6 Easter A

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Episcopal Church
May 25, 2014

6 Easter A

My husband's Aunt Joy will be 98 years old at the end of this week.  Even though Don and I have been married for over 30 years, I had not met Aunt Joy until about 3 years ago when two of her six children brought her to Springfield for a mini family reunion.  Aunt Joy was a mere 95 years old at the time, fiercely independent, utterly delightful, and deeply inquisitive about her faith.  At the time, she lived in a retirement community where her main complaint was not the food, which was certainly worthy of complaint, or the care, which was actually quite good.  Her main complaint was that no one would talk with her about dying, or death, or what life beyond the grave would be like.  Aunt Joy was appalled at the lack of curiosity among her peers on this topic.  I imagine she has always been a pragmatic and realistic person, wanting to plan for the future, and she is pretty clear about what the future holds.  What she could not understand was why no one else was equally curious.   Aunt Joy and I struck up a friendship that weekend and have corresponded off and on over the last few years, and I got to visit her when I went to Richmond in February.

Several weeks ago, Aunt Joy was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.  To make a long story short, she had emergency surgery and is now having to relearn how to make her arms and hands work, and how to stand again.  We talk on the phone a little more often these days, and when we talked last week, she told me with a real sense of accomplishment that she had been able to stand several times that day.  She marveled at the ability of the physical therapist to hoist her out of the chair, and told me that she had to hang on to the therapist for dear life.  But she had stood up, even if briefly, and she felt like a new person.

Her problem, she told me, is that she is having trouble hanging on to Jesus.   In fact, she says, she is having trouble finding Jesus at all, much less hanging on to him.  We talked about this and then we wondered together about whether Jesus might be present in the physical therapist she had held on to so tightly so she could stand up.  Or perhaps Jesus was present in her children, at least one of whom is with her around the clock.  Or perhaps Jesus is present in the oncologist that Aunt Joy adores and is probably younger than some of Aunt Joy's grandchildren.  We said good-bye that night without any clear resolution to her concern about being able to hang on to Jesus, but her deeply inquisitive mind had engaged the question on a new level.

This morning, we hear Paul speak to the Athenians in front of the Areopagus.  Paul recognizes that the Athenians are very religious and he points to the altar to the unknown god as proof of their quest to know the divine.  For all the gods the Greeks had, and there were many, the Athenians admitted that there might be yet another one that they did not know about.  Paul seizes the opportunity to tell them about the God they do not know: the God who made the world and everything in it, who made all the nations of the earth that they might search for God and find God.  And then Paul adds "though indeed God is not far from each one of us."  The god the Athenians do not know is working in their very midst, they just do not recognize the Divine.  For, as Paul reminds them, "In God, we live and move and have our being."

Paul is telling the Athenians that the God they search for, the one they admit they do not know, is in their very midst.  In the gospel reading, we hear Jesus preparing the disciples for the time, quickly coming, when he will no longer be with them.  So that the disciples will not be alone, Jesus promises to send the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, to be with them forever.  Jesus tells the disciples that the Spirit will abide with them and be in them.  This promise to the disciples is fulfilled on Easter night, when, in John's gospel, Jesus appears to the disciples, breathes on them, and says "Receive the Holy Spirit."

When life is difficult, we can think that God is very distant, as the Athenians do, or have trouble hanging on to Jesus, like Aunt Joy, or feel like we have been left as orphans, as Jesus' disciples were feeling.  We can feel that God is somewhere else and that we need to hunt for God in order to experience God's presence in our lives.  But both Jesus and Paul tell us that when we start by thinking that God is some where else and that we must expend great sums of energy trying to find God, we are starting in the wrong place.  Both Paul and Jesus tell us that the God in whom we live and move and have our being is right here with us.  Our task is not to find where God is hiding but to recognize where God is already present.  Jesus' promise to us is that we will never be abandoned.  Jesus calls us to hold onto that promise and look for the ways God is already at work in our lives.  Then, like Paul, we can help others see where the God who seems unknown is actually present and working in their lives.

Amen.