The Solemnity of the Ascension of Our Lord

 

Now What?

Ascension has all the makings of a story’s end.  Jesus, who was crucified and is now resurrected, is once again with his disciples, teaching them to anticipate the arrival of the Holy Spirit. Then, in a moment of great transcendent glory, he departs, “lifted up into the clouds”.  We have been following the story since Christmas. Now it is only fitting that as we watch him ascend, there is a feeling of completion; the drama will certainly end with the arrival of the Holy Spirit.

In truth, the story continues to the Eschaton and the righteous judgment of humanity, culminating in the end of earthly history.

The ascension completes the human ministry cycle of Jesus and begins the reign of Christ within the Church. The Kingdom is more than a representation of Christ to humanity; it continues as God’s presence among us. For Christians, the Holy Spirit gives us communion with God the Father and Son; we now “abide” with God. For non-believers, we become more than simply messengers of a doctrine; we have the potential to be Christ’s presence.

The liturgical cycle reflects this well. Most of our time is spent after Pentecost. This is the time to compare our lives with the life of Christ and his ministry.  In the Advent-Christmas cycle, we revisit God’s incredible love for humanity and the birth of Jesus. Then, in the Lent-Easter cycle, we celebrate the mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection, ascension, and the spark of the Holy Spirit, which sets the Earth ablaze with God’s Kingdom once again. The final chapter has not been written, and there is much work yet to be done.

Sixth Sunday of Easter

 

Keeping Our Word

Jesus’ farewell address has the curious phrase, “Whoever loves me will keep my word.”  We all understand how to keep our word, but how is it that Jesus is asking us to keep his word. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is the Word, in Greek, the Logos of God.  The Son in the Trinity is the Word of God; the Son proceeds from the Father as God’s Word, his expression of perfect love for all creation.  Just as words that come from us reveal ourselves to the world, so the Word (Jesus) proceeded from God the Father as a revelation of God’s true nature.

Keeping Jesus’ word is nurturing God’s promise of salvation that Jesus’ life embodied as a sign of grace, God’s great love for His creation in general, and humanity in particular. The world can know God most intimately through Jesus the Christ, though God reveals Himself in many other ways and to many other peoples; however, it is our faith that tells us God’s preeminent and perfect revelation of Himself is through Jesus.

The second part of today’s gospel anticipates the gift of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.  Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as The Advocate or someone who acts on another’s behalf.  The Spirit, then, is the means by which we can keep Jesus’ word to us and God’s Word to humanity.  Jesus’ reference to peace in declaring, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.”  The world offers us a sense of peace that can only be temporary; the peace of Christ is eternal peace, but it isn’t a peace that leaves us in a type of protective spiritual bubble that inoculates us from the difficulties of life.  The Reverend A.J. Muste, a famous American clergyman who preached peace, said, "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."  

 We stand upon the foundation of peace that allows us to face the world in all its chaos and turmoil because keeping Christ’s peace means venturing into a violent and broken world with Good News when all around us is falling apart.  William Blakes’s famous line from “The Second Coming,” “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” is the bad news of the peace the world gives.  The peace of Christ is the center that holds for eternity and extends out into the world, and draws everyone in like foundlings brought from a storm into a warm, protective, loving home. Alleluia, Christ is risen!

Fifth Sunday of Easter

 

A New Commandment?

Jesus tells his disciples that he will leave them shortly. He doesn't have instructions, an organizational plan, or even inspired writings. He simply gets their attention by declaring he is giving them a new commandment: "Love one another." 

Interestingly, he doesn't repeat an earlier reference to the "greatest commandment" in response to fancy rhetoric from a Pharisee to love God and neighbor.  This commandment is more in line with the needs of the community of the faithful. Because if the community is not animated by love, love of God and love of neighbor grow out of fiction. What Christ is trying to establish is what grounds the community: love. Doctrinally, the Church is founded on Christ, which is all well and good, but it isn't a very practical statement without this "new commandment". Just as the popular phrase "believing in Jesus" doesn't help understand what one must do with this belief, reciting doctrine or dogma can't substitute for love. Christianity is not merely a creed.

In our first reading, we get a sense of the heady times in the early Church. That although "it is necessary to undergo many hardships", people saw the love of Paul and Barnabas that drew them to worship Christ, which is to say, to join them on this "way".  They "opened the door of faith" by inviting them to share a journey animated by love based on sacrifice.

It is easy to get lost in the rhetoric and rituals of Christianity and forget that resurrection is only through crucifixion. Sacrificial love caps God's revelations of prophets and kings, and ultimately of his revelation through Christ. To obey God's final commandment is to love his creation (including oneself) with all the passion we can muster and all the grace we can take.

Fourth Sunday of Easter

"I Know My Sheep"

If you knew God was speaking to you, it is likely you would listen. It is even more likely that you would be trembling in fear and, like countless times in the Bible, have to be encouraged not to be afraid. 

In the Gospel of John, we hear Jesus speaking as the Good Shepherd, which makes us sheep. Sheep have the reputation for being rather dull, but I suppose if you look at the course of history from the outside, say the way an alien race might see us, perhaps the sheep would come out ahead.

In the gospel reading, Jesus does not lead with a conditional statement: “If my sheep hear my voice”, he says “My sheep hear my voice”; it is a declaration. As a matter of fact, real sheep (not metaphorical ones) have been reported to be a good as people in distinguishing others in a crowd (Sheep 101.info). So why use sheep to make his point?

As in most of Jesus’ figurative statements, he uses something familiar to his audience; however, like Paul and Barnabas in the first reading, his audience was divided: some followed, and some thought he was a nut.

The Gospel of Christ isn’t a very attractive philosophy. Following is, for us, a becoming, a transformation into someone who recognizes Christ by his “voice”. Where do we hear Christ’s voice?  Most clearly, we hear the voice of Christ in those who are oppressed, who are marginalized and unjustly punished, who are poor in spirit and materially poor (the two often go together).  It is the “least of these”; but to put this phrase in context from the 25th Chapter of Matthew, the “least” are his disciples. Following Christ puts us at the end of the line, so the poor become not always those outside our community, but those inside our community as well. It is in our poverty, the ordinariness of our daily lives, that Christ speaks, and we respond.  Last week, Christ said to his disciples “Feed my sheep”; we are those sheep; we are those shepherds.

Good Friday of the Lord's Passion

 We Call this Friday Good

Good Friday is when we recall that even Jesus' closest disciples fled into the night and sought refuge away from the Roman and Temple authorities for fear that they too would be arrested. What a spectacular failure of faith.

Today is a day we move deeply into meditating on our need to tell God, like Jesus, hanging on the cross, to pull off another miracle, save yourself, and save us! No? We’re out of here! I’m not going to end up like that!! 

     Peter’s famous denial three times echoes Jesus’ earlier query, also three times: “Do you love me, Peter?” Peter responded then: “You know that I love you!” Now, fearful of his life, he replies, “I know nothing of this man you refer to!” This person is the disciple upon whom the Church is built: Peter, called “Rock” by Jesus, crumbles into sand at the crucifixion. 

     The cross is a spectacle of human folly, failure, and faithlessness. "Yet, in spite of that", as T.S. Eliot wrote, “We call this Friday good.” Its goodness lies in God’s total submission to his love for humanity in the person of Jesus. It is the goodness inherent when we willingly suffer for another person, perhaps a stranger, or even an enemy. Today, we contemplate how we respond to being asked to suffer for another, or whether or not the possibility of suffering sends us scurrying into the night, renouncing God. 

     “How could God allow such suffering ?” many ask and imply this is the cardinal weakness of Christianity. Perhaps the better question is “Why would God be willing to enter into our world of suffering?” The mightiness of God isn’t a lifeboat dropping out of the sky for survivors floating in a tempest; it is God falling into the water next to us to show us the way to dry land. 

     God with us, “Emmanuel”, means God suffering for and with us. God does not want to “save” us as much as he intends to be with us. We want to be “saved”, just as Jesus wanted to escape suffering; it's only natural. No one suggests that to follow Jesus we should seek out pain, but rather, following Jesus, we will enter the suffering of a suffering world with a resounding affirmation: “Yes” to being with the poor and hopeless, the excluded, imprisoned, tortured, and sick. “Yes” to the suffering of the world, and all its messiness and dysfunction. The Cross’s affirmation is entering into the heart of the suffering world and walking with those who suffer to find God calling us into his embrace, arms stretched out on the cross, now embracing us in all of our horror and pain, failure, and humiliation. Today, we come to the cross to be embraced by Christ and to be resurrected with him.

Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion

 

A Passion for Humanity

Today, we begin Holy Week. We see the Passion from Jesus' entry into Jerusalem to rolling the stone to seal the tomb. On Monday, we rewind to six days before Passover, followed by Tuesday and Wednesday with the Passover meal and Jesus' subsequent betrayal by Judas. Holy Thursday is the day Jesus washed his disciples' feet and told them, "If I, therefore, the Master and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet." Good Friday, we again meditate on The Cross. Today and Friday, we speak of the Lord's passion and God's love for His creation.

Passion.  The word evokes reckless adventure, impulsive romance, gestures too big to fulfill, and the brief but intense relationship of Romeo and Juliet.  This word places Jesus in the tradition of the foolish Romantics—an itinerant preacher from the margins schooled by his radical cousin (John the Baptist) and led to make one final, dramatic gesture to get his message out: die as a martyr.  But Jesus’ death was unlike the death of many of the martyred faithful to come.  His death wasn't for a cause, but for a relationship.  God fell hopelessly in love with humanity and inserted Himself to be with His own creation to deliver this message of healing, love, and forgiveness.  God’s power isn't the power of Zeus with lightning bolts from the heavens, but God’s message is now simply “Return; I love you”.

Throughout Holy Scripture, God has struggled and seemingly failed many times, just as His people have.  It has been an on-and-off-again cosmic love story between the Creator and His creation since humanity was first created and was given a choice not to love God.  This dance between Creator and created culminated in His great and defining act of love: self-sacrifice on the cross.

Today’s gospel reading recounts this journey to the cross with Jesus as God leading the way, experiencing the pain and abandonment of His creation, the physical pain of gruesome, ignominious death, giving into the abyss of his own uncreated end-all for love.  But in this remarkable journey, he found a few responding with courage: Simon of Cyrene shared some in your suffering, the women who gathered at the foot of the cross and stayed there long after the men had scattered for fear of being arrested, the felon who believed because he, of all people, responded to the suffering of an innocent man, and finally the Roman centurion who saw in this suffering man God’s love.  This is pretty intense stuff

Rather than struggling to believe, many struggle to disbelieve because God’s affirmation of his creation, of saying “yes” to the cross, is the ultimate folly for a world seeking safety over communion.  God as Jesus, crucified, dead, and buried.  Stay tuned.

Fifth Sunday of Lent

 

"Has no one condemned you?"
She replied, "No one, sir."
Then Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn you.
Go, and from now on do not sin anymore." 

The speaker in Isaiah is God, trying to redirect His people's attention from the pains of the Babylonian exile toward a new exodus. This return home has echoes of last week's Prodigal Son parable.  God is making a way in the desert, bringing water to barren soil, renewing life from death. Today's Old Testament from Isaiah is almost a response to Psalm 137: "By the rivers of Babylon; there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion." God is pleading with His people to "Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago, consider not" to re-establish His relationship with them.

I think it was more than a preoccupation with a sense of loss; it was a sense that God had spoken through the prophets, especially Moses, and that is where they sought comfort and understanding.  The prophetic reality of Isaiah, however, was calling them to abandon defining themselves by their history and look to God now and realize God is calling them to a living relationship.  Like all great prophetic literature, the past is only useful insofar as it points forward.

Today's gospel of the woman and man caught in adultery and Jesus' response is an excellent illustration of being called to the present.  They dragged the woman to the feet of Jesus in an attempt to catch him pronouncing the death penalty that was prescribed under the Holiness Code of Leviticus (20:10), but in so doing, Jesus would have been guilty under Roman Law of carrying out capital punishment, which had been banned for the Jews.  If Jesus pronounced a pardon, he would have been guilty of heresy.  Jesus, however, brilliantly escapes this trap with the legendary reply: "Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone".  This took the steam out of the crowd and foiled the plan of the religious leaders to trap Jesus. Along with the woman, Jesus does not condone the sin of adultery but merely says that since she was not condemned by anyone else, he will not condemn her.  He only admonishes her to "sin no more".

Using the Law as a tool for announcing God's condemnation of a sinner was looking back and missing the reality of God's present love and concern for humanity.  Using tradition and text as a tool of power still has its hold on religious authorities in the Christian church today.  Jesus was sent to fulfill the law in his person; text becomes the Word only when it is faithful to the living and present reality of a relationship with God in the Holy Spirit. Sin is an occasion for communal grief and prayer, not condemnation, for "we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God".  By grieving sin and loving the one who sins, we heal.  We can only love the sinner by loving ourselves first, as God loves us.  Loving means not encouraging sin but supporting the struggle.  The unrepentant sinner separates himself or herself from the community, but the community still longs for a homecoming, still longs for a renewed relationship.  As a community of sinners, the best we can do is keep picking ourselves up and leaning on God's unending grace.  Our response to ourselves is Jesus' response to the woman (and equally pertinent to the man not dragged before Jesus) is go, and sin no more.  We can only hope to begin a righteous life if the journey begins with love and support.  Lent is the ideal time to make this beginning because Easter is a celebration of this resurrection.