A Sermon Preached at the Feast of the Ascension June 5, 2011: How Love Got Through

by Lee Cheek, Lay Preacher

And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy –Luke 24:52

I was so glad when Francie asked me to preach this Sunday and gave me the option of using the Ascension propers this morning, because unless you attended services in Pittsfield on Thursday, when David Pott was received into The Episcopal Church, you may have missed the Feast of the Ascension this year.

Unlike Christmas and Easter, there is no cultural holiday or ado made of this feast which celebrates the end of the forty days that Jesus spent with his disciples in those paradigm-shattering experiences of a dead man who comes back not to haunt them, but to forgive them.

Interestingly, most Christian churches don’t make a big to-do about the Ascension either. That’s too bad, because the moment of the Ascension is the moment of joyful recognition of the disciple’s HUGE discovery that they—even THEY!—had been loved into being a part of God’s true purposes, a part of God’s dream for the world that was much, much bigger than they had ever been able to imagine before.

Just to recap prior events, let us recall that the young rabbi Jesus had been going back and forth for three years between Galilee and Jerusalem inviting everyone without exception to God’s project of love: the complete elimination of violence which requires giving up the idea of retribution and vengeance.[i] This was not popular with the powers that be, then as now, who were politically skilled at using resentments and revenge for their own purposes. So sensing an uprising during Passover they chose to channel the energies of various conflicts in one direction, executing the one person they could agree to hate.

Jesus’ commandment to love was too demanding for his disciples to follow at that point … for they might be killed, too, hated and reviled by association with him. They betrayed him, lied about knowing him, and abandoned him to suffer alone what they saw was a degrading, humiliating end.

What they could not see then was that Jesus shared God’s eye-view of the world which was, of course, Love’s eye-view of them and thus was much more interested in expanding their ideas about love than their goodness or badness.

So when confronted with the risen Jesus, they came to gradually discover and trust that indeed, they had been entirely wrong about who and how God loves. For forty days they were saturated with the wisdom and knowledge that comes from the forgiving nature of love.

And according to the accounts we heard this morning, it ended for them in the scene depicted on our bulletin covers.[ii] I like that the woodcutters captured the sense of joy, not only for the disciples whose imaginations had been cut loose, blasted apart from the old paradigm about who can be loved, but for Jesus, too, at the sight of it all. He is doing some happy dance on that cloud!

And we see not only Jesus’ joy, but choirs of angels most likely singing Alleluias at the top of their lungs that Love had finally been able to free these people. Maybe that would be the original praise music! I think a crazy mix of East 17’s “House of Love” (you know, the song on the T-Mobile Royal Wedding spoof) and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus would fit the occasion.

Since that day, one person at a time, Love has been blowing apart earth-bound imaginations about who is lovable—or as we might say in the Christian language, who is in on God’s dream for the world. I would like to tell you one of those stories about how Love got through.

I was 15 years old in early June 1964 when I was caught pulling a long face during lunch at the Egyptian Music Camp in DuQuoin, Illinois. My piano ensemble teacher asked me why I was sad. With no sense of irony about being north of the Mason-Dixon line, this culturally blinded daughter of the Old South told her that I heard on the radio that the end of segregation was near.[iii]

To this day, I remember her deeply compassionate eyes as she asked me sweetly, without reproach, what that meant for me. I said that my school would be integrated, as if that were the most unheard of thing in the world.

But something in me was put off-kilter by the kindness of her unblaming gaze which signaled regard for me and who, from that moment, I would be on my way to becoming.

I like to think that looking at me just so, she knew that one day I would come to know the joy and delight of being in the company of people whose skin was darker than mine. In that most promising moment when she did not point the finger back at me for being a teenage bigot, her reproach-free imagination gave birth to my gradual discovery of mercy.

This mercy would enable me to begin forging a new story for myself that did not involve making someone else wrong or bad or dirty or stupid so that my place in society behind the Cotton Curtain, or anywhere else, would be secure.

Another way of saying this is that my teacher’s unconcern for my goodness or badness gave me room to eventually see that yes, I was wrong to transfer my anxiety and conflicts on to a repugnant, reviled other who would bear the blame.

And after some time, I came to be very happy indeed to be wrong, for I was able to share in some measure God’s eye-view of the world, where no person is to be called profane or impure[iv], not even me!

No wonder the disciples returned to Jerusalem with great joy. They were happy to discover that their hope of redemption and reception of mercy did not depend on their goodness or badness, or on the whims of a rescuing or avenging god, but solely on Jesus’ commandment of love that teaches us to pay no heed to the judgment the world makes concerning precarious, marginal people.

There is so much to say about what it’s like to be on the path of Love—the courage needed, the empowerment of the Spirit of Truth, the Love that got us here this morning, the Love that planted Gideon’s Garden yesterday morning, the Love palpably present at the celebration of Ruth Ide’s life yesterday afternoon, the Love that the world is still aching for, that we are aching for. But we can offer all that up in prayer in our petitions and thanksgivings.

So for now let us tarry here just a moment longer on the under-celebrated Feast of Christ’s Ascension which I like to believe that the Anglican priest and poet George Herbert had in mind when he wrote “Love (3)” which appeared the year of his death, 1633.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

If I lacked anything.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:

Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,

I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

My dear then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

So I did sit and eat.

AMEN.[v]

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[i] Matthew 5:38-40.

[ii] Free access and non-commercial use of over 31,000 woodcuts from The Digital Archives of Pitts Theological Library of Emory University, Atlanta, are available online: http://www.pitts.emory.edu/dia/woodcuts.htm; this image from Antwerp, 1646, by Christoffel van Sichem II and his son

[iii] The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the Senate on June 11 and was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson June 19.

[iv] Acts 10:28

[v] The inspiration for this sermon was from Catholic priest and theologian James Alison, especially his Raising Abel (New York: Crossroad, 1996).