Ascension 2022 - The Valley of Pain

 Ascension 2022 – The Valley of Pain

With little time to process the targeted killing of 10 people in a Buffalo, NY supermarket, suddenly we are immersed in the killing of 19 young elementary school children and two adults in Uvalde, TX. In both cases, the shooters purchased AR-15 style automatic weapons legally at age 18 from Federally licensed dealers. A photo from what looks like a church or school yard in Macedonia, OH shows 21 chairs lined up outside in front of the building: 19 child-size chairs, with an adult-size chair on either end – a photo summarizing more than 1,000 words of pain, grief, anger and sorrow. Meanwhile, we are reminded with horrendous images from the eastern Ukraine Donbas region almost daily where at least 4,000 non-combatant citizens have been killed by the Russian invaders.

 

One afternoon in May of 2012, I returned to St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Ellicott City, MD, to find that my two closest colleagues in ministry, Brenda Brewington and The Reverend Mary Marguerite Kohn, had been shot execution style in the church office by a young man with a gun who took his own life in the woods nearby. Each time one of these mass shooting events takes place, there are countless numbers of people throughout the country and throughout the world who have memories of similar events in their own lives brought back as if it were happening again, over and over again. Right here. Right now.

 

It's easy to overlook what lies at the heart of storyteller Luke’s two versions of what the church remembers as The Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ. In his two-volume work, Luke-Acts, beginning with the events of what we call Holy Week, the 120 men and women Luke tells us who were in Jerusalem with Jesus had witnessed the brutality of the Roman Empire’s use of crucifixion not only of their Lord and companion, but of others, all others, whom the Empire considered a threat to what the Empire deemed law and order of its authoritarian regime. Both Luke and John describe the 120 as hiding in fear of who among them may be next. Children and teachers throughout these United States know this kind of fear as they practice “active shooter” drills just to be able to go to school each day.

 

A colleague I have never met reminds us that Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar and priest, has said, “All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.” [i]

 

All week at our Live-Stream Noonday Prayer I have been reminded that the Ascension, which Luke describes twice, once at the end of the gospel and again at the opening of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles,[ii] is not really about Jesus finally, forty days after Easter, forty days having returned from the tomb to appear among his followers, finally returning from whence we all come and to where we will all one day return. It is about us, the survivors, and what we are to do, as Jesus modeled over and over again - what we need to do to transform our pain, our grief, our anger and what often feels like paralyzing, numbing sorrow.

 

Both accounts of the Ascension in Luke-Acts depict Jesus’s departure as a teachable moment. Jesus is giving instructions that must have sounded dangerous if not outright insane: remain in the city, stay in Jerusalem as “my witnesses” – witnesses as to how we are to live even in the midst of the terror and pain of our present circumstances as an occupied people. Like those 120 men and women disciples, we are to remember that Christ is already Lord of a Kingdom like none we have ever seen or experienced in human history. A Kingdom, a world, in which spears are to be turned into pruning hooks, and guns melted down to become gardening tools.[iii]

 

As the 120 men and women gaze up into the sky at the departing Christ, two men in white robes suddenly appear nearby. We have seen them before. The women immediately recognize them as the two men robed in white who greeted them at the empty tomb.[iv] “Why do you stand looking up into heaven?’ they now say. Translation: Did you not hear the man? You are to be his witnesses back in the city of Jerusalem, and in Samaria, and to the ends of the Earth! You have been called by him to live God’s peaceful tomorrow today! Get going! He has promised to send his Spirit, his Power, his Love, his Compassion to clothe you from on high as his witnesses, his ambassadors to all the peoples of the world. Get back to the city. Get to work! There is much work to be done to transform the pain, grief, anger and sorrows of the world into a joyful and peaceful tomorrow today!

 

Yet, the deeper truth of the Ascension is that Jesus never really leaves us. Whenever we gather to share the bread and the wine, his body, his blood, he is here. Whenever we reach out to feed the hungry, heal those in dis-ease, welcome the stranger, care for the poor, the discarded, the outsiders, he is here. Whenever we sing the glory of these Great Fifty Days of Easter, and pray the Psalms, he is here. Whenever we pray the final words of Holy Scripture, “Come, Lord Jesus, come,” he is here. He is with us in our pain, in our grief, in our anger and in our sorrow. Alleluia, alleluia he is here! Reminding us to stop gazing into heaven and get to work living God’s peaceful tomorrow today! Amen.

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[i] Tim Seitz-Brown on Facebook

[ii] Luke 24:44-53,  Acts 1:1-11

[iii] Ibid Seitz-Brown

[iv] Luke 24:1-12

Rogation Sunday 2022 Easter 6C

 

Healing the Earth / Healing Ourselves

“Let your ways be known upon earth, your saving health among all nations.” Psalm 67:2

            I was listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and a First Nations member of the Civil Potawatomie Nation as she combines science with the wisdom of her elders as to our relationship with the Earth. In her nation’s native language there is no word for “it,” our much used indefinite pronoun. As a result, one does not think of, let alone address, a plant, or an animal, or even rocks, rivers and streams as “it,” anymore than anyone of us would refer to dear old Aunt Grace as “it.” Science does objectify such things, whereas Kimmerer’s nation treats everything that is of the Earth as living beings.

            “I can’t think of a single scientific study in the last few decades,” she offers, “that has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It’s always the opposite, right? What we’re revealing is the fact that they have a capacity to learn, to have memory. And we’re at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings.”[i]

            Psalm 67 reminds us that since the very beginning of creation, we were put on this fragile Earth our island home to know the Creator’s ways, and that there are ways to walk upon this planet as participants in the health of all nations – which ultimately, clearing all the other obstacles of religion, politics and national identities aside, depends on our stewardship, our caretaking, of all living things around us.

            The problem with a worldview infected by the Enlightenment and science objectifying everything around us is that we tend to carry on a one-way relationship with the things of nature and see this world as objects to be consumed and exploited with little or no concern for the needs of plants and animals and rocks, rivers and streams, and the earth itself, let alone any concern for the future not only of our planet, but of our children and grandchildren. Ironically, Kimmerer suggests we need to retreat to a child-like way of knowing, which is actually a worldly-wise way of knowing – a deep kind of attention that we pay as children can be a “doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity. And it worries me greatly, she says, that today’s children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than 10 plants.”[ii]

            Listening to this conversation, I was already approaching our lessons in Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5, and John 5:1-9, asking myself, Just what does Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath and John exiled on the isle of Patmos’s vision of a new Earth, a new Jerusalem, have to do with Rogation Sunday? With no need for a cultic center like The Temple, all the rules of sacrifice and healing are out the window. Instead, there is a “river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” It’s all there.

            We need to allow this vision to reside in our hearts, not our minds. When we do, we begin to see that all we need for health and healing, even the healing of nations, has been given. In all that is alive all around us is all that we need to go beyond simply finding ways to sustain life on this planet, which is to treat creation as something we sustain only to be able to consume more and more. The vision invites us to go beyond sustaining and to open the door to reciprocity – “recognizing that we humans do have gifts that we can give in return for all that has been given to us, is … a really generative and creative way to be a human in the world. And some of our oldest teachings ask what does it mean to be an educated person? It means that you know what your gift is and how to give it, on behalf of the land and of the people, just like every single species has its own gift. And if one of those species and the gifts that it carries is missing in biodiversity, the ecosystem is … too simple. It doesn’t work as well when that gift is missing.”[iii]

            Jesus knows this reciprocity as he abandons rules that suggest you cannot heal on the Sabbath. He knows that the man waiting near the pool inside the Sheep Gate of Jerusalem ought not have to compete with others to get to the healing waters at just the moment the water is stirred. It turns out that survival does not depend on who wins and who loses, or who is the fittest – it depends on the kind of reciprocity, the giving and sharing of gifts, throughout the entire ecosystem. Jesus gives away his gift of healing. We say we know this, and yet the allure of greed and conspicuous consumption of resources tempts us to ignore what even more ancient civilizations have long known. Every plant, every ant, every drop of water, every molecule of breathable air is essential to the earth and to one another.

            Four times a year we renew our Baptismal Covenant to shape our knowing God’s ways upon earth, ways meant to lead to healing a fragile Earth as well as the healing of relationships with one another, including, says Jesus, our enemies and nations. Perhaps we need to regularly renew a covenant of reciprocity with Creation itself. Kimmerer suggests such a covenant might look like this: “We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity. Plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Our elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift we must pass on just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning, for the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers, and the memory of snow.”[iv]

            The elders of the Civil Potawatomie Nation remind us that life is a dance if we remember that the Earth is a gift we must pass on just as it came to us. Our ceremonies must always help us to remember, all our dances will be dances of grief and mourning should we forget to regularly join in the Dance of the Giveaway, the Dance of Reciprocity, that our hearts and eyes may be opened to see all of Creation as living, and true, and ready to give back to us the wisdom of healing that is to be for all peoples, for all nations, for all time. May the Creator’s ways be known upon earth. Amen.

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[i] The Intelligence of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer with Krista Tippett, On Being, May 12, 2022 for this and all further references to their conversation, https://onbeing.org/programs/robin-wall-kimmerer-the-intelligence-of-plants-2022/

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid

[iv] Ibid

The Primacy of Love : Part VI

 

The Primacy of Love: Part VI

The first words I saw online Saturday morning were, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a strong mind.” A friend from my days in the gym, Armando Ortiz had posted them on Facebook. I was immediately reminded of an afternoon when I was alone in a large church in Rochester, walking up the aisle, and saw these words from 2 Timothy 1:7 in stained glass. Directly across the aisle was another window with these words from 2 Corinthians 13:11, “The God of Love shall be with you.” I remember standing there in that church and repeating these two verses over and over to myself. Love and a Sound Mind.

 

We tend to think of a sound mind in terms of knowledge, and a sort of unspoken assumption that more knowledge will lead us to greater success – both personal success and success in solving this world’s great problems and crises. Whereas, Ilia Delio reminds us that Bernard of Clairvaux realized that love itself is a kind of knowledge possessed of its own kind of logic. “The knowledge of love is not of the intellect alone but of the heart, an integrative knowing in the field of awareness. Knowledge through love is performative, for the one who sees the truth of things becomes a revealer of the truth through the actions of love. True knowledge is never an end in itself but always a step toward and ever deeper, richer transforming union.”[i]

 

This is what Jesus is talking about in John chapter 10, “I and the Father, we are one.” The Judeans who are questioning his identity, “Are you or are you not the one we are waiting for, the Christos, the Anointed, the Messiah?” A question for which they have preconceived and prefabricated answers – characteristics or certain minimum requirements to qualify as God’s anointed Christ or messiah.

 

Whereas, Jesus points away from himself to the performative actions of love which he does on behalf of Abba, God, Father – turning water into wine, healing those in need, feeding those who hunger and thirst for even a small sign that God is their protective shepherd as well as literal, aching hunger for a scrap of a meal shared with others – five thousand others on one occasion alone.

 

“The Father and I are one,” he says, in our love, our mercy, our forgiveness and compassion for all people. The Father and I are united through our actions of love and mercy. The sheep or our pasture know this and join us in the unfolding of a world of justice, peace and love for all persons. We are artisans of the future. God’s future. For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a strong mind. Join us, and know that the God of Love shall be with you.

 

In the very next verse, his questioners pick up rocks to stone him. They try to arrest him. They accuse him of blasphemy, profaning the very name of their God – as if God is some sort of possession that needs defending. They are afraid of such perfect love that cares more for others than for themselves. This is madness, they must think. And of course, madness it is! It is a Holy Madness to empty oneself on behalf of others – others you do not even know. Cannot possibly know. Where outside of Facebook can anyone truly ‘know’ five thousand people! And yet, he gives away all that he has so that they may be fed – which goes far beyond a morsel of bread and fish, but simply a sign that someone, anyone, cares about us and our need for love, and care, and wholeness. So that our fears may be set aside and eclipsed by the source and energy of all life and the entire universe – love.[ii]

 

Before we ever met, Armando would see me at the gym, flailing at the various punching bags until one day he walked over, and almost gently, demonstrated how one can strike each of the various bags in a manner that can enhance your speed, your strength and your attentiveness, your focus. For Armando it was a small gesture of what we used to call brotherly love born out of a deep faithfulness to the life of his shepherd, the Good Shepherd, who leads us beside still waters. For me it made all the difference not only in learning the mechanics of the “manly art,” but was evidence that when we walk together as children of God the Father we don’t ever have to worry. Through this world of trouble, we have to love one another. Even in the very smallest of things, in the smallest of gestures of care for one another. For it is even in the smallest gestures of love that we and the Father are one.

 

Elsewhere, our Bible reads in 1 John 4:18, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.”

 

We are surrounded by much fear every day. We are encouraged by bad shepherds every day to fear one another. We are told outright that it is dangerous to love one another. That ‘the Other’ is not to be trusted. Influenced by such bad shepherds we feel a need to pick up stones and throw them at one another. Or, worse. Much, much worse.

 

May we begin each morning, as my friend Armando started my day, reminding ourselves, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a strong mind.” That, “The God of love shall be with you.” That through the eyes of love, we see the face of God. Yesterday, today and tomorrow. There is no fear in love, for the God of love shall be with you.

Amen.

 

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[i] Delio, Ilia, The Primacy of Love (Fortress Press, Minneapolis: 2022) p. 80-81)

[ii] Ibid p.82