Threshold
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
Click here to view the full sermon video, titled "Threshold"
This morning’s reading finds us in between. The risen Christ, having spent forty days showing up to meals and speaking to his disciples about the realm of God’s power present in the world in light of his resurrection, has ascended into heaven (whatever that means). But at this point in the story, the Holy Spirit has not yet made its dramatic entrance for the day of Pentecost. That’s next week. Here we find the church in between. In between Jesus’ ascension and the arrival of the Holy Spirit. We often like to talk about the Spirit as the life breath of the church. In the second creation story, when God forms the human from the earth, it only comes to life as God breathes into it. So it is with the church. Which raises some questions about this passage and what takes place here. Ten days may not sound like that much time, unless we’re talking about breathing. Ten days without a breath would be the end of any of us. But then again, while Jesus had promised to send them the Holy Spirit, so that in his words they would be “clothed with power from on high,” it wasn’t like a shipment from Amazon. There was no tracking notice to know when they could expect delivery. They didn’t know it would only be ten days. They were living in between what they knew, what they had seen and heard in Jesus, and whatever was next, not knowing exactly what that was or when it would be.
Living in between can be hard. To live in between is to see in the mirror darkly. Far more is unknown than is known. It can be scary, awkward and unpredictable. It can feel like we’re stuck, with no direction. The most prominent story from the bible about living in between is the exodus. The people are set free from the yoke of slavery, only to find themselves in the desert. They know they have been promised a land, a destination. But they cannot see it. All they can see is the immediate crisis of being in the wilderness with no water and no food. Sometimes the word we use for this place of in between is liminal. It’s a word that comes from the Latin word “limen” which literally translates as threshold.
Life is filled with these threshold moments, starting from our conception until we arrive in the world. There is the moment we walk up the sidewalk to school for the first time moving from home into the world. There is the moment that the church recognizes through the rite of confirmation, when we mark the threshold on which childhood gives way to the beginning of adulthood. There is the moment we move from the homes in which we were raised to the homes we begin to create for ourselves in a dorm room, or our own apartment. We may move from life as a single person to a life lived with and for another, as a partner or as a parent. These are the thresholds of our personal lives. Then there are the thresholds of our professional lives: a graduation, a first job, a transfer that sends us across the country, or across the world, a layoff, a career change, retirement. In many ways, our lives are marked, measured and lived in between. In between where we came from and where we’re going, what once was that is now gone, and what is still to come but not yet here. It’s a young Dustin Hoffman as Ben Braddock in the 1967 film The Graduate, on a bus to who knows where.
In the Celtic tradition, the figure associated with the threshold, with the in-between, is St. Brgid of Kildare. Because she dates back to the 5th and 6th centuries in Ireland, her biography is more legend than it is history. For instance, in Celtic lore Brigid is said to have been the midwife to Christ ushering him across the threshold of heaven to earth. Many of the stories surrounding her are infused with birthing symbolism, bringing new life into the world. In the Hebrides islands that are named for her, the name of Brigid is invoked in the doorway at the birth of a child. In this way, every birth is understood to be the rebirth of Christ into the world.
Today is the day in the United States that is set aside to celebrate the mothers who bring us into the world, as well as the mothers who raise us, nurture us, and when needed give us a swift kick to get us moving. They aren’t always the same person. Originally conceived as an anti-war protest by mothers who had lost their children to the civil war, Mother’s Day has since become a complicated mix of sincere sentiment, opportune commercialized guilt, and unresolved trauma. It turns out that more than one thing can be true at the same time. Technically speaking, motherhood is the means by which each of us crosses the threshold from non-being to being. But there’s way more to it than that, and it can be fraught with all the pain, loss and longing that come from human biology, physiology, and families. Brigid is a good reminder that we need not create the birth to play a mothering role in the world, to help midwife all that God would bring into the world over whatever threshold on which we find ourselves standing.
All of which makes our reading this morning a little disappointing, if I’m being honest. Now, to be fair, just like the liberated Hebrew slaves, the disciples have the freedom, the life, the joy of Jesus’ resurrection with absolutely NO sense of direction. As such, they do what most of us do, what the Hebrews did on the other side of the Red Sea. They try to go back, in a manner of speaking. When Jesus was with them, before Jerusalem, before crucifixion and resurrection, he appointed the twelve and sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal. Of course, one of those twelve was no longer with them. This is the one instance where I’m grateful for the lectionary’s abridgment of the reading. Often when we get a split reading like this, I feel shorted by not including the part we’re told to skip. However, in this case, what we’re spared is the gory detail of Judas’ demise at his own hand and the standard condemnation. For the record, I like to imagine God extending far more grace to the failings of Judas than the biblical witness leaves room for. But that’s a sermon for another day. The immediate problem, as Peter sees it, is that they’re an apostle shy of twelve. Twelve feels like an important number to them. After all, Israel was represented by its twelve tribes. This is often what happens in between, when the way things were is clearly not the way things are, and certainly not the way things are going to be. We cling to what we’ve known. We cling to what was done in the past as though it has to be the standard going forward. It’s also what happens when the church exists to satisfy its numbers without the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit. Because Peter’s criteria for filling the spot is that it has to be one of the men who has been with them since John’s baptism all the way to the ascension. To, and this is a quote, “become a witness with us to his resurrection.” Are you seeing what might be problematic about this? And so what happens? They put forward the names of two men. Excuse me, what? You want someone who will be a witness with you to the resurrection and no one thinks to name any of the first three witnesses to that momentous event? Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James. Salome, if you’re reading Mark. Hello?? They are right there, Peter. But we’ve never done that before. So? Rather than satisfying the mission given to them by Christ himself who regularly broke from the patriarchal strictures that subordinated women and kept them separate from men, Peter satisfies the form of the thing he knows. Does anyone really think that the mission of the church is determined or reliant on the gender of those called to lead and bear witness to the good news for all of humanity? In fact, you might think that a gospel that serves the whole of humanity should be preached by people who represent the whole of humanity. As much as we want to celebrate Mothers, I sometimes wonder if we have either wittingly, or unwittingly fallen into the trap that sidelines and treats women as if that is the only role they can or should play? Brigid would point us to the power of the sacred feminine that need not give birth to have a role in facilitating all that bears God into the world, to bear witness to the light that those women encountered on the first day of the week, while it was still dark.
I would like to say that the church has come to do better than leaving its leadership up to the chance throwing of lots, but it can continue to do a better job of attending to the Spirit that leads us into God’s future, instead of replicating what we’ve always done or known. In the in between places of our lives we can cast our eyes to what’s ahead instead of what’s behind us. We can open our hearts and minds to the new thing that God is trying to bring forth even now, and help to usher it across the threshold as a whole new world opens up to us.