Today is the 7th Sunday of Easter, the 7th Sunday of the 50 day season of joy.
I just mention that because we always have to watch out for the number 7.
It is, if you like, our lucky number.
It is the number of completion and fulfilment.
It’s the days of the week,
the measure of our time,
the time of creation,
the span from start to finish.
It’s the number written into our rhythm of life –
the six day week, the day of rest, the gift of God.
So, we’ve had 7 Sundays inhabiting the Easter message,
letting the hope of resurrection work in our hearts and minds.
But the season isn’t quite over.
We are left with a question.
It is a question asked of the apostles, and by the apostles.
And it’s been left hanging for all who have followed them.
They gathered round Jesus and asked him:
“Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”
As far as we can see, they don’t get an answer.
They were asking him – are you the Messiah we were expecting?
Are you the one to restore the fortunes of Israel?
There is no answer because it’s the wrong question they’re asking.
The question is a reflection of one of the great temptations of human nature –
the tendency towards nostalgia and restoration.
The temptation is still with us.
We long for restoration.
We dream of returning to some imagined greatness,
some remembered certainty,
some lost golden age.
Nations do it.
Churches do it.
We do it ourselves.
There are men in white suits in today’s readings.
They catch the apostles watching Jesus disappear from sight.
They see their grief and their pining for the past,
and then they tell them to stop looking that way,
and they redirect the gaze of their longing
They redirect the gaze of their longing –
away from nostalgia,
away from heaven as escape,
back toward Jerusalem,
back into the world,
back into prayer,
back towards one another.
They stop staring into heaven.
They turn around.
And they walk back to Jerusalem.
A sabbath walk.
Day seven.
And Day Seven becomes Day One:
not completion as an ending,
but completion opening into a beginning.
Easter gives its people a new body clock,
a new sense of time,
a life no longer ordered by nostalgia for the past
but by longing for what God is yet to do.
The time of our lives.
And what do they do,
these people learning resurrection time?
They pray.
They return to Jerusalem,
and gather in an upstairs room.
Men and women together.
Mary.
The brothers of Jesus.
The Church before it knows what the Church will become.
And they pray.
They do not launch a strategy.
They do not reclaim power.
They do not “make Israel great again”.
They pray:
waiting not for the restoration of the past,
but for the coming of the kingdom of God.
This is Day One of the prayer of the Church,
not longing for the past glory,
but longing for a glory like no other glory we have known,
not longing for the past
but longing for the future.
Thy kingdom come,
that’s the way to pray.
When we introduce the Lord’s prayer,
we casually say
“as our Saviour has taught us,
so we pray”.
But let’s be definite.
This is the way Jesus taught his followers to pray. To pray for the kingdom to come,
on earth as it is in heaven.
So we could say in introducing our prayer:
this is the way we pray
because this is the way Jesus prayed,
looking to our Father in heaven,
giving him the power and glory
instead of seeing power and glory
in wealth, or celebrity, or control.
This is looking the other way.
Looking away from power as domination,
and discovering power as compassion.
Looking away from glory as status,
and discovering glory as love poured out.
Because when Jesus speaks about glory,
he does not mean celebrity,
spectacle,
or triumph.
In John’s Gospel,
Glory means the cross.
Glory is love poured out.
Glory is love that gives itself away
for the life of the world.
Glory is love that gives itself away for the life of the world.
And that is why our Collect today dares to hold together two words usually kept apart:
power
and compassion.
Heaven’s power is compassionate power.
Worldly power is anything but.
Risen, ascended Lord,
as we rejoice at your triumph,
fill your Church on earth with power and compassion …….
that’s the way to pray,
for the sake of the future,
for those who suffer
under the world as it is,
and under the ways we have learned to look at one another,
for those “estranged by sin”,
by the wrongs of the world,
for those estranged,
disconnected, alienated, turned inward, turned backward.
For their sake,
that they may find forgiveness,
that they may know peace
that’s why we pray,
It’s for their sake,
for the sake of the lost, the last and the least,
that the glory of heaven
may be seen on earth,
in the troughs of human experience,
in the valleys overshadowed by death.
And so this week,
in churches,
halls,
homes,
and quiet corners,
Christians will gather again,
just as they did in that upstairs room.
Not looking backward,
not staring into the sky,
but praying toward the future:
Thy kingdom come.
When we pray the Jesus way,
Jesus prays alongside us still:
for the world,
for the estranged, the wronged,
for peace,
for glory shaped like love.
Grits and Grains 