The Time In Between

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.17.15; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lessons:  Luke 24:44-53; Acts 1:1-11

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Nothing is harder on the soul than those places in between.

Oh, goals we understand.  Destinations we get.  They are nice and clear and finite, easily described and definable.  We set ourselves to do a particular thing, and we’re striving towards it, and we know where we’re headed.

When I was in first grade, there it was.  My goal was to be a sixth grader, those giant almost adults who wandered like titans through the sea of lowly kindergarteners.  Just do your homework, and don’t punch anybody, and there you go.  And in high school, the goal was...well, it was supposed to be college, but eighty five point three percent of the time, it was pining over getting a girlfriend.

After that fourteen point seven percent of effort somehow miraculously got me into college, there was the goal of finding a major, and the goal graduating.

At each of those stages, there was a clear destination, where you could mark the time and check the box and get the piece of paper that told you you’d accomplished the thing you wanted to accomplish.

Those places were straightforward.  There was a timeline.  There was an end-goal.  There were markers and metrics and measures, and the world seemed clean and manageable.

But then there are the places in between.  

Like adolescence, that awkward time when you transition between childhood and adulthood, neither fully one nor fully another.  Like when you’ve graduated, and time stretches out before you, and you really don’t have a single clue what you’re going to do with that lovely little diploma you’ve spent all those years getting.  You can get that job at Starbucks, of course, but that pretty much only covers your student loan payments.  

Or when those children you’ve spent most of your adult life raising are suddenly grown, and off in the world, and you realize you have no clue what exactly you’re supposed to do with your time.  Should I take up macrame?  Competitive yodeling?  And you have this flicker of memory...hey...wasn’t I married to somebody?  I think it might be that person who drives the kids to karate.  

“What happens now?” we ask ourselves.  And the answer we get isn’t much of anything.  A faint hint here.  A nudge there.  But mostly, we’re in that place between places, and in that time in between times.

“Liminal,” the word is, for those who like fancy descriptive words from the social sciences, which being a Presbyterian and all, I totally do.   Liminality is a term from the field of anthropology, derived from the Latin word for “threshold.”   It’s used to describe that tension we feel when we’re right there in the middle of things.  We are neither one thing nor another.  We have left an old identity behind, but the new identity just isn’t there yet.

Liminality is ambiguous, an anxious, vulnerable space.  Everything is fluid...or solid...or maybe gas….or some weird admixture of multiple states of being all at once, like quicksand or fusion plasma.  You really don’t want to spend too much time in quicksand, and fusion plasma is over a million degrees celsius, which in fahrenheit is...um...really, really hot.

The scriptures we heard today are about an in-between time, about a threshold, a time between times.  The first reading, from the Gospel of Luke, brings things to a close for that story of Jesus.  There are teachings, and then...whoosh...Jesus is caught up into heaven.  

Like most liminal things, this first passage is a bridge, intentionally overlapping with the second reading, blending verses, creating a connection between Luke’s story of the early church and the end of the Gospel.  The Acts of the Apostles offers us up more detail about what Jesus did as he prepared for his departure. The disciples have come together with the risen Christ, and during the Q&A at the end of the meeting, they’re trying to figure out what in the world is going to happen next. Is this it? Are we done?  Is God’s Kingdom finally here?

Jesus tells them pretty clearly: No.  No, this isn’t it. They’d been hoping that this was the thing they’d expected, the arrival of Jesus as the great warrior who would liberate all of Israel, bringing about the fulfillment of the Kingdom. Jesus tells that that this isn’t how it’s going down. When exactly things are going to completed, when the age of messianic fulfillment will come, none of those things are to be known by anyone but God. It’s not on the table. It’s not going to be shared, at least, not in the way that they expect. But something else, something they had not expected, is going to happen.

In response to their question about the Kingdom, Jesus goes on to tell them that power will come to them through the Holy Spirit, and that from that, the disciples will become witnesses to Christ in Jerusalem, in the southern kingdom of Judea, in the northern kingdom of Israel, and to the ends of the earth itself. They are not yet there. They have not yet arrived.  

After all that, after the travels through Galilee, the healings and the crowds, the terror of capture and execution, the sorrow of the grave, the explosive half-crazy joy of Easter?  And they’re not yet there?  They’re still crossing that threshold?  Ack.

Imagining their frustration at this point reminds me a little bit of one of the best games I’ve ever played, a wonderfully crafted puzzle game called Portal 2.  In it, you’re a nameless young woman trapped in a vast underground facility, as a witty and malignant artificial intelligence forces you to engage in test after test, a sequence of increasingly complicated three-dimensional exercises that require you to manipulate space itself with your handy dandy portal gun.  Over and over again, the game makes you think you’ve finally cleared the final hurdle, only to pull back.  Oh?  You thought that was the exit?  Nope.  There’s just more testing ahead!

And so the apostles realize, as Jesus ascends, that the game has really only just begun.  What they thought was the final boss battle turns out to be just another step forward.  

But forward to what?

Which brings us to verse eight of chapter 1 of the book of Acts, which overlaps with verse forty-nine of the last chapter of the Gospel of Luke. They are moving towards an event that is deeply vital and pivotal to the Gospel proclamation in Luke and Acts. They are moving towards the arrival of Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, God’s own Spirit, which comes down from heaven and fills them with God’s presence.

And that movement, from Christ-experience to fulfillment, from Easter to Pentecost, is the liminal space we’ve been occupying these last few weeks.  

Next Sunday is Pentecost, though it’s close to two thousand years later. And over those two thousand years, we Christians have been stuck in this strange in between time.  We’d stepped across that threshold, or so we’d thought.  The faith that Jesus came to share teaches that we’ve crossed over into a new place, but the challenge is that this new place isn’t a nice solid final destination.

What we have stepped into is liminal space, and a liminal time.  It is both the goal and the journey, blended up into one wild and frustratingly ambiguous mess.  It is both now and not yet, which, as those anthropologists who came up with the term “liminal” remind us, is the very nature of the sacred.

And yes, that can be frustratingly uncertain.  But it is also filled with possibility, filled with the unknown, a bridge into a reality of which we have only hints and whispers. And, sure, we might find that a little hard on our souls.  Whenever we’re in transition, moving from one state of being to another, it’s hard on our souls.  

But as Jesus reminds us, at the end of Luke, at the beginning of Acts, that time of change is not something we must do alone.  

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.