May 14, 2023
Easter 6
Epiphany, Winnipeg
Acts 17:22-31; John 14:15-21
For six weeks now we’ve been celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, with all its promise of life, healing, reconciliation, the defeat of death, all those things. But today we take a step back in time, here in John 14, and we find Jesus with his disciples on the last night before he will be arrested and finally crucified.
His disciples don’t know what’s happening, but Jesus does, and he wants to prepare them for the tragedy and the trauma that are still to come. So he assures them again and again for four chapters that his promises are true, that his love for them and God’s love for them is endless, that they will not be left to fend for themselves. And his hope is that when the world around them seems to be falling apart they will remember all this that he has said and done, and they will trust that they will get through this together. The Spirit of God will bring them through this together
When we hear that now, in the middle of Easter, maybe it’s a reminder that even when life doesn’t seem like Easter the Spirit of the risen Jesus is still with us, and hasn’t left us on our own. And all those promises for abundant life still hold true…for us and for all creation.
Along the way Jesus does two things. He promises his disciples – and that’s us too – that he will send the spirit of his God and our God, the breath of God, the wind of God, to comfort us and guide us and give us life. It’s the same Spirit Jesus talked about way back in the beginning that blows where it will and does what we don’t expect and makes us new and even gives us new ways of seeing and being in the world.
That’s the spirit that calls us here and breathes among us. Forever.
And then Jesus says while he sits down to dinner with his disciples, “I’m giving you a new commandment, that you love one another just as I have loved you. He reminds them again, “If you love me you will keep my commandments,” and that command is that one most important thing: That you love one another, as I have loved you.”
The same Spirit and the same commandment to love have been breathing and speaking among us all these thousands of years…
Just about three weeks ago, on a Wednesday morning in London, Val and I went to worship at a small-ish church in the neighbourhood where we were staying. It’s a few hundred years old, and built on a site where records show that there has been a church in one form or another for about a thousand years. We joined seven or eight others and the priest for communion in a little side chapel of the church. Then we joined them for coffee and biscuits, which means “cookies” if you’re speaking Canadian. The Spirit that Jesus promised was strong in that place. Then we travelled by bus and train to the heart of London and went for lunch at another church: St. Martin-in-the-Fields. That might sound familiar to some of you; it’s the home of a world-famous chamber orchestra. You know – THAT St. Martin in the Fields. We didn’t go for music or worship though. We went to have lunch at the Café in the Crypt.
Now in case you don’t know, in old churches like that one the crypt is a room below the church, that might function as a chapel and that usually was also a place where the dead would be buried. St. Martin in the Fields has converted their crypt into a restaurant and arts centre. It’s a place for the community to gather, and a portion of the money they raise there helps to support local programs for people in the inner city. It’s a beautiful space, with stone arches that you walk through on your way to pick up your sandwich. And as you walk back to your table with your sandwich and your drink you can’t help but walk on flat tombstones, level with the floor, that mark where someone has been laid to rest. The sandwich was really good.
If you were there a few nights later you could listen to some really good local jazz in the crypt, or a few hours earlier you could have heard a concert of Indian classical music. In the crypt.
There were all kinds of people there. Some obviously had some kind of high-falutin’ jobs close by in the heart of London, some looked like their jobs faluted quite a bit little lower or perhaps they had no jobs at all. There were travellers like us, and there were locals, and I guess there were really really locals for whom that was their final resting place. And it wasn’t weird. It kind of felt like the people gathered there were part of something much bigger. I guess you might call it the communion of saints. And right there, on the Wednesday after the third Sunday in Easter, we were together where there were all these signs of death right under our feet, and all these signs of life in the conversation and the eating together and the Spirit of life that seemed to breathe through that place.
The Spirit that Jesus had promised would be with the disciples forever is the same Spirit who moved somebody at St. Martin in the Fields to cook up that idea to make a café in the crypt. Where people could experience love and life in the simple act of eating together, and helping make sure that other beloved people get to eat together as well. Who knows how the Spirit will blow? The Spirit that moves among us today.
A week and a half or so after that we found ourselves on a windy and barren spot in the Orkney Islands, way up at the north end of Scotland and beyond.
We were visiting a place called Skara Brae. It’s the site of a village, discovered just over a hundred years ago, a village that is about 5000 years old. People were living there and farming and thriving in small but nearly identical stone houses way back before people starting using metal, like bronze or iron; before the Great Pyramids of Egypt were built, before Stonehenge was put together. The age of that place is almost impossible to grasp.
It was really windy that day – windy enough for one of the Scottish guides to say, “It’s a wee bit breezy today” – breezy, as in gusting to seventy five. It was like the Spirit, which I’ve mentioned before could also be translated “breath” or “wind”, the Spirit that Jesus promised was gusting to seventy over that bare landscape, and showing us new things, and helping us get life in perspective and see that if people were living five thousand years ago our time is a blip on the cosmic timeline, and that’s good because it reminds us that we’re part of something so much bigger than ourselves, and that the promises of God for life and community and Spirit…they have staying power; those promises will last.
The Spirit was breathing on that landscape. The Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, was blowing over that barren and beautiful Scottish island five thousand years ago. I don’t know if people then knew it or sensed it, and no one really knows what they might have believed. But the Spirit was blowing in that place too. So long ago. And still blowing.
Then, just a few days ago, we were back on the mainland, this time in Edinburgh. It was Wednesday morning, and what do you do on Wednesday morning in Great Britain but….go to church, right? (No, we don’t just go to church all the time). It was a bigger and older church than the one on that first morning, and there were a few more people. Twenty, maybe, or even twenty-five. It was a great service. And then, where did we go for lunch?
To the crypt. They’d done it too. But the lunch place was small, because they also needed to have room for the bookstore next door. In the crypt. And the vegan café and the fair trade shop. In the crypt. The old stone was painted white, but there were these arches you walked through and bumped your head on when you went to get your sandwich. The tombstones under the floor had been covered over by laminate flooring, but you knew they were there. And on that Wednesday after the fifth Sunday of Easter, in that place where there were reminders of death and in a world where there are so many stories and reminders and realities of death, people of all kinds of high and low falutin’ gathered together to experience the gift of love in the simple things of conversation and sharing some food. The Spirit of life that calls us to love one another as Jesus has loved us breathed strongly in that place. Only gusting to five or ten, but still breathing. Signs of life were all around us. Because that Spirit that Jesus promises is with us and stirring us up forever.
With us, as promised, even right here, even in our basement which is not a crypt but still a place to gather for a Soul Sisters brunch on a Saturday morning, even in our life here right now, and for some coffee and biscuits after and in our life as we leave this place…even as we live and love and are loved, surrounded by the Spirit of the risen Jesus wherever we go.
AMEN.