Time, Space, and Sabbath
Author: Pastor Corey Bergman, Holy Trinity Sermon 4/19
Time is weird right now; I don’t know if you’ve noticed. Some days, we wake up and think it’s Monday but it is actually Thursday. Weekends can appear out of the blue or just never show up. If you’re driving somewhere like work or the grocery story, there are so many less cars on the road that the trip just seems to take less time. But, once you’re in the store, it takes forever as you dip, duck and dodge in order to keep a socially acceptable distance from everyone else.
It’s not just us for whom time feels weird. In our reading today, the disciples are experiencing weird time. They’ve gone from traveling, teaching, and learning throughout the week—spending all their time with the living, breathing, walking, talking Jesus—to being suddenly thrust into a state of mourning for three days before celebrating the return of Jesus in a complete and unexpected way. Then after 40 days, we come to our text today about Jesus rising up into the heavens but promising that time would stay weird for his disciples. Soon they would be baptized in fire of some sort. And eventually a second kin-dom would be coming. What are they supposed to do with that? How are they supposed to spend their time and use their days?
In the same way, we are left with confusion about our future. We know that eventually we will be able to go back to work, to school, to gathering together face to face in church, but we don’t know when. We don’t know what things will look like on the other side of this. Will we still shake hands? Can I wear my PJ’s to church all the time now? How will I find God in this new reality?
I wish I had answers for all of these questions. Especially the PJ’s one. But one question I can offer insight into is the where to look for God. Because, luckily for us, the Disciples once again get a nudge in the right direction after getting it wrong. Two beings clothed in glory appear next to them while they are doing their best first-century impression of “Is it a bird. Is it a plane?” while looking at Jesus in the sky. They are told that they should not be looking up, for Jesus will come to them the same way he went up. (Now that’s an odd thing to say, seeing as he just went up to heaven from right next to them not a moment before. But if you remember in some of the Gospels, Jesus first meets the male disciples after his resurrection by appearing among them in a locked room where they were praying.) So the disciples hurry home. They go into their house, in the upper room where they take sabbath and pray, for they know that Jesus is not going to descend from the sky like some warrior king of old but appear among them and give them peace in times of trouble.
So too should we go to where we take sabbath and pray and know that God/Jesus appears among us all the time.
This can be hard though. Because just as time is weird, so is space. We get done with work and are home. We go to church but at home. It can be difficult to have a space for sabbath right now when all of our spaces are limited and turning into multi-purpose rooms. So I’m not sure how, but I hope you find a space between all the other rooms and spaces in your life right now to take sabbath. Not just the time, but the space. Maybe it’s a chair, under a certain tree, while standing at the mailbox or something unique to your house. God and Jesus are still acting and appearing in this world, and it can be hard to know they are working if we don’t sit with them.
My mom is obsessed with John Krasinki’s “Some Good News” Youtube videos right now. Honestly, in the stories he “reports,” I think God is showing up from time to time. I know it can be sickening to turn on the news, but in the faces of the chaplains, nurses, orderlies, doctors, food service workers, and all other essential employees, I think God shows up too. Even when we are stuck in our work chairs in Zoom or Google Hangout or other video conference call meetings, God can be found. In the faces people make, in the kids and pets that burst onto the screen, and sometimes just in that moment we get to hit “Leave Meeting.” So I hope this upcoming week you find time and space for Sabbath and that God reveals Himself in many and wonderful ways.