12 May 2002
St. George’s Episcopal Church
Le Mars, Iowa
Dr. Donald Wacome, Lay Preacher
Psalm 68.1-20
Acts 1.1-14
1 Peter 4.12-19
John 17.1-11
Where in
the World is Jesus Christ?
Last week in a remote jungle community in northwestern Colombia a tragedy occurred that was not large enough, or closely enough tied to American ‘vital interests,’ to break through into the headlines and occupy the public consciousness alongside Iowa’s exploding mailboxes and Israel’s release of Yasser Arafat from house arrest. At least I only happened to notice this story in the online version of the Boston Globe. The800 residents of Bojaya found themselves caught in the crossfire of that country’s civil war, which has been going on for 38 years between Marxist rebels and right-wing paramilitary forces. The bullets penetrating the walls of their flimsy wooden houses, about 300 villagers fled to the church, the one concrete building, seeking safety. But during the second day of the firefight a rebel missile smashed through the church roof and exploded near the altar; there, as it happened, was where the people huddled for protection. At last count 117 people, including about 40 children, were killed and another hundred wounded. As the Globe’s correspondent reports: The altar was obliterated, wooden pews reduced to firewood, human remains were scattered around the church. And a shattered figure of Christ stared skyward.
Like the disciples Luke describes in this morning’s lesson from Acts we sometimes find ourselves looking up into an empty sky wondering where has Jesus gone. We know of course that Jesus has not abandoned us. Thus the Swedish theologian Gustaf Wingren writes that it would have been self-evident to Luke’s audience that to ascend to heaven is to ascend to God and that since God as the creator of everything was everywhere, the Ascension means that the exalted Christ does not put distance between himself and this world but instead assumes a closer and more sovereign presence everywhere (Credo, p. 129). And there is the coming of the Spirit, that Pentecost we will celebrate next week. We are not left bereft. Yet, to be honest we say that for us the presence of Christ is under the sign of his absence. In a song about another act of meaningless violence Warren Zevon sings
Time marches on
Time stands still
Time on my hands
Time to kill
They all say
Someday soon
My sins will all be forgiven
Gentle rain
Falls on me
All life folds back
Into the sea
We contemplate eternity
Beneath
the vast indifference of heaven.
The reality we confess is that Jesus, first vindicated in the resurrection, then glorified and exalted in the ascension, sits at the right hand of God the Father. Often treated as a kind of footnote, a tying up of loose ends, a contrivance to sidestep embarrassing questions -- well, if Jesus is resurrected where is he? – in reality the event Luke relates at the beginning of Acts lies at the center of the good news. It gives our faith and mission its shape and meaning. We know, as St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians, that by ascending Jesus filled the whole universe with the reconciling love of God (4.10). But the appearance so often is that the savior God has taken his leave for good, and we stand under an unknowing or unconcerned heaven. For we live “between the times:” the great work of God in Christ is already – and not yet – complete. Our task is neither to fall back into despair at the absence of God, nor is it to leap ahead to the glory of the consummation when all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, our task is to bear witness to what was, and is, and is to come.
It’s hard to focus on that role of being witnesses to the great work of God in Christ.In Luke’s account we see this with the disciples. The resurrected Jesus has for forty days been teaching them, speaking about the kingdom of God, yet still they misunderstand; they try to force Jesus into the mold of their preconceptions. They have one last opportunity before Pentecost to get things wrong in a big way, and Luke does not hesitate to show them taking it. “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”They are even now thinking of the national fortunes of Israel, not of the gracious God who in Christ reconciles the whole world to himself.Jesus lets them know they are, once again, off base: their concern isn’t with Israel but to be witnesses to him, and to take that witness not just to the elect of Israel, but – incrediblyenough - to the Samaritans and –unthinkably – to the ends of the earth.Leaving them with that appalling charge, Jesus is taken up and lost from view.
Those two men in white robes – angels or whatever they were -- sent them on their way, on their mission, not seeking Christ in the heavens to which he ascended and from which he will return, but out into a world no less bloody, cruel and hopeless than our own, testifying that God in Christ has acted decisively to heal and save and forgive.
Thinking about what it means
for us to be about this very same mission, a line from our ‘Baptismal Covenant,’
comes to mind.Each time one of us
is baptized, we all promise to “seek and serve Christ in all persons,
and to love our neighbors as ourselves.”It’s
not that we are not with our whole hearts to be seeking the Christ who
is now ascended but that we are to be seeking him in this way, seeking
him in one another, looking for him in the faces of strangers, yearning
for a glimpse of him even in the angry eyes of our enemies. How assiduously
we would seek, how differently we could live, if we were always seeking
Christ this way.
A woman who had been adopted as an infant told me of a long period in her adolescence and early adulthood when she became obsessed with finding her biological mother. She said that wherever she went she scanned the faces in the crowd, silently asking of any woman anywhere near the appropriate age: could that be her? The devotion with which that young woman, at heart an abandoned child, sought the person who had abandoned her, was, as you can probably guess, wrongheaded, flowing from a love not to be requited. In the end she found woman who had given birth to her and in her found not the perfect mother, but the person who had cast her off.Her quest for the beloved in the faces of strangers was grounded in need and illusion, but our quest to see the beloved in those around us is grounded in the real and enduring love of God in Christ.
In our world, everyone’s
looking for love, for someone willing to accept them as they are, no strings
attached. (They are of course at the same time sure that anyone who found
out what they’re really like would never love them, so at the same time
they pretend to be something other than what they are.) But in God’s world
“belovedness is always prior to loving” (Paul Zahl). Being better
is always the result of being accepted, loved, esteemed, not a precondition
for it. We are called to witness to God’s love, seeing in everyone we encounter
someone unconditionally loved by God. And that demands that we strive,
often with our sense of what’s proper or even reasonable going badly out
of whack, to act the same way, to live as best we can free of the demands
of reciprocity and merit.
To seek Christ in
all persons means to learn to regard others as bearing his image, as of
unlimited value in God’s economy.We
live in an age perhaps especially prone to self-involvement and indifference
to the reality of others, seeing in them only a reflection of our own needs
and desires. Devotees of Garrison Keillor will be familiar with Guy Noir,
the down at heel private investigator. One day a potential client arrives
at his office, a young man, clearly a yuppie. He’s wearing an exquisite,
obviously very expensive designer suit. “Wow,” exclaims Guy Noir,
“You could feed a village in India for a year for the price of that
suit!” Puzzled, the yuppie takes a moment to respond: “Well, you
can’t wear a village…”
The vast indifference of most of us most of the time for most everyone else is a real fact of this world. The absent Christ is nonetheless present in the works of love, works done for his sake, but not in memory of him. For in faith they are done because of the present reality of who he is, and the future but certain reality of what he promises. The Athanasian Creed makes the point obliquely when it says:
Who although he be God and Man yet
he is not two but one Christ, One, not by conversion of the Godhead into
flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God.
That
Jesus who ascended to God was from the start fully God, yet the full story
of the Incarnation is complete only with the Ascension, for only then do
we see humanity taken up into God, made forever a part of God’s nature,
part of who and what God in his sovereign freedom chooses to be.In
Jesus the human is beloved, accepted, endorsed, vindicated, celebrated,
glorified and made divine. Our task is to witness to this God who calls
everyone to himself; this God who becomes one of us by drawing all of us
into himself, into the eternal, infinitely joyful life of the Trinity,
holy and undivided. He calls us to seek Christ in all persons, for there
is no one whose indifference or rejection we can take as the last word
that overturns the saving will of God for them. There is no one we can
give up for lost, as not part of the humanity the ascending Christ offers
his Father. Indifference to other human beings is never justified, for
it is in Christ that God in his abiding grace chooses to see all of us,
however unworthy or unwilling we may be.
Where
in the world is Jesus Christ? Wherever the apparent indifference of heaven,
and the very real indifference of humans for one another, is answered by
us, seeking and serving Christ in all persons, and loving them as ourselves.
Amen.