Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Elise Feyerherm, March 10th, 2024

It’s been a long time since I’ve been to the circus. If memory serves, the last circus performance I saw was the Big Apple Circus in Boston, over twenty-five years ago. I’m not a huge circus fan, especially when animals are involved, because no matter how well they are treated, I know how inhumane circus life is for a creature meant to live wild and free. Of the human performers, one of the most entertaining acts is always the trapeze artists, who swing and glide and soar across the performance space in “death-defying feats.” It seems so effortless, though we know it isn’t. It is certainly elegant and wondrous to see human beings flying through the air in beautiful arcs, catching and letting go of bars, ropes, and each other.

I have never seen a trapeze artist fall, missing the bar or a partner’s hand, but I know it can happen. The margin for error is so small, the precision of the human grasp never guaranteed. What must it feel like in that moment between letting go and laying a firm hold on that bar, or rope, or hand? It lasts only a few seconds, usually – are those seconds ones of exhilaration, confidence? Trepidation, adrenaline, hope? Or all of those things at once?

Have you ever known a time like this in your life, when you had let go of some identity, or person, or work, or life, but didn’t yet know what would come next? Maybe you quit a job without having another one in the queue. Maybe it was a divorce, or an empty nest after children had left home. Maybe leaving treatment for an addiction or mental health challenge, wondering how to re-enter your life, or forge a new one. Or maybe you know what is like to be in a community where one leader has left and another one has not yet arrived. 

These periods are sometimes called “liminal” periods, whether in the life of an individual person or a community or a nation. “Liminal” means “on the threshold,” from the Latin word for that ledge in a doorway between two spaces. In a liminal time, you are neither here nor there; you’ve left the old but have not yet landed in a new thing. Liminal times are full of uncertainty; they feel extremely disorienting, making us anxious, grasping for certainty and security wherever we can find it.

William Bridges has written, in a book about leadership in managing transitions, “This is a time when you’ve let go of one trapeze with the faith that the new trapeze is on its way. In the meantime, there’s nothing to hold on to.” 

The Israelites in the wilderness are experiencing liminal time. They are no longer enslaved, but they lack a firm identity as a people. They have a leader, but are frustrated by how hard it is to make this long, uncertain journey. Their anxiety makes them long for a past that cannot be recovered and shouldn’t be recovered. They grumble, and are irrational – first they say there is no food, and then they complain about the food. Which is it? I’m not sure they even know. All they know is they have let go of one trapeze and the next one has not shown up yet. And there’s no safety net.

What the Israelites don’t understand yet is that this in between time, as hard and scary as it is, is the place where they will meet God, be transformed by God, and forge a new and salvific identity with God. This time of wandering in the wilderness is not just unavoidable; it is necessary, and full of grace in ways that times of stability are not. 

Franciscan priest and teacher Richard Rohr believes wholeheartedly in the power of liminal times; he is all in! He writes that liminal time in our personal and communal lives is

“the realm where God can best get at us because our false certitudes are finally out of the way. This is the sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed. If we don’t encounter liminal space in our lives, we start idealizing normalcy. The threshold is God’s waiting room. Here we are taught openness and patience as we come to expect an appointment with the divine Doctor.” 

So how do we live in liminal space and time? How are we here at St. Paul’s to do this? You may think we’re beyond this: we’ll have a new rector by the fall and all this waiting and in-betweenness will be over and we can go back to normal. 

That’s just not the case. This in-between time lasts far longer than we expect; it continues even after new leadership arrives, because it takes time to get our footing. 

We avoid this uncertain time. The way to let God “best get at us” in this realm is to face it, and live in the present. When we pine for the past or push for a premature future, we’ve allowed poisonous serpents to bite us. The Israelites had already been poisoned; the serpents sent by God were simply a reflection of what was already happening. If we’re being bitten by poisonous snakes, the remedy is to face the source of the poison, as the Israelites looked at the bronze serpent on a pole. 

Notice that God does not remove the poisonous serpents, but rather provides a remedy for their venom. So where is our anxiety? The story reminds us that we cannot eliminate it, but we can name it. And then ask, Where has that anxiety led us to fall back on old certainties or patterns?

Jesus said that “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Especially in liminal times, we are called to look to Jesus as he is lifted up on the cross. When we look at Jesus on the cross, we see not so much the source of our own pain, but a reflection of the pain we inflict on ourselves and others when we refuse to look for grace in the uncertainty. If we are being faithful to this time of wandering, of being neither here nor there, we will be willing to face our tendency to try to fix things without asking if there is something new to which God is calling us.

The task for us now is not to focus on how we can survive, for we, like the Israelites, are being led and cared for by God in our wilderness. We have everything we need, except perhaps the understanding that we have everything we need. There is food, but we imagine ourselves starving, because it is not the food we expected. If we start from the trust that we have everything we need, how might that impact our actions, our life together? Might it bring us to looking to each other instead of saviors from outside, whether those are rectors or renters or fancy marketing strategies.

We have everything we need right here, in this liminal time. We do not have to look elsewhere. How much do we really know about the gifts and longings that each person here brings to St. Paul’s? The search committee knows a lot about those things by now, I imagine; now, how is the whole community going to discover and nurture and celebrate them?

The first thing we have to do is let go of the trapeze, even though it means hanging in mid-air until the next one arrives. God will not let us fall.