With our routines and world upended by the Shelter in Place Order that affects all of California, we are looking for ways to stay connected during a mandate to physically stay apart from one another. This is a continuation of our time together, even though we’re in different spaces.
Opening Hymn • Crown Him With Many Crowns • Page 234, Chalice Hymnal
Invocation
Lay Leader: Christopher Williams
O God of glory,
your Son Jesus Christ suffered for us
and ascended to your right hand.
Unite us with Christ and each other,
in suffering and in joy,
that all your children may be drawn
into your bountiful dwelling. Amen.
Tithes and Offerings
Checks can be mailed to:
Grace Community Church
C/O Rene Horton
P.O. Box 368
Auberry, CA 93602
Holy Scripture • Acts 1:6-14
Lay Leader: Christopher Williams
Children’s Time
Faith formation resources for families and those who like to color as prayer.
Gospel Reading • John 17:1-11
Lay Leader: Christopher Williams
Church at Prayer and The Lord’s Prayer
All are invited to email me prayer requests for next week’s prayer, or to get in touch any time during the week. We are in the midst of an unprecidented global event, and I am available as a compassionate ear if you find you need to talk through what’s going on.
Hymn • Jesus Shall Reign Where’re the Sun • Page 587, Chalice Hymnal
The Message
Sermon Transcript
Many of you have met my effervescent 5 year old Dorothy. She has a way of saying things that always catches me off guard, and sometimes the things she says make me laugh those big belly laughs that only come from an Art Linkletter, “Kids Say The Darndest Things” place of hearing, and other times, her words cut to the chase and reframe the world around us in kindergartener terms. I can cut through all the other grown up verbiage I’ve built around everything else and get to the center of the thing. She has become fond of saying “Mama, when the coronavirus is over, can I go to grandma’s house?” “Mama, when coronavirus is over, will you take me to the Zoo?” or, my favorite because it really shows how weird our situation truly is, “Mama, when the coronavirus is over, can we go to a gas station store for Hot Cheetos?”
All this kids wants is to go to a store. Not even a cool store with toys. She just wants to go to a GAS STATION and load up on road trip snacks. We’ve reached that point in this where even the AM/PM is looking like a 5-star resort. And when she asks these things, I can feel the confusion of whatever Coronavirus means to her, this thing that is keeping her from singing lessons with Ms. Des at her school, and from going to Livingstones in Fresno to order their strawberry cheesecake and chat with every person who walks by inside the dark dining area. “Mama, when coronavirus is over” has become synonymous with “when we go back to normal” in her way of rationalizing the world around her.
I think we also fall into that same way of thinking, wanting things to go back to normal. And with the phases of some businesses opening back up after being shuttered for two and a half months, it feels closer than ever. However, this reopening is with strict and severe modifications. Normal isn’t possible yet.
We also talk a lot about a “new normal.” This week we’ve seen the new CDC guidelines for schools to resume in-person education, and within those parameters it’s hard for us to imagine the sticky-hands, hug-my-bffs, experiential learning that takes place in a classroom. As schools flirt with plexiglass partitions between students in class, and frequent disinfecting of surfaces, we wonder what new strains and stressors will be put on teachers to prioritize health and safety and distance and sneeze-covering over the lessons they had prepared. The “new normal” is not something we can really get too jazzed about.
And that’s partly because, even though we really love comfort and knowing what to expect and the feeling of normalcy, normal as a status, as a goal, as a system, is deeply flawed. Even when we benefit from “normal” we know under our veneer of being happy we can just go to a funeral again—image that!—we know that there are some deep flaws with our normal.
We can take some inspiration today from the ascension. Earlier this week a meme circulated around the liturgical-geek corners of the internet that said, “Tomorrow is the feast of the ascension. To those who wonder what it’s about, it’s the day Jesus started to work from home.” I couldn’t help but chuckle, if this pandemic has done nothing else, it has given us a whole new take on old traditions. However, the ascension isn’t just a cool, albeit baffling story, about the Risen Christ making a flashy exit in a cloud. I think we can sometimes get distracted by the fancy pyrotechnics and special effects in these kinds of stories and we miss the parts that are the most relevant to us. Not this year. As we hear about the ascension, we are especially drawn to the disciples who are gawking at the sky. They’re just awe-struck. They’re in disbelief. They’re in their own heads going, “Wait, what? What just happened?” and as they’re all gazing toward heaven, two white-robed men appear with them and ask, “Hey, what are you all looking up there for?”
We too, have that tendency to continue to stare in the direction of where our most recent sense of normal was taken from us. A BBC article from last week asked people to look for the last “normal” photo on their phone, and when I shared it among my contacts, the images that popped up in the comments were of things like birthday parties, groups of friends at brunch, the first and last day of little league baseball practice. Looking at those images felt a little bit like staring at the clouds where Jesus had just ascended. Looking back at what cannot be recreated. “People of Facebook, why do you stand looking toward that photo of that amazing plate of tacos consumed from within a resaturant from early March?”
The ascension signaled a new phase for the apostles. Jesus had been with them in life, he had died, he had been resurrected and had stayed with them to give them some final instruction. To let them know they totally had this, they were fully equipped to take this message of hope and love and run with it, to reassure them that they were never going to be separated from him. To let them know that God’s timing belongs to God, and that in the meanwhile they would need to keep moving forward, witnessing to the world.
This is literally the last thing he tells them. He lets them know they can move forward, and there is lots of work to be done to the ends o the earth.”
And then they get stuck on looking at the clouds. Look at the last known place where things were normal. The last photo in their gallery that depicted life before everything changed again.
I can see how easy it is for so many churches to want to open back up soon. To defy CDC recommendations and say “Our doors are open! Allelujah!” but in doing so, it may be more like the apostles standing there, jaws agape, staring at the cloudscapes. A desperate grasping for what felt like the last time we felt like things were okay.
And yet, through all of these mandated closures and recommendations of staying out of spaces with a high likelihood of spread of COVID-19, we have managed to find Church. Church has never really closed, it has found new expressions. Some of those pathways to new expressions have been clunky, to say the least, but social distance cannot keep God’s beloved community from being community. From being church.
Being UCCers, we likely recognized the end of today’s Gospel reading from John. “That they may all be one” is written within the pre-red comma, pre-swirly blue comma, old school United Church of Christ logo. It used to make me think of some “we are the world,” hands-across-america utopia of everyone in harmony in some epic group hug. Now, with the COVID-lens, the idea of a gigantic, worldwide hug sounds like a terrible idea. It sounds like we’re one sneeze away from all getting sick, and that isn’t quite the oneness that is envisioned in this passage.
To jump backward from the Ascension, our John reading is a continuation of Jesus’ farewell, as he’s preparing his apostles for life without him. They haven’t yet experienced the heart-wrenching pain of loss in the crucifixion or the glorious illogicality of the resurrection, or the doubt, and then joy at his re-appearance among his beloved disciples. Here, they just know something big is about to happen. And so, jesus prays for them. He spends these final moments, these precious last words before his arrest in prayer. He prays for them. He lays out that everyone who is his, is also God’s, and all who belong to God are also his, and that the relationship isn’t one that is possessive of the disciples, of believers, of us, but that there is reciprocity. In the disciples, in the believers, in us, Jesus is glorified. He asks for protection, he asks for unity, he prays that all may be one.
This prayer happens just before certain scattering. Before the cohesive unit will soon become fragmented, and sent out to share the Word.
Oneness isn’t from being in the same place at the same time. It isn’t in going back to the last known point of normalcy. It doesn’t come from staring at the clouds, or into our phone’s photo roll. The kind of becoming one that this is, and has been since this farewell speech, is an understanding that unity comes through rolling with change, leaning into it and knowing that no matter the distances between us or the scary weirdness that ensues, we are one with Christ and one with God and one with each other because we are one with Christ and God and each other. It’s weird math, and yet there is truth in it. The apostles were brought together one last time after Jesus’ death for the purpose of scattering across lands and borders. They are reminded by the men, clothed in whited, that their job now isn’t just to stare at Heaven and wait for Jesus to come back through the same cloud-door he exited through. They have a whole lot of good stuff to do in the very near future. Similarly, we are not to look at the last paper order of worship from the last Sunday we spent together in church, not to pine for the things that are no longer possible. We are to look forward and really try to see what new ways in which the Spirit is calling to the church, how we can build a better world instead of a new normal. The next thing the disciples did after Jesus Ascended was form a nominating committee to fill the empty seat left by Judas. The work of the disciples continued, and yet they knew that it couldn’t just go back to the same work they were doing while Jesus was walking among them.
The church also continues, and we pray that we don’t get too stuck on gazing into the heavens while repeating, “when coronavirus is over…” but instead know that we can move the church forward, secure in our oneness with God, no matter where we are. May we be blessed by our unbreakable interconnectedness with the divine as we are led by the Spirit to replace “normal” with something much better. Amen.
Closing Hymn • Blest Be the Tie That Binds • Page 433, Chalice Hymnal