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See You Next Week - The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
In his sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel likens the gap between the Ascension and the arrival of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost to a committee meeting. Without their beloved leader and protector to guide them, they turn to control and tidy order. Is this what God wants for us? Or is there something more on the way?
Today's readings are:
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
Psalm 1
John 17:6-19
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for the Seventh Sunday of Easter
Transcript:
[Introductory music]
[The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel] Please join me in a spirit of prayer.
Lord God, you have opened our minds and hearts to many new revelations in this past year. But chiefly have we learned how much we need you to sustain a life that we might even begin to call Godly. Lord God, in our exhaustion, in our knowledge of our limits, and our humility we know that we need you and we need your Holy Spirit. Lord God, plant us by streams of living water so that we may live in glory to your name. Amen.
Please be seated.
My wife had a very pious and devout secretary when she worked at Bucknell University. Her name was Ruth Craven, God rest her soul, and she loved to repeat the following joke. It's a church joke. So, Ruth would say again and again to my wife, "A pastor got into the pulpit and said I've had a long and difficult week with many challenges that prevented me from preparing my sermon as I usually do. So today I will be trusting in the Holy Spirit. Next week, continues the pastor, I promise I will do better."
These unnamed 11 days, this odd season of the church, this anxious, uncertain interim 11 days after Ascension Day and before Pentecost, are here to remind us how much we need the Holy Spirit if we are to take on the mission of Jesus Christ in a hostile world.
The gathering of the Jesus people after the Ascension and before the Holy Spirit is portrayed in our reading from Acts of the Apostles and many commentators see a warning in it - this is what the church without the Holy Spirit looks like. It looks like a committee meeting.
The Acts of the Apostles reading reads like the minutes of the first church meeting. Behold the banal birth of the bureaucratic organization soon to be known, after it is born again from above by the Holy Spirit, as The Church. A technical problem is identified, we have 120 members and only 11 leaders and 12 would be much more orderly. 10 per liter, and the 12 tribes of Israel, and such so, we need one more leader and all will be tidy. There's a three-step process: nominations based on qualifications, prayer, and the good old Torah practice of casting lots. Even the nominees are lackluster. One has three names listed, as if in retrospect the author is not sure who he was, and Matthias never appears in scripture again.
However, all is in order. All is tidy. That is, after all, what God wants, isn't it?
No, it's not.
This is not what Jesus has been prepping the disciples for over 40 days from Easter to Pentecost. He wasn't teaching them Robert's Rules. "Be my witnesses to all nations," says Jesus. "I send you out into the world," says Jesus. "Why are you standing there looking into heaven?" says the man dressed in white on Ascension.
We are not leaving the world with Jesus. We are not an other-worldly faith. We are not avoiding the hostile world and living lives of faith in an easier place. We are sent back into the same empire that crucified Jesus to live the life that got him crucified, and that is why we need the Holy Spirit. We will need the life of God in us. We will need to be so wrapped up in the inner life and the mutual love shared between the Creator and the Son if we have any chance of living lives of witness and mission. Lives of healing and peacemaking. Lives of loving and restoring in Jesus' name. The name of that shared inner life, that mutual, loving relationship. The name of what flows in the life of God is the Holy Spirit and we need it.
Jesus knows what we will need if we are to do what he charges us to do. We hear it in his great prayer in the Gospel of John today. Three times Jesus mentions protection; two times in petition for his community and once referring to himself as the protector, the guard. This is a prayer for the ears of an anxious community. An anxious community in transition, feeling threatened, feeling loss, feeling vulnerable, feeling edgy. Abandonment is one of our most primal hard-wired fears. In the 11 days the disciples face that fear head-on. Are we being abandoned by the One who loves us and protects us? Who provides our basic need for security and safety, they wonder with nerves on edge.
But not only are they confronting the most basic fear we all share, there's more. They know they are to be sent out into that same hostile world that murdered their leader. So they are also afraid of opposition. They are afraid of hostility. They are afraid of vulnerability in the service of mission. They are wondering to themselves, "so are we now abandoned and exposed to a threatening empire alone and without recourse?" This crucial moment begs the question, can we do this on our own?
The answer is a resounding, no. Followed quickly by, we need the Holy Spirit.
We cannot sustain ourselves, we cannot sustain our community, we cannot sustain our mission and witness and faith in a hostile world without the gift of the Holy Spirit.
See you next week.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
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By St. Martin-in-the-FieldsIn his sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel likens the gap between the Ascension and the arrival of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost to a committee meeting. Without their beloved leader and protector to guide them, they turn to control and tidy order. Is this what God wants for us? Or is there something more on the way?
Today's readings are:
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
Psalm 1
John 17:6-19
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for the Seventh Sunday of Easter
Transcript:
[Introductory music]
[The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel] Please join me in a spirit of prayer.
Lord God, you have opened our minds and hearts to many new revelations in this past year. But chiefly have we learned how much we need you to sustain a life that we might even begin to call Godly. Lord God, in our exhaustion, in our knowledge of our limits, and our humility we know that we need you and we need your Holy Spirit. Lord God, plant us by streams of living water so that we may live in glory to your name. Amen.
Please be seated.
My wife had a very pious and devout secretary when she worked at Bucknell University. Her name was Ruth Craven, God rest her soul, and she loved to repeat the following joke. It's a church joke. So, Ruth would say again and again to my wife, "A pastor got into the pulpit and said I've had a long and difficult week with many challenges that prevented me from preparing my sermon as I usually do. So today I will be trusting in the Holy Spirit. Next week, continues the pastor, I promise I will do better."
These unnamed 11 days, this odd season of the church, this anxious, uncertain interim 11 days after Ascension Day and before Pentecost, are here to remind us how much we need the Holy Spirit if we are to take on the mission of Jesus Christ in a hostile world.
The gathering of the Jesus people after the Ascension and before the Holy Spirit is portrayed in our reading from Acts of the Apostles and many commentators see a warning in it - this is what the church without the Holy Spirit looks like. It looks like a committee meeting.
The Acts of the Apostles reading reads like the minutes of the first church meeting. Behold the banal birth of the bureaucratic organization soon to be known, after it is born again from above by the Holy Spirit, as The Church. A technical problem is identified, we have 120 members and only 11 leaders and 12 would be much more orderly. 10 per liter, and the 12 tribes of Israel, and such so, we need one more leader and all will be tidy. There's a three-step process: nominations based on qualifications, prayer, and the good old Torah practice of casting lots. Even the nominees are lackluster. One has three names listed, as if in retrospect the author is not sure who he was, and Matthias never appears in scripture again.
However, all is in order. All is tidy. That is, after all, what God wants, isn't it?
No, it's not.
This is not what Jesus has been prepping the disciples for over 40 days from Easter to Pentecost. He wasn't teaching them Robert's Rules. "Be my witnesses to all nations," says Jesus. "I send you out into the world," says Jesus. "Why are you standing there looking into heaven?" says the man dressed in white on Ascension.
We are not leaving the world with Jesus. We are not an other-worldly faith. We are not avoiding the hostile world and living lives of faith in an easier place. We are sent back into the same empire that crucified Jesus to live the life that got him crucified, and that is why we need the Holy Spirit. We will need the life of God in us. We will need to be so wrapped up in the inner life and the mutual love shared between the Creator and the Son if we have any chance of living lives of witness and mission. Lives of healing and peacemaking. Lives of loving and restoring in Jesus' name. The name of that shared inner life, that mutual, loving relationship. The name of what flows in the life of God is the Holy Spirit and we need it.
Jesus knows what we will need if we are to do what he charges us to do. We hear it in his great prayer in the Gospel of John today. Three times Jesus mentions protection; two times in petition for his community and once referring to himself as the protector, the guard. This is a prayer for the ears of an anxious community. An anxious community in transition, feeling threatened, feeling loss, feeling vulnerable, feeling edgy. Abandonment is one of our most primal hard-wired fears. In the 11 days the disciples face that fear head-on. Are we being abandoned by the One who loves us and protects us? Who provides our basic need for security and safety, they wonder with nerves on edge.
But not only are they confronting the most basic fear we all share, there's more. They know they are to be sent out into that same hostile world that murdered their leader. So they are also afraid of opposition. They are afraid of hostility. They are afraid of vulnerability in the service of mission. They are wondering to themselves, "so are we now abandoned and exposed to a threatening empire alone and without recourse?" This crucial moment begs the question, can we do this on our own?
The answer is a resounding, no. Followed quickly by, we need the Holy Spirit.
We cannot sustain ourselves, we cannot sustain our community, we cannot sustain our mission and witness and faith in a hostile world without the gift of the Holy Spirit.
See you next week.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org