Sermon preached at the Regional Confirmation Service
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Pittsfield, MA
Feast of the Ascension 5-17-12
by Lee Cheek, Lay Preacher, St. James Episcopal Church, Great Barrington, MA
Peace be with you, Friends of God! Peace be with you, (Bishop) Gordon, Hannah
and Jennie! Peace be with you, candidates for confirmation
and reception into this Communion! And
peace be with you, mentors, sponsors, friends and families!
15 years ago, May 4, 1997, on the Sunday afternoon before
Ascension Day, Gordon confirmed me and received several others at Grace Church,
Dalton, less than a year into his tenure as our bishop. Tonight some of you will be confirmed by him
in this, the final year of his tenure.
As I recall, most of the service that afternoon was somewhat of a
blur to me. But the one thing I remember
was the weight of Gordon’s hands on my head. The weight was sure and firm—certainly much more
sure and firm than my understanding at that time of the strange and complex
vocation of being a follower of Christ—which is what I want to speak about this
evening.
So I am grateful, Gordon, for that palpable firmness on my head and
the assuredness it communicated to me that the project I was signing up for was Love’s project and it was Real. Real with a capital “R”, even though it has
taken me over ten years to appreciate just how Real it is and just how
stunningly difficult it is to remember I am actually a part of it.
Understanding this project and my part in it is the foundation for
what I understand to be the Christian vocation.
And it is this: that Love (for God is Love) desires my agency in its
world and there is no part of my life that Love does not desire to be in
charge.
That Love (for
God is Love) wants me (even ME!) to be its agent in the world of my life and
there is no part of my life where Love does not desire to be in charge.
And this I know, and in this I place my hope for the world, because
of the life, death, and resurrection of a young rabbi two thousand years ago
and the witness of his followers who eventually learned to read the troubles of
the world through his eyes.
I say “eventually” because their new understanding of his life
which became the foundation for their true vocation began when they encountered
a dead man now strangely and fully alive, who greeted them with ‘Peace’ and let
them know that their cowardice and
betrayal had simply no effect on his continued love for them! Joy!
Through the eyes of this Forgiving Victim, they began to
understand the scriptures, law, and history of their people—a people who had
been called since Abraham to use the subversive power of forgiveness and mercy to
organize and unite themselves with one another, rather than to exercise the temporary
unifying powers of human sacrifice, whether cultic, spontaneous, or
conveniently “lawful.”
Sadly and tragically today, human group cohesion and security is
still being achieved far too often in the same murderous way.
So what does this strange picture of “ascension” of the
state-crucified and God-resurrected Jesus have to do with our vocation as
Christians? What does this text have to
say to us tonight, we professed members of a shrinking, yet still world-wide
communion of those who long for restorative love and rescue from our
entanglement with the powers that rule us by fear?
First of all, let us say that the picture of the Forgiving Victim
rising to take his place on the throne beside the Ancient of Days is not a
fanciful or pretty picture of Jesus’ cloud-ride to heaven which we also might
get when we die if we have tried to be as good as Jesus or made a lot of public
noise about how great we think Jesus is.
It was, rather, for Luke’s community, a picture of the removal of
the veil of separation of Heaven (God’s place) from Earth. Any Temple Jew of the time would have understood
the significance of the image. The
Temple which had been the place of holy intersection between Heaven (God’s
dimension) and Earth (humankind’s dimension) could now be anywhere—two miles
away, over in Bethany! Or in Pittsfield,
or in your home or your body. In short,
wherever we are!
Because
the point is that the connecting pathway to the place of holy intersection is
accessible from anywhere, for it is the pathway for the journey of the heart.[i]
In addition, the image of the aforementioned cloud should be read
as the traditional symbol for the presence of God, like the cloud pillar of
Yahweh that guided the Israelites in the wilderness. So this says something to us, too, about the
identity of the Forgiving Victim as God himself—the One who has a claim on
us and on whom no human can have any claim.
It was for them, and is for us, a picture full of hope in the understanding
that Love (for God is Love) really is ultimately in charge—not the Caesars of
this world whose claim on us is not ultimate.
You see, the manipulation of our allegiance, which is the giving
of our hearts and minds, is where evil does its work in the world. And the work of the church in the world is to
ask the hard questions about whose lives and dignity are at risk in any human
endeavor and in any human encounter in our homes, schools, our workplaces, and
our institutions, especially our churches.
For it is a hopeless world indeed if
the Caesars of our world and their collaborators are ultimately in charge of
our souls.
This is how it must have felt for the disciples when it looked
like the restoration of Israel had seemed to fail for them with Jesus’ state
ordered execution. They couldn’t see
that their ideas—like many of our own today—about salvation from the world’s
evils were pretty much limited to getting rid of the bad guys violently or
securing their identity of goodness with moralistic pride and
self-righteousness.
The powers that discount, degrade and devalue other human beings,
especially their enemies, were still in charge of their souls, even though they had been following for
three years a man who had challenged every current idea of kingdom, sacred or
secular, that was established by exclusion.
What I love about the Ascension event is the joy when they learned
how wrong they had been about who was really in charge and what was going to
save their world. Their story continues in us today, because
it is only in this process of being wrong and being forgiven that any of us has
a chance to understand and embrace our part in God’s great project
of rescuing us from our own violence towards one another.
Even though we are disinclined much of the time to being wrong
about something or someone, isn’t it a mercy when we can finally let go of the
lie and relax into the truth? And when
we are relaxed, are we not less inclined to resort to returning tit for tat, or
hitting back? Less inclined to spread
lies and rumors to shore up our goodness?
Less inclined to demonize others?
Using the language of Ascension, we could say it this way: anytime we can let ourselves be wrong about
someone or something and relax into the truth is the moment when Love’s throne
room moves into our lives.
And that, my friends, brings us back to what we are doing here
this evening in this splendid space with the beautiful liturgy and traditions
lovingly crafted by the saints before us and the saints among us now. For each of them began their individual,
personal journey with the hope to which each disciple is called:
that Love is indeed in charge of the world and that Love’s Spirit of
Truth will be in us and among us and always for us and for the world.
So in my attempt to use the Ascension event to say something about
our vocations as Christians, I hope you have some sense this evening that Love desires each one of us to be Love’s
agents in the world, and that there is no place in our lives where Love does
not desire to be in charge.
Candidates, I hope for you that the weight of Gordon’s hands on
your head will help you remember your acceptance into this strange vocation[ii]
in a world that values a different kind of power.
And for all of us here this evening, I hope that when Gordon
stretches out his arms in his inimitable and memorable way at the end of our
service, we will remember that we are loved
and blessed into this vocation. In his
gesture, let us take in the hope for us in Christ’s Blessing. It is how the disciples returned to Jerusalem
with great joy. May you return to your
own Jerusalems with great joy, too.[iii]
AMEN.
[i]
Joseph Ratzinger, in part two of his Jesus
of Nazarath (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 2011), described the path that the ascending Christ opens to us is “not
a matter of space travel of a cosmic-geographical nature: it is the “space travel” of the heart, from
the dimension of self-enclosed isolation to the new dimension of
world-embracing divine love.” (p. 286)
[ii] On
the Christian vocation, Rowan Williams writes:
“In his faithful and obedient relation to the Father, Jesus sketches a
new and comprehensive vocation for human beings. So to come to be ‘in Christ’ , to belong with
Jesus, involves a far-reaching reconstruction of one’s humanity: a liberation from servile, distorted,
destructive patterns in the past, liberation from anxious dread of God’s
judgement, a new identity in a community of reciprocal love and complementary
service, whose potentials are universal.”
(from the essay “Trinity and Revelation” in Williams’ On Christian Theology, Blackwell, 2000).
[iii]
The preacher is indebted to the following authors for much of her reflection on
Ascension: James Alison in Raising
Abel (Crossroad, 1996) and The Joy of
Being Wrong (Crossroad, 1998); N.T.
Wright in How God Became
King (Harper, 2012) and Surprised by
Hope (Harper, 2008).
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