Surely the Presence
The Rev. Canon Frank Logue preached this sermon for the
Diocese of Georgia livestream worship on May 24, 2020
Surely the Presence
Acts 1:6-14
The church has done more harm with ready answers than the good we have done in sitting silently with people in pain. We do answers well. But we would be better served to accept the pain, hurt, and grief, before trying to move on. Sometimes we need to just let the hurt come and don’t try to speak to it.
For when a child dies, the parents are plunged into the most excruciating pain. The ready answers of “God needed another angel” or “God has a plan” add to the pain. The deep darkness in the Good News of Jesus is that God knows the pain and tragedy of unimaginable loss. Jesus cries out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In his humanity, Jesus felt loss and abandonment on the cross. The heart of the hope we have in Jesus is found in knowing that God will never leave us or forsake us. But this is a most difficult lesson of hope, for we often learn it best only after we feel the most intense of losses and we have other lessons we need to unlearn.
I have been formed in my faith through years in Pentecostal churches. From the age of nine until I turned 16, I could be found sitting with my family on our accustomed pew at Mount Paran Church of God just outside Atlanta. We sat close to the front on the right side. If we were in town and well, we were in that pew. My freshman year of college I attended Southeastern College of the Assemblies of God in Lakeland, Florida, and attended a little Church of God congregation. While I wandered on from that Pentecostal upbringing, I didn’t run away from the church of my childhood. I walked toward a way of following Jesus that challenged and inspired me. Yet, I have many fond and formative memories from those Pentecostal experiences.
There is so much of those years I have never given up and continue to cherish. But there was a lesson no one ever taught, that I have been unlearning for decades and it had to do with feeling God’s presence. Pentecostal worship is often a quite emotional experience. I recall singing the song, Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place, and I knew I had felt God’s presence and power. In the decades since I found my way into the Episcopal Church I have looked back and seen a problematic message I absorbed. If we could feel God’s presence in ecstatic worship, then what did it mean when I couldn’t feel God in that way?
Don’t get me wrong, no Pentecostal minister teacher ever taught me that if you are not able to feel God’s presence, God is not with you. Yet, the repetitive sense of being in church and feeling God in the emotions stirred up in communal worship, did make me wonder if had God had abandoned me when that feeling was absent.
By the time my brother Michael died after an 11-month battle with AIDS, my brother-in-law Ben drowned in the Gulf of Mexico, and my father was felled by a heart attack at work, I had learned that God’s presence is more reliable than my feelings. That was an essential lesson as we all face times when we want to feel God with us and don’t.
In our readings from the Acts of the Apostles, we move into the shortest and most neglected season of the church year, Ascensiontide. From the day of Ascension, this past Thursday until Pentecost Sunday ten days later, we retell of the story of Jesus’ first followers as they live in the uncertainty of Jesus having left them and the Holy Spirit not having yet arrived. They are no longer disciples following their teacher and they are not yet apostles sent out into the world. They will be witnesses, but first they must wait.
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I am reminded of the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) describing the slow work of God. He wrote,
“Trust in the slow work of God. We are, quite naturally, impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new, and yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time….
“Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”
In our collect for today, we pray, “Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before.” This prayer borrows language from John 14:18, in which Jesus told his disciples on the night before he died, “I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you.”
I love the hymn “Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place” all the more now as my experience of God has deepened over time. In surgical waiting rooms, in the emergency room, in funeral home parlors, I have seen how God was present especially in the midst of tragedy and loss. I also see how it is too much for those in the midst of grief to feel that presence dependably in those times.
I have even found my definition of place expanded in recent weeks as I have been with many of you in online worship and known that God was with us in a powerful way, connecting us to God’s own self and one another in this virtual space. In our Diocese of Georgia worship and in worship of our congregations I have attended virtually, I have heard thoughtful and challenging sermons. I have also been moved by our music in these services and by your comments during the worship.
Let’s not move to that sense of God’s presence so quickly as to fail to name the feeling of the absence of God. In Ascensiontide, the disciples are holding on to hope and remaining in prayer not knowing how long they would be waiting. They will elect from the group Matthias as a successor to Judas, making their number twelve once more even as they wait, which shows that they didn’t know the time would be relatively short. We know it was ten days, but each day of that wait brought no certainty that God is faithful and the Holy Spirit will show up.
I am quite impatient in wanting to get on to the next step. Yet, I am leaning into Ascensiontide this year as the time between the times. Ready answers and pat responses ring hollow when life gets tough and God feels absent. The instability of the intermediate is where the slow work of God unfolds. Knowing that Jesus will not leave me or you comfortless allows me to trust that the darkness of this inbetween season is part of how God acts in our lives. In reclaiming the uncertainty experienced by those gathered in the upper room, we find how steady is the hope to which we cling when there seem no answers to the questions we face. As Teilhard wrote, “Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”
Amen.
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