Because He Lives.

Acts 1:6-11

May 13, 2018

I.

My favorite part of this passage is when the mysterious “two men in white robes” appear by the disciples as Jesus is taken into heaven.  And they first ask why they are standing there looking up into the sky.  Then they state that Jesus will return in the same way he was taken, that is, from heaven.

They are saying that, on the one hand, these disciples will be Jesus’ witnesses, and they can’t do that if they are spending all their time gazing into the sky.  On the other hand, they do say that Jesus will come from the sky.  So the manner of their waiting for Jesus to return is by committing themselves to the work that needs to be done down here.  

This is not going to be a faith that has to do with measuring or counting out “the times or the periods” before Jesus comes back.  That is a form of this fruitless and pointless “looking up towards heaven,” that these two men in white are critical of, and it is not the job that Jesus has left the disciples to do.  We are not like dogs who sit looking anxiously out the window all day until their master comes home.  Jesus has promised that he will be with us “always, even to the end of the age.”  

At the same time, this story does seem to be saying that he goes away to heaven, leaving us alone here on earth, waiting for him to come back the same way he went.  In the meantime, Jesus’ presence will be known in the Holy Spirit, who is about to come upon the disciples, empowering them to be his witnesses “to the ends of the earth.”

So the disciples are implicitly instructed not to waste their time looking up into the sky where Jesus appears to have gone, but to realize that even though he is “lifted up” until “a cloud took him out of their sight,” which means that he is no longer visible or perceptible to their 5 senses, and his physical, tangible, mortal, temporal presence is no more, he is at the same time, by the Spirit even more directly present with them than he was before his crucifixion.  

His having gone into “heaven,” then, is way to say, not that he has abandoned the disciples.  For heaven is the place of highest and most inclusive and comprehensive vision.  From heaven everything is seen and known, inside and out.  Heaven is the eternity that is within, around, among, beneath, and above the time/space continuum that we experience.  There is, then, a sense in which “heaven” is everywhere, embedded in and penetrating everything, yet at the same time, because of our limitations, unknown to and remote from our perceptions and experience.  Therefore, to say that Jesus has gone into heaven is really to say that he has emerged into everything

The Holy Spirit is our interface with that eternity, the breath of God by which all things are created, which has left God’s imprint on and in everything.

The Ascension means that Jesus is with us, as he promised, to the end of the age, always, by the mediating power of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus is still here, with us in an even more intimate and direct form, than he had been when he was, for 33 or so years, with the disciples as a “historical” figure.

II.

So Jesus is actually closer to us now.  But, as we know, this creates other problems.  Jesus is so close to us that we often confuse him with ourselves.  That is, it is easy to imagine that the voice of our ego is actually the voice of God telling us what is best to do.  Discerning and distinguishing God’s voice in our hearts from our own becomes a primary task of Christian spirituality.  

This is why the church eventually came to rely on the gospels.  Let’s not forget that the church lived and grew for many years, perhaps even a century or more, before any of the written gospels were relatively widely available.  All of Paul’s letters are written to churches that did not possess copies of the gospels — because they hadn’t even been written yet.  Aside from the cross and resurrection, Paul almost never refers to anything Jesus does or says during his historical life.

This is because the church has always relied, not on people’s memories of the historical Jesus, but on his direct, living presence, with them by the power of the Holy Spirit.  We, of course, have the inestimable benefit of the gospels.  But my point is that we should, in theory, be able to thrive in mission even without a New Testament, as the earliest church did, and just depend on the indwelling presence of the ascended Lord Jesus, by the Spirit.  That is, in fact, the story that Luke is about to tell in the rest of the book of Acts.

Before he does ascend, the disciples ask the risen Jesus if he is going to “restore the kingdom to Israel” now, a question which he ignores because it indicates stubborn cluelessness on the part of the disciples.  They still, even now, imagine that he is about something as small as bringing back Israel as an independent kingdom under Davidic rule.  Jesus is requiring them to expand their imaginations exponentially.  He doesn’t mention “Israel” again, but tells them to start their mission in Jerusalem, and “Judea and Samaria.”  Judea and Samaria were the two regions representing the old divided Israelite kingdoms from centuries before, but currently under Roman administration, whose respective peoples still hated each other.  

The Lord says that on the one hand this mission is to the whole world, but that on the other hand it has to start locally and spread from there.  If this good news of God’s reconciling love revealed in Jesus the Messiah can take root in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria — places of crushing oppression by a foreign power and bitterly divided internally — it will surely be able to work in other places as well.  If the disciples can bear witness to God’s love and justice in such an inhospitable place, then  It’s like Jesus is saying, “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”

The story of the church will be this spreading throughout an oppressed, conquered, colonized, exploited, divided, conflicted world, the Roman Empire.  And the message, the truth to which they bear witness, the basic, bottom line, essence of the good news, is Jesus: the Romans crucified him for sedition, but he did not stay dead.  He rose!  He’s still alive with, within, and among his people, which means that a whole new future, a future not under the yoke of a cruel empire, is now open to anyone who follows him.

III.     

Jesus gives the disciples instructions to be his witnesses in the whole world.  In other words, they are to retell this fundamental and very simple story.  It is the elevator pitch of the new movement, a brief summary easily memorized and repeatable by anyone in less than a minute.  

There’s this man named Jesus, the promised anointed King of the Jews.  The Romans crucified him for treason.  But he rose from the dead and now he lives forever with us.  Visit us on Sunday morning and we’ll show you!  

Anyone hearing this would have immediately understood that if there was someone the Romans couldn’t kill, their whole gig was over.  It’s a new world.  We’re free!  Jesus is Lord!  If we get together to follow Jesus, we don’t have be jerked around by Caesar anymore.  And there is nothing Caesar and all his wealth and power can do about it.  Because, even if they do kill your physical body, Jesus proves that that simply gets you closer to him.  Joining this movement is a win-win.

If we truly understand his cross and resurrection, the church is inherently and necessarily an alternative and subversive gathering loyal to Jesus Christ  alone, which means it is radically disloyal to any and all other political, economic, or social powers, people, or philosophies.  

And this whole movement depends, in the end, on the Ascension.  Otherwise, Jesus’ death and resurrection are interesting and perhaps very attractive stories that we remember, admire, and support… but they have nothing directly to do with us and how we live our lives.  There is no necessary “now what?”  

The real energy in the Jesus movement is in the knowledge that Jesus still lives and remains present with, within, and among his followers, who still participate in his life, ministry, blessings, and truth.  He lives, not just out there, not just far away in heaven, not just long ago, not just when he returns in the far future.  He lives now.  He lives here.  He makes a difference.

The early church understands and lives within the absolute connection between Jesus’ death at the hands of the world’s mightiest superpower, his resurrection negating and neutralizing that power, and his ascension by which he continues to live in and among his disciples, by the Holy Spirit.  The early church knows itself to be an alternative Way of living together trusting in Jesus and practicing his values of humility, non-violence, forgiveness, compassion, and equality, and in opposition to the demands of a regime based on arrogance, violence, selfishness, and inequality.

IV.

The church cannot be about standing around, looking up towards heaven.  We have work to do down here.  The Ascension means Jesus is with us down here.  His death and resurrection identifies him and therefore us with those who are real victims of violence and injustice, exclusion and colonization, exploitation and bondage.  And we start here and now, where we are, and move out to all the world.  

And it is only and because we in Christ identify with the broken and oppressed of the world that the words of William Gaither’s now classic song make sense as an affirmation of the Ascension:

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow

Because He lives, all fear is gone

Because I know He holds the future

And life is worth the living, 

just because He lives.

+++++++

Love and Joy.

John 15:8-17

May 6, 2018

I.

The Christian life is about love and joy.  

That is something we often forget.  The church grows and thrives because people are attracted by the love and the joy we share among us and with the world.  People see the love and the joy, and they want to be a part of it.  The church contracts and implodes when we don’t express and reflect love and joy.  

Unfortunately, love and joy are not things for which Christians, Presbyterians in particular, are known.  That’s not what pollsters discover when they ask what people think about Christians and Christianity.  They don’t say, “Oh yeah, those people are definitely all about love and joy.”  It’s more the opposite.  Christians are more known for who they hate, these days.  We’re known for resentment, hypocrisy, closed-mindedness, and judgmentalism….  

That’s because for too long and for too many of us, Christianity was not about love and joy, and certainly not about Jesus, but about other things.  It was about nostalgia for a largely imaginary past, when everything was supposedly better; a time when we had status, privilege, clout, and money.  And it was all wrapped in Christian-sounding language.  Now that that isn’t happening so much, some are really angry about it.   

Jesus doesn’t care about any of that.  He rejects that kind of status, privilege, and power when the devil offers it to him.  He says: “Sorry, no.  What I am about, what glorifies my Father is not your throwing his Name around to justify your self-righteous, paranoid violence.  It’s love and joy.”  Unless we have a reputation for love and joy, people are not likely to show up here.  Who wants to waste a perfectly good Sunday morning being hateful, mad, and sad?     

Jesus says that we abide in his love when we keep his commandments.  That is, when our way of life, our behavior, our words and actions, is shaped by what Jesus does and teaches, we participate in his love.  And his love is also God’s love, for the whole world.  To share in this love is to find joy.  This is what Jesus means by “bearing fruit.”  It is when we act in the world according to Jesus’ example and commandments.

The gospel of John, unlike the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, doesn’t actually have a set list of Jesus’ commandments in one place.  I suspect that John knows that, when presented with written commandments, people always find ways around them.  So in this gospel, Jesus has basically one big commandment that is supposed to cover everything:  “Love one another as I have loved you.”

And, in case that is a bit too general, the Lord follows it up with a clarifying statement.  “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  So Jesus shows his love for us by laying down his life for us, his friends, who do what he commands.  This is summed up in one, general commandment to love as he loves us, by also laying down our lives.  He is calling us basically to die for each other, as he dies for us.  Not be willing to do it.  Not to affirm it verbally.  But to do it.  To lay down our lives for him and for each other.  

II.

Now, laying down our lives is sometimes in extreme circumstances of persecution or war literally demanded of Jesus’ followers.  Christian history is populated by many martyrs called upon to suffer and die for the truth.  This still happens even today in parts of the world.  

But, just because we are not in those places or situations does not mean we are off the hook.  Jesus commands all of us to love one another as he loves us, which means laying down our lives for each other.  We need to set aside the ego-centric, small, false selves we think we are, in order to emerge into the vast, blessed, good, true Selves we are in him.  And that is where the love finally blossoms into joy.

In order to love one another as Jesus loves us, nothing less than our death, in the sense of letting go of everything that has come to define us and everything that we have come to rely on, is needed.  It symbolically happens in the Sacrament of Baptism in which we figuratively and ritually “die” with Jesus.  And it happens in the ongoing work of repentance, in which we come to see and think differently about ourselves and our world, and thus act differently.  

Rather than living out of ourselves and our own reason, self-image, memories, and feelings, we, because we are connected to him like a branch to a vine, come to live according to his energy and life.  We “bear fruit,” as Jesus says, according to his living Presence in us.  We obey his commandments and thus become his friends, his agents, his disciples, his apostles, and his representatives in the world.  He lays down his life for us, his friends, in order that his life may become ours.

It is essential that we remember that this is not something we simply do as private, isolated individuals.  Jesus says that love is not just laying down one’s life, it is laying down one’s life for one’s friends.  Laying down our selfish, ego-centric existence is something necessarily done as an act of love and obedience to him and therefore for others.  We cannot do this because of what we will personally or individually get out of it.  We cannot do it on our own initiative at all.

Laying down our life means laying down our false sense of independence and separateness from each other.  It means laying down, as in relinquishing and letting go of, our seeing others as adversaries or competitors, let alone as enemies.  It means identifying with them until they really aren’t even others anymore, but people whose pain, loss, weakness, and hunger we feel ourselves.  It is something we can only do in Christ, after his example.

Jesus loves us by emptying himself over us, giving himself to us, laying down his life for us, feeding us with his own body and blood, calling us up out of our own tombs, and declaring us his friends.  We participate in his friendship when that same life that animates him begins to flow through us, as shown in the way we keep his commandments.  That is, we are his friends when we in his name befriend the world over which he gives his life.

III.

“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you;” “as I have loved you,”

“love one another.”  Jesus is doing nothing less than inviting us into his relationship with the Father and with the world.  This is what we have been chosen for, to abide in his love.  His love is not a static thing we possess or even pass around among ourselves.  His love is alive like light, or an electrical current, or the water rushing through a hose.  It is dynamic and always in motion.  We abide in it when we don’t block it but let it flow into and through us, into the world.  We abide in it when we bear the fruit of good, loving, sharing, healing, blessing, welcoming, forgiving actions.

This obedience is not a burden or an obligation in any negative sense; it is a profound joy.  It is the joy we experience when we are most alive, most connected to others, most truly ourselves, and most full of love. Jesus comes to complete our joy by revealing God’s love to us.  It is a joy that we will give everything to receive; it is a joy that we only receive when we express it, when we give it away, when we share it with others.

Christians need to be seen in the world as people of love and joy, who receive from God whatever they ask because their desires and longings, their hopes and dreams are already fulfilled.  Jesus Christ has already given us God’s life; what else could we possibly want?  We already know the end of the story and the meaning of every life in the glorification of God.  We already know that everything is working together for good, that the whole creation and everyone in it is precious and beautiful.  We already know what we belong to God, and if we belong to God then everything belongs to us.

This doesn’t mean that we live charmed and hassle-free lives.  Jesus goes on to talk about how the disciples will bear the hatred and violence of the world.  He himself will be crucified just a few hours after he says all this.  But he is asking us to see beneath and behind that to the ultimate and basic truth of God’s love pervading everything.  Even if the surface remains torn and broken by human sinfulness, in Jesus Christ we are in touch with Reality so deep that these disturbances cannot touch it.  And this will be revealed to all in time.  It is revealed to us now, and we are entrusted with this good news to live and to share in the meantime.

IV.

I am always reminded of that hymn from the 1960’s that has the refrain, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, yes they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”  The world will know we are Christians by our love for all.  They will know we are Christians by our love for our enemies and for those deemed unloveable.  By our love for the homeless and the guilty, the broken and the arrogant.  “For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse; and for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe,” to quote another song from that era.

Jesus’ message is summed up in the final simple call to love one another with the passion, patience, humor, acceptance, courage, honesty, and affection that fills our hearts, and our world, with joy.

+++++++