Lectionary Link
7 Easter Cycle A June 5, 2011
Acts 1:6-14
Ps. 68
1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11
John 17:1-11
Last Thursday was a major feast day of our
Lord and there were five people here to celebrate this major feast day. It was the feast of the Ascension of our
Lord, sometimes a forgotten feast between Easter and Pentecost because it
occurs on a Thursday and therefore does not get the benefit of Sunday billing.
It does let
preachers off the hook to explain the phenomenon of someone rising into the
clouds and going out of sight. Most of
us are not members of the flat earth society and we do not hold to the ancient
cosmology of the netherworld, the flat earth, the dome sky and beyond the dome
sky, heaven, the abode of God. Up and
down does not mean much for people who live on a globe in a vast universe,
though it does mean something for us in simple perceptual relationships.
As Christians, we
are people who re-enact the drama of salvation each year in the cycles of the
church seasons which are comprised of events in the lives of God’s people and
more particularly, the life of Jesus Christ.
We have an annual teaching curriculum in the presentation of salvation
history to focus upon different aspects of our lives of faith.
We know that in our
lives there is much that we do not see nor understand. That mystery in itself is a continual lure
for us to continue to try to know as much as we can. Today, in our time of scientific knowledge,
many have come to find a conflict between the ways in which we know
scientifically, and the ways in which we know things through faith.
People of faith
may be looking forward to the day when scientists invent a microscope that can
present a visualization of “spirit” as the most sub-microscopic particle
smaller than neutrons, protons and quarks.
People of faith, may be waiting for a macro-scopic way to travel to the
far edge of an expanding universe to provide the biggest picture of all. It probably will not make much difference for
our faith, because as humans we perhaps have to embrace that we know things
differently and use language, symbols and expression differently in our
different ways of knowing.
Physicists attempt
to give invisible answers for the visible world. People of faith use more the language of art
and love to speak about other parallel realms.
Whether we live in
the world of ancient cosmologies or our own age with a cosmology that will be
regarded as primitive by people of the future, to be human is to be possessed
with language and with the ability to formulate meaning and asking what is the
worth of this world and my life in it.
On this Ascension
Sunday, we contemplate the movement something like an elevator between the
parallel universes in the ways of knowing and in the language that we use to
find meaning.
In Christian faith, we have inherited the annual
drama. God off stage and unknown, but
revealed in Laws, and inspiring prophets and wisdom teachers. God, occasionally as sending messengers,
angels, who make visual, the invisible to indicate the communication between
inner world and outer world. God
entering the human stage in the person of Jesus Christ, thus validating the
human way of knowing things that are more than human, God exposing human nature
as being threatened by the very notion that God could be known in human
form, God in Christ constituting holy
friendships on earth to create a community, God in Christ leaving the visible
realm to prove that God has never left this visible realm but only needed to
awaken people to the closeness of God’s Spirit who could be known intimately to
those who could be made aware.
And so we are a
part of this annual presentation of Salvation history and we must each year
re-write its compatibility with our own age and with our own lives.
On this Ascension
Sunday, you and I are asked to advance in the art of living in parallel
universes. Up and down are not
necessarily just perceptual visual phenomena; up and down are parallel phenomena of inner realm and outer
realm and the ways in which we use words and in the ways that we come to
meaning in our lives. And our lives have
many, many meanings. And what makes them
exciting is that we always have more meanings to discover.
The prominent
image that is presented to us of Jesus Christ today is that he prayed to God
his Father for his friends. Here we have
Jesus Christ as the chief symbol of one who lived best in both realms; he was a
fully divinized human being and so even in his human life, he already lived an
ascended life. His communication between
the realms of experience was complete. And
he revealed to us that at the heart of living, life is intensely personal
because God is like the best human parent who we can experience as a wonderful
friend and mentor for our lives. That is
what Jesus revealed about God. We,
Christians, have wanted to make Jesus so special that we want Jesus to be an
only child. But that is not what Jesus
wanted; Jesus revealed God as his mentor Father, so that you and I could know
that God is mentoring parent for us and that friendship and relationship and
communication is what is at the heart of finding meaning in our lives.
If we believe that
friendship and communication are the highest values of life, perhaps we can
survive situations where friendships and communication seem not to be present in
this world. Jesus praying to his Father
and wanting his friends to discover this same relationship reveals to us what
we regard as most important in our Christian faith.
Today you and I
are invited to pray. Pray in all of the
ways that we can. Prayer is the art of
communication; it can be done alone or in community; with word, song, liturgy,
ritual, silence, and our acted deeds in the course of everyday life. Prayer
is the attempt to find our voice in language to work at communication between
the various realms of our being; to communicate between our inner lives and our
outer world.
Today on this
Ascension Sunday, you and I are ascending and descending with Christ as we try
to weave inter-relationship between the realms of our lives. We are trying to bring concord between our
inner realms of desire, hope, and quest for what is ideal, beautiful, perfect
and complete and our outer worlds where everything is in some state of becoming,
of being developed, of going through rites of passages and phases of abrupt
discontinuities.
Jesus prayed and
showed us that we live not in just physical and visual up and down worlds, we
live in inner space and outer space and we have words to bring the two
together. And from the realm of where
words come, we realize that we are born to seek meaning for our lives. And the meaning of our life is known as we
pray, as we find our voice before God and with each other as we hope for the
best meanings of all for ourselves and for each other. Let us Ascend with Christ today in our prayer;
let us find our voice before God so that we can live and speak the Good News,
the Gospel of God in Christ. Amen.
