Ascension: It's about you - It's about me - It's about us

 

It’s about you – It’s about me – It’s about us

Faith is one part hope, one part imagination, and in many ways beyond explanation. Give it to Luke – Luke gives us not one, but two imaginings of just how the Risen Christ Jesus departed once and for all. One view at the end of the Gospel and one at the beginning of Acts. We call it the Ascension. In both he gives final instructions which instructions make clear that his Ascension ultimately is all about us. It’s all about you. It’s all about me.

 

The genius of Luke is that he, or she, tries to make the final Act of the Gospel, and the first Act of the Book of Acts appear to be about Jesus, with not one, but two possible scenarios of just how the Christ’s departure from this world may have looked like. Luke goes so far as to imagine the resurrection, the appearances, first to two companions on the way home, then to them again along with the rest of the crowd of disciples in Jerusalem, and finally his departure all on the same day: Easter. Then Luke imagines in Acts that the Risen Christ went on an appearances tour after the resurrection for the Biblical period of forty days (which means more than one lunar cycle), and THEN took off for parts unknown, but assumed to be at the right-hand of God.

 

So, which was it? All in one day? Or, forty days later? Luke knows what we all know – nobody knows. Nobody knows any more than one day the tomb was empty and people experienced him walking down a country road, breaking bread at a table, and eating fish to try and convince the often clueless disciples to at demonstrate that ghosts don’t eat fish! At the end of the day, it does not matter if it was one day, or forty, or even more, because the story as Luke tells it is not about Jesus. It is a story about us. About you. About me. And, what we call the Ascension is a hinge, a moment in time, between one period of time and another – it is that moment between the time of Jesus and the time of what has come to be known as The Church.

 

The Ascension is a Rite of Passage. Jesus had done all that was possible to do over several years to not simply demonstrate, but rather to actually live what it means to be created in the image of God his Father. The God of the Covenant who is repeatedly depicted as merciful, compassionate, forgiving, and caring. Jesus came to show that these qualities of God his Father were not abstractions, but rather ways of Being that are meant to shape the fabric of our lives. Lives that hope for mercy, compassion, forgiveness and care, but lives that often have a difficult time Being merciful, compassionate, forgiving and caring. Even worse, we often run away from those who try to love us out of such God-like qualities. Which is what I suspect is meant by the “sins of the world” – our resistance to God’s love for us which is mediated by others just like us. Sometimes we just do not allow ourselves to believe that God might really love us. Which is why God sent us Jesus as God’s little demonstration project!

 

It’s like the other day when I looked out at our pool which has been drained for repairs. I thought I saw something huddled against the far side and went to get a closer look. It was a fledged Mocking Bird who could not fly out. I got the skimmer net hoping he might hop on so I could lift him out, but instead he ran away to the other side of the pool where, lo and behold, there was another fledge also stranded. And who also ran away from my attempts at rescue. I was getting frustrated, and they were good at escaping my best intentions for them. It struck me all of a sudden – this must be what God feels like trying to rescue us and embrace us with all of God’s mercy, compassion, forgiveness and care. Jesus even said God his Father is like a Mother Hen trying to gather all her chicks under her protective wings. Three get under her wings, and two more squirt out! Jesus experienced this all first-hand. “Who said you could heal a blind man on the Sabbath?” they said. “Who said you could allow people to pluck grain to make some bread on the Sabbath?” they said. Jesus must have felt frustrated with all the resistance to God’s love for every single one of us.

 

Enter his final words. His final play. His final plan to rescue humankind from itself and gather us back under the Mother Hen God’s wings. His final instructions after eating some fish go like this, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high."

It’s brilliant! Get the recalcitrant chicks to gather one another back under the wings of our merciful, compassionate, forgiving, and caring God! We are to be witnesses of these things: repentance and forgiveness, which is turning back to God and accepting God’s love. God works through us.

 

Scenario Two in Acts – Forty days after the resurrection from the dead, once again he is with the disciples – and they want to know when he will overturn Rome and restore the monarchy of King David. ‘He replied, "It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.’ Translation: you will be my witnesses to the ends of the Earth! You will be given power from on high. And as I have said elsewhere, you will continue to do the things I do, and greater things than these! Brilliant once more! Note, however, they just stand there gazing into the sky until two characters dressed in white chide them: Don’t just stand there, get going and do what he said.

 

Do we get it? God is going to do God’s work of mercy, compassion, forgiveness, and care no longer through one man, but through all of us together. Knowing that we cannot do it all by ourselves, God will endow us with powers to succeed. And people will say when we feed them, or welcome them, for care for them out of God’s love and forgiveness, they will say, “You must have been sent by God. I thought I was on my own all this time, and here you are to rescue me, and accept me, and serve the Christ that is in me, and love me in all the ways that make me feel whole again!”

 

Instead of Jesus being God’s one-man demonstration project, Jesus commissions us all to be his Body on Earth – what the Episcopal Church calls the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society (DFMS). DFMS is the official name of the church first adopted by the special General Convention of 1821 and incorporated by the New York State legislature. In 1835 the General Convention adopted a new constitution which made membership in the society no longer voluntary but inclusive of all the baptized in the Episcopal Church. We are all domestic and foreign missionaries. This is exactly what Jesus had in mind on that day he Ascended to return to the household of God’s merciful and compassionate and forgiving Love. Jesus imagined that together we could reach out in Love to rescue more of the whole world, empowered by his Father’s love.

 

The Feast of the Ascension is about you. It’s about me. It’s about us. It’s about Being the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. It’s about being the Love that is all around! It’s about accepting God’s power of Love and loving others – all others. All of the time. To the ends of the Earth. It’s a miracle. As one wag put it, God’s wrath is God’s relentless compassion, pursuing us even when we are at our worst. It will take imagination to do this work to which we are called. And hard work. But we will finally Be, finally act, as if we are truly created in the image of God.

 

Oh yeah, about those fledged Mocking Birds. I devised a way to trap them between the net and the soft vinal side-wall of the pool and gently, slowly, brought them up to safety, much to Mother Mocking Bird’s relief! It feels good to reach out and rescue others – for it rescues a little something inside of ourselves at the same time. Amen.

 

See The Son Rising

Imagine The Love We Can Be Easter 6A

 

Imagine the Love We Can Be

As I ran across an old seminary text on the history of the Reformation, I found myself thinking: Was the Reformation really such a good idea? Before the sixteenth century there were arguably four branches of Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, along with a few movements that were not really what one thinks of as a denomination, but altogether let’s say there were fewer than ten organized Chrisitan movements, with the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Western Roman Catholic Churches being the two best defined Christian denominations.

 

Compare that with today, when it is estimated that there are something like 30,000 – 45,000 Christian denominations worldwide! I often imagine that a new branch of the Church is born at least once a day, and perhaps more often than that! As Jesus seeks to comfort the disciples after announcing that he would be leaving them, he continues to urge them to “love one another as I have loved you, and as the Father has loved me.” He imagines a kind of Christian unity, that honestly has not been seen in this world since the early father of Chrisitan Theology, Tertullian, in the second century converted to Christianity, leaving a pagan world in which everyone hated everyone else! It was Tertullian who famously wrote, imagining how the pagan world viewed Christianity: “Look . . . how they love one another (for they themselves [pagans] hate one another); and how they are ready to die for each other (for they [the pagans] themselves are readier to kill each other).”

 

Alas, even before the Reformation, that sort of Chrisitan love and hope had been shattered by episodes like the Crusades, when the Christian Crusaders had slaughtered the Jews and Muslims of Jerusalem, who at the time were living peaceably with one another, they then turned on the Christian community in Jerusalem as well. Look, how they love one another, indeed.

 

Yet, the earliest Christian texts, such as the First Letter of Peter, like Jesus in the 14^th chapter of John, urges strength and hope while living in a world that readily persecuted the Church. “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God's will, than to suffer for doing evil.” [1 Peter 3:13-22]

 

Amidst the acrimony and divisiveness of today’s world, one can hardly imagine defending one’s position, one’s faith, and one’s hope with “gentleness and reverence” for those who malign you. But this is what the texts, and what Jesus, repeatedly call Christians to do: imagine a better world. And to imagine this better world, early Christians, as Tertullian observed, truly loved one another to the point of laying down their lives for Christ and for one another. One can only believe that those who truly were attentive to the directions of the promised Holy Spirit, the Paraclete or Advocate as Jesus says, would withstand the endless persecutions with “gentleness and reverence” for the persecutors. “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you,” he says in his Farewell Discourse. “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

 

There are still those who live among us, Christians and non-Christians, who can imagine the kind of God’s Spirit of Shalom being possible in our own time. One such person was a singer song-writer, Ed McCurdy. After the murder of my two closest colleagues in ministry at St. Peter’s, Ellicott City, a fellow musician and friend of over half-a-century, sent me a CD of music meant to heal a truly broken spirit and heart. Among the songs was McCurdy’s song, Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, as sung and interpreted by Johnny Cash.

Like Jesus in John, and the 1^st Letter of Peter, the song calls upon us to imagine what could be if, as Jesus commands, we would truly love one another.

Last night I had the strangest dream

 

Last night I had the strangest dream

I ever dreamed before

I dreamed the world had all agreed

To put an end to war

 

I dreamed I saw a mighty room

The room was filled with men

And the paper they were signing said

They'd never fight again

 

And when the papers all were signed

And a million copies made

They all joined hands and bowed their heads

And grateful prayers were prayed

 

And the people in the streets below

Were dancing 'round and 'round

And guns, and swords, and uniforms

Were scattered on the ground

 

Last night I had the strangest dream

I ever dreamed before

I dreamed the world had all agreed

To put an end to war

Songwriter: Ed Mccurdy

 

It’s all about hope. Ed McCurdy, Johnny Cash, and recently Pope Leo XIV, all hope and imagine that one day there can be an end to humankind’s endless warfare.

The modern theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, in his little book, Experiences of God, which I picked up for the first time in over a decade, writes this about Christian hope: “Christ is our hope because Christ is our future. That means we are waiting and hoping for his second coming, praying, ‘Come, Lord Jesus, come to the world, come to us!’ Just as the resurrection faith is hope’s foundation, so Christ’s second coming defines hope’s horizon. Without the expectation of Christ’s second coming there is no Christian hope; for without it hope is not putting its trust in a radical alternative to this world’s present condition…It is only the person who does not really look for a truly new beginning, or who thinks that he has no need of it, who can do without the alternative future offered by the image of the returning Christ. A person like this can do without this new future. But for the person who commits oneself unreservedly to the new beginning…Christ’s future is more important than the world’s present.” This is why Jesus teaches us to pray, “Let thy kingdom come.”

 

Moltmann goes on to suggest that to refer to Christ’s return as a “second coming” implies Christ is not here at this moment and must come again. For that reason Martin Luther and others have urged that we speak instead of “the future of Jesus Christ” – for his future presupposes his present and presence in the here and now, most especially in our weekly celebration of the Holy Eucharist, our Holy Communion with Christ who promises that he is always with us and in us just as he is in the Father, and the Father in him.

 

The importance of hope and imagination in the life of faith cannot be overlooked. Christ’s future is our future – a future that lives out of love for one another, making our case for Christ’s future to others with gentleness and reverence, and allowing ourselves to truly commit to the belief that Christ’s future is more important than the world’s present. Every time we pray, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” may we recommit ourselves, as individuals, but more importantly as a community of those who follow Christ, to love one another as Christ loves us. Just as Christ has loved us, we also should love one another. Imagine the Love we can be. We can be The Future of Christ! May the Spirit of God’s love move us to become the community Christ imagines and knows we can be. Amen.

 

Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream Johnny Cash

The Farewell Easter 5A

The Farewell

“Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” [John 13:1] Thus ensues what many perceive as the most unusual portrayal of the Last Supper, unique to the Fourth Gospel. No mention of bread or wine. Instead, Jesus strips down, wraps a towel around his waist, and begins to wash people’s feet. There were the twelve disciples, including Judas who would betray him. There must have been other men, women, and children who had accompanied him into Jerusalem to participate in the annual festival of Passover – itself the remembrance of a long ago farewell. Farewell to Pharaoh, farewell to Egypt, farewell to several generations of slavery. The event that marks a new beginning in the lives of those descendants of Sarah and Abraham, Rebecca and Isaac, Leah, Rachel and Jacob.

 

Washing all those feet was his way of saying “Farewell.” It was a way of expressing his love for them all. Even for Judas the Betrayer. He issues a new commandment. Which may strike some as rather pretentious. But this is the logos, the Word. The embodied Word that was with God in the beginning. The Word through which all things came to be. The Word which is the light and life of the world. He had helped a lawyer reduce the 613 commandments of the Sinai Covenant to the simplified formula: Love the Lord with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your soul; Love your neighbor as yourself. For God is Love. So, if the Word was with God in the beginning, and the Word was and is God, surely, reasons narrator John, the Word has the authority to issue a new commandment: Love one another, as I have loved you. I risk my life out my Love for all of you. Just as I love you, you are to Love one another. N.B the “you” in the Greek text is plural – as in, “Just as I have loved y’all!”

 

Peter. Peter was uncomfortable with the foot washing until Jesus commanded him to submit, or have nothing to do with the Risen Lord ever again. And Peter at the end of chapter 13 insists he will follow where Jesus is going on Friday, the Day of Preparation for the Passover. N.B. Maundy Thursday was not, according to narrator John, the Passover meal. Jesus tells Peter, “No, where I am going you cannot follow right now. And before the cock crows tomorrow morning, you will betray me three times.” Peter refuses to accept any and all of this. Peter’s heart is troubled. So are the hearts of all those who traveled from Galilee to Jerusalem with Jesus to celebrate the festival of farewells and new beginnings.

 

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Commit yourselves to God, commit yourselves also to me.” He goes on to say he is going back to whence he had come – His Father’s house where there are many dwelling places. And I am going to prepare a place for y’all. And I shall return and take y’all to myself that where I am, there y’all may be also.” Then comes the problematic part: “And y’all know the way to the place where I am going.” Those with troubled hearts allow as that they do not know the way. How can we know the way, they say. One imagines Jesus, after three years of living the Love of God, his Father who is the full embodiment of Love, heaving a sigh of disappointment and disbelief. Thus begins his Farewell Discourse meant to comfort their hearts.

 

By way of clarification (no pun intended), he states, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If y’all know me, y’all will know my Father also. From now on y’all do know him and have seen him.” Let’s remember who is being addressed here – the community of those who have followed Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem. His gathered community of those interested in loving God and loving their neighbors. He is not addressing only Peter. Or, Thomas. Narrator John portrays him speaking to a particular community of people, not to the whole world. Jesus does not make a statement about the relative worth of other religions, other philosophies, or other ideologies. The lack of clarity, however, is signified by this particular community’s continued lack of understanding.

 

Jesus then tries to help them to understand. He says, in effect, the way in which I call y’all to walk, the truth and the life I call you to embody, is the way, the truth and the life of the works I have been doing: accepting others, all others; healing and welcoming into our fellowship those with disabilities; feeding those who hunger and thirst; welcoming strangers, even those foreigners who are utterly unlike us; bringing all people into the world of God’s shalom for all people. To commit yourselves to me, is to continue the works that I do…” and then comes the the kicker! “…and in fact, greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”

 

With all the attention on “the way, the truth, the life,” the truly most controversial statement of all is that we who wish to follow the Christ, and bear his name as our own, will do greater works than he does. We need to just let that sink in. Take a breath, and just let that sink in.

 

These are meant to be words of comfort for their troubled hearts. And yet, they are also words of awesome responsibility! These words are also meant for us, his gathered community here and now. We are to be those people in this world who do the things he does, “and greater things than these!” Then comes his promise. “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”

 

These prayers of ours are to be related to do the works he does, and greater things than these. This is not, “O, please, Jesus, let me win the lottery!’ Or, win a football game. Or, find a parking space. It is an invitation to pray something like this: “Please Lord, help us to feed even more people than you did when you walked among us.”

 

It is easy to overlook what this last part really means. Despite the cross, despite the tomb, despite his return to being the Word that is with God and is God, and through prayer and the works themselves, he is still with us even though he is gone. This farewell discourse goes on through chapter 17 in which Jesus prays to the Father on our behalf, which concludes: “Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” It is his farewell and a new beginning for us all.

 

This is how he settles their troubled hearts. It is all about the Father’s love for Jesus, and for those of us for whom Jesus is the way, the truth, and our life. That Thursday night began: “Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” And this is how it ends: I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” Let not our hearts be troubled. For he is in us, and we are in him. Now and forever. And ever. Amen.

Der Abschied – The Farewell

-                - Gustav Mahler 

He dismounted and handed him the drink of farewell.

He asked him where he would go

and why must it be.

He spoke, his voice was quiet. Ah my friend,

Fortune was not kind to me in this world!

Where do I go? I go, I wander in the mountains.

I seek peace for my lonely heart.

I wander homeward, to my abode!

I'll never wander far.

Still is my heart, awaiting its hour.

The dear earth everywhere

blossoms in spring and grows green anew!

Everywhere and forever blue is the horizon!

Forever ... Forever ...