Ascension

Acts 1:6-14
If you ask people to list the highlights of the Christian Year, my guess is that most Protestants, anyway, would not have Ascension high on the list, or even on the list at all. In fact, in 26 years of preaching, I think I've only preached one or two sermons on the topic.

It all seems so airy-fairy, like bad religious art with a white-robed Jesus floating up barefoot through the clouds into glory. Is it just Luke's way of trying to explain the very valid question that goes something like this: If Jesus rose from the dead in the flesh, then why is he not around today?!

It is a conundrum. If the Resurrection is so important, why didn't Jesus stick around. At the risk of inciting folk to label me a heretic (a la Carly Smithson who apparently got voted off American Idol for choosing to sing the title song from Jesus Christ Superstar and so vexed the conservative Christian Idol voters in one of the most bizarre popular culture events I've seen in a while), I would ask with Judas in Superstar why Jesus didn't really make a big splash post-Resurrection in order to completely convince people he was divine and therefore get a whole lot more convinced folk to follow God's way?

The text in Acts that tells Luke's second version of this (see the end of Luke's gospel for the first version) does make fairly clear Jesus' reasoning on this one. The enfleshed Jesus has limitations: he can only be in one place at one time. If he goes and the new earthly form of the presence of God is in Spirit, a Spirit that will move in and through people in many places and across time, then the word and work of God has legs, so to speak. The legs of the disciples, and our legs now.

But there is more to it than that. The issue of what the power of the Spirit, the continuing power and divine authority of Jesus, now dwelling in what would become the church, the issue of what that power is to be used for is also addressed here. The disciples asked Jesus if now was the time that the great political revolution would start, the one that would restore Israel to its historic greatness. Even after all this time with Jesus, the disciples are still looking back for their vision and not ahead. Jesus actually ignores the question because he has all along been talking about power not limited to kings and queens and empires. Will they get it post-Pentecost?

Will we?

Paul at the Areopagus

Acts 17:22-31

A sermon from Paul; maybe not a piece that would get people real excited, but this one is different from all the others in Acts in some ways. He is preaching not to a mixed crowd of the eager and the skeptical and the apathetic, but to a crowd of intellectuals and philosophers at one of the teaching places in Athens.

Now I pastor a church in New Haven, Connecticut, just down the hill from some of Yale's buildings, so I find connections with this passage that are different from when I was pastor of a small church in rural Michigan, when I connected more closely with other of Paul's writings.

So what does Paul say to the smart people? He does not chastise them or denigrate their religious impulses. He praises them for their seeking after God! I really don't think he is being facetious here. I think he honestly is reaching out to them at the place where he and they have something in common: a history of "groping" for truth, for understanding, for God.

He then tells them that in his seeking, he has found, through Christ, one God. He connects with this God; he knows this God as the one who has been living and moving in his life for many years. It's as though he recognizes someone he knows but has never seen before.

What's odd is that our reading for today leaves out the part of the response to this sermon. A couple of people responded to Paul and came to learn more about Jesus. Most did not. Most walked away, disappointed perhaps that Paul did not have a better argument, a more erudite philosophy perhaps?

This is a real tension place for me, as I expect it was for Paul. I am very highly educated at some of the best schools, and I serve a congregation with many highly educated and accomplished members. So do I preach to them with complex theological arguments, doing all manner of apologia? Or do I call them to search within all they know and all they are for the one in whom they live and have their being? Or both? How does the church and its preachers reach out to those who are among the wise and great thinkers of our world with Jesus? The Dawkins and other atheists are reaching out with complex (and often misleading) scientific, philosophical and literary arguments. Paul doesn't really respond to that kind of thing in Athens.

What is the gospel for Yale?

Emmaus Rd.

No, I have not abandoned the blog! Just got caught up in other things!

This week we continue the resurrection appearances of Jesus in our gospel readings. Luke 24:13-35. Some interesting pieces to lift up about this story follow.

• This is the only gospel in which this story appears. The man named "Cleopas" and his unnamed companion (some speculate it was his wife) also appears nowhere else in the scriptures. Obviously Cleopas was in the circle of those who followed Jesus, though not one of the 12. I love it that Jesus appears to those not in the inner circle: Mary and the other women, Cleopas. We need to remember that the early Christian Community consisted of far more than those 11 disciples!
• Cleopas and wife come to know Jesus in two important ways: first, through the scriptures. He reminds them of what they already know about him and how God has kept trying to make clear who God is!
• Second, they know him through the breaking of the bread. Obviously, this has Eucharistic implications (that last supper, by the way, Da Vinci notwithstanding, had to have included more than just the 12. If it was a Seder, then women had to be present at the very least!). Jesus took, blessed, broke and gave which are all basic movements of Holy Communion. More than once these post-Resurrection appearances involve eating! He had an actual human body and was not a ghost
• So excited were Cleopas and friend that they ran, in the dark!!!! back to Jerusalem to tell the others. Their hearts burned. They were inflamed!