May 4, 2008
Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year A)
Ascension Sunday
Acts 1:6-14; Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36; Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11; John 17:1-11
Last Thursday we celebrated Ascension Day at Trinity Church in Concord with four other Episcopal churches. As usual mostly the choirs and choir families came. This year because the children's choirs joined us, it was a bit bigger crowd, but nothing like what the singing of the combined choirs and the work of the choir directors deserved. It was really beautiful. I was honored to be the one who preached. And as always I hope that next year more will come and celebrate this rather crazy feast day of the church on the actual day!
But here we are the Sunday after the Ascension and we have much the same story from Acts. It is, as I said Thursday, a bit of an absurd feast day. Even the pictures that have been made famous throughout the centuries of feet dangling in the air are a bit absurd, humorous even, but the Ascension is only one of the many absurd things Christians believe about God – and taken out of context would cause anyone to laugh. Yet it is not unreasonable to know that the body of Jesus is not anywhere on earth and somehow that fact had to be explained. And so the gospeler Luke explained it with the Ascension story.
And for me it’s a reasonable explanation. He was going up a mountain and disappeared into the clouds. Last summer I had the privilege of spending my summer vacation in Tanzania – said ”Tanzan´ia” by the native people when English speaking benefactors are not around. And I landed in Kilimanjaro and stayed at the base of that highest mountain in eastern Africa twice, once at the beginning of my trip and once at the end. Neither time did I see it. I was right there but I did not see it.
It is like the mountains near my parents home in Arcadia, California. They live a stone’s throw away from very high craggy mountains that are so close it often feels like you can put your hand out and touch them. Yet often the fog comes in, clouds if you will, and you can’t see them at all. People visiting for the first time have absolutely no idea they are there. So it is no wonder to me that Luke describes Jesus as disappearing into a cloud – standing at the base of a mountain. It seems perfectly natural to me
And as I said on Thursday, it seems equally likely that the disciples would stand there trying to still see him, hoping he would come back, praying that they were not the ones left behind to do the work that Jesus began and that Jesus entrusted to them. Most of us, when we pray, ask for supernatural help, to get done what we think ourselves powerless to do; or we find ourselves knowing the cost of doing it, so we ask God to do it for us, a very human response, and one that is time honored.
Every time we ask God to end poverty, or heal a terminally ill person, or reconcile the estranged, or maybe even, I would wrongly say, maybe we even pray that God will smite our enemies, as the psalmist did often, or how about, my personal favorite, winning the lottery? These are “Jesus do it for me so I don’t have to" prayers!” To ask for these things is human, to expect God to do our bidding without our taking responsibility for our prayers and doing the action, the change and the hard work required of us to accomplish the things we pray for is to be a bit like the disciples standing there with their mouths’ open hoping Jesus will come back and do the work he commanded them to do: make disciples, heal and bring reconciliation to others in Christ’s name. When we make this sort of, “O Jesus, please do it for me so I don’t have to” prayer, we fail to follow, we fail to live up to and into the mission Christ has given us by way of his charge to his disciples right before his ascension.
“The Spirit will be upon you,” he said. And the Spirit is upon us, the Spirit that empowers, leads, and cajoles us, guides us, holds us, and, most of all, loves us. But the Spirit is not magic. We can’t pray this – whatever this is – to get that, whatever we want, whatever that is. Every time we make a prayer we need to be willing to give ourselves up, even as Jesus did on the cross, give up our tenacity, our resources, our lives, our self-righteousness – whatever it is we think we can’t possibly give up, that may be the cost of God answering our prayers!
Not always, of course, perhaps not when we pray for the sick – but perhaps even then, for the healing that people often need is the presence of someone at their bedside, and in that case it is not enough to pray, some times we have to be the one who visits. The advantage of living in community is that we have people who visit our sick regularly and people who knit prayers into shawls that become a tangible cloak of our presence, along with our prayers.
Action follows prayers! If we pray for the health of the earth, then we need to be active in healing the earth by reducing our own carbon footprint. If we pray for the poor, then we need to work for a change in cultural and government systems that keep forcing generation after generation into poverty. If we pray for the end of war and for the safe return of those we love, then we need to be peacemakers at home as well as abroad.
Prayer is a powerful thing. And it is even more powerful because the spirit is within us and empowers us to do the things Jesus has asked us to do. We can’t just stand here with our mouths gaping, staring at the clouds, hoping Jesus will come back and do it all for us any more than the disciples could. They prayed, it’s true. But then they lived as Jesus did, to the best of their human ability, and we can do no less.
This morning we are baptizing three children into this band of human disciples, Julia, Brian and Callum. It is a daring thing we do, bringing children so young into this company of followers who actually believe the absurd, and act on it. We will recount our faith with them, and promise to support them in their life in Christ. And as we do so, let us remember that we also support each other. And that following does not mean praying for the world to be the way we want it to be, or even the way we think God wants it to be. Following means being daring enough to risk making the kingdom of God an earthly reality by our daring actions of faith, healing, disciple making, and reconciliation.
And as an aside, another thing I said on Thursday that I want to repeat to you this morning, is that I think God laughs with us when we see pictures of feet up in the clouds that try to explain the mystery. I think we need to laugh sometimes at the absurdity of it all. If we dare not laugh, then we probably don’t have the courage to really believe it.
But my prayer for us, and for the children we baptize this morning, Julia, Brian and Callum, is that we will not be ones who spend our time waiting for Jesus to come back down out of the clouds to rescue us again, but that we will be ones who dare to go and live the way Jesus commanded, and follow where the Spirit leads us.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd