John 14:15-21
Remember the first time:
- You walked home alone from school.
- You are left alone at home as a child.
- You are allowed to be alone at home in the evening without a baby-sitter.
- Your parents are away overnight or for a weekend and the house is all yours.
- Strong moments…scary and exciting!
Remember sleeping away from home for the first time.
- The first dance.
- The first kiss.
- Learning to tie shoelaces (before Velcro).
- Learning to tell time (before digital watches).
- Learning something by heart.
- Learning the news of a death of a pet or friend or parent or grandparent.
I’ll never forget the first time I…
- Is followed by stories about getting your first real job…
- Or getting your driver’s license.
- Or finding out you are pregnant with your first child.
The moment when something of importance happens to you for the first or only time is a liminal moment.
- The phenomenon of liminality.
- Liminality and threshold moment mean the same thing.
- From the Latin root limin…meaning the centerline of the doorway.
Liminality is the moment of crossing over.
- It describes the transitional phase of personal change.
- Where one is neither in an old state of being…nor a new state of being.
- And not quite aware of the implications of the event.
- All stages of life include liminality.
- Life is nothing but moments of crossing over.
- Stitching these moments together into the comforting quilt of wisdom is the task of one’s later years.
And this is where Jesus meets his disciples and us in the gospel of John this morning.
- In a state of liminality.
- A threshold moment.
- A moment of crossing over.
- A state of being with Jesus physically.
- To a state of not being with Jesus physically.
- And because of this liminal moment…Jesus gifts his disciples…he gifts us…
- With the comforting quilt and gift of the Holy Spirit.
The four of us met during our graduate school/teaching days at Northwestern Lutheran Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.
- John and I were students.
- Susan and Darlene taught at the same elementary school near Como Park.
- The day Susan and I moved into the seminary’s married student housing the door to our apartment got stuck on the carpet on the threshold (yes…a threshold moment).
- The door was propped open to get our belongings in.
- And having no tools unpacked yet…John and Darlene saw us struggling with it.
- They came up with tools and helped us get the door free so that we could close it.
- They lived a half of flight of steps down from us.
- We have been wonderful friends ever since.
- Through the years we have been with one another as we have gone through the ups and downs of life.
During our student/school teaching days we ate ice cream at Bridgman’s Dairy.
- We went camping together.
- We ate many meals together.
- We raised Tilapia Mozambique fish together…they were mouth breeders.
- We hung out together.
- John played college football and I grew up in Green Bay…so we were both NFL buffs…
- The first Monday Night football game took place that year…
- We watched football while our wives watched the fish in their tanks.
- We even went to Charlies Restaurant in Minneapolis during the Christmas holiday season.
- You know…one of those swanky places where they brush the crumbs off the tablecloth between courses.
- And after…we saw the new Christmas Carrol movie with Albert Finney.
- That movie is no longer new…this was 1970.
- It was snowing that night!
- We held one another up in the wake of rocky times.
- This was all BC…before children.
- And then we went on internships…John and Darlene first and then Susan and me a year later.
And then we began birthing children.
- Even though we moved to different places.
- We continued to be there for one another.
- In good times and bad times.
- We knew that help…support…a listening ear and understanding were only a phone call away.
- Always honest and frank.
- Always loving and forgiving.
- Never judgmental.
We celebrated one another’s liminal/threshold…coming of age moments.
- Graduations
- And more graduations and weddings and babies and baptism.
- You get the picture…our children become best friends too.
- We would meet between Christmas and New Years at a great big Holiday Inn halidome in South Bend Indiana.
- We supported one another as we coped with our experiences of death and loss.
- Funerals and memorial services.
Last July…we suffered the loss of our son Jason…
- And John and Darlene were right there with us.
- The soothing ointment of super-friends in the deep pain of loss and grief.
We are older…grayer and wiser since that first meeting at our front door 56 years ago.
- But the experiences we have shared and the memories we cherish make our friendship as strong and as real as the day it first took root more than a half century ago.
- Shared memories that bind us together.
- Shared memories are what bind friends together.
A similar memory binds us together as a Church:
- The memory we share and celebrate in the event of Jesus.
- A memory that is as real and as enduring among us today…
- As it was for the Twelve that Holy Thursday night in the room in which the Last Supper was held.
The Spirit of truth…the Paraclete (parakletos: called alongside) …is the creative…living memory of the Church.
- The Spirit/Paraclete unites us and energizes us as we come together to share…
- Our liminal/threshold moments together.
- Our moments of crossing over.
- And because of our liminal moments of crossing over…
- Jesus gifts us with the comforting quilt and gift of the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit of truth…the Paraclete…is a living presence among us who makes of us a community of faith.
- A family…a circle of friends who offer Christ’s love…support and compassion to one another…to our community and to the world.