Easter 5A
In the name of Christ, who shows us the way. Amen.
The year that I graduated from seminary, my brother brought
his family up for the celebration. They
came a few days early so we could spend some time together. Of course, one day, we went into the
city. My oldest nephew was not quite
three years old at the time, and taking him into the city was an adventure.
My brother, understandably, wanted everything to be
perfect. This was his son’s first trip
to New York City, and he wanted him to see it all! Granted, we were only wandering around the
city together for an afternoon, so “seeing it all” wasn’t happening, but that
was his goal, nonetheless. No first trip
to New York City is complete without going to the top of the Empire State
Building, so that was on the agenda. Of
course, that is the very definition of a tourist trap. It’s one of those things you should probably
do if you haven’t done it, but it’s a huge hassle. The day we were going was a pretty day in the
early summer, so the lines were outrageous.
My brother decided to spring for the “express” tickets to cut down on
the waiting time, but even so it took a couple of hours…. With a not-quite-three-year-old.
Predictably, Brooks got fussy. Standing around with nothing to do for so
long is tough on anyone, but it’s nearly impossible for a toddler. But we waited and waited. We tried to keep him entertained. We worked hard at fighting off the tears that
came closer and closer with each passing minute. But at last, we made it to the elevator. We shot up to the 86th floor and stepped out
to see the world.
Charles took Brooks’ hand and walked with him to the edge,
overlooking Central Park. He lifted the
tired little boy up into his arms so that he could see everything. With rapt expectation, my brother asked his
son, “So, what do you think, Brooks?”
Through faint tears that had been fought off for far too
long, my little nephew responded, “Daddy, I want to go to New York now.”
The idea of visiting New York had been built up so much for
him, but this wasn’t what he had in mind.
He couldn’t recognize that the moment he’d been waiting for, for so
long, had finally come. It just didn’t
match his expectations.
That’s not too far off from the story that we hear today
about the disciples talking with Jesus.
He’s trying to teach them, and to help them to see the way to a deeper
relationship with God. He even says, in
a pretty uncharacteristically straightforward way, “I am the way, and the
truth, and the life. No one comes to the
Father except through me. If you know
me, you will know my Father also. From
now on you do know him and have seen him.”
But Philip’s response to that is: okay, but let us see
God! You can almost hear Jesus’ hand
slapping his face in an exasperated “face palm”. They still didn’t get it. They’d seen so much for so long. They’d seen EXACTLY what they were looking
for. And still, they didn’t recognize
it.
Very often that’s what our Christian lives and vocations
look like. We’re feeling around in front
of us, trying to find the way, even though we already know the way. We just don’t know that we know it – because
it doesn’t look like we’d expect.
The paradox we face right now is that while we don’t really
know what we’re doing – how to be the church in this new age – we also do know
the way. The way, as it keeps being
revealed, doesn’t really look like we’d been expecting it to look – but it is
the way we know, nonetheless.
Over the next several months, we don’t know what the future
holds for the church. At some point we
will probably get back to some way of being able to worship together in the
same room again, but it also may not be permanent, even when it does
happen. We may find ourselves drifting
in and out of these periods of quarantine in one way or another for a while –
at least until there is some medical advancement that makes it safer for us to
gather again in the same room.
And when we are back together, we’ll probably be
different. There may be ways that we
have to change what we do and how we behave in worship. It probably won’t be just a return to the
normal that we knew a few months ago.
And, if nothing else, we will have been changed by this experience. So the way forward will look different than
we might have imagined it. There will be
things about our prior experience that we’ll be eager to return to, and things
about this experience that we’ve found that we appreciate – and we’ll want to
hold on to them.
Living into so much uncertainty can be stressful. It can feel like we’re wandering without
direction – particularly since we can’t possibly imagine what new “normal”
might emerge.
But just as the disciples knew the way, even though they
couldn’t recognize it, we, too, know the way we’ll be facing. We may not (and almost certainly can’t) know
and recognize all the details, but we do know the way. We know it, because we’ve been down this
road.
When this all started, we had just about 48 hours to
reimagine how to “do” church together.
It was a herculean undertaking, but we did it. We figured out the technical things we needed
to do to keep the most essential elements of this church running in the most
efficient way possible. And slowly, over
time, we fine-tuned the process. We
identified things we were missing and fixed them. And then we turned our attention to trying to
focus ourselves on being the church that God is calling us to be. And while we haven’t perfected any of it, we
figured out a lot.
We remembered that we have to be more intentional about
reaching out to each other. The goal was
set that everyone in this parish would reach out to some other member of the
parish once every day. And I’m sure we
all haven’t done that perfectly, I know a lot of us have been doing it, at
least most of the time. We figured out
ways to continue our commitment to outreach ministries. We continued distributing funds for food
pantries and for North Porch. We found a
new way for providing a meal for the men at St. Paul’s shelter. We even figured out how to do coffee hour.
The future is unknown, but we know the way. We knew it before all of this started, even
though we didn’t know that we knew it. Now
we know. Now we know that we can face
whatever comes our way. We know, because
we’ve already done it. It just comes
down to trying our best to follow Jesus, even when circumstances keep
changing. The circumstance that hasn’t
changed is that the people God has called us to serve still need to know and
experience the love of God as much as ever before. And we’re still called to share it.
After my family and I left the Empire State Building those
years ago, we figured out that the real magic of New York City for my nephew
wasn’t in the tall buildings and the tourist traps. It was in riding the subways. It was in playing on swings and jungle gyms
in Central Park. Most importantly, it
was in the time we spent together and the love we shared.
The way wasn’t what my brother, nor what any of us
expected. But we did know the way. Once we set aside our expectations and
preconceived notions, we were able to find it together.
We’re doing the same in the church. The path is unknown, but we know the way. We’ve proven it before, and we will
again. Amen.
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