What Did you Expect, May 4, 2008

Acts 1: 1-14
Ephesians 1:15-23
According to the Apostles' Creed,... we believe in “the bodily Ascension”.
Of all the Creeds and Confessions, and teachings of the Church, this is one of the hardest for us. That Jesus forgave those who betrayed him, who abandoned him to suffer and die is one thing, to believe he stepped on a cloud and sits at the right hand of God, is another. Part of our difficulty is our human avoidance of death, particularly of thinking about what happens to the dead body, part is the incredulity of this according to logic and reason.

The Church has done mental gymnastics to try to explain Papal Infallibility, the Virgin Birth, to try to equate Astrology to the dating of a star leading Wisemen in order to prove the Scriptures, we have searched to carbon date fossilized wood from Mount Ararat believed to be Noah's Ark, searched for the Lost Tribes of Israel, made blockbuster movies of the archaeological hunt for the Ark of the Covenant and 10 Commandments, we waged Crusades in search of the Holy Grail, all to prove what we believe. But the Ascension of Jesus is a story that leaves us staring at the sky, wondering how, why, so what, and what next.

We arrive at the climactic end of the Gospels, where the Powers and Principalities, people's fears and Pontius Pilate put Jesus to death; after being executed they take down his lifeless corpse, laying the cold dead body in the stone tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, and we hear and see the Stone rolled in front of the opening to seal him away forever; then three days later miraculously we hear and believe the stories of the Resurrection. Even Death could not withhold the love of God. All the power of the Roman Empire, all the fears of the Sanhedrim, the gruesome suffering and death, and The Gospels end with the glimmer of faith in Jesus' Resurrection.

As a society, we have carefully orchestrated professionals to bury the dead, because we do not want to be too close, to have death become too real for us, as if death itself were profane. This reality was brought home a few years ago, when the church suffered the death of a college freshman. On a beautiful spring morning like this we gathered outdoors for the memorial, all his friends returned from college, the high school students raked the winter debry from the circle of evergreens. The celebration was beautiful and sincere, but at the conclusion of the memorial, rather than the congregation walking away from the casket in a cemetary, the pallbearers carried the casket to the hearse that was doing to the crematorium. The sound of the door closing and watching as the car drove away from us, was all a little too surreal, and too real in these post-modern times.

Like the disciples who heard Jesus mention again and again “The Son of Man must suffer and die,” we too have disbelieved and not wanted to hear. Consequently, for the last 2000 years and more, Christianity has focused on the first two persons of God. We have the Old Testament that names God as the CREATOR, the God of the Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the COVENANT who created the LAW and spoke through PROPHETS as a Nation grew and fell.
Along with Andrew, Simon, James, John and Bartholomew, we were Called by Jesus, we were Baptized by John, we heard Jesus teachings and witnessed the Blind given sight, the deaf allowed to hear. We came to know and believe in this RABBI as being the REDEEMER, the MESSIAH, the CHRIST, who enters into life to SAVE US from what we have done. SO like waiting for the shoe to drop, AFTER the RESURRECTION, we hear that Jesus rose and ascended into heaven and we find ourselves staring into the sky, wondering.

It is an over-generalization, but true, that the 20th Century was about reconciliation of the powers of Faith and Reason, Science and the Church. We developed and held in human hands the power to End the World, we split the atom and followed the DNA Chain, discerning more and more about the end and beginnings of life. The Challenge of the 21st Century is to live into a world beyond the fear of Apocalypse, where the origins of life and the end of all we know, are no longer spatial and chronological. The recorded question of the Disciples, as Jesus led them out was, “So, When will you restore the Kingdom to Israel?” From that time until this, we have been waiting for the end.

Belief in the Ascension is a broadening of our perspective, to question and wonder, what if the purpose of faith is not RELIGION? What do we expect to believe and do?

The Letter to Ephesus is written to a people like us. All those who were part of the first generation died, yet the Apocalypse did not come, the world did not end, so what are we to do and to believe.

Twenty years ago, in the early 1980s my spouse was working with the Junior League and coordinated a conference with Elisabeth Kubler Ross on AIDS, WOMEN & CHILDREN. Kubler Ross was well known for her work as a Psychologist on Death and Dying, on the six stages of grief and loss and the end of life. She described that at age 60 she began a new life's work, caring for orphaned children with AIDS. To this group of 3000 people she asked “How many of you would be willing to adopt a child, to give a motherless newborn the love and affection of a parent?” Then, of that group, “How many of you would be willing to adopt a child who is ill, a child born with HIV, having to live with the constant precautions of caring for one who is so helpless, whose immunities are compromised, a child that neighbors fear and fear having their children play with, adopting a child who is going to die?” NOW IMAGINE, that you adopt this child, you walk the floors with them at night when they cannot sleep, you take them to every doctor's visit, you worry about them knowing they are going to die, and someone finds a cure. What would it be like to have a child be normal, whom you adopted believing they would die? How do we live together, when imminent death, when the end of the world is no longer a concern?

We have lived in a time of War, for what now almost seven years. Imagine those who have gone off to war, constantly surrounded by the reality that the children playing in the road up ahead may be planting a bomb. That you may not come home, at least not whole, when so many have died and been wounded. What would it be like to live in peace after imagining you were going to die?

We have a tendency to take life for granted when we are healthy, when we are whole. Is it possible for us to do more than survive, to BELIEVE and HOPE, and PRAY for what God May Do, THANKFUL EVERY DAY?
What happened to the body of Jesus is an important theological question, one of the bases of all the separations of Christian churches. In the Catholic Church, there is description of the mystery of Communion as being Transubstantiation. Historically, a curtain would close between priest and congregation, while the liturgy was pronounced in Latin “Hacus, Pacus” meaning change from Bread into the very body of our Lord, from wine into his blood of the Covenant. For an unschooled population who did not understand Latin, they perceived this as magic, literally pronouncing “Hocus Pocus” to make the bread disappear or change. The great Reformer Martin Luther, lived and died believing he was a Catholic priest and was calling for a reformation of practices within the church. Luther taught that this is NOT magic, but bringing the Real Presence of Jesus into our midst. Another of the Reformers, Ulrich Zwingli, taught that faith is not magic, or a philosophy of Real Presence, but the very tangible experience of memory, we remember what Jesus did for us by dying for us, and we are changed by getting in touch with our memories. John Calvin, who penned the basics of our theology as Presbyterians, said No, faith is not a matter of simple remembrance, or of magic. We need to question why the church has tried to bring Jesus down out of heaven to be present with us again at the table? Instead, we believe in the practice of forgiveness, confessiona dn forgiveness of one another and by God, in order that we can fully share ourselves “communing” without inflicting sin, without holding back from one anoter or God. In the act ofd forgiveness, we literally are brought closer together, and as the body of Christ, we are brought closer to God. SO it is not bringing the body of Jesus out of heaven to serve us, by magic or memory, but our being changed and transformed, brought closer together, closer to God, our BEING CHANGED INTO the Body of Christ.

Faith in the ASCENSION is not a belief in people flying on clouds. The ASCENSION is affirmation that the one who explored all human life had to offer, who experienced all humanity could suffer, sits at the right hand of God. The ASCENSION is belief that Jesus was raised by God, and given a place by God. In faith, none of us earn reward, Jesus does not sit at the right hand of God because e was better than everyone else, but God has raised him and elevated him who did suffer for us and knows us.

Faith in RESURRECTION is not belief in the REANIMATION of DEAD CORPSES like some Frankenstein movie. Resurrection is living life differently because we no longer fear life or death, because we believe we are living beyond what we most feared.