What can we say May 21? Easter 7

    {Check out my 28 minute talk, "Hope as Arsenic," which I was supposed to give in Minneapolis for the Festival of Homiletics, but due to my hospitalization and the doctor grounding me, it's on video now for their video package - and for you to view too!}

   Acts 1:1-14 has the virtue of serving as Easter 7’s reading, but also the lection for Ascension Day (May 18). Were I to hold a Thursday Ascension service, the attendance would be fewer than the handful of disciples who witnessed it live! I preached on this 3 years ago, if you'd like to watch. Skeptics hoot over the idea of Jesus defying gravity (Wicked, anyone? or John Mayer? anyone else?) and floating up into heaven. Art images are hokey – of course. Own the hokey. God put it there for us. What better time to say to the skeptic, the intellectuals, the doubters, that yes, there's room in church for you too.

   If we recall that Jesus was raised with a “spiritual body” (as we will be too) – a body, but a transformed kind of body that appears and disappears…  Gravity may just lose its hold on us, along with a great many other limitations. Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest, March 28) asks if we are loyal, first to my intellect and only then to Jesus? “Faith is not intelligent understanding, faith is a deliberate commitment to a Person.” How can we entertain solid science questions with candor, grace, and flat out interest, and yet stay committed to whatever is at the heart of the story of the Ascension - which shows up in our creed every week? As a young man, I heard a preacher tackle the Ascension with quibbles, but then said “All I can figure is that this story gets Jesus back home where he belongs, with his Father in heaven.” Note to self: use this one day.

   What commitments does this Person ask of us here? Jesus departs, leaving the disciples alone – as Gandalf did to the hobbits in Lord of the Rings. Without him, they face horrific difficulties, requiring courage and hope; they need one another; they have to stick together. Gandalf shows up again at the climax, but then bids them farewell once more. Wasn’t Tolkien mirroring the Bible’s plot in some way? Jesus dazzles – then leaves. He trusts them, the little, unlikely ones. And he trusts us, we unlikely ones. Instead of dominating them, or creating codependency, he entrusts his future to them. We are Jesus here, now. 

   “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ is to look out on a hurting world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless now” (attributed to Teresa of Avila). My first book, Yours are the Hands of Christ, spent 100 pages explicating this.

   Notice verse 1: “In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach.” Luke is what Jesus began; Acts is how his people continued what he began. So we’re all about continuities. WWJD indeed! It’s never mere niceness, or judgmental attitudes, but sharing property, touching untouchables, and more. Does the church today – does my church today – continue what Jesus began, and what the first disciples continued?

 

    I adore that Easter-morning-like query from the white-robed-guys: “Why do you stand looking up into heaven?” Is it a rebuke? Of course we’re gawking! He just defied gravity. Aren’t we who follow him supposed to do lots of looking up? Maybe it’s a commission: don’t just linger over who Jesus was, but go, get moving out into those rippling circles that define our mission field: Jerusalem, then Judea/Samaria, then the ends of the earth. Do we do mission in our back yard or abroad? Yes.

   How lovely and worth naming, with no takeaway, the reality of verses 13-14. A room, with people, with names. Including women! And how tender: Jesus’ mother, Mary. And astonishing: Jesus’ brothers. If you want proof that Jesus was the one, look no further. His brothers, who would be the first to fall prey to sibling rivalry, who could say He cheated at marbles! Or He stole my toy! Or He at the last piece of cake! They are there, risking life and limb with everybody else, worshipping the guy they shared a bed and toilet with. Their oneness, and our failure at oneness, draw our attention to…

   John 17:1-11. At the end of the very long Last Supper, there’s a long pause – and Jesus prays, in such a moment, as if anticipating our awful history to come, for the unity of his people. To any who would split the church, be very sure Jesus has a different purpose for his church – that we be one.

   David Ford’s new commentary on this text is especially eloquent – or maybe wise, the wisdom framed in lovely verbiage. “Is there any chapter in the Bible richer in meaning than this?” “There is an extraordinary combination of definitive ultimacy and intimacy, together with the invitation into an infinitely capacious abundance of meaning and life… Could any desire be more daring than this desire of Jesus for those for whom he prays? Here the inner dynamic of believing and trusting in Jesus is shown to be the desire for union in love.” “The desire of Jesus is for the intimacy and intensity of God’s own life to be opened up for wholehearted, trusting participation through the ongoing drama of being loved and loving. And the desire of Jesus amounts to a promise.”

   Ford calls all this “the summit of love” – a place to look back and see paths of meaning converging, and to look forward. I love his grappling with whether this is a literal prayer or not, as he quotes Lesslie Newbigin: “The prayer is not a free invention of the evangelist; nor is it a tape recording of the words of Jesus.” Ford declares, “It is testimony distilled and enriched by the Spirit.” He encourages an intertext reading with the Lord’s prayer – and there are so many parallels and deeper understandings! Try it.

    There is a lot in Jesus' prayer about the disciples being in but not of the world - a pregnant, memorable framing of what our life is like, we whose citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20). And then Jesus' culminating plea is that, just as Jesus has consecrated himself, his mission is that they may be consecrated - and verse 19 adds "in truth." We could use some of this consecration-in-truth, in our day of cynicism and ideology where nothing is what it appears to be and truth is negotiable and ideological slant more than a real, trustworthy thing.

   Jesus’ prayer about glorification: in John, it’s not a titanic win, some shining, towering victory. It’s the Cross. It’s the nails and thorny crown, the blood, the lance in the side. This is how the Father glorifies the Son. If there is any single point clergy will struggle to communicate, or even to “get” themselves, it is this. It’s not the rush to the empty tomb, it’s not the soaring or the shedding of agony. It’s in the agony, it’s at the heart of the God-forsakenness where the glory is glory.

   Take special note in preaching of verse 3. Jesus prays for them and us: “This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus whom you have sent.” Better rewind. Could this be? Eternal life – isn’t it all the fun, acing every hole playing golf, festive parties, reunions with lost loved ones, eating bonbons and not gaining an ounce, basking in the brightness of heaven and the endless music of angelic choirs? Eternal life isn’t God saying You get to keep on keeping on. It’s not the infinite extension of the best life you’ve enjoyed thus far. 

   1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11. I’m not fond of what I tend to view as a vapid Christian habit – the lifting up of a single Bible verse as an amulet of protection, or a medicinal dose of comfort. But 1 Peter 5:7 is quite good, something I text out now and then to my mass text distribution – and people love it, as they should. “Cast your cares upon the Lord, for he cares for you.” {I'm not as fond of "Cast your anxieties on him," as it begins to feel more about me and my inner self than "cares," which are usually real things out there... but it's not awful.} 

   I wonder about a sermon that just settles around that invitation, reflecting on how much we need this, how it’s not a quick fix or a blithe assumption that God will do what I demand, that it’s the sharing of our anxieties, our darkness, whatever we care about, with the assurance that God cares. That’s as much as we really want from the people we love: my wife can’t fix my trouble, but she cares; my best friend might be clueless about my work situation, but he cares.

   It’s not a forsaking of responsibility or even asking God to make up the little deficit of what you can’t manage for yourself. I think about Henri Nouwen’s (best?) book he wrote during his own darkest days: “You so much want to heal yourself, fight your temptations, stay in control. But you cannot do it yourself. Every time you try, you are more discouraged. So you must acknowledge your powerlessness. You have to say Yes fully to your powerlessness in order to let God heal you.” He notes how addiction recovery begins, continues and ends on just this assumption: you are powerless. And all our troubles are addictive, aren’t they?

   And then there’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s marvelous little book on the Psalms, which are as good a primer in how to pray as I’ve ever known: “The Psalms cast every difficulty and agony on God: ‘We can no longer bear it, take it from us, and bear it yourself, you alone can handle suffering.’” After all, verse 7, the little golden nugget, hinges on what Peter just said in verse 6: “Humble yourselves.” The humble know they aren’t masters of the universe, and that the grit of free will might just spiral you into ever worsening maladies.

   At the same time, verses 6 and 7 keep some rigorous company, don’t they? Verse 7 is followed by counsel to be disciplined, and to keep alert. If you’re in a pickle, and you cast your cares upon the Lord, and there is some lightening of the burden, you’ll be right back where you were in a few hours without the discipline of new habits, avoiding perilous places and people. Sam Wells wittily wrote that “Ethics is not about being clever in a crisis, but about forming a character that does not realize it has been in a crisis until the ‘crisis’ is over.”

   Hence not merely how to cope with but how to grow from or even avert the “fiery ordeal.” Sounds like flaming torment – but the Greek, peirasmos, is the same word used for Jesus being “tested” in the wilderness, with the connotation of test, trial, discipline. The worst of combating difficulty is feeling alone; 1 Peter offers good company: we “share” (the Greek is koinonia!) in Jesus’ sufferings!

   This might be a word for clergy more than it’s a word for clergy to preach to the people. And the sneaky peril is this: I suffer in my ministry – so can I safely conclude it’s because I’m so in fellowship with Jesus? Or is it because I’ve been a dufus and have miscalculated my emotional capital or what my people can bear in love?

    ** I’ll add here that I like to seed a sermon by texting all my people with a question. A question I ask them, apart from sermon preparation, is simply “How can I pray with you?” I get like a zillion replies, and reading them breaks your heart. For this Sunday, if I’m preaching 1 Peter’s “cares” or the Gospel we’re about to consider, asking our people “What are your cares, what are you suffering?” This prepares them for worship (and life with God), creates solidarity within the Body – and also provides me with something to ponder or even use in my sermon. If I’m preaching 1 Peter, I may just read a sampling. Then their hearts break too – and maybe break open to new life in Christ.

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   Check out my book on preaching - not how to preach, but how to continue preaching: The Beauty of the Word: the Challenge and the Wonder of Preaching.