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When Jesus leaves earth, in the Ascension, he advises that we stay in the city. We don't know everything we are going to know yet. We are not yet clothed with "power from on high." We will be. But we're not there yet. Jesus' advice in the meantime, or mid-time, between his leaving and his return, is that we stay where we are.

He is talking out of a rich sense of time. It is not the kind of advancing, clock-type time in which you and I live. He is talking about eternity and the way his incarnation in time has happened and will happen again.

There may be just a thousand days left in the century, but I doubt that it matters. I will wake up the first day of the new century with unknit yarn, unfolded laundry, unreturned phone calls, the same extra ten pounds of flesh. For me, time is continuous, cyclical, almost folk. For those who tell me about time, it is digital, advancing, and "modern." I save a certain hesitancy. I am suspicious of time that is not waiting for the return of its origin, for "God to come again in glory."

Time doesn't make sense without a beginning and an end. Digital time insults the good time of God which has a beginning and an end which are connected to each other.

I think I am as modern as the next soldier in Progress' conscientiously objecting army. Many of us resemble the Mexican woman who announced, "By day, I am Christian. At night, I dance." With Marcia Clark, by day, we wear our angel pins and on Sundays say our rosaries or sing our sophisticated doxologies. We swear we believe in the Trinity. We also cry in movies. There are those who will say these very mixtures are the post part of our modern culture. I bet my mother was fairly good at blending too. I don't mean that I don't believe in the Trinity: rather I mean that I believe in it and angels too, side by side, in a blend that is the best version of my city that I can come up with. I blend God's kind of time and culture's kind of time, all the time.

We blend city and God's city all the time, in many ways. We may believe in God's sense of continuous time but we also wear a watch. We make appointments and get to them (somewhat) "on time."

When Jesus advises that we stay in the city during this interim period, between his first and second coming, I think he means that we stay in time. That we live in our kind of time, our kind of city.

When we live in time, we live with our unfinishedness. We learn to be in process. We learn what it means to want to become new and not know how. What if you were sick of yourself, your house, your clothes, and your car, but were too old to take off for the West Coast in a jalopy? What if you had heard just one too many stories about the crash of currency in Indonesia and couldn't stand to worry about your own problems any more? But what if you didn't stop worrying about your own problems? What if a new part of you was struggling to be born, to shed an old skin, to find a new way -- but you felt wrapped tightly in shrink wrap, like a sandwich that has stayed on the shelf too long, waiting to be chosen, waiting to be used up, waiting to be discovered? Finally, all the customers go home and there you are, still on the shelf, still in a holding pattern. Shrunk. Wrapped.

Or you are an airplane circling over the airport. Air traffic control says wait your turn. You can't go down; you have to stay up. Others got here before you. But you could run out of fuel. You have told air traffic control that if you have to stay in this pattern one more circle, you might crash. They don't respond.

Or you are the pastor of a congregation that patterns itself after yesterday. You preach tomorrow; it lives yesterday. You wonder if what you do matters. You don't see the security of Sunday on Tuesday night in the board meeting. You live but you don't thrive.

You preach or hear a whole sermon on substituting the word "responsibility" for the word "fault" -- and then go to the annual meeting of the parish and the first three speakers say something that was not done or poorly done is their "fault."

Many of us are sure that God is a part of this kind of time as well as part of "perfect" or improved time. We see God as at least one step ahead of the devil. We know that even cyberspace has a heaven and a hell. We know the sacred part of present and past.

The Holy Spirit is on the Internet, if in no other place than the ways parents and children talk with each other daily again, after long separations. People are able to be closer to their families because of the Internet. People are able to find out after plane crashes what happened and to do so quickly. People are able to inquire after each other when a flood comes to a village they used to live in. They can get there quickly; they can ask what is happening to those they love. I have an e-mail relationship with a woman in China! Dare I imagine that God is not behind these good things that happen in our city? They seem to me to be part of the coming of God's time and God's commonwealth, what we called God's kingdom when that was the type of city people lived in.

Those of us who know the pattern of the Holy Spirit are not surprised. We know how Spirit breaks through nooks and crannies, webs and nets. We know how Spirit gets where it wants to get, even when "modern" has banned it from using the front door.

The Holy Spirit joins the devil in working pre- and post-modern, pre- and post-millennium. Children learn how to build bombs on the Internet. They also learn to know other cultures. Sometimes the Spirits are good; sometimes they are not. Often we are too naive to know the difference.

Jesus said, "Stay in the city," after he rose from the dead. He doesn't mean that we are alone. The Holy Spirit stays with us.

Sometimes our silence is more powerful than our speech. We may need to comment less on the seeming all powerful nature of the modernity blanket. We may need to let it make its own case.

Virginia Owens puts my strategy well. It is the quiet, sure hope in a miracle to topple modernity's conceit. She says:

The sustained existence of the church has always been by miracle ... Augustine died during the siege of Hippo: things could not have looked good. It will be interesting to see how the Almighty pulls this one off.


I'm not talking about trivial or well-promoted quiet, like that small tasteful sign which says that American Express "donated" the plaque at the Hidden Temple in Beijing. I am talking about things we say to each other when we really talk. I mean authentic speech and sharing with our God and with each other.

When we tell each other in truth what is really going on in our real time, we reframe ourselves. A new frame is a new picture. A reorientation of the material. A new frame is a kind of resurrection, or resuscitation. Or renewal. It is as good as a new outfit, as fresh as a haircut that works, as lively as a well-set table awaiting a well-cooked meal.

Writer Tillie Olson spoke of her life needing margin. It had run into the walls of her frame. Artists and photographers insist that the empty space around an object defines it as much as the colored-in part. Our journey through Lent and Easter is the rearrangement of the space in which we live. It is a look at context, at the air, at the nothing that is ours. We have the opportunity to live deeper in our time on behalf of God's time. We stay in the city of time and space waiting for God.

Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.