LOOKING FOR GOD IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES
Ephesians 1:15-23 and Acts 1:1-11
May 4, 2008
I had a choice for today. This last Sunday before Pentecost is
designated, by the greater church, in two ways: It can be celebrated as
the 7th Sunday in Easter. If I had gone that route the
Gospel text, according to the brains behind the common lectionary, would
have been a nice reading from John’s Gospel, …part of Jesus prayer for
his disciples at the last supper. But the church suggests that this is
also Ascension Sunday and gives us, if we choose to go with that, this
text from Acts with its admittedly strange images of Jesus ascending
into the sky on a cloud. From the 21st century perspective
of modern science, cosmology, and non-literal Biblical interpretation,
making sense of the ascension story is, well, ….tricky.
But the Gospel writer is adamant that this story be told. Luke ends his first volume, and then begins the second volume with the same story, albeit with some notable variations in detail. Pay attention to this story Luke whispers. For in this story is not only an ending but a beginning.
Sitting at my desk on Thursday with a serious case of writer’s block and wondering if I had made a big mistake in choosing this text, I looked up at the row of Bibles on my bookshelf and for the first time, really, noticed that on the spine of the book jacket on the New Jerusalem translation which I bought last year, was the figure of Jesus from Raphael’s painting of the ascension….floating in the sky against a backdrop of clouds. Pay attention to this story something seems to whisper. OK. Let’s pay attention.
Have you ever watched a cat with a bug in the house? The cat will follow that bug around for what seems like an inordinate amount of time. And then the bug goes under a piece of furniture where the cat can’t go and the cat, for the longest time, lies there utterly motionless, watching, watching, expecting that bug to reappear at any moment. Meanwhile, the bug is doing its bug thing just inches from the cat’s nose but the poor cat is clueless and so tends to stay rather stuck until he just gives up on the bug. Cats are not very good mystics. They have a hard time relating to anything they can’t see, feel, hear or taste. Kind of like us.
That’s the picture I have of the disciples in this Gospel story. Luke isn’t describing an event. He is trying to describe, in a word picture, a moment of great theological and spiritual significance for the early Jesus movement: how it felt and what it meant to be part of this new movement that was changing lives and changing the world…a movement initiated by God through the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, in a time when Jesus was no longer present in the usual ways. That intense period of post-resurrection experience came to an end. That generation was beginning to pass on. What happens now is the question. Is this still real?
At the same time people were being changed…changed from the inside out…empowered in amazing ways…like ripples on a pond changing things around them. And so they were also asking the question: How can we understand what is happening to us? What is the relationship...the continuity… between what happened then and what is happening now?
Put that way, the question the Gospel story wants to answer is outrageously relevant. For here we are, 21st century members of this on-going movement and yet not all of our questions have been answered: Who are we and what is happening to us and with us? How are we still connected to this Jesus? Is he just an historical figure confined to the past or is there something else going on? From the search for the historical Jesus to the current spiritual renewal movements these are our questions!
They are often personal questions. If you have felt, even once, a tug toward the holy and mysterious that you could not name…a wistful and silent seeking for what is most profoundly good and real, then this is a story that invites you to open your imagination to a truth beyond words, because it was that search and that journey that the first century church was also about. And if you have, even once, been caught up in that intellectual quest to get back to the historical Jesus, to understand the flesh and blood person in order to make sense of why you are sitting here this morning instead of sipping a latte at Starbucks, then this story is speaking to you. Because then and now many people feel there remain some things still unresolved, mysteries beyond understanding and sometimes we get stuck there in the dimension of faith that is always on a passionate quest for understanding.
And so, to the inquisitive and the practical, to the confident and the seekers alike, Luke writes this story that is in part mystical testimony and part marching orders. To those still stuck in the “what exactly happened to the body mode for instance, Luke writes, don’t waste your time. Not so much because you won’t find it but because that’s not the important question. What is important is that what God was doing in Jesus' life continues even now. And we are part of it…empowered by God to BE Christ for the world. Luke ends the Gospel with this story…He begins the next chapter with it. The ending and the beginning are the same. And the continuity is in the lives of the community of those who continue to live the way of Jesus.
That doesn’t mean the questions will stop. But we don’t want to become paralyzed into inaction like the cat waiting for the bug. The intellectual journey will give us tremendous insight but it can take us only so far.
Sometimes we just have to stop waiting until we have it all figured out and start doing what we are called to do as the continuation of God’s work in Christ. Things that are hard and will always invite debate like forgiveness, and renouncing violence, and sacrificial sharing, and discover only later how those actions have taken on significance and power beyond anything we could have figured out on our own.
It is like we are connected to a source of power that we can’t control…can’t see. And if we can’t see it we assume it doesn’t exist. Luke says…be careful what you assume.
The dividing line between the holy and the mundane…the material and the spiritual, between heaven (which is wherever God is) and earth (which is the realm of our activity)…whatever it is that may separate those things is porous…full of thin places where they touch and intermingle. Just because the man Jesus is no longer here for us to touch and see doesn’t mean that the living Christ is not present. The Christ of God is with God…but is also coming to us again and again and again. …whenever two or three gather in Jesus name….whenever bread is broken and wine is poured in remembrance…whenever the hungry are fed and the marginalized are welcomed into community and the neighbor…even the enemy…is loved into wholeness….the Christ of God is there empowering in us more ways than we could ask or imagine.