May 28, The Ascension of our Lord

Pastor Frank C. Senn

Readings: Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 47; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53

            Goodbyes are never easy. I’m coming up to the fourth anniversary of my retirement from active pastoral ministry and resignation of the pastoral office at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Evanston. I wanted to give the congregation time to digest the fact that I would no longer be their pastor and give the parish leadership time to prepare for the transition to an interim situation.  So I announced my retirement at the annual meeting of the congregation in January, and set the official date as of the end of June. Then over the next five months we had the last this and the last that. Finally, we had the really last day, and since Mary and I were not moving away from Evanston I took off to Singapore to teach in a seminary there to completely get out of their sight.

I think the story Luke tells at the beginning of the sequel to his Gospel, The Acts of the Apostles, served the same purpose. It was a dramatic way for Jesus to impress on his disciples that he would no longer be among them in the way they were used to relating to him. This story of Jesus’ ascension belongs to Luke. You won’t find it in the gospels. It’s entirely Luke’s story, and the church built a festival on it, just as we built a festival on Luke’s story of the Nativity of Jesus.

            I think a case can be made that Jesus’ ascension---his return to the Father in heaven---took place on the day of his resurrection. In the resurrection narrative in John’s Gospel Jesus tells Mary Magdalene, once she recognizes him, not to cling to him because he has not yet ascended. And then he commissions her to go the disciples and tell them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Note: Jesus didn’t tell Mary Magdalene to tell the others that he had risen from the dead but that he has ascended to God.  

So in John’s Gospel the resurrection and ascension seem to occur on the same day. Yet we know that Jesus appeared to the apostles that evening and again eight days later when so-called “doubting” Thomas was with them and again along the seashore in Galilee where he has breakfast waiting for the fishermen disciples. So where had Jesus been when he’s not appearing to disciples? Presumably in heaven, which I think we may imagine as another dimension rather than some place up in the sky.

            I think we see the same thing in Luke’s Gospel, the end of which we heard proclaimed today. The myrrh-bearing women go to the tomb early on the third day after Jesus’ crucifixion to prepare his body for a proper burial. They find the tomb empty. Two men in dazzling clothes tell them that he has risen. Then that afternoon Jesus appears to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, explains about himself as prophesied in the Hebrew Scriptures, and is finally recognized at the supper table when he breaks bread and says the blessing. Those two immediately run back to Jerusalem and tell the others. But suddenly Jesus appears among them all in the room and eats in their presence to prove he wasn’t a ghost.

At this point our Gospel reading for today begins. Jesus explains that everything he has done has been to fulfill the Scriptures and he commissions these disciples to be his witnesses to the nations. But they are to wait in the city until they are clothed with power from on high---the Holy Spirit. Then he leads them out as far as Bethany, blesses them, and withdraws into heaven. If we didn’t have the sequel to this Gospel, we would think, as in John’s Gospel, that Jesus’ ascension occurred on that event-filled day of resurrection.

But we do have the sequel. Luke tells Theophilus and his other readers that Jesus appeared to the disciples “during forty days” (a good biblical number) “speaking about the kingdom of God.” Then, while they’re still thinking that it’s about the restored kingdom of Israel (even this late they don’t seem to “get it”), Jesus departs from them. And they stand there with their mouths open gazing up at the sky. Is that it? Is Jesus finally gone?  Is that what this story is about: showing the disciples that they shouldn’t expect to see him any more the way they were used to seeing him?

When I left Immanuel and went to Singapore, was I gone for good from Immanuel? Not quite, because I was invited back to the congregation’s 125th anniversary banquet in the fall. Was Jesus totally gone from the disciples and from the earth? Not quite, because in the 9th chapter of Acts he appeared to Saul the Pharisee and converted him into Paul the Apostle to the gentiles. Well, he needed to have someone who would get his gospel to the nations.

So we wonder: why does Luke tell us this ascension story at all? Leave-takings can be rather depressing if you think you won’t see that person again. Last Sunday I attended the monthly Bach Cantata Vespers at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest, where I am technically a member. It was an observance of the Ascension of our Lord, which was actually this past Thursday in the liturgical calendar---forty days after Easter Day, according to Luke’s chronology. The choir sang a stirring setting of Psalm 47 by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Psalm 47, which we sang this morning, is a royal enthronement psalm and it has been applied spiritually to Jesus ascending to the throne of God. Vaughn Williams’ setting of the words “God is gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet” with choir, organ, brass, and timpani would have shaken the roof of Westminster Abbey as it did at Grace Lutheran. Then came Bach’s Ascension Oratorio after the Gospel reading, also with full orchestra including brass and timpani, and it was something of a let-down.  Because while there were brassy praise choruses sung by the choir, right in the midst of the biblical story Bach had the alto singing (in German),

Ah, remain still, my dearest life,

Ah, do not flee so soon from me!

Your departure and your early leaving

Bring me the greatest suffering.

Ah, do then remain still here;

Otherwise I shall be quite beset by grief.

With these pietistic words Bach brings in the human reaction to Jesus’ departure. He sees in the ascension story a narrative that has become very familiar in our modern age: the one about a God who is deliberately distant from those who need him, and who seems to have abandoned his people to their own inner resources, as if no Holy Spirit has been sent, as if we each of us must now invent our own spirituality, our own morality, our own religious practices, as if there’s nothing set down in the gospels and two millennia of tradition to draw upon?

I think it’s important to recognize the legitimacy of the experience from which this lament arises. Many people do feel that Christ has indeed left the stage. A Catholic friend once told me that she had stopped going to church because of the abuse of children by the priests. She couldn’t understand how a Church full of the Spirit of Christ could allow such a thing. For her, any residual sense of Christ’s presence in the world has now disappeared. And who can blame her, or any of the victims of abuse, for seeing things that way?

Yet, this morning I would bear witness to another way of reading the Ascension story, another way of understanding why Jesus departed from his disciples and from the earth. For there is a bigger story here in Luke’s account, and I believe that if we can only allow ourselves this enlarged vista, then even the very real “fact” and “experience” of divine abandonment will turn out to be something other than what it appears to be.

And it is this: yes, by virtue of his Ascension into heaven, Christ is indeed no longer present as a particular human being who occupies and is limited by a particular place and time.  But he is nevertheless, also by virtue of the Ascension, more abundantly present and active than he had ever been before. And this not as some kind of ghostly presence who hangs in the air but never takes form. No, Christ remains present in a material body: in the Eucharist.

In Jesus the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, God has a body. And that body shares in Christ’s divine nature, which includes omnipresence. God still relates to us body to body in the body of Christ. And that body of Christ is present wherever the words of Christ are proclaimed: “This is my body.” This is me.

In the bread and the wine we receive the body and blood of Christ according to his word. In a kind of spiritual biochemistry we take his body and blood into our bodies. This can be a more intimate and a more saturating presence than we experience with another human being occupying a space next to us.

Robert Orsi, professor of Catholic Studies at Northwestern University, has chronicled case studies of victims of priestly abuse in his recently-published book, History and Presence. He calls what happened to these victims “events of abundant evil.” Yet many of these victims continue to come to church and receive the Host, the sacramental body of Christ, from the hand of a priest, even though they may have suffered abuse at the hands of a priest. Believing that this bread is the body of Christ, perhaps they have a sense that ingesting the body of Christ gives honor to their dishonored bodies.  This was a feeling I had when I was a young adolescent receiving first Communion at a time in my life when I had all sorts of young adolescent body issues. I wasn’t feeling very good about my body when I was thirteen going on fourteen, but I had been catechized to believe that Christ’s body and blood is really present in the bread and wine and if his holy body was coming into my body, then my body was honored by his presence.

Moreover, we share the same spiritual biochemistry with all others who receive the body and blood of Christ from the same bread and cup.  If we receive this sacrament we are bodily in union with Christ and with one another. The church becomes the interpersonal body of Christ. Working through the means of grace, the word and the sacraments, the Spirit whose coming we celebrate next Sunday makes the Church the body of Christ in the world, so infusing and shaping its life and work that the mission of Jesus continues in the Church as a real and tangible Christ-presence for the whole world.

And in the meantime, it’s good for us who have to live in the meantime to know that Christ has indeed taken his place at God’s right hand – the position of clout, we would say --, “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion.”  God has made Christ “the head over all things for the church, which is his body.” Eastern Orthodox worshipers are reminded of this every time they enter their church building and see the icon of Christ the Pantocrator, the ruler of all things, in the apse or in the dome overhead gathering all his people under his rule.

Christ abides with us in the bread broken and the wine poured out for the life of the world; in the Scriptures read and preached; and in the stranger, the widow and the orphan we are called to meet in our ministries of care. Christ has indeed ascended to the Father…so that he can be present everywhere and to everyone now and always and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Pastor Frank C. Senn

May 21, The Sixth Sunday of Easter

Kristin White

John 14:15-21

I wanted to be able to call myself a downhill skier.

They were the risk-takers, the ones with the tan lines around their eyes where there ski goggles had been for a sunny day on the mountain, the ones with the lift tags – sometimes many of them – a seeming badge of honor and proof, on the zipper pulls of their ski jackets.

We, the Uffelman Family, we were a cross-country skiing people. We were cautious, economical, as we did our skiing under our own steam through quiet and undisturbed countryside, at a pace both measured and safe.

As a freshman in high school, I wanted almost nothing more than to walk down the hall on a Monday morning, and join the cool kids, as I saw them, talking about the powder conditions at Mt. Bachelor over the weekend.

Mostly, I wanted that lift tag on the zipper pull of my jacket.

Somehow, I talked my dad into taking me to that mountain on a cold Saturday in January of 1986. I paid for part of the expensive lift ticket. I got the coveted tag. My dad was a good sport about it; he taught me the basics of what to do, from getting off the lift at the top of the run, to learning how to fall without hurting myself (that was the goal, anyway). And so we skied, and I fell, and it mostly wasn’t horrible, but I didn’t love it.

And then it was the end of the day, and the one lift I hadn’t gone on yet was called the Black Diamond. I don’t know that it’s still the case now, and maybe it’s that way everywhere, but in January of 1986, the Black Diamond was the highest and the most difficult ski run on Mt. Bachelor. I had been skiing for the better part of one day at that point. And I decided that that day would not be complete until I could not only walk into school the coming Monday morning with the lift tag on my jacket, but to be able to do that while talking about my time skiing Black Diamond.

I have no memory about how I convinced my father that this was a good idea.

But we rode the lift up, and I slid down the off-ramp at the top…the really, really high top.

Did I mention that we Uffelmans are a cautious people? I am, anyway. And I already had that stupid lift tag.

I looked down the mountain at the place I needed to ski in order to be finished with this ridiculous endeavor, and I just stopped. I couldn’t. My dad tried to encourage me, probably to the point of frustration on his part, but I just couldn’t bring myself to it.

And then it was dusk, and there were no more skiers on our part of the mountain. The lifts weren’t even running anymore, or else I would have made the case for riding back down on one.

A guy from the ski patrol showed up, seemingly out of nowhere. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s do this together. I’ll stay with you.”

And he did. He stayed right next to me, showed me how to take that mountain bit by bit. He waited for me when I fell. He talked with my dad all along the way.

He wasn’t annoyed that I, a brand new downhill skier, had done this thing that was so clearly beyond me – or if he was annoyed, he didn’t show it, so points to him for that. He just stayed with me all through that thing I didn’t think I could do, all the way to safety. When we finally got to the bottom of the mountain, just outside the lodge, he wished us well and skied off.

Jesus’ disciples are in a space of fear and confusion and sadness in today’s gospel. This is still his farewell discourse, a continuation of him saying goodbye to his friends before the betrayal and arrest that loom ahead of him.

“If you love me,” he says, “You will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.”

The Greek word for advocate is paraclete. It means “one who has been called to our side.”[1] The one called to witness. The one called to be our companion.

By Jesus’ own words, this is not the first paraclete – this will be another. Because the earlier advocate is Jesus: look at the ways he has lived his life and ministry called to people’s side. Sure, the healings and the miracles. But also the walking with people from the Galilee to Jerusalem. The taking up of children in his arms. The noticing of people whom others would disregard. The times he sits and eats with wealthy people and prostitutes, with tax collectors and Pharisees. Again and again, Jesus comes alongside people. He sees them and he knows them, and he wants to be with them. He sees us, and he knows us, and he wants to be with us.

In promising another paraclete, Jesus promises that what the Spirit will do is what Jesus has already done – things those disciples, those friends of his, have already seen and tasted and heard and felt.

“The world will no longer see me, but you will,” Jesus tells them. “Because I live, you also will live. I in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”

One of my seminary professors used these five chapters marking Jesus’ farewell in the gospel of John, when he taught biblical Greek to his students. There are comparatively fewer vocabulary words here, they just get rearranged and repeated a lot. This passage is a prime example, the “I-in-you, you-in-me”-ness of it contributing to a kind of poetic, mystical, dare I say “spiritual” quality.

But what if it’s not that?

I’m a little flinchy about asking this question, but what if Jesus is actually being, well, literal?

What if he means this in practical and real ways? “If you love me, you will show up and wash each other’s feet, and feed people who are hungry, and shelter people who are homeless. And I will ask God to send another Advocate to come alongside you, as witness and companion. The world might not see me, but you will. Because I live, you will live; because I am in the Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.”

What if this description shapes our very presence in this world? What if the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives has a claim on how we live as disciples?

Because I live, you will live.

I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.

“This is the Spirit of Truth, the Advocate, Jesus himself dwelling in (us), and among us.”[2]

You don’t need me to tell you that we live in a fearful and confusing time – so much is unfolding in these last days, all at a furious pace, and channel by website by posting by tweet, we’re being shouted at about what to think and how to feel and who to blame.

What a blessing, then, what a blessing we can find, in those people who show up and come alongside us, alongside those we love.

Thanks to Debbie Buesing for doing that in your ministry at St. Augustine’s, which we celebrate today. Thank you for your leadership as witness and companion, for loving the children and youth and families and everybody else in this parish. Thanks for building a ministry of wonder at what might be possible, with God’s help, and then working with others to make it so.

And thanks to the many of you who continue the good work Debbie has begun, coming alongside our young people, teaching them to explore the stories of who we are.

Lift tag and tan lines and Black Diamond stories or not, we need paraclete ministry in this life. We need people who show up and say, “Come on, let’s do this together. I’ll stay with you.” Because whatever our circumstance, we all face moments so scary that we can’t quite bring ourselves to begin, or times painful to the point that it takes our breath away, or those that are profoundly joyous, or just bewildering, or even so amazing that we need somebody else to be there and say, “yes, this is really happening!” We need each other. We need people who will show up as witnesses and companions, people who will come alongside us until we make it through.

“They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me,” Jesus says. “And those who love me will be loved by my Father; and I will love them, and will reveal myself to them.” May it be so. Amen.

[1] Linda Lee Clader. “John 14:15-21, Homiletical Perspective.” Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 2. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. 491.

[2] Clader, 493.

May 7, The Fourth Sunday of Easter

Kristin White

The Fourth Sunday of Easter – May 7, 2017

John 10:1-10

Bishops carry croziers, the name for that fancy long crook, a sign of their symbolic role as shepherd of the people. Last Saturday in Indianapolis, John and I and about 1500 other joyous people got to witness, for the first time, a woman: the retiring tenth bishop, Cate Waynick, hand her crozier to another woman: our friend, Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, now the eleventh bishop of the Diocese of Indianapolis.

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Today we celebrate what churchy folks refer to as Good Shepherd Sunday. Our lessons revolve around Jesus as the good shepherd – the one who promises to leave the 99 in order to go find one lost sheep, and then to carry it home over his shoulder; the one who must go to care for his sheep who are not of this fold, and who promises to return.

We just prayed and sang the 23rd psalm, those most-familiar words: “the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, and leads me beside still waters…surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” We will sing, “Shepherd of souls, refresh and bless,” and “The king of love my shepherd is.” Language of the good shepherd will weave its way throughout our prayer and worship.

The tricky part of all this is the parallel. I don’t find it all that difficult to imagine Jesus as the good shepherd – tending, leading, and caring for his flock. The hard part is that those who follow him are the sheep. And sheep are most often – and mistakenly, I believe – described in unlovely ways…as smelly, messy, and dumb. So who wants to be compared with that?

I come from cattle and sheep country, a place where wars actually raged between cattle ranchers and sheepmen (as they were called) in the 1890s.[1] They all grazed their livestock on the same open lands back then. And cattle ranchers didn’t like sheep, because sheep eat everything – so the ranchers saw the sheep as stripping the land where they hoped to have their animals roam and be fed. And many of the ranchers held the sheepmen in a certain amount of contempt, not just because they couldn’t stand sheep, but because the shepherds did things differently. Cattle are driven from behind, back then always by men on horseback, with whips and shouts. You can’t do that with sheep; they’ll get scared and try to run around behind you. Sheep have to be led by someone who is in their midst. So instead of riding horseback, shepherds have to walk with their animals. Sheep don’t follow strangers, and they won’t go anywhere without being led there by someone they trust, who goes ahead and shows them that it will be okay.

Today’s gospel testifies to the wisdom of those who follow. “The sheep hear his voice,” Jesus says as he tells people the parable of the good shepherd. “They follow, because they know his voice. Those who came before were thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them.”

No, this gospel does not hold up that “smelly, messy, and dumb” trope for the sheep who follow Jesus. Those who follow in this gospel passage have their own wisdom, their own discernment. They know how to listen, and whom to trust.

And that’s important, because there are thieves. There are bandits. There are those who push and jostle and shout.

It matters, the wisdom and discernment and trust of those who follow.

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In 1915, the Indiana Ku Klux Klan organized itself with a focus on prohibition, education, political corruption, and mortality. Klansmen opposed immigration, wrote and supported laws to limit the number of people moving to this country; it was hostile to Catholics and Jews, was avowedly white supremacist.[2]

By 1922, Indiana's KKK was the largest organization of any in the country, averaging 2,000 new members a week between 1922 and 1923. Membership would grow to 250,000, with nearly one third of all white men born in the United States and living in Indiana joining the ranks as Klansmen. By 1925, Klan membership counted the governor of Indiana, more than half the elected members of the state legislature, and a majority of ranking state and local government officials. People who wanted to run for any office at any level learned that they had to get KKK endorsement if they hoped to get elected.

Thieves and bandits.

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So what does it say, just fewer than 100 years later, that the people of the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis would call a black woman to take hold of that crozier?

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Last Sunday in Godly Play, the children heard the story of The Good Shepherd and the World Communion. The good shepherd leads the sheep from their fold out into the pasture, and then to the table of the good shepherd, where the good shepherd is in the bread and the wine. The telling of the story has the priest eventually stand in the place of the shepherd, the sheep exchanged with the people – children and adults.

Teddy LaRosa has heard the story of the good shepherd in Godly Play every year since he was 2 ½ years old. And Teddy knows that the first kid to get to the parable box during response time gets to re-create the story for himself. So by Teddy’s re-creation, the shepherd doesn’t go anywhere. You can see it on your bulletin cover: closest to the table is this angelic, faceless god-like figure. And the priest is there with the children and the people and the sheep. All creation gathers for the feast, that they might have life, and have it abundantly.

There’s wisdom and discernment in those who follow, a reciprocity of trust with the one who leads. We listen for each others’ voices. We know each others’ names.

I can tell you that there was a claiming of Jennifer as bishop last Saturday in Indianapolis. Members of the black community from all over the country, and beyond – lay people and bishops and priests and deacons – gathered to mark the moment of Jennifer’s consecration, standing with joy to sing together the gospel music of “Total praise.” I can tell you that women came from everywhere to mark that day as well, and the image of the retiring bishop giving her crozier to the new bishop, all under the watchful gaze of the very first woman made a bishop of the church, who happens also to be black, is one I will cherish for the rest of my life. I can tell you that the people of Indianapolis chose Jennifer and called her; they trust her, and they know her to be their leader.

Teddy’s re-creation resonated there, again. God was at that table. The good shepherd hadn’t gone anywhere. There were adults and children, together for the feast. And Jennifer was right there in their midst.

There’s wisdom and discernment among those who follow, trusting that Christ comes to us, that we may have life, and have it abundantly.

[1] https://oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-records/central-oregon-range-wars/#.WQ9cobzyvow

[2] a great deal of information about Indiana’s Klan history can be found here: http://www.theindychannel.com/longform/the-ku-klux-klan-ran-indiana-once-could-it-happen-again

April 30, The Third Sunday of Easter

Deacon Sue Nebel

            You probably did it the first time as a young child, and probably many more times again as an adult.  You stood at the edge of a lake, a pond, or maybe just a nice deep puddle.  You stretched out your hand and dropped a small stone or a pebble into the water.  Then you stood there, watching intently, as a small circle formed where the stone had dropped and disappeared.  Then gradually more and more circles formed, spreading out on the surface of the water.  Smaller ones in the center, surrounded by increasingly larger ones. I don’t know about you, but I never fail, even as an adult, to be amazed by the sight of those circles.

            The stories of the experience of the Resurrection are like those circles.  They begin small and get bigger and bigger.  At the Easter Vigil and on Easter Day, we hear the stories of the discovery of the empty tomb in the early morning. Not many characters involved. Some women and an angel or two.  In the version of the story in Matthew, two women, Mary Magadalene and another Mary the stone rolled away and Jesus’ body nowhere to be found.  They rush off to tell the others.   In the account in John, Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb alone. Stunned at what she finds, she runs to tell Peter and another disciple. The men rush to the tomb to check out what she has said. In both stories, we have the first post-Resurrection appearance of Jesus. In Matthew, he appears to the women and the disciples.  In John, Jesus appears only to Mary Magdalene and she then tells the others, “I have seen the Lord.”  The empty tomb.  The stone dropped into the water.  Circles starting to form.

             In last Sunday’s Gospel lesson, Jesus appears again. By now, it is evening.  The disciples are in a house, somewhere in Jerusalem, gathered in fear.  Jesus comes to them.  He shows them his wounds and breathes on them.  And then the words, “Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  The hint of what lies ahead. A bigger circle is forming.  The disciples will not remain in this small place.  They will not sit still, paralyzed by fear, and do nothing.  Jesus is going to send them out to do the work that he started. 

In today’s Gospel lesson, this one from Luke, another post-Resurrection appearance. A  larger circle. Jesus now appears to people who are not part of the small group of women and men closest to him.  On the road outside of Jerusalem, Jesus joins two of his followers who are headed  to the village of Emmaus, some seven miles away.  They do not recognize him. They are discussing the extraordinary events of past few days. When he asks them what they are talking about, they are astonished that he does not seem to know about what has happened.  So they recount the events.  Then Jesus begins to teach them, interpreting the scriptures for them.  As they approach the village, they invite Jesus to join them.  At the table, Jesus takes bread, blesses it, breaks it and gives it to them.  Suddenly, they recognize him, and in that same moment he disappears.  They say to one another, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was interpreting the scriptures to us?” Instead of staying in Emmaus, they return to Jerusalem to tell the smaller group of disciples what they have experienced.  Jesus teaching them on the road and how they knew him in the breaking and sharing of bread.

Scripture and shared meal. Key elements in this story.  The pattern of the earliest days of the Jesus Movement.  People gathering in homes to share a meal.  Telling stories about Jesus. Wondering and talking together about the meaning of all that he taught them.  Then going out from those gatherings to spread the good news about Jesus. To live out his teaching to love another.  To build the Church.  We have come a long way since those early days.  The church has become a huge, complicated institution.  We have taken the simple pattern of word and shared meal and dressed it up. Made it grand with vestments and music. Scripture read from lecterns.  The stories and teachings of Jesus proclaimed from the center aisle.  The meal, the Eucharist, begins at a large table, front and center with elaborate coverings and silver vessels.  Words that remind us of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples.  Words that give expression to layers of meanings we have given to the simple actions of sharing bread and wine.  “This is my body, which is given for you.”  “This is my blood of the new Covenant.”  “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Word and Sacrament.  The framework, the basic structure of our common worship.  It is probably most familiar to us in what we do each Sunday morning when we gather here.   With some variation in seasons like Advent or Lent, we follow the same pattern, week after week.  We listen to the Word. We share the bread and wine of communion. This is how we learn about Jesus.  This is how we come to know and experience Jesus as a living presence in our hearts and in our lives.  It is our road to Emmaus experience. Not a one-time, heart-burning-within us moment, but something we do over and over again. The familiarity of its pattern shapes and grounds our faith.  It strengthens us to go out from this place and continue the work that Jesus and those early disciples started. 

Yesterday was the consecration of Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows as Bishop of Indianapolis, a grand event with all the pomp and circumstance the Episcopal Church can muster.  Lots of people from our diocese were there.  Kristin and John White, Andrea Mysen and Rene Brandt and Sadie and Ascher among them. At the same time yesterday, I was at the funeral of Rebekah Rimkus. She was the wife of Bill Rimkus, a deacon in our diocese.  A time of sadness, honoring a woman who had died of brain cancer at the age of 63.  Two very different liturgies, yet both taking place within the basic framework of Word and Sacrament.  A framework that is pliable, flexible.  Opening up to include unique elements. In the consecration: an examination of Jennifer, testimonials to the validity of her election, the giving of symbols of her new position.  In the funeral, space for a eulogy given by one of Rebekah’s daughters, a poem as one of the readings, interment of her ashes in the parish columbarium.  

The consecration of a new bishop, a beginning. A funeral, an ending.  Beginnings and endings—and everything in between.  Framed by familiar ritual of Word and Sacrament.  That is our life in the Church.  Within that structure, we welcome new members and say goodbye to others who are leaving to continue their life’s journey in another place.  We bless pregnant women. We give thanks for newborn babies and adopted childen.  We baptize, we confirm and receive people into the Episcopal Church.  We marry couples. We recognize and commission a variety of ministries. In all of those events, we hear the Word and share the meal. .      

Two people in the fading evening light, heading from Jerusalem to Emmaus.  Encountering a stranger.  Then the dawning light of recognition: it is Jesus.  Known and experienced in hearing the scriptures interpreted and in the breaking and sharing of bread.  A small, simple beginning.  What a long way we have come since then.

Easter 3; Year A

Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Psalm 116:1-3,10-17; 1 Peter:17-23; Luke 24:13-35