Sermon of 22 May 07, Tuesday of Easter 7
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Readings: Acts 20:28-38, Psalm 103:1-2, 19-22, John 17:11b-19


We find ourselves this week in one of the several liminal spaces in our church year. This past Sunday we celebrated Christ’s Ascension into Heaven which marked this past Thursday the fortieth day of Easter and the end of Christ’s presence with human kind on Earth in human form. This coming Sunday we celebrate Pentecost, the fiftieth day of Easter and the day on which the Disciples, filled with the Holy Spirit, spoke to the assembled masses, who each heard them as though spoken to in their native tongue.

This week, however, we are in a between time, beyond an ending and yet just at the threshold of a new beginning. Somewhere between the closing words of Luke’s gospel in which the Disciples watched Jesus ascend into heaven and and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and the coming of the Holy Spirit at the beginning of Luke’s Act’s of the Apostles.

During this time, the disciples are said to have blessed God ceaselessly in the temple, that they chose a new twelfth disciple to replace Judas, and that they spent a lot of time in the upper room in which they were staying.

Our readings today reflect this liminal space – an almost but not yet. Paul bids a tearful farewell to the elders at Ephesus, lamenting that he will never see them again and commissioning them in the name of the Holy Spirit to carry on as shepherds of the Ephesian church and commending his own model to them of working to support the weak. Jesus prays for God to watch over and protect his disciples in his own extended farewell address in John’s telling of the Last Supper. Jesus claims the disciples as his own, drawing them apart from the world in which he will leave them in just a few short hours seeking their sanctification and protection through God’s truth which will come fifty two days later in the coming of the Holy Spirit.

The importance of the liminal space is one that we tend to lose sight of in our modern, Western, civilized world where we seek to do everything possible to circumvent these priceless spaces of reflection and personal growth. It is the journey that is increasingly shortened as we enhance technology to get us to and from with increasing speed. It is the process that we continue to abbreviate through computer shortcuts and “virtual” experiences. It is the courtship that we continue to devalue until we arrive today at one in every three marriages failing. It is the infancy that we label as manipulative and gluttonous such that we conform it to scheduled feedings and self-soothing. It is the childhoods that we schedule and arrange to our adult schedules until there is no space for spontaneity and fun. And it is our spirituality that we increasingly diminish until it survives as a one-hour per week phenomenon that has no place in the rest of our buy lives.

There is a concept of liminal space in Celtic myth and legend that is referred to as the thin places. These are the times and places where the boundary between the physical world and the spiritual or fairy world are at their thinnest. The hour at dusk and dawn just before the sun rises and just after it sets, when colors appear almost alive with an eerie brilliance and the air itself seems to tingle with a living energy. Hidden forest glades and dells, mountain glens and hidden pools, dense fogs and mountain tops. Particularly these places during the times of dawn and dusk are where these two worlds collide and the music of fairy folk can be heard eerily piercing the silence of our physical world. And whether it be imagination or simply a profound understanding of the powerful importance of these liminal spaces and their capacity to change us in our own lives, there is something in this tradition that calls to me. It calls me out to the woods, to the ocean, to the mountains. It calls me back into those liminal spaces where my own boundaries are thin enough and my own guard lowered enough for the divine to truly touch my life.

This is the space that we are in this week. It is a similar space to that which we experienced between Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. A time of introspection, a time of preparation, a time to allow ourselves and to prepare ourselves to be changed.

Paul is in such a space as he prepares to leave Ephesus, knowing that others will come and try to lead his small vulnerable church astray. Christ is in such a space as he prepares for his own death – leaving his small vulnerable disciples behind to face the world and continue on in his stead. We experience much the same feelings as we watch those we care for venturing out on their own. Our children become more and more independent until one day they leave for college and we are left in the space of worrying and praying for their protection just as Christ and Paul did for their precious followers.

I am reminded, as a parent, just how important these liminal spaces are. Infancy itself it seems is one extended liminal space. I am honored and blessed to be brought closer to God through my daughter, Emjay, as she teaches me so much about the patience to experience and enjoy this time of boundary crossing, this time of journey, this time well spent in the thin place of her first few months on earth.

It is this awesome space that we are reminded of so poignantly in today’s scriptures. We are encouraged by Paul and by Christ’s examples to take seriously those places in our own lives, to celebrate them, to cherish them, and as the Psalmist exhorts us, to Bless the Lord for these opportunities to think about, pray about, and live in the thin places God gives us as a means to be changed forever.

God of Love, bless us this day with the presence of mind and spirit to cherish the moments of liminal space that you build into our lives and hearts. Bless us with the wisdom to seek your presence in these times and to open ourselves to your Holy Spirit that we may be profoundly touched and changed by you.

Amen.