ISSUES OF FAITH: Until the end of time, be with us

Published 1:30 am Friday, May 22, 2026

Readings: The Lessons Appointed for Use on the Day of Pentecost, Year A, RCL.

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of [the religious leaders of the day], Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” (John 20:19-22).

THIS COMING SUNDAY will be one of the great Festivals of the church year: Pentecost, which means “fifty days.”

For those who care about such things, there are five such festivals: Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension and Pentecost.

All these are tied to important aspects of the Christian faith: Incarnation, the Revelation to the Gentiles, Resurrection, the return of Christ to Heaven, and the coming of the Holy Spirit to Earth.

As humans, it’s our belief that we need all these aspects, because of the fact that we are not able to manage God’s work of renewal and salvation on our own.

We need the incarnation so that Christ could take on sin, and the Resurrection to seal the deal and reconcile us to God.

We need Ascension so that Christ can send the Holy Spirit on her way to support us here after Christ’s life on Earth came to an end (our bad, by the way).

And we need Epiphany so that the promise God made to the Jews would be extended, through to all peoples and nations.

Then we get to the green season — aka the rest of the Church Year, which represents life and renewal, but also a time that allowed the farmers and those who herded sheep and cows and other animals to get back to work and raise the food and other supplies we need to survive. (I have often thought that if Christ is the New Adam, as Paul tells us, then more than half of the Church Year, all those green Sundays remind us of Cain and Abel, the First Children of the Garden of Eden, one of whom farmed and one of whom raised livestock. And yay to all the farmers and shepherds and others out there who help us to renew the Earth. Thank you. I can barely manage my own shopping at Safeway these days.)

So the great arc of the year is swinging back to Ordinary Time, the plain simple services that wind us all down till the glory of Christ the King again, the last day of the Church Year.

That final Sunday reminds us of the pain and the wonder of Last Things, when the Earth will end its service and we all move on.

I’m reminded here of the fact that we will all die: like Ash Wednesday reminds us, “Dust we are, and to dust we shall return” on the low point of the Christian year.

As some of you know, part of my work is to serve as a spiritual director, and in session today, one of my directees said something really profound. He said, “following my mom’s death recently, I find that I feel myself seasoned in a way I never felt before.”

That stopped me in my tracks because that is one of the ways death serves us. We can find ourselves deep in grief, but also deepened by the experience. We find ourselves rounded out by the events in our life. They may be hard to bear and our sorrow may be intense, but we also have a chance to go down into our own selves and into the inner life of others, and find healing there as well.

It’s really hard at first, and it seems utterly without meaning, but then, after time, we find ourselves with new depths and a greater understanding of God’s role in our lives.

And so, that’s why Christ had to go back to God.

It wasn’t just that he had finished his salvific work and was free to go back to glory, let loose from his diminishment to the human (though that too), but also that he needed to send the Holy Spirit, telling the Spirit to go take care of humans, because they’ll need it.

As we know, the world is not always an easy place to be: there’s poverty, illness, lack of housing, despair, and, yes, finally death.

As atheist Arnold Scopenhauer famously put it, “Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse, until at last the worst of all arrives.”

Well, that’s a bit gloomy for me. I need to know that the human condition can be full of agony and horror, but there is meaning past it. Ask the victims of the Holocaust, and I do not say that lightly.

They faced horrors I pray to God I never have to face. We do awful things to each other, and sometimes it does seem to be without meaning. But we can also go, as many victims of oppression do, “singing to their graves.”

As author Raymond J D. [his usage] put it in a 2022 article from Gaudium, “Christian history is filled with stories of martyrs who went to their own deaths, joyfully, often singing hymns, sometimes even telling jokes as in the famous case of St. Lawrence) [who, being roasted to death by the Romans, said, “Turn me over, I appear to be done on this side.”] Their joy at their own deaths testifies to the clarity of the Christian hope, a joy in the face of death that has long puzzled the world.”

And so, we celebrate the arrival, and thank God, the continued residence of the Holy Spirit, so that, as we journey, in all times and all conditions, we remember God and glory in Him.

As today’s Psalm reminds us: “All of [Creation looks] to you / to give them their food in due season. // You give it to them; they gather it; / you open your hand, and they are filled with good things.”

May peace be with all of us.

________

Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. Previously a deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia, Dr. Keith Dorwick is a retired deacon continuing his walk with God who is part of the community at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Port Angeles; he’s also the executive director of Spiritual Directions of PA (https://spiritual-directions-pa.org), his next holy adventure.