A Sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter: The Sunday after the Ascension, Year c

 

The Spirit and the bride say, "Come."

And let everyone who hears say, "Come."

The one who testifies to these things says,

"Surely I am coming soon."

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

  

 

One Ascension Day, I received an email attachment from a friend.  It was of a woodcut print by the 16^th century German artist Albrecht Dürer, showing the gathered disciples looking up at Jesus ascending into heaven.  As is true of many depictions of the Ascension, all you can see of Jesus are his feet sticking out of the bottom of a cloud.  And so my friend had titled his email:  “The Feast of the Disappearing Feet!”

 

Now, somehow, I think the Feast of the Ascension in whose wake this Sunday falls should mean something a bit more than that!  At least one of the things it means is spoken of in today’s collect:  that God has “exalted Jesus Christ in great triumph to God’s Kingdom in heaven.”  Another way of saying this is that Jesus ascends from the earth into heaven – metaphorically through those clouds – in order to reign with God over all creation.

 

John of Patmos, in the texts we have been reading from the Book of Revelation through this Easter Season, pictures Jesus’ heavenly reign in powerful visions and poetic language that tug at the imagination: God as Alpha and Omega, the first and last, the one who was and is to and is to come; [1]  the heavenly chorus singing praise to the Lamb that was slain and to the One seated on the throne; [2]  God sheltering the multitudes from every family, tribe, people and nation who are gathered around the throne -- feeding, protecting and comforting them; [3]  God creating a new heaven and new earth where God dwells among mortals and death is no more; [4]  and in the new Jerusalem come down from heaven, the river of the water of life flows from God’s Throne, and the leaves of the tree of life bring healing to the nations. [5]  

 

It is a glorious picture that John paints,  a picture of hope and joy; a picture of life and comfort and love; a picture where conflict, suffering, pain and death have ended and God reigns in over all the peoples of the earth in peace.  Surely, this is what the Ascension of Jesus – a poetic picture of another sort – seeks to convey:  the conviction of Christians through the ages that the One who suffered death on our behalf and then triumphed over the grave did so in order to usher in God’s Kingdom of peace, comfort, love and eternal joy.

 

So, my friends, what are we to make of the painfully obvious truth that the world we live in bears very little resemblance to these visions of God’s reign?  If Jesus has conquered death and sin and has been “exalted in great triumph to God’s Kingdom in heaven” to rule over the whole creation, why does our world look the it does? 

 

Gas deep underground explodes and miners are trapped and die; An offshore rig blows up, killing workers and spewing millions of gallons of oil into fragile ecosystems; In both cases, we are learning corporate desire for profit and compromised government oversight took precedence over human safety and care for God’s creation.  Wars meant to end terrorist threats continue and continue -- yet a bomber (thankfully inept) leaves a smoking van in Times Square.  

Excessive debt and financial speculation bring the world economy to the brink of another meltdown, even as millions remain out of work; poverty, hunger and preventable disease continue to kill thousands in the developing world every day.  And closer to home, death hovers nearby as members of our parish and their loved ones reach the end of their  earthly lives.  Sin, suffering, pain and death have manifestly not ended.  How can we speak of the reign of God in such a world?

 

Christians have struggled with how to come to terms with this dilemma for centuries – with mixed success.  One common approach has been to assert that whatever God’s rule means, it isn’t a dominating control of all that happens on this planet.  God has left human beings free to make our own choices --  and often we make the wrong ones, resulting in the troubled world we know so well.  That’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t offer the life-giving hope that so animated the first Christians who set out to change the world that it might more closely resemble the Kingdom that their Lord had taught, lived and died for.  To say only that this world is still subject to the vagaries of human sin is to make pointless the claim that the crucified, risen and ascended Jesus indeed reigns over this creation.

 

A different approach to this dilemma has been to transfer all of the promises about God’s reign to another realm --  the Kingdom in Heaven which we will enter after our death.  There, it is said, pain, sorrow, sin and death will indeed have their final end.  This world may remain a vale of tears, effectively cut off from the power of God’s reign, but in that world, what is absent here is fully present.  We need only wait for death to take us on our own trip to the heavens, and all will be well.  

 

The Christian hope has often been so interpreted, and there is partial truth here.  But such an other-worldly Christianity reduces this world to nothing but a transit point to somewhere else;

a way station that matters only as a place of testing and waiting.  Such an other-worldly faith has little room for the God who made this world and declared it good; who entered this world in Jesus Christ in order to bring God’s reign near; who sent the Spirit to empower the Church to live, serve and love this world that God loves with a depth and passion beyond our imagining.

 

What then?  How are we to live faithfully in this good, yet sinful, suffering world and claim hope in the reign of our Lord in this place? One answer lies less in theoretical solutions and more in spiritual practice -- in prayer, specifically the kind of prayer with which the Book of Revelation ends that we heard today.  After drawing his astounding word pictures of God’s reign, John of Patmos ends with a plea  -- indeed, an order -- for the coming of that Reign:

 

The Spirit and the bride say, "Come."

And let everyone who hears say, "Come."

The one who testifies to these things says,

"Surely I am coming soon."

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

 

This ancient prayer echoes another we all know well:

 

Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

John’s call to Jesus to come; the prayer we say every Sunday for the coming of the Kingdom and the doing of God’s will on earth as in heaven -- these show how we are to pray in the situation we Christians have been for nearly 2,000 years:  having received the promise of God’s reign in the life, death, resurrection and  ascension of Jesus,  but living in a world where that Kingdom is not yet evident.  

 

In prayer, we claim our co-creative partnership with God in bringing into being this Kingdom that is already here and still not yet arrived.  So we pray for the Kingdom’s coming:  we ask, we plead, we urge, we order God to bring God’s Reign in all its fullness to this earth. Our prayer has a critical role in making it possible for God to reign, to bring the Kingdom that God desires and for which we long more fully into being.  

 

New Testament Scholar Walter Wink puts it this way as he writes about the power of intercessory prayer. 

 

“No doubt our intercessions sometimes change us as we open ourselves to new possibilities we had not guessed.  No doubt our prayers reflect back on us a divine command to become the answer to our prayer.  But … intercession is more than that.  It changes the world and it changes what is possible for God.  A new force field appears that was hitherto only potential.  An aperture opens in the praying person, permitting God to act without violating human freedom…  

 

[Prayer] to be Christian must be prayer for God’s Reign to come on earth.  It must be prayer for the victory of God over disease, greed, oppression and death in the concrete circumstances of people’s lives, now.”  “That is why,” Wink continues, “the phrases of the Lord’s Prayer are not indicative but imperative  --  we are ordering God to bring the Kingdom near.  It will not do to implore.  We have been commanded to command.  …

 

The God of the Bible invents history in interaction with those “who hunger and thirst to see right prevail” (Mt. 5:6 REB)… Prayer is not a request to an almighty King who can do anything at anytime.  It is an act that liberates the [God who is the] origin, goal and process of the universe from all distortions, poisonings, ravagings, misdirectedness and sheer hatred of being that frustrate the divine purpose.” [6]  Our prayer for the coming of the Kingdom, Wink wants us to understand, is necessary for Jesus’ reign to come into being in this world.  “History,” he writes, “belongs to the intercessors.” [7]

 

Lest we become arrogant at our role in bringing God’s reign into being Wink goes on to affirm that God is the ultimate intercessor; that “it is God, rather than ourselves, who initiates prayer; and that it is God’s power, not our own, that answers the world’s needs.  We join with God in a prayer that is already going on in us and in the world.” [8]  This, of course, is true and  what we affirm in our Ascension faith that, appearances to the contrary, notwithstanding, Jesus does indeed reign.

 

But that truth in no way diminishes how essential our prayer is to Jesus actually being able to exercise his Rule.  Each and every day, we need to ask, plead, urge, and order God to bring God’s Reign in all its fullness to this earth.  And so we pray: 

 

Thy Kingdom come.  

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  

 

The Spirit and the bride say, "Come."

And let everyone who hears say, "Come."

The one who testifies to these things says,

"Surely I am coming soon."

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

 

 

The Rev. Jack Zamboni

May 16, 2010