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It’s the Seventh Sunday. You can see it right there on front of the bulletin. The count begins with Easter Day, that glorious and miraculous resurrection day when Jesus rose from the dead to the fear and joy of Mary Magdalene. Every week’s Gospel since describes a new revelation of Jesus showing up unexpectedly, in person, and sometimes unrecognized.
On Easter 1, Mary encounters Jesus, the disciples meet Jesus on the road running to see the empty tomb. On Easter 2 Jesus shows up in a locked Upper Room with the disciples. Thomas, the doubter, doesn’t believe it is possible until Jesus invites him to touch the wounds in his side. Then comes the Road to Emmaus where three of the disciples walk with Jesus but don’t recognize him until they are having dinner together. That story is depicted by a famous Carravaggio painting so it must be true! In other resurrection stories, Jesus has breakfast with the disciples on the beach, and in another, Jesus calls the disciples to share good news in the world. For 40 days the Gospels offer us and the disciples assurance of Jesus’s presence—moments of life as it had been, not so long before.
What must they have thought? Could he have come back to finish the job, the work they had so longed for—the overthrow of our oppressive government? The end of Roman rule? Was NOW the time for Israel to reign?
And so boldly they asked, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the Kingdom to Israel?”
“Not for you to know the time or the season,” was Jesus’ response, with some promise of a Holy Spirit to guide and comfort. And then he was suddenly gone, in some mysterious way taken from them again. As the book of Acts tells it, “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”
This is what in the church’s calendar we call The Feast of the Ascension—40 days after Easter—always a Thursday. Specifically in the US in the 21st century, not a high-attendance church day. More like a bump on the road to Pentecost, which is next Sunday. Why not just skip it?
Because what happens next, I believe, is a vital truth of the resurrection and a vital truth for the life we as 21st-century disciples are called to live even now.
The disciples, in their confusion and fear, once they have stopped gazing into heaven, gather the followers. This time a crowd (you heard the list!) including Mary, Jesus’s brothers, Philip, Bartholomew, and even, as the scripture says, “certain women.” (I wonder who they were!)
They are back in Jerusalem, perhaps in that same upper room where they’d been with him before for the Last Supper, that same upper room where they gathered after the first devastation of the crucifixion. This time though, Jesus was truly absent. What to do? How to go forward without their leader? What was the answer?
Scripture tells us they devoted themselves to prayer even as they waited with hope for whatever promise to be fulfilled.
Did they get on their knees? Read the Torah? Sing the Psalms? Sit Shiva? Pray the traditional prayers or to Abba Father as Jesus had taught them? Probably all of that.
I suspect they also wailed and lamented, wept and wondered, shouted loud epithets—words of hope and questions. And in all of that found a way to wait for what comes next. Waited for this Holy Spirit Jesus had promised would not leave them and would be comfort and guide.
Could it be that this time in our church’s calendar—this time between the Feast of the Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost—isn’t a non-event at all, but one that reminds us over and over that God is available to us in the waiting time, in the in-between time, as we long for and reach out for that spirit presence in our lives?
And not just between Ascension and Pentecost, but for all the time—in joy and sorrow and hope and despair.
In Advent, where we are full of hope for a baby to be born; in the spring, when finally flowers are showing up again. Or when we are grieving over a loved one’s death, or need some space in our own lives.
Prayer is for when we are afraid and lost and when we are full of so much joy that we can hardly contain it. It is for those times we are alone or in community—as in church, of course, in our home, or on the street, in our own upper room.
In the days when we are lost—or maybe even rejoicing—devoting ourselves to prayer. In church where we gather, in public spaces and private.
Not because we will get something we want. I am pretty sure God knows we don’t mean it when we bargain. Prayer is not a transaction but a connection, a relationship—with a creating, loving God, in ourselves and with one another.
“Do not leave us comfortless,” says the collect for today. Prayer is the answer to that Spirit’s promise.
There is no prayer prescription or proscription.
Recently at the women’s retreat, we were reminded of Ann Lamott’s book about prayer. For her there are only three:
Wow!
Thanks!
Help!
Poet Mary Oliver says prayer is about noticing…the earth, the sky, the sea, an ant, a bird.
Joy Harjo has a poem called I AM A PRAYER. (Yes, we are.)
And last week, one of the tutors from Homework Help said, “For me, Homework Help is a prayer.”
Our praying, with or without words, by ourselves, in community, or when two or three are gathered, is a portal into the universal promise that each one of us is worthy, made in the image of God, and we are invited to live in the presence of God even if not in person—or in the person of Jesus.
Sometimes we learn to pray from others, whose practice is not like ours at all: Buddhist meditation, or in the sacred space of a synagogue, or temple, or a garden.
For me, it was in the basement of a Cathedral in Boston—where Muslims have been praying Jumah Friday prayers for over 20 years. People working in the city who couldn’t go home to their own mosque came there to pray.
For me it was the Friday after the Marathon bombing of 2013. I was on sabbatical, studying for the semester. It was the year of the April Marathon bombing.
I will spare you the confusion and fear and disappointment of that time, except to say that those of us who had been working for interreligious peace were devastated.
So I went to Jumah prayers and sat with the small group of Muslim women who prayed in a special loft looking down on the hundreds who prayed there. The dean of the Episcopal Cathedral welcomed us all and noted our solidarity in this time, all praying our own ways to the one God who created us all.
When it was time for the prayers, the women in the loft beckoned me to them. They touched my arm and guided me to kneel on the floor, showing me where and how to place my head.
And together we prayed for peace: shoulder to shoulder, body, mind, and spirit.
I had no doubt that the comforting Holy Spirit promised at Ascension was with each of us in that place of prayer for all people.
That group of Muslim women taught me to pray in ways I had not imagined.
Let us then, in our own waiting time, be it between Ascension and Pentecost or any time, be devoted to prayer—however those prayers are offered.
And may we too follow the disciples whose devotion to prayer after Jesus’ Ascension became a call to tell the Good News to the ends of the earth.
That is our call as well—prayers to pray, work to do, people to love.
God is present in it all.
Amen.
