in the Asia Minor Asia Minor, great peninsula, c.250,000 sq mi (647,500 sq km), extreme W Asia, generally coterminous with Asian Turkey, also called Anatolia. It is washed by the Black Sea in the north, the Mediterranean Sea in the south, and the Aegean Sea in the west. of 1 Peter's day. And it is difficult and dangerous in the Asia Minor of today--Turkey, Iran, Iraq--and the rest of the world. We do it because that is how we praise God. God applauds us, too, and showers us with restoration, support, strength, and a place in God's family and world. If nothing is as it seems today, the most unexpected moment of all comes in the Gospel. The God who gallops through divine places with the cherubim and seraphim Cherubim and Seraphim is the name of an Inspector Morse mystery dramatized on ITV in the United Kingdom. It was broadcast in 1992. The story involves a group of teenagers revelling in the contemporary rave and acid house culture. is the same God who changed the world order by simply standing up and walking out of the tomb. So what is the culmination of the most magnificent moments in our faith? Our celebration of Easter's great fifty days ends with a prayer. T: We began with silence and the rush of an earthquake. We felt the first flickers of hope when we saw a stone rolled away. We end with a whispered prayer, a rush of wind, the lick lick 1. a stroke with the tongue, normally used in cleaning the coat or ingesting a substance from a flat surface. See also licking. 2. a mixture of salt plus other macro-elements, especially phosphorus, trace elements, vitamins and other feed additives, fed loosely in a box of flames. This is our God, praying for us. And here is the sobering reality: we need to be prayed for. K: We are back in the moments that preceded our Easter celebration. Jesus is praying before his arrest and crucifixion crucifixion, hanging on a cross, in ancient times a method of capital punishment. It was practiced widely in the Middle East but not by the Greeks. The Romans, who may have borrowed it from Carthage, reserved it for slaves and despised malefactors. . I wonder if we are now at a place to be able to hear him more clearly. The murmur murmur /mur·mur/ (mur´mer) [L.] an auscultatory sound, particularly a periodic sound of short duration of cardiac or vascular origin. anemic murmur a cardiac murmur heard in anemia. of death was so loud back in Holy Week that we may have missed it when Jesus told us that we were to continue to work together and live in unity. Perhaps we were busy praying that it would not have to happen this time. Perhaps we were resigned to praying for a short suffering. Perhaps we felt sorrow and pain for Jesus' prayer. T: Maybe we missed it because that whisper from Jesus is about our work. Standing at the verge of Holy Week, knowing what is to come, we were overshadowed and overpowered o·ver·pow·er tr.v. o·ver·pow·ered, o·ver·pow·er·ing, o·ver·pow·ers 1. To overcome or vanquish by superior force; subdue. 2. To affect so strongly as to make helpless or ineffective; overwhelm. 3. by the specter of God's work: suffering, death, resurrection. In the face of that divine activity, our simple work so pales in comparison that it seems meaningless. In truth, it is meaningless until God has done the work of the cross. Only then can our work begin, because it branches out from and is motivated and "meaninged" by, God's work. K: Jesus is praying for himself. He is also praying for "them" (v. 9) and "those" (v. 20). Are these the disciples and the converts to Christianity? Or are they all believers of the past and present, as well as the believers who, because of our work of witnessing to the Good News, will come after us? Either way, it is a prayer for the faith community and for the future of that community. What's unexpected? There has never been a moment this Easter season when the future has been in our own hands. Look back over the texts. In the Gospel readings, Jesus openly and honestly talks about his time of leaving. Every time that reality of the future is discussed, he fills up a potentially fatal hole with the waters of baptism baptism [Gr., =dipping], in most Christian churches a sacrament. It is a rite of purification by water, a ceremony invoking the grace of God to regenerate the person, free him or her from sin, and make that person a part of the church. , with the Word of God, with bread, with a community of people singlemindedly committed to revealing God's love to the world. Listen to his prayer with Easter ears. "God, the future is ours, yours and mine. They belong to us and we belong to them. They know (there's ginosko!) you because they have seen you in me. I have given them all of us. They believe in us. Their future is ours. Now keep them safe as they live out that future--as they try to live their lives in the same unity, the same completeness in which we live our lives." Jesus does not rest after conquering death. He waits and walks patiently with us as we discover again the life he lives in us. KH/TK |
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