Sermon – June 21, 2015, Responding to the Killings at Mother Emanuel

In this week’s newsletter, Mother Liz celebrates the parish’s feast day with Malcolm Guite’s sonnet on the Ascension, exploring its paradoxes: ending and beginning, absence and presence, humanity and divinity. Jesus leaves the disciples to fill all things with even more profound intimacy, and it is his broken, still-wounded body—”the heart that broke for all the broken hearted”—that ascends to God’s heart. The rector invites us to sit with these mysteries during the “dazzling darkness” between Ascension and Pentecost, pondering how we are held and hidden with Christ while called to be his presence in a world of crisis, wonder, and grief.