The Church of St.
Paul and Incarnation, Jersey City NJ
May 24, 2020
Year A: The Seventh
Sunday of Easter
Acts 1:6-14
Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36
1 Peter 4:12-14;
5:6-11
John 17:1-11
Abundance of Comfort, Abundance of Power
Alleluia!
Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
It’s
the Seventh Sunday of Easter – it’s still Easter, but just barely.
We
have just one more week of Easter to go.
It’s
still Easter but this past week we celebrated another big feast, one that is often
overlooked because it always falls on Thursday: the Feast of the Ascension.
So, we’re in this
little in-between stretch of days, the time between the Ascension and
Pentecost, a time that begins with the disciples once again facing what sure
looks like Jesus’ absence - and a time that ends when the disciples receive the
Holy Spirit and begin to head out into the world, sharing the best news of
all-time:
Alleluia!
Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
So,
we begin with our first lesson, the story of the Ascension as told in the Acts
of the Apostles.
Now,
at this point the disciples’ heads must have been spinning.
Remember,
it’s been forty days since the Resurrection, forty days since despair and fear
had been transformed into hope and joy, forty days of the Risen Christ
appearing, forty days of the disciples just beginning to make sense of the
amazing new reality of a world where love conquers hate and life defeats death.
When
it comes to getting used to a new reality, forty days is not a long time at all,
right?
I think it took me about forty days
just to get used to doing church over the phone and on Facebook.
So,
the disciples were probably just beginning to get used to their new reality
when it is upended yet again!
Jesus says good-bye again and departs from the
mountain, promising that the Holy Spirit will give them power.
Now,
being a kind of glass half-empty person, if I had been with the disciples that
day on the mountain I think I’d slide right back into despair and fear. I’d ask
the others, “Can you believe we’re going through this again?”
“Can
you believe that Jesus has abandoned us again? How will we survive? What are we
going to do now? What happens next?”
Well,
we’re told that the disciples returned to Jerusalem and gathered in their room.
What
are you going to do, right?
But,
instead of worrying and spreading anxiety – which would be my approach and
maybe yours - we’re told that the disciples prayed – they constantly
devoted themselves to prayer.
And,
not to get ahead of ourselves and spoil next Sunday, we know that for
those first disciples in just a few short days the absence of Jesus will be
filled with the presence of the Spirit.
Scarcity will be
transformed into abundance – abundance of comfort and abundance of
power.
And,
what was true two thousand years ago is still true today.
A
couple of months ago when we received word that we wouldn’t be able to worship
in person for a while – maybe a long while – my natural glass half-emptiness
seemed to drain into just plain emptiness.
I
wondered how in the world we could go forward, how would we be able to stick
together, how would we be able to provide for those in need.
Well,
maybe this time I’ll finally learn my lesson, because look what has happened here
over these past few months!
Like
the first disciples, our first reaction to what sure felt like absence and
scarcity was to gather for prayer – our first response was to pray - to pray
maybe more than we had ever prayed before.
I
remember that first Sunday when it was just Sue and me and my phone here in our
church that felt so sad and empty, and as I said the words of the service I was
asking myself if any of you were out there. I worried that maybe the technology
wouldn’t work or you would log off and find something more interesting to do on
the internet.
But
that’s not what happened.
And each week, by
the end of the day, way more people have watched and prayed with us than when
we were meeting in person – people next door and people on the other side of
the country.
I
remember the first day I dialed into the conference call prayer service,
wondering if anyone else would call in, preparing myself for the possibility
that I might just have to pray alone.
But,
that didn’t happen that day and it’s never happened.
Instead,
lots and lots of people call in each day – in fact, sometimes Evening Prayer
gets a little raucous and I need to use “teacher voice” to impose some order –
lots of people call in, greeting people we know and people we don’t and
offering some of the most beautiful prayers I’ve ever heard – prayers for our
community, for ourselves, for the sick, for the doctors and nurses, for the
people who must work in public to keep us fed and safe and to get us where we
need to go – and each day we’ve offered prayers for the dead, including when
the heartbreaking losses have touched our community and seemed almost too much
for us to bear.
Abundance
of comfort and abundance of power.
When
all of this started, I was afraid that people would drift away from the church
but, to my amazement, we are actually attracting new people to our community!
Last
week I had a wonderful phone conversation with someone I’ve never met in
person, but she has been calling into our prayer services and worshiping with
us here on our Facebook Sunday mornings – I spoke with her because she had
contacted me to ask me how she could officially become a member of our church!
Isn’t
that amazing?!?
Abundance
of comfort and abundance of power.
At
the start of this time of pandemic I worried we might not be able to pay our
bills and might not be able to help those in need.
But,
so many of you have sacrificed and continued to give to the church. And
neighbors and friends have made some incredibly generous donations both to
support the church and for us to give away to the hungry – and our skilled
Finance Committee has done amazing work navigating us through this crisis and
keeping us afloat.
And,
as you know, we have continued to serve some of the poorest among us down in
Triangle Park. Just last Saturday we once again broke records at our Saturday
food pantry with about 170 people lined up around the block.
And,
in a new twist on abundance, our own Deacon Jill and some helpers have started
a new program gathering food and clothing from neighbors in Hoboken who have
more than they need and delivering those items to our community center, in a
neighborhood where often people don’t have enough.
Our
hope is that we will expand that program here to Jersey City, to the places in
our city, including Duncan Avenue and some of the blocks around us, where
people are full and are looking for easy and reliable ways to share what they
have.
You’ll
be hearing more about this in the weeks to come.
And
then there’s Family Promise which has moved into the Parish House over on
Storms Avenue, offering stability, decency, and privacy to our guests who need
all of that more – and providing us with an unanticipated way to be good
stewards of what God has entrusted to us.
Abundance
of comfort and abundance of power.
So,
just like the disciples long ago, here we are, and maybe with all we’ve been
through our heads are spinning.
It’s in-between
time, a time between Ascension and Pentecost, a time between stay at-home and -
when we’re ready and not a moment sooner no matter what anybody says - a
move to whatever our new normal is going to look like.
And,
just like the first disciples, during this in-between time we have prayed,
maybe not constantly, but pretty close.
During this
in-between time we have been given so much abundance – abundance of comfort and
abundance of power.
We do have at
least one advantage over the first disciples – they have to wait a little bit
to receive the Holy Spirit but, while we’ll celebrate the Spirit in a big way
next week, the truth is the Spirit is already with us – just look at all the
abundance!
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Amen.
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