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while he was parting from while he was blessing them , he parted from them. That's how luke describes the final moment of leave taking between the risen christ and the disciples in the last verse of his Gospel

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, the last verses of the Gospel of luke to which as you know, the ascension story we just heard in the first chapter of Acts begins the sequel , luke is the only evangelist brave enough or whimsical

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enough to include in his story, this tender moment of contradiction when jesus left the disciples on their own once and for all, while he was blessing them , he parted from them. So much of the

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religious life, links opposites unexpectedly like that in such a matter of fact way that at first you don't really notice how startling the juxtaposition really can be. The beloved prayer of saint Francis strings all those paradoxes

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together. It is in giving that we receive in pardoning that we are pardoned in mortality, that we discover life in jesus, the suffering servant, the wounded healer, the humiliated messiah in jesus, God

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distilled the essential paradoxes of this human existence out of the improbable alchemy of flesh and spirit. And then Jesus gave it all away, lost his life so that we could find ours abundantly and in the very

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final moments of their togetherness. So luke's story has it, of all the things he could have been doing, he was blessing them of all the things that could have been happening as he blessed them.

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He was leaving them. Even while he made himself absent from the face of this world, He instilled his presence among them, and only when he left them most alone did they begin to understand what it

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would mean to be together this season in the life of our church and the topics of this year's midwinter's made this seem like a ripe time to look closely at the community, gathered around jesus as they weathered

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storms in the presence of his absence. Last night we found ourselves with them on a boat in a meteorological sort of storm, wondering where to find the courage and what to do with the fear that the

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heavy weather and the uncertain course summoned up out of the depths of them in the long run, the brevity of Peter's success with his madcap little water walking experiment. His baptism by nearly total immersion came to

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seem less important than the audacious buoyancy of his pissed us his trust and his words bid me come to you across the waters came to seem like words that might help to point our prow in the direction of

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whatever it is that's coming next. Okay, so tonight we're looking at a different kind of storm, less literal, no less drenching, no less formative . It's a storm that involves grief and memory and

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more fear. And so it to calls up from the depths of those disciples and these disciples a full measure of courage and endurance and the mainspring of the story is wound again by the paradoxical absence and presence

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of jesus and the call to imagine a way toward an inscrutable future. So according to luke, jesus last explicit instruction to the disciples was every bit as paradoxical as so many of his words and gestures remain

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in Jerusalem, he said Now on the face of it, there'd be a certain devotional and strategic logic to this. If in fact what they'd all been trying to do all along was start a new religion

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, it would only make sense for them to stick close to the religious epicenter, near the building on the postcard at the bustling destination of pilgrimage. But luke actually calls what jesus said. Not a teaching

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, not an idea, a strategy, but a command. An order. He only gives a few of those. And when you think about it, that's probably what it would have had to be.

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Maybe the disciples didn't realize it at first as they gazed up into heaven. Maybe yet another paradox. Maybe they needed to have their reverie grounded by angelic voices at their elbows. What are you looking at

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up there? But even in the midst of blessing and leaving them, their master of paradoxes was bidding them to return to the place from which perhaps more than any other place on earth they must by that

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time have longed to escape forever, Jerusalem, Jerusalem . How often had he wept over it himself? City that kills the prophets and stones, those who are sent to it. How often have I desired

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to gather your Children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. But you were not willing . And now the brooding maternal protection seem to have flown once and for all. And he sent them

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wingless back into the city that had just demonstrated that it could turn in an instant on a hinge of anger and shout for him, or any one of them to endure public torture from the crest of the

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Mount of Olives where they last saw him. You can look west, you know this, you've seen the postcard, You can look west and see the whole city spread out before you as they look back

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that day. The skyline must have faked with echoes all the places he'd been with them and that charged weak barely a month before, now throbbing in their memories. The beautiful gate through which he first entered

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it and the short lived cheers in the air and the Temple Court where he turned the tables on the religious establishment and the second story windows of the house where they had celebrated Passover and the Pretoria move his

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sham trial and the Via Dolorosa that he'd walked from there dragging his cross to the hill near the stone quarry where it had seemed as though everything had ended . And then the empty place with the stone too

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big to move by themselves. Go back into all of that and wait. He commanded how much this landscape must have set off a longing for home among the galleons. A yearning for places they understood places

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more predictable and less threatening. A quiet life of fishing and pondering the resurrection with its 1000 questions too big to roll away by themselves. But no remain in the city, he said. And then while

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blessing them he left them stay in Jerusalem Luke is the only one of the four writers who tells this story. The other three gospels remember the locus of life after easter moving back to galilee, where the

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light of resurrection was refracted through a familiar landscape with encounters by the sea and the smell of broiling fish for breakfast in the air and all those fish and sheep metaphors just ripe for picking. But luke is

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the one for whom the city has to be the epicenter. The city with its ligaments to the world . It's messy, human patchwork, it's multiple identities , always in some kind of tension or other remain

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in the midst of all of that jesus ordered them maybe because it wasn't home, even while blessing them , he asked them to do the hardest things to go back to look again and the hardest of all

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to wait. W. H. Auden wrote the truest thing about any of us is that we are waiting. So stay in Jerusalem words that no matter how we may hear them in a gentle jesus voice

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, feel to me more and more like facing into the full force of a hurricane. Words like you therefore must be perfect or blessed. Are you who are persecuted, rejoice and be glad or you lack

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one thing, Go and sell what you have and give it to the poor or unless you become like Children or Stay awake with me just one hour or on this rock I will build. But they left

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the mountain and walked into the hurricane, risked the streets again. They went first, luke says to that room upstairs where they were staying and the luke doesn't say it explicitly. It must surely have been

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the upper room in which they'd broken that bread together . The room in which thomas held out for actually seeing the nail holes in the resurrected hands. And the room in which jesus held out those hands and

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caught thomas faith as it rose from the dead and hurled it forward into history, luke goes around the room and names them one x 1, the ones who stayed, peter I'm john James Andrew together with

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certain women whose names would have been such a precious gift to us, had luke, had ears to hear them. And mary of course they were praying constantly luke says. But luke delicately avoid saying much

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about the conditions that would have made constant prayer essential , surrounded by danger, drenched in memories bereft of organization, overshadowed by empire utterly at the mercy of the future. They stayed in Jerusalem in a room

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upstairs, waiting indefinitely for something they had never seen and couldn't be sure they'd even recognize when it came stayed. For the only reason it's possible to imagine for such a choice because of the trust they held

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for the one who sent them back into it. Now, you know that room you've been there, I'm almost certain it is the place you stay. Not because you want to, but partly because you

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want not to. It's the place you stay, because you are called there by your eternally indelible name . It's the place you stay because the thing that might happen there, if you recognize it when it

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comes, might make all the difference. Might banish finally, and forever. The familiar anxieties and ambiguities might answer the taking questions, might roll the stone away, might help you to understand what your work

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really is now anyway, might steer the prow of you into the looming future. It is the place which insists that you stay and feel the presence of absences and the presence which transcends them. It's the

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place from which you look out over the landscape of echoes and losses. Consider the costs of commitments and ask yourself what you're sure about what you trust, what matters most. The place you stay because of

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the kind of love that's not so much about what you want to do as it is about what you have to do. Stay in the city stay. Not because of what the schools are, but because

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of what the schools might be. Not because of the current administration. Oh, no, but because of the next one stay. Not because the battles for the society, we long for have been one

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, but because here is a place where you can see that they haven't yet been one take to the streets once in a while of the city, just as a personal spiritual discipline to let the powers that

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be hear the cry for justice and mercy, or to walk for hunger or run for a cure or carry the torch for others whose hunger or fear keeps them inside. Or just because your day of pride

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has come around again in the cycle of the year , stay where it exhausts you. To think of re engaging the struggle so that the struggle itself is never exhausted. Stay in the church, stay,

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not because of what the church is, but because of what it might be, pour out your weariness or disillusionment or doubts there not because it's always the most satisfying thing to do or God knows the tidy

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ist, but because pouring them out is part of what will allow you to be filled again. And because pouring them out, God knows, is better than holding them in stay, not only because it

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has been home, but because it is still becoming home stay with the news of the epidemic, or the suffering or the debate or the schism or the struggle stay, not because any of that will ever

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get fixed, not because the needs will ever stop , but because the needs will never stop. Mattering stay because the struggles will never stop teaching you things that you just have to know, stay as a

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way of believing that the suffering of people whose names you'll never know whose faces you'll never see have a place in the heart of God stay as a way of finding the heart of God in your own heart

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, stay in the conversation if you can stay unless and until the relationship becomes a place of death to you, there are almost always more ways of staying than you probably realize. And though some of them

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will cost you more than your spirit can pay. Other ways will be more possible than you can see now stay in relationship as long as you can, because though it's not the easiest thing to do,

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it's easier than lugging unreconciled bitterness around with you wherever else you go. And when you have to leave , then pray for the wholeness of the people who grieve you and who agree, view the people you

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leave behind and the ones who leave you behind and pray for the wholeness of the family that we have not yet begun to imagine pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Stay in Jerusalem. It is a landscape

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with many rooms, places you've been, places you long to be, places you hope never to be again. The room of indignities suffered is there and maybe a day will come for you to return to

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that room and discover your dignity unscathed. After all , the room of grief is there. And you'll be surprised how even tears can finally help baptize a home for blessing and parting. Parting and blessing are

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not as contradictory as they seem. At first, the room of Anger is there and sooner or later you'll have to stop there in order to leave something behind. You've been carrying so long, so long

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that you've stopped noticing. It's astonishing weight. And the room of memory is there where you can touch all the things you've loved about the way it was and then leave the ones there that need to stay

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the room of memory where you'll recollect all the places you've ever lived and understand at last that all of them were temples because God lived there with you so many rooms, all upper rooms. When you go

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back to them, rooms with a view in the House of God, there are indeed many windowed mansions . Each of them is a place known to the heart of jesus. He took in that view from

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the hilltop too. In fact, he had some altitude on them. Each is a place where are suffering is known by its name and our joy and are floundering, are floundering around in all the contradictions

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and paradoxes remain there, he says, because that is where the promise will be fulfilled. Jerusalem, precisely because it is the place where the struggle is engaged the most deeply and with the highest stakes is

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the place where the gift of spirit will be given , Jerusalem will be the shining destination, precisely because for now it is the place in which it is hardest to breathe around the hurt and uncertainty and memory

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and need. It will be the place of Pentecost because it is to this day, the capital of paradox go back there wingless and alone. So it seems go back there and wait for the promised breath

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to lift you to soaring after all at a time that it is not yours to set, lift you to a new way of being together and a new way of seeing. And when you get there,

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maybe go around the table and just say the names because they'll help you to stay, go around the room And say the name of the one you love and trust who sent you here in the first place

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on a wing and a promise, Hallelujah, Hallelujah