When I was in third grade, two of my classmates drowned. We lived in northern Indiana at the time. It was winter. They were playing on the ice.

Of course, they were playing on the ice. We all played on the ice. We went ice skating, played ice hockey. The ice in northern Indiana fifty years ago was reliably thick most of the winter.

Until it wasn't. Tim Minor and Eric Mathews fell through the ice in one of the many small lakes around town and couldn't find their way back to the holes they'd fallen through.

When I got to school the next day, the playground was abuzz. One of my friends, Scott Eckert, caught me before I reached the monkey bars. "Did you hear about Timmy and Eric?"

"Hear what?"

And he told me. I couldn't quite wrap my eight-year-old brain around the fact that kids I knew, kids I played kickball and capture the flag with, kids I complained about the cafeteria spinach to, were gone.

We weren’t best friends or anything, but I sat next to Timmy during reading group. That day, there was a gap in the circle, a gap that felt sinister, like it might try to expand and devour us all.

As a kid, I guess I knew about death. I mean, I watched Gun Smoke and Mod Squad, after all. But "knowing" that people die in an abstract sense is different from "knowing" that actual kids die because Timmy's place on the reading rug next to you is empty.

The world can't help but be a different place after you come to realize that death stalks us. But it's not Timmy and Eric’s absence, is it? It's the sudden understanding that the grown-ups don't actually have everything under control like we thought they did. It's the terrifying realization that the world operates by rules we don't fully understand, and that sometimes those rules can be cruel and arbitrary, creating empty spaces in the circle.

That empty space on the reading rug symbolizes all the empty spaces we'll encounter throughout our lives—the missing voices at family dinners, the vacant chairs at committee meetings, the silence where laughter used to be. It's the first crack in the foundation of our childhood certainty, the beginning of our lifelong struggle with questions that don't have easy answers.

All of us have to face the empty spot on the reading rug at some point. And the fact of someone’s absence only serves to drive home the point that the world we casually assume is stable and predictable holds a lot more secret horrors than most of us are comfortable entertaining on a nice Sunday morning in June.

Finally coming to the realization that there are a lot of corners in this world that we can't see around is difficult. But realizing that our inability to see what's coming next often makes us defenseless against the forces that shape our lives—that’s what keeps us awake at 3 a.m., wondering if we've prepared our children for a world that might not be as kind as we've led them to believe and they’re fixin’ to find out.

That kind of uncertainty raises the tension level, doesn't it? Kind of makes you start looking around for the nearest grownup, realizing that something is potentially horribly wrong with a world you've often assumed was, if not friendlier, then at least more reliably predictable.

Which is why this passage ... if we really understand it ... probably ought to scare us enough to just say the benediction and go home.

Consider the situation of Jesus' followers as our text begins. Jesus has just said goodbye to the gang and ascended to be with God. The disciples, who'd gotten Jesus back after Easter, lost him again at the ascension. They're dealing with their own version of the empty space on the reading rug—the teacher who promised to be with them always has physically departed, leaving them to figure out what comes next.

Our Gospel tells us they were "all together in one place." That sounds peaceful enough, doesn't it—kind of a staff retreat?

But let's not romanticize their situation. These weren't people gathering for a team-building exercise or a potluck supper. These were frightened people huddled together, trying to make sense of a world that had turned upside down.

So, what do they do?

The disciples do a bit of shopping around and find an Airbnb where they can hole up for a bit while the heat dies down. As followers of a known and publicly executed revolutionary, Jesus' disciples had recently found the world in Jerusalem and its surrounding environs to be unforgivably inhospitable.

They weren’t stupid. They knew what happened to people who got too close to suspicious movements that threatened the status quo. I mean, they’d seen their leader crucified between two thieves. They understood that association with Jesus could be a death sentence. So they did what any rational person would do—they found a safe space and tried to wait out the storm.