The Sixth Sunday of Easter

One of the best newspaper cartoons of all time is Calvin and Hobbes. One day Calvin and Hobbes come marching into the living room early one morning. His mother is seated there in her favorite chair. She is sipping her morning coffee. She looks up at young Calvin. She is amused and amazed at how he is dressed. Calvin's head is encased in a large space helmet. A cape is draped around his neck, across his shoulders, down his back and is dragging on the floor. One hand is holding a flashlight and the other a baseball bat.

"What's up today?" asks his mom.

"Nothing, so far," answers Calvin.

"So far?" she questions.

"Well, you never know," Calvin says, "Something could happen today." Then Calvin marches off, "And if anything does, by golly, I'm going to be ready for it!"

Calvin's mom looks out at the reading audience and she says, "I need a suit like that!"

That's the way many of us feel as we see the news and deal with life.

The Gospel is in advance of the feast of the Ascension which occurs this Thursday, the day when Jesus ascended back into heaven. It is a part of the long discourse Jesus gave to his disciples on the night before he died giving them notice that he will be leaving them and will send the Holy Spirit to guide and support them when he is gone. Hence the paradoxical line “I am going away, and I am coming to you.”

Today is also “Rogation Sunday,” rooted in the Latin "rogare" which means to beseech, and it was on this day that the church asked God's blessing for the seed, for the soil, for those who labor in the fields and for all of God's creation.

There is so, so much pain to go around and that is just the tip of the iceberg both locally, nationally and globally. How we must want to cry out in the words of this morning’s psalm, “May God be merciful to us and bless us, show us the light of his countenance and come to us.”

But isn’t that why we come here? Why we gather as a community to support one another in times like these? It’s all about our faith and our doubts, our dreams and disappointments, our hopes and our fears, our questions and our struggles, our laughter and our tears, our blessings and our losses and it’s all about who walks the journey with us and those with whom we travel. It is through our ministry together as God’s people that we receive the strength to walk the journey.

Wayne Teasdale, writing in The Mystic Hours says, “The world is divided enough by religions, culture, languages, ethnicities, tribes and nations. Even more profound are divisions between the haves and have nots, the educated and the uneducated, those whose hearts are open and those whose hearts are closed. These crushing divisions seek to isolate people and rob the world of peace.

The challenge is to realize our essential interdependence, our fundamental need for one another. The key to social peace and community, indeed the key to the spiritual life, is remembrance: of God, ourselves, one another. Only when we remember our inescapable relatedness to one another will peace become a reality.”

So today we remember that Jesus wants to bring us a peace that the world cannot give. We remember that we are intrinsically related to one another as God’s beloved ones and that each of us is a blessing for the other. We remember that God’s gracious abundance supports and sustains our lives. And we remember that God is ever abiding with us, that God has moved in with us.

The great preacher, Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor, says, “When God and Jesus move in with us, apparently, they make lots of keys—keys for the Holy Spirit, keys for the other disciples, keys for all kinds of indwelling cousins in Christ. Coming and going, we learn to recognize each other, and to call upon each other for everything that people who live together do.”