Wonderfully Strange

Let us review a bare outline of the life of Jesus: God becomes incarnate in Jesus. He gathers disciples and teaches and performs signs and wonders that show us who God is. Jesus dies a horrible shameful death. Jesus rises. Jesus appears to his disciples in many mysterious ways, entering locked rooms, manifesting himself in the breaking of the bread on the road to Emmaus, cooking a breakfast of fish over a crackling fire at the edge of the sea of Tiberias. And then Jesus ascends into heaven, promising to return one day and to send the Spirit to fill his disciples in the interim. What an interesting form of closure, if we can call it that, for the Resurrection narrative.

He doesn’t just stop appearing to them. Jesus doesn’t fade away. He tells them specifically that he is going to the right hand of the Father, and will be sending them his Spirit. There is an emphasis, a strange, puzzling, awkward emphasis, on his departure. Jesus has never had the need to leave this way before, in the days after the Resurrection. He has just disappeared when he wants to. Luke 24:30-31: “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight.” I don’t know where he was after the Resurrection when he wasn’t appearing to the disciples, do you? I’m not even sure what I mean by that question. The scriptures don’t bring it up. It’s not a scriptural question. But this particular departure, this Ascension, is somehow different than those ones were. It’s embarrassingly explicit. They have to see him leave, in his resurrected flesh, going to a physical place, I guess, that is heaven, Up There.

And so we are left today having to wonder why we are being asked to take note of this explicit departure from the disciples. We are in fact left to try to celebrate this departure, in all its awkward physicality. The church asks us to gather and celebrate it, as we did so gloriously on Ascension Thursday. And then the readings return us to that same moment again today, on this seventh Sunday of Easter. There is no turning away from the strangeness of this moment. The church won’t allow that. We can’t just miss Ascension Thursday and somehow excise its challenging awkwardness from our lives of faith. The Ascension comes back, presents itself again, claims its place in our awareness. Pay attention, our tradition tells us. Pay attention to this departure.

And I have to say, it won’t do for us to give Jesus’s ascension some kind of begrudging acknowledgment. There is no “tolerating” the Ascension as a charming bit of Christian lore. There is no half-measure for us here. We belong to a faith that insists that Jesus had to be lifted up into the sky. And we are challenged to greet that fact with true joy. Not bemusement.

Can we do this? Can we be twenty-first century Philadelphians who rejoice that our Lord has ascended into heaven? I think we can, despite what we like to think of as our immense sophistication and worldliness. And in fact, since the truth we celebrate this morning is so literally over the top, let me go over the top myself, and make a radical claim: celebrating the Ascension is the most modern thing we can do.

This, my friends, is the feast (or more properly the Sunday after the feast) of the absolute limit of our understanding. This morning marks the limit of our ability to make Jesus into something familiar. The story has gone off the rails. It’s the end of our ability to normalize God. It’s the end of our ability to keep Jesus within the confines of our own imaginations. This is the Glory of the Lord, from before all time, and this Lord cannot be close to us without also being profoundly strange to us.

That means that the Ascension is also the end of our ability to make God over in our own image. And there is great hope in that. Accepting the Ascension means accepting that we cannot exploit God for our own purposes and our own theories. God will not be available to confirm our good sense or our social acceptability or our fitness for promotion. God is strange. Jesus is immensely, wonderfully, kindly, strange, and we too are strange for loving him, believing that he loves us first. We are wonderfully strange. Let it sink in. We are socially irredeemable. Our gathering here this morning to hear these scriptures and then to eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus, our being filled with the Spirit, makes us frankly bizarre.

And so, drawn by the grace of God, our gathering here this morning makes us free. It makes us open to mystery that is beyond what we think mystery is. Open to life beyond the horizon. It’s a sign of our God-given fearlessness as followers of Jesus. Let him go! Alleluia! Or as we used to say in California, “Shine on you crazy diamond.”

Let Jesus ascend. Let him fly up there, into the clouds. Let God go up with a mighty noise and a famous pair of sandals dangling from the clouds. Rejoice in his freedom. Let him elude our grasp. Be grateful that he eludes our grasp. Let him go beyond anything you can imagine: free, wild, untamed, so beautiful. Our creator and redeemer. So close to us, so entirely within us and for us, that we are free to love him with open hands as perhaps we can love nothing and no one else. No grasping. No fear at this moment. Just now, caught up in love, we are free in the image of our God.

This is the freedom we need to be able to love this wild, untamed world. Nothing else will do. Look around you. God’s creation, God’s people—it’s not what we would have expected, is it? The story of our lives together takes turns we cannot fathom. The world is perpetually resistant to being made over into something we can grasp. This God with the dangling sandals is the God we need to be able to love the world in its 2017 edition. This is the source of love for us, of joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control: the fruits of the Spirit that Jesus will send. Learning to rejoice in this God means learning to love the world and participate in it and work for healing and forgiveness without demanding that the world conform to our expectations. This is how forgiveness becomes real for us.

Every person you know needs this kind of love. Your children, your parents, your coworkers. You yourself require it. We all do. Human history needs to be held with open hands, with a kind of confidence and audacity that can only come from a God whose love is beyond our understanding. Pay attention. Pay attention to this departure. Don’t shrug it off! Know that because of this departure, Jesus is very close to you, and you are very close to the world for which he gave his life. It is a strange privilege to stand here, gazing up into heaven, wondering. May we never take this privilege in vain.

Preached by Mtr. Nora Johnson

May 28, 2017

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Sermon for Ascension Day

Preached by Bishop Neil Alexander

May 25, 2017 - The Feast of the Ascension

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Lion

I hope you have seen the lovely and touching film Lion that tells the true story of a five-year-old boy from a desperately poor village in central India who through a tragic series of mishaps gets lost and separated from his family. Heroically surviving life on the streets of Calcutta, many hundreds of miles away from home, he is eventually taken to an orphanage. Before long, the boy, who is called Saroo, is adopted by an Australian couple who have him brought to them in Tasmania, where Saroo adapts well to his new country and his new family as he learns to speak English, and how to use a knife and fork, and begins to grow up on the beautiful Australian beaches.

When he is ten years old, Saroo’s Aussie family adopts a second child from the same Indian orphanage, a nine year old boy named Mantosh, who has a harder time coping with his emotions, dealing with his past, and adjusting to his new life in Australia, and who will struggle with inner turmoil as he tries to adapt to his new life.

The heart of the film is the story of Saroo’s search for his birth mother that he begins while at university, drawing on memories of his early childhood, and using Google Earth to try to identify the landscapes, landmarks, and location of his childhood village. The search took years, during which time Saroo wrestled with the emotional turmoil of knowing he had a history he could hold onto only by the fragile threads of distant childhood memory. He obsessed about the thought of his poverty-stricken family in India that he missed and loved, and that he was certain missed him and loved him too. He was confused about assimilating so easily into Australian culture, even though he knew that he belonged in a meaningful way to another culture and another world. And he was plagued by the inner conflict that comes from having a loving adoptive mother, at the same time believing that his birth mother was someplace far away in the vast expanses of India, he knew not where.

“Do you know what it’s like,” he says to his girlfriend, when he is consumed by the search, “knowing my real brother and mother spend every day of their lives looking for me? … How every day they scream my name. …And I can feel their touch. I see their faces….”[i]

Eventually, after years of maddening Internet-driven searching, Saroo locates his childhood village through Google Earth.  And with the blessing of his Australian family he travels to India to find his birth mother, who amazingly is there, has stayed put, and has not stopped hoping that her long-lost son would someday return.

There is a touching and important scene in the film, at a point when Saroo’s search for his birth family has created significant tension between him and his adoptive parents, as he struggles with questions about his own identity. Perhaps looking for an emotional wedge to separate himself from his Australian family, and knowing that his adopted brother’s struggles have caused this family heartache, he says to his Australian mother, with maybe a bit of passive aggressiveness, “I’m sorry you couldn’t have your own kids.”

He has assumed that his parents chose adoption because of their infertility. But it immediately becomes apparent that this assumption has never before been tested or discussed.

“What are you saying?” his Australian mother replies.

Saroo goes on, “I mean we weren’t blank pages, were we? Like your own would have been. You weren’t just adopting us, but our pasts as well. And I feel like we’re killing you.”

The screenplay says Saroo’s adoptive mother “smiles – still holding off the tears.” Then she says, “We could have had children. We chose not to… We wanted you two in our lives. We chose that.”[ii]

I wish she had said, or that the screenwriter had written, “We chose you.” But it’s good enough the way it is, “We wanted you two in our lives. We chose that.” 

The moment is an emotional turning point in the film, as Saroo discovers something new about who he is, by discovering that he is not and never was what he feared he might have been – a consolation prize for a couple who couldn’t have kids on their own. No, he was the chosen object of their love, which actually has nothing to do with fertility. He and his brother were the children that his parents wanted.

In the Gospel this morning we hear Jesus talking to his disciples about his relationship to them. In a pivotal and important moment, he reassures his followers with words that the King James Version of the Bible translates as “I will not leave you comfortless.”  Other common translations of the text say, “I will not leave you desolate.” Or “I will not leave you all alone.” But the translation we hear today (like many others) puts it this way, “I will not leave you orphaned.”

The remark comes amid what scholars refer to as Jesus’ farewell discourse. He has shared the Last Supper with his disciples. He has washed their feet. He has told them that one of them will betray him, and predicted Peter’s denial of him. He has spoken with them about his Father, and he is beginning to speak of the Holy Spirit. The truth of his identity is beginning to unfold, whether the disciples can perceive it or not. And the complex nature of the inter-relatedness of the persons of the triune God becomes evident as Jesus sits and teaches, and casts light at a certain angle on the truth of who he is. And as Jesus shows his disciples who he is, he is also showing them who they are. And as he is showing them who they are, he is also showing us who we are.

And although the saying might have been poignant for the disciples that evening as Jesus bade his farewell, and they wondered what would become of them, it’s easy for us to miss the poignancy of this tender moment when Jesus says, “I will not leave you comfortless,” or “I will not leave you orphaned.” It’s easy for us to miss, because it seems to be answering a question that we have not asked - what will become of us when you have gone?

But the answer to the question still tells us something important, I think even if we have not asked it, and especially if we hear it in this translation, “I will not leave you orphaned.” I suppose that like Saroo, we imagine that God is stuck with us the way we come to him. And the assumption of the church for many centuries has been shaped by the often truthful assertion that the way we come to God is broken, sinful, rotten, depraved, stained, in need of major work. We are not blank pages, are we? And (God knows) we are lost.

But there is something poignantly telling in Jesus’ promise that he will not leave us orphaned. He is unfolding both the past and the future; he is revealing his divine identity; and he is telling us something about who we are, and who we are to him. When he says that he will not leave us orphaned, he is telling us that we are the children God wants. We are not the consolation prize that God is stuck with because things didn’t work out in the Garden of Eden. We are the children God wants. A little later in the farewell discourse, Jesus will put this more clearly still when he says to his friends, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”

I chose you.

We are the children that God wants, and always has wanted. True though it may be that we are broken, sinful, rotten, depraved, stained, and in need of major work, God wanted us in his life. He chose that. He chose us. He chose you.

The producers of the film tell us that more than 80,000 children go missing in India every year: a statistic that is so heartbreaking at so many levels that I haven’t any idea what to do with it. One particular irony in the story of Saroo, is that although he ended up in an orphanage, he was not, in fact, an orphan. His mother was alive, and if not able to search, at least praying for her son’s return.

You don’t have to be an orphan to be lost, or even to go missing. I’ve known people who have gone missing in plain sight, as their lives have become so pained or broken that they just can’t seem to keep it together.

We live in a world that buys and sells everything from weapons to children and if you can’t find a way to fit into the marketplace, you may become easily lost, discarded, or forgotten. And we live in a world that often does not consider a stable in Bethlehem, or a green hill outside Jerusalem to have anything to do with its own personal history, its past, its story, its heritage. Estranged from God, so many of us do not see ourselves as runaways, but see ourselves freed from the clutches of a controlling church whose narrative is primarily of shame and guilt, not of love and acceptance. 

Who am I, after all, to say that any of you are broken, sinful, rotten, depraved, stained, or in need of major work? Indeed, those are not my judgments to make, though at times and in many ways I believe them to be true of myself. Certainly, I know that there have been times when I am lost, without any idea which way home is.

But I hear Jesus speaking to his disciples, and I know that he is speaking to me and to you, too. “I will not leave you orphaned.” And I believe that when he says this he smiles – still holding off the tears. And I hear him say, “We wanted you in our lives. We chose that.”

And we discover that we are no consolation prize. We are the children God wanted, the children God always wanted, the chosen objects of his love. And nothing will ever separate us from that love.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

21 May 2017

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] “Lion” screenplay by Luke Davies, based on the book “A Long Way Home” by Saroo Brierley, page 75

[ii] Ibid., pages 86-87