Now What?

A sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter
June 1, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Acts 16:16-34; Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21; John 17:20-26

Now what? It’s a question for in-between times. It’s the question after a graduation–one all of our graduates we will honor today have no doubt heard. Now what? What comes next? It’s the question after a tragedy. Now what? How do we move on? It’s the question after surprise, after the unexpected is realized, whether good or ill. Now what? What’s around the next corner? It’s the question of the disciples on this seventh week after Easter. Jesus ascends into heaven 40 days after the Resurrection (that was last Thursday), and in his parting instructions he told them to wait for power from on high in Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit will, indeed, come next week, on the feast of Pentecost. But on the seventh Sunday of Easter, with Jesus gone and the Holy Spirit not yet descending, we are in an in-between time, watching, waiting, wondering, straining to see around the corner, asking, well, now what?

As the disciples sit in this uncertainty, I bet they remembered the words of Jesus at the Last Supper. Perhaps that is why the lectionary takes us back to those moments before the trial, death, and resurrection. Our gospel reading comes from John 17, right before the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus has given his disciples those final instructions–“love one another,” he says over and over and over again. He says, “where I am going you cannot come now.” He promises that the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Comforter whom the Father will send in Jesus’s name, will come to guide and help them. They remember those words as they sit in a room, as they pray, as they watch. Jesus is not with them bodily any longer; he has ascended. But they remember his words. They remember that he prayed for them, that they all would be one. They remember and they wait. Now what?

They could not have known. Not yet. They could not have known the power that would be unleashed on Pentecost. The power that is second nature to St. Paul in today’s reading from Acts–the disciples would come to know such power, but not yet. They could not have known–not yet–the liberation that would come as the wind sweeps down from heaven, just like at creation, remaking them all, calling them into a new way of living in the world, without fear, just as the Spirit liberates the young woman today from a life of slavery. They could not have known–not yet–the peace of the Spirit that would guard them, keep them, sustain them even in jail cells, even through beatings, giving them prayers and praises as they walk through their darkest hours, giving them strength to have compassion for their captors, to invite them into new life. But they would in time. Like Paul and Silas, the Spirit would grant them all a song in the darkness that was more powerful than the shackles that bound them. 

But not yet. Today they wait, and they wonder, now what? Do you know what that’s like? To sit in an in-between time–a time of wonder, perhaps of grief, always a time of discernment? You sit there tense, with fists gripped tight, trying to hold onto the small amount of control you have. But eventually you relax those hands. You open yourself up to the God of all goodness. You wait, and you trust. Said another way: you have faith. You realize none of this is on your timeline. God is in control. 

When I find myself asking, now what, waiting in the uncertainty, wondering what comes next, straining to see around the corner–in such moments, I remember the prayer of the 20th century monk Thomas Merton:

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though
I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Whenever I pray that prayer, I imagine the saints in heaven. We hear some of them in our reading from Revelation today. Their robes are washed; they have drunk the water of life as a gift; they have taken Jesus at his word and accepted his invitation to come. I imagine them listening in, and perhaps they think back to that upper room where they waited for 10 days. Perhaps they think back to prison cells and shackles. And as I say amen, they say it with me. For they discovered once, long ago, what we know now: that our Lord Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega, does not leave us comfortless. And whenever, whether in despair or wonder, we ask, now what, we can be assured that the Holy Spirit is already at work in mysterious ways we can hardly know.