Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA
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I know we’re a long ways from it, but Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday... And I have a recurring fantasy that I’m not particularly proud of.
It hits me every year, right around the time the turkey gets cleared and, yes... the football comes on.
It’s not that things go badly. Nobody fights anymore. We’ve all gotten wise enough to steer clear of politics and religion, given that the left-right and atheist-Christian divides in my extended family are both, shall we say, robust. So we keep it safe. And for a while, it’s genuinely lovely.
But then, at a certain point, the conversation just... kinda stops. With a gentle, collective exhale, as everyone turns (almost by gravitational pull!) toward the large screen hanging on the wall. And what follows is a liturgical movement to the sofa and surrounding sitting areas around the altar of the TV. The room filling with, not alleluias and amens, but rather cheers and grunts directed at athletes none of us know personally, punctuated by observations about a referee’s competence that I am in no position to evaluate.
What I want is to make it past dessert... Together. Having a rich conversation. Into the part of the night where someone says something true and unexpected. And then someone else says yes, me too, and a new story gets told. Connection is sparked. And we leave at midnight knowing more about each other than we did at noon.
So I try... I’m not an extrovert. But I’m a feeler, and I care, and every year, at this moment where I feel the connection start to break, I anxiously compose something in my head and lean in and say it. A question. An observation. An overshare. Something to crack the surface just a little. And it typically lands with the conversational equivalent of a soft thud.
That’s when the fantasy kicks in. If I could just snap my fingers three times and teleport somewhere people actually commune with each other. Like Ireland, where a lot of pubs don’t even have televisions, just sad songs and Guinness: the perfect petri dish for honest conversation. Or anywhere in the southern hemisphere, where people do life together loudly and late. Where we introverts don’t have to work so hard to start a genuine conversation.
I tell you this not because I’m proud of it. But because I am the disciples.
And so (I’m sorry to inform you) are you.
Maybe you don’t want to teleport geographically, but chronologically. A survey conducted by Pew Research found that 14% of Americans would transport themselves to the future, if given the choice; while nearly half say that they’d prefer to live in the past.
We are the disciples.
Let’s look at them (us?) in our passage from Acts. Jesus has been raised. And they’re standing on a hill outside Jerusalem with this impossible fact in front of them, and they have two requests.
The first: Take us with you, Jesus!!! Get us outta here!
Because Jerusalem is the city where everything went wrong. Where they all ran. Where Peter said three times, I have no idea who this Jesus guy even is.
If Jesus is going somewhere the vibe is unswervingly harmonious and nobody betrays anybody, yes — take us with you, Lord. Please.
The second: So, Jesus... This is when you fix it, right?
Is this when the kingdom comes the way we’ve been imagining: visible, organized, justice executed according to the blueprints we’ve been drawing up for all these years?
So, two options:
1. Get us out. Or...
2. Make it go our way.
I look at this country and I feel both of these exactly. Right now. I want a church that isn’t corrupt. I want good people in power. I want everyone to have a fair shake. And when none of that materializes on schedule, the Thanksgiving fantasy kicks in. Surely, there’s gotta be somewhere better. Surely, we can execute the right plan.
So we can’t blame ourselves. Neither can we blame the disciples.
Jesus doesn’t rebuke them. He says something that is either the most frustrating or the most liberating thing ever:
Stay.
Now, with Jesus, there’s never just an instruction manual. His words always carry more nuance than we think. He’s saying to stay, but he’s leaving.
Stay, not because nothing is going to happen — everything is about to happen! But you don’t ‘receive power’ by leaving, and you don’t receive it by getting your plan approved. You receive it when you stop managing the outcome long enough for the Spirit to move.
Now... There’s a difference between staying and being stuck. Staying and hiding out of fear.
Between staying and the paralysis of comfort, where you’ve arranged your Jerusalem into something pleasant enough that you’ve stopped noticing you made a choice at all.
Or pure inertia: you’re not here because you chose to be, but because choosing is hard and the couch is right there.
Jesus is not telling anyone they have to stay in danger. He’s not baptizing the endurance of harm as spiritual virtue. You can flee a genuinely dangerous Jerusalem and carry this groundedness with you.
The life of faith is a pilgrimage with real movement, real displacement, real leaving and arriving. Sometimes at the worst times conceivable.
But to them, he says, stay. This is what THEY needed to hear.
Because underneath all that movement travels something that doesn’t depend on the zip code or the political climate or whether genuine Thanksgiving conversation can ever make it past dessert.
The ancient monastics called it stabilitas: a stillness at the center that holds when everything outside is shifting.
It’s important to note that the opposite of stabilitas isn’t leaving. It’s the restless refusal to be anywhere fully.
True staying is active. A choice you keep making, eyes open, trusting the Spirit knows where you are and what to do with you there.
And then, the resurrected Jesus is gone. Lifted up. A cloud, taking him from their sight.
Now, this seems like the sad part. The part where the credits roll.
But what the mystics eventually saw is that what looks like divine departure is actually the revelation of divine saturation. What looks like Jesus escaping upward is Christ being revealed inward.
It’s not that Christ was absent from creation and is now present. The Ascension unveils what was always already true. Christ — the anointing, the ground of all that is — was never absent from anything. The cloud doesn’t take him away. Nor does it change anything about reality. It reveals Christ as the One who was always everywhere, filling all in all, in whom everything has always been held together. The disciples’ eyes are being opened to something eternal they had not yet had eyes to see.
The blessing with raised hands as he ascends doesn’t stop when the cloud rolls in. It was never not happening. The Ascension is the end of his limitation, not his presence.
This is what Paul is praying for in Ephesians: that the eyes of your heart would be opened. The ‘eyes of your heart’ is what the ancient world called your mind.
Christianity is not anti-mind. The mind is not the enemy of faith. It’s actually the primary organ that faith sets out to heal and make fully alive. Paul is asking for a deeper mode of perception entirely; one that sees the world as it actually is: saturated, Christ-soaked, held, carried from within by a love that cannot be contained.
Yes, the Holy Spirit is sometimes like a gentle dove. But more often, it’s more like a big ole’ rusty crowbar. Prying the heart’s eyes open at least every Sunday, more ideally every morning, to the reality we keep forgetting: the party... the cosmic eternal wedding feast... is already underway. It was underway before you and I breathed our first breath.
When this hits the heart, it’s impossible to resist announcing this. To say out loud, to anyone who will listen and a few who won’t, that the bill they’ve been working their fingers to the bone to pay has already been covered. That the love they’ve been striving to earn from life itself was never conditional. That the cross was not a transaction that needed completing before God could tolerate us, but the revelation that God’s love never had fine print.
The work is done.
So we throw this party every Sunday with the barely-containable joy of people who found out the tab was picked up and cannot stop telling strangers.
And then we do something stranger and more wonderful than talking about it.
We eat it. We drink it. We become what we receive: the body of the One who fills all in all, sent back out into a world that doesn’t yet know how loved it is.
Thanks be to God.
The ALL Says Stay