The Seventh Sunday of Easter-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
The Very Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg
The 7th
Sunday of Easter-Year C
June 1, 2025
Liturgically, we find ourselves in a
strange, in between time today. Today is
the 7th Sunday after Easter-The Sunday after the Ascension-where we
find ourselves dwelling in a liturgical “already-not yet.” Jesus has already ascended to be with God,
(we commemorated the feast of the ascension this past Thursday), and the gift
of the Holy Spirit has not yet been given to his disciples. (That will happen for us next week on the
Feast of Pentecost.)
So, we’re in a sort of spiritual
in-between or liminal sort of place.
It’s no wonder that the collect for today seems to plead: “Do not leave us comfortless!” This week at the healing service, we talked
about liminal spaces, and about how or where we have found comfort in those in
between times and places and seasons.
I shared that I had recently read the
book How to Walk into a Room by Emily Freeman, and she uses the image of
how our lives are like different rooms in a house, how we spend different
seasons of life in different rooms, and sometimes we are forced out of a
particular room, and sometimes we choose to walk out of our own accord. There are even liminal, in-between times when
we find ourselves hanging out in the hallway of our life, in between
rooms. That’s where we find ourselves
today; in the liturgical hallway between Jesus’s ascension and the gift of the
Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
None of us is a stranger to this hanging
out in the hallway. These liminal spaces
are a part of our human condition. The
shift from babyhood to toddler-hood, from childhood to adolescence and
adolescence to adulthood. There are
transitions between being engaged and getting married, from leaving one job and
starting another. The transition from
this life into the next is another liminal space which we will all dwell in
eventually, and often accompany loved ones through.
Some
of us find comfort in these hallways, these transitions. These liminal spaces can give us a break, a
time-out for a reset, or even be a place of safety, a refuge where we build a
nest of blankets and hunker down when the tornado sirens are going off. For
others, the hallway is a place of risk, where we relinquish any sense of
control over our goals or our destiny, a place of waiting and watching, and of
discomfort. For many of us, these hallways are the portal between life before
and life after—life before the diagnosis, the loss of our spouse, the job loss,
a new relationship, a new job, or the birth of a child and the life after this
transition that we sometimes choose and sometimes don’t.
These liminal spaces, these hallways,
are opportunities for reflection on our life and our call, and they are spaces
where God invites us to be open to uncertainty, the unknown, to mystery.
Can you take a moment to think about
when you have experienced one of these liminal spaces or stood in the hallway
of your life? Was it a place of
discomfort or comfort for you? What did
you learn about yourself, about your life, your relationship with God?
Where or how did you find comfort in the
liminal space, in the hallway of your life?
How did courage take shape in your life the last time you were hanging
out in the hallway?
The Irish priest, theologian, and poet
John O’Donohue writes about these liminal spaces, these hallways that he calls
thresholds in his book To Bless the Space Between Us. Here is what he
writes, “ At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now
standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to
enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would
enable me to do it? A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that
divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a
lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of
life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be
crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up. At this
threshold a great complexity of emotions comes alive: confusion, fear,
excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were
always clothed in ritual. It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize
and acknowledge the key thresholds; to take your time; to feel all the
varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete
attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come
to cross.”[i]
In our gospel reading for today, we get
a glimpse of Jesus’s farewell discourse to his disciples from John’s gospel,
where he is trying to impart to them the truths he wants to leave with
them. He invites them to stay grounded
in God’s love and to stay connected with each other, even as things are about
to change dramatically.
In her reflection on the feast of the Asension,
the pastor, poet, and artist Jan Richardson had this to say about how Jesus
takes leave us his disciples and how he encourages them to dwell in the liminal
space for a time.
She
writes, “Before he is gone from the
physical presence of his beloved followers and friends—precisely while he is
leaving them, in fact—Jesus offers them a blessing. It’s this moment that
really knocks me out. Jesus is not trying to put a silver lining on his leaving.
He is not giving them a blessing as a consolation prize for having come through
these wild years with him, only to see him leave—though consolation is surely
part of his intent. Instead, with the blessing that he gives them in the very
moment of his leaving, Jesus is acknowledging that the substance of grief is
also the substance of love. They are made of the same stuff, and if we can be
present to this—if we can stay with both the grief and the love that lives at
the heart of it, the love will become more and more clear, and more clarifying,
and it will, in time, show us the way to go.”
In
conclusion, I’ll offer you Richardson’s blessing that accompanies her
reflection. It is titled
STAY
I
know how your mind
rushes
ahead,
trying
to fathom
what
could follow this.
What
will you do,
where
will you go,
how
will you live?
You
will want
to
outrun the grief.
You
will want
to
keep turning toward
the
horizon,
watching
for what was lost
to
come back,
to
return to you
and
never leave again.
For
now,
hear
me when I say
all
you need to do
is
to still yourself,
is
to turn toward one another,
is
to stay.
Wait
and
see what comes
to
fill
the
gaping hole
in
your chest.
Wait
with your hands open
to
receive what could never come
except
to what is empty
and
hollow.
You
cannot know it now,
cannot
even imagine
what
lies ahead,
but
I tell you
the
day is coming
when
breath will
fill
your lungs
as
it never has before,
and
with your own ears
you
will hear words
coming
to you new
and
startling.
You
will dream dreams
and
you will see the world
ablaze
with blessing.
Wait
for it.
Still
yourself.
Stay.[ii]
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