“Who Are You?”-- Genesis 2:4b-9, Romans 8:14-19-- June 29, 2014

 

In this “not ordinary time” – this so-called “Ordinary” time between Pentecost and Advent in which the current condition of our planet begs us to stop and re-consider how we are living–in this “not ordinary time” there are some core questions we need to consider. If we are to survive and adapt to the inevitable changes that are now in motion, if we are to make conscious choices about what direction we want our world to head, if we are to leave the planet with a chance for our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to enjoy even a portion of the beauty and abundance generations before us have known, then we’d better get clear about who we are and Whose we are.

Last week we considered the question, “Where do you come from?” and looked at a few origin stories–the origin story in Genesis 1, which tells us we are from a God who creates, who savors beauty, who moves in rhythms, who rests; and the origin story of the Big Bang, which tells us we are made of stardust, of the same elements as the stars and moons and planets and galaxies, the same elements as the dust of our earth and the other creatures of our earth.

Today we consider the question, “Who am I? Who are you?” It’s related to last week’s inquiry, “Where do you come from?” and the piece of the origin story in Genesis 2 that Barbara read for us this morning continues our search. This is the beginning of the second creation story in Genesis–different from the one in the first chapter–and the very first line that Barbara read for us should give us a clue to that–“In the day that the Lord God made the earth and heavens...”–just one day, not six. There are no plants or herbs yet, only a stream and a river bed, out of which God begins to fashion the creatures, beginning with adam, literally the earthling or earth creature, out of the adamah, the dust of the ground. Adam has no gender, or maybe both /all genders, and when God blows breath into the earthling, adam becomes a living being. It is then that God plants a garden in Eden, and puts Adam in it, “to till it and keep it.” That was our original role in creation--to serve the soil.

The story goes on, of course. “It is not good that the earthling should be alone,” God says. “I will make a partner, a helpmeet for adam.” After making all the other creatures of the earth–the birds and animals and every living thing, which Adam names, God still is not satisfied. And so putting the adam to sleep, God reshapes the earthling into two, now with genders, bone of one another’s bone, flesh of one another’s flesh. None of this is science or history, remember, but poetry, hymn, doxology, story, the mystery greater than facts and figures. We are made for relationship! the story sings, we are made for each other.

Who are you? Who am I? Our culture, our society, surrounds us with answers to those questions, from the lips of leaders and celebrities, in glossy advertisements and seductive commercials.

You are a consumer, we are told. You hold the key to our economy, to putting people back to work, to generating capital which makes the world go round. Your patriotic duty is to go shopping, to buy, to accumulate, to eat, to acquire. We need to consume food and water, of course, to stay alive, but the word “consumer” as a common term is relatively recent to the English vocabulary, less than 100 years old. Yet now it defines us. Even those who want to be conscientious ask, “How can I be a green consumer?”

You are an individual, our society says. Your primary obligation is to yourself and your family. It’s weak to depend on others. Take care of your own. Family first. Country first. Freedom is being able to do what you want.

You are nobody, our culture says, unless you’re famous, unless you’re wealthy, unless you’ve got power, unless you’re beautiful in the way the magazines define beauty, unless you win.

These stories that our culture tells us about ourselves are big on immediate gratification and profit, have no sense of obligation to future generations, and are leading us deeper and deeper into the ecological and political crisis we’re in.

The best of the Christian tradition tells us that we are beloved children of God. “For all who are led by the spirit of God are children of God,” Paul wrote to the church in Rome. It is what we affirm in baptism. You’ll recall the story of Fayette who was astounded and delighted to learn in her baptismal preparation class that when she was baptized, she would be “beloved, a precious child of God, beautiful to behold.” And when she came up sputtering and blinking from being immersed in the waters of baptism, she cried out, “And now I am?” “Beloved!” the congregation responded. “A precious child of God! Beautiful to behold!” “Oh yes!” Fayette affirmed. And even months later, when Fayette lay in the hospital, bruised and beaten after a savage attack, she could be heard saying to herself, “I am beloved... I am a precious child of God...and if you come back later, I’ll be beautiful to behold.” Who are you? A beloved child of God.

Who are you? You are meant for relationship, for community. The church is that community that affirms each one as beloved child of God, across geography and time. We are part of a great cloud of witnesses.

Who are you? You are a creature of the earth, your DNA only infinitesimally different from that of all other creatures, yet our origin stories tells us we were given the role of being stewards of all the creatures, caretakers of the earth. We are, in fact, co-creators, coming, as we do, from a creative God. We are makers of music, of art, of dance, or poetry. We are creators of homes and shelters, tenders of gardens, sewers of quilts and clothing, cabinet-makers, carvers of wood and stone.

Who are you? You are a disciple of Christ, a follower of the teachings and the Way of Jesus. Like Jesus, you have the potential to become fully human and fully divine, the glory of God being the human being fully alive.

The stories we tell about ourselves shape us. How we perceive ourselves affects how we act. Experiments in positive psychology have shown how self-perception changes actions. When we see ourselves doing even a small act of compassion or kindness, we begin to perceive ourselves as compassionate and kind; and we then act more compassionately and kindly. When we give something of ourselves to another or to a cause, we begin to see ourselves as generous and can build on that. Conversely, stories that tell us we are good for nothing, or only to consume, reinforce those self-perceptions and those pathways for acting.

Are we citizens of Empire or citizens of the Earth, author David Korten asks? (The Great Turning, cited on notordinarytimes.org) We must change our stories–or reclaim our stories–if we are to heal the earth and have something beautiful and liveable to pass on to future generations.
Humans from humus [writes Rev. Tom VandeSadt], ancient of lineage,

Extending back to savannahs, oceans,
Stardust, Creator.
Our blood, made red and salty by iron and oceans,
Iron formed by atoms flung into the cosmos by primordial explosions,
Salty from the waters in which our ancestors swam.
Our lungs, filled with oxygen,
Exhaled by light-drinking trees that inhale what we exhale.
Formed by stardust and water, earth dust and sunlight,
We are life among life, creature among creatures,
Kin to every fruit on life’s sacred vine.
Woven by creation’s threads, we are part of, not apart from...
(notordinarytimes.org)

“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God,” Paul wrote. “...I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons and daughters of God...

And I am? You are? Beloved, precious children of God, beautiful to behold. All creation waits for us to reclaim and live into that identity. Amen, and amen.

Rev. Mary H. Lee-Clark

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"Where do you come from?"-- Genesis 1:1-2:4a-- June 22, 2014

 

A couple weekends ago, Bruce and I went up to Middlebury for my 40^th college reunion. It was an exquisite June weekend in Vermont, blue skies and brilliant sunshine during the day, and deeper blue skies and brilliant moon and stars by night. Friday night the College observatory on top of the Science Center was opened, with 3 smaller telescopes out on the roof and the big, 23-inch telescope reaching up through the dome. One of the retired astronomers who was there to provide extra help remarked, "Wow, we probably get 4 nights a year like this in Vermont."

Through the smaller telescopes, we saw the surface of the moon, including the shadows in the craters; we saw Saturn and its rings; we saw Jupiter and 4 of its moons. I needed a step ladder to reach the lens of the big telescope in the tower, and that was trained on M... 137..or some such number, a globular cluster some 20,000 light years away. It was awesome, in the original sense of the word. At a moment like that, I was reminded of a question one woman posed, wondering whether "we still want to pester God about good weather for the family reunion or the new member drive at church?" (Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web, pp. 90-1)

20,000 light years away. That means the light from that cluster of pinpricks we were looking at through the lens began its journey to earth 20,000 years ago–that’s what that globular cluster looked like 20,000 years ago, when here on earth, human beings were at the end of the Stone Age. The oldest non-contested human remains are 200,000 years old, although a few years ago archaeologists in Israel found 8 teeth that are believed to be human from 400,000 years ago.

I told you last week that I sometimes read metaphysical texts when I need to burn away the cobwebs forming in my brain. Thinking about 200,000 years ago and light that began its journey to the retina in my eye 20,000 years ago has the same effect. I am lost in the mystery, or as one of my favorite hymns puts it, "lost in wonder, love, and praise."

And yet, "in 1611, the King James translation of the Bible was published with a note to readers that creation had occurred on the evening before the 23^rd of October in the year 4004 BC. In 1616, the Catholic church banned all books that suggested the earth moved at all." (BBT, op cit., p. 52) This calculation of the date of creation, I gather, was obtained by working back through the genealogies in the Bible from the time of Jesus. There are people today who still believe this, that the earth is 6,000 years old, and I struggle to understand how holding to such a belief gives glory to God and the evidence obtained through science doesn’t. The Dalai Lama, as you may know, has entered into collaboration with neuro-scientists at MIT who are interested in studying the brains of monks who have spent a lifetime meditating. The Dalai Lama has said that if science discovers something that shows an error in what Tibetan Buddhism had thought to be true, then, he says, we must change our belief. How different from the history of the Christian Church!

The opening chapter of Genesis which David read for us this morning is a story about origins. It is not history or science, but rather poetry, hymn, doxology, myth, not in the sense of something that is untrue, but rather a truth so big it can only be told in story. "If we in the post-modern world struggle to see truth in those art forms," as one writer puts it, "it is not because Scripture is lying. It is because our post-Enlightenment imaginations are impoverished." (Debie Thomas, Journey with Jesus, 6/9/14) Albert Einstein said, "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." And the American humorist Will Rogers quipped, "We’re all ignorant, just on different subjects." (Both cited by BBT, op cit.)

When the Hebrew priests and sages wrote down this creation story, they were most likely living in exile in Babylon. They knew that if there was any hope of retaining a sense of identity in the midst of this foreign land, their people would need to have a way of remembering who they were. The origin myth of their Babylonian captors said that the "cosmos had been made from the dismembered corpse of the goddess Tiamat, whose skull was split by her youngest son Marduk. By murdering his evil mother, Marduk brought order out of chaos with an act of redemptive violence." (BBT, op cit., p. 27)

The Hebrew story was very different, and what we have in Genesis 1 and then in Genesis 2 & 3 are two of the stories that the Hebrews told to their children about who they were and Whose they were. We are their children as well, and if we can allow our imaginations to speak in their own language of images and poetry and song, we too can find deep truths here about who we are and where we come from.

We come from "a God who pays delighted attention," as one wise woman observed. (Debie Thomas, op cit.) "A God who lingers over leaf and wing," every scale and hoof, stream and crystal. This is not merely an engineering, mechanistic, utilitarian God, but a creative, artistic God with a sense of humor. Have you seen an aardvark or a zebra?

This is a world that is, before anything else, essentially good, not evil. The first word before evil or sin or flaw is blessing, original blessing, not original sin. Marcus Borg observes that "Genesis is strikingly world-affirming," not world-denying, (Cited by Thomas, op cit.) focused on this world, not some other, "heavenly" place. If "good" rather than "evil" were our default setting for looking at the world, might we see the world differently, when we are overwhelmed by the violence, destruction, depravity, and greed that so often seem to be the only way to describe it? Rather than simply holding on until we can get to "that other place," might not our broken hearts and deep gratitude for the beauty of this place nourish and empower us to do all that we can to heal the world?

We come from a God who makes all things new. Out of void and chaos, God doesn’t split open a skull and dismember a corpse, but God’s Spirit moved over the waters and breathed light, spoke a world, created human beings, male and female, out of God’s own image. You think Apple keeps coming up with new things? They are nothing compared to what God can create. Every morning you wake up it is actually a brand new day, never before dawned. Your body is new, different, as is the body of the person or dog or cat waking up beside you. This new day, this present, is a present, a gift. We come from a God who makes new things.

"...And there was morning, and there was evening, the second, and the third, and the fourth day." We come from a Source with rhythms, morning and evening, work and rest. Our 24-7 lifestyles are literally killing us. We’ve forgotten who we are, where we come from.

God also created and named the light and the darkness. We must not be too quick to dismiss the gifts of the darkness, as Barbara Brown Taylor’s latest book, called Learning to Walk in the Dark, reminds us–gifts of insight, of quiet, of rejuvenation, of stillness. In fact, all our dualisms, opposites–light and dark, good and evil, black and white, up and down, in and out–are fraught with peril. There is territory in between. If we can accept and affirm only one half of the dualism and reject the other, we end up blinded by the light, with stiff necks from looking only up, afraid of "the other," with only striving and no release, only aggression and no submission. "To want a life with only half these things in it is to want half a life," one sage observed, "shutting the other half away where it will not interfere with one’s bright fantasies of the way things ought to be." (Debie Thomas, op cit.)

And finally, for now, this origin story tells us that we are made in the image of God. What does that possibly mean? Physically? Spiritually? Morally? Those are questions to be pondered and experienced throughout a lifetime. We are made in the image of God. But in Jesus of Nazareth, we do seem to get the beginning of an answer. This is what it means to be fully human in the image of God. This is the deep truth of who we are and Whose we are. This is the Fully Human One, what we are intended to be, what we all can be, if we open to, awaken in, the fullness of God that is our heritage and birthright. We are sons and daughters of God. That’s what the origin story in Genesis 1 is telling us. That’s what Jesus tells us.

That other current origin story–the story of the Big Bang–tells another truth about us. It says that from a "singularity," a primordial burst of energy spewed elements and fire, stars and galaxies, planets that cooled and tilted, like ours did, at 23 ½ degrees, and from that stardust, all life and all the features and creatures on earth were formed. "We are stardust," Joni Mitchell sang, "we are golden..." The 2^nd creation story in Genesis says the same thing in a different way– "And the Lord God formed the earth creature (adam) from the dust of the ground." How can we poison, use up, exploit the earth, without committing suicide? This is who we are!

"Mommy, where did I come from?" the little boy asked his mother. "Oh man, this is it," she moaned. Sweating, fretting, the mom did her best to describe the process where moms and dads come together, and there’s an egg and a sperm, and it grows inside the mommy’s tummy, and finally the baby comes out of his mother’s body. The little boy looked confused. "But where was I born?" he asked a different way. "In Utica," the mom replied. "Oh," he said, and went back to his Luke Skywalker action figure and its desert scooter.

Lots of different origin stories. Where do you come from? Utica? Blackwell, Oklahoma? Pownal? Switzerland? California? Mississippi? What is the question you’re asking really? If the question is deep enough, the first chapter in Genesis is a good place to start looking for some answers. "In the beginning, God...."

Rev. Mary H. Lee-Clark

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"One, Two, Three...What?!"-- 2 Cor. 13:11-13, Matthew 28:16-20--June 15, 2014

 

Trinity Sunday is the only Sunday in the Christian year devoted to a doctrine; and yet the great 20^th century theologian Karl Rahner "claimed that if the Trinity were to quietly disappear out of Christian theology, never to be mentioned again, most of Christendom would not even notice its absence." (Cynthia Bourgeault, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, p. 1) As one Lutheran preacher put it, "a) I don’t fully understand the Trinity, b) I don’t expect to this side of the eschaton, and c) I tend not to trust those who say they do." (David Lose, WorkingPreacher. com, 6/9/14) Amen.

And yet, here we are on the Sunday after Pentecost, when we celebrated the gift of the Holy Spirit to the gathered and bewildered followers of Jesus after his death, adding to their experiences of the God whom Jesus taught about and the God whom they experienced, somehow, in him. When they tried to tell others about their experience of God, they soon found themselves defending their belief in one God. How is it, they were asked, that you say you believe in the God of Israel, creator of the universe, yet you also say that this Jesus is God and this Spirit that overwhelmed you and taught you to speak in tongues is also God? "God in three persons," we sang in our opening hymn. Only three? What about God as mother bear, or source of living water, or judge, or lamb–all Biblical images for the Holy One? Or the 99 names of God that Islam knows (the 100^th name of God is unknowable, they wisely teach)? God in 3 persons? "a) I don’t fully understand the Trinity, b) I don’t expect to this side of the eschaton, and c) I tend not to trust those who say they do."

There does seem to be something about the number 3 that has a completeness and unity and dynamism to it, that other numbers do not have. Emily Dickinson invoked the Bee, the Butterfly, and the Breeze. The ancient Celts called on a trinity of birds: Wren, Raven, and Wild Goose, known for different qualities of compassion, courage, and character. (Nancy Rockwell, The Bite in the Apple, 6/7/14) They invoked the female trinity of virgin, bride, and crone, each with powers for regeneration and fertility and called upon in blessings of fields, hearths, and marriage beds.

A common object lesson in teaching children about the Trinity is the apple, with its seeds, flesh, and skin. Three in one. God in three persons–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–but it is this notion of "persons" that often distracts us from the original intent of this doctrine or teaching, which was less about who God is and more about how God is. The 4^th c. church fathers who articulated this doctrine of the Trinity actually described these three personae–less "persons" and more states of being, like steam, water, and ice–as engaged in a perpetual dance–perikoresis was the Greek word they used. Constantly flowing in and around and through one another. God as community. This is who and how God is. "The universe is not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects," the late ecological theologian Thomas Berry wrote. The same could be said of God. Not a collection of persons but a communion of subjects.

St. Patrick, bringing the gospel to Ireland and into that ancient trinitarian Celtic culture, invoked the Trinity on his deathbed in the hymn written on his breastplate–

I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trinity, by invocation of the same, the Three in One, the One in Three.

I bind unto myself today, the virtues of the starlit heaven, the glorious sun’s life-giving ray, the whiteness of the moon at even, the flashing of the lightning free, the whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks, the stable earth, the deep salt sea, around the old appointed rocks.

Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

It was a swirling, dancing, personal, earthy, moving portrait of God, capturing a sense of the how rather than the who of God. Our more traditional male trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (or Ghost, which is even scarier) has all too often become stagnant and familiar, instead of dynamic, mysterious, and strange.

But it is not just a matter of using different words, perhaps different genders, to retrieve and bring alive this description of God. In her book, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, Episcopal priest and wisdom teacher Cynthia Bourgeault writes that the Trinity "is primarily about process." (P. 15) She describes an up to now relatively unknown but ancient "Law of Three," perhaps with origins in the mystical traditions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, but also found in the Wisdom schools of Central Asia. I’ll conveniently spare you the wild and eccentric details of this metaphysical theory (convenient because I can barely follow the progression myself and only read this stuff when I want to burn away the cobwebs forming in my brain), but basically what the Law of Three says is that every new arising is the result of three forces–an affirming, a denying, and a reconciling force–coming together and acting upon one another. Another way of putting it is, "The interweaving of three produces a fourth in a new dimension." (P. 131)An example would be a seed (an affirming force), moist soil (a "denying" or steady force), and sunlight, bringing about the arising of a sprout–something new and in turn creative.

The Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Bourgeault writes, is in a progression of trinities, beginning with the very first, primordial coming into existence of the universe, out of the heart of God. The new arising that is produced from the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Bourgeault posits, is the kingdom of heaven, which Jesus taught so consistently about. And the so-called kingdom of heaven is, of course, not a place, but a way of being; in fact, a way of awakening and being in the Body of Christ, not as the institutional church, but literally, mystically, in the body of Christ.

Nearly a thousand years ago, [Bourgeault writes], an Orthodox monk by the name of Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022) ...came up with yet a third meaning for the Body of Christ [in addition to the Church and the Eucharist]. This strikingly bold and intimate poem sets us down firmly upon that inner ground of transfiguration:

We awaken in Christ’s body

as Christ awakens our bodies,

and my poor hand is Christ. He enters

my foot, and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully

my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him

(for God is indivisibly

whole, seamless in his Godhood).

I move my foot, and at once

he appears like a flash of lightning.

Do my words seem blasphemous?–Then

open your heart to Him.

And let yourself receive the one

who is opening to you so deeply.

For if we genuinely love Him,

we wake up inside Christ’s body

where all our body, all over

every most hidden part of it,

is realized in joy as Him,

and He makes us utterly real,

and everything that is hurt, everything

that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,

maimed, ugly, irreparably

damaged, is in Him transformed

And recognized as whole, as lovely,

and radiant in His light.

We awaken as the Beloved

in every part our body.

Talk about a "new arising"! And, just to make things more fun, this is not the final Trinity, Bourgeault suggests, although it has lasted some two thousand years. There is one more, with this awakened kingdom of heaven as one of the three forces, out of which the end point, the fullness of God, arises, and everything is folded into oneness.

Who needs drugs to venture into wild and mind-blowing territory?! Perhaps we have come full circle--"a) I don’t fully understand the Trinity, b) I don’t expect to this side of the eschaton, and c) I tend not to trust those who say they do." This is still an accurate description of how I regard at the Trinity, though I’m beginning to see it less as a dead doctrine and more of a living, moving mystery. David Lose, who wrote this a, b, and c, suggests that it might be more helpful to look at what he calls "Trinitarian congregations." "The short definition of a Trinitarian congregation [he writes] is one that sees itself as called and sent by the Holy Spirit to bear witness to the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed for the sake of the world God created and loves so much." (Op cit.) To intentionally work on becoming a Trinitarian congregation is probably more useful than trying to understand the inner workings of Trinity, though I have to say that there are more possibilities and potential in this ancient, wild-eyed doctrine than I had ever thought before.

The aliveness and relevance of this dancing, creative, unfolding description of how God is–and we are made in God’s image, remember-- only makes sense if we are awake to its presence and possibilities. If we are "awake" in Christ’s body and Christ awakens in us, as Symeon the "New" Theologian of the 10^th c. wrote about, we become part of bringing about the new arising, the kingdom of heaven, and the more of us who are so awake, the more others may experience that utterly amazing healing, hope, and wholeness which God intends for the whole world.

Through it all, wherever and whatever this Trinity or the future unfolds for us, may we remember Jesus’ promise to his followers: "And lo, I am with you always, even to the close of the age." So may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you." Amen, and amen.

Rev. Mary H. Lee-Clark

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"Coming Together/Still I Rise"-- Acts 1:6-14, John 17:1-11-- June 1, 2014

 

This past Thursday marked the 40^th day after Easter. There was a parking lot full of cars at Christ the King Church on Rt. 7 in Rutland when I drove past late Thursday afternoon on my way to a meeting at Grace Church. Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters were at church for the Ascension Day liturgy.

"After [Jesus’] suffering, [we read in Acts], he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God."

40 days (again)– as long as it took–to convince them that Death really had not destroyed him, had not ultimately separated him from them, 40 days to give them glimpses of resurrection life and how the power of God to give life was fundamentally different from the power of empire to inflict death.

"It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority [Jesus said to the gathered disciples]. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.

Gone again, but this time they seemed to have an assignment, a purpose for living. They were to receive the same power that Jesus had received from God, the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, and then they would be witnesses to that healing, life-giving power in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

The rising of Jesus occurs in 3 stages, one commentator points out [Nancy Rockwell, The Bite in the Apple, 5/25/14] beginning with his resurrection on Easter. We will celebrate the 3^rd stage next Sunday on Pentecost, when he rises into the life of the Spirit, but today we celebrate that 2^nd step–his ascension–into heaven, which is another way of saying, into fullness of the presence of God. "In my Father’s house are many dwelling places," Jesus had told his disciples in John’s gospel, trying to describe the indescribable fullness of the presence of God; the Great Feast was another image he used; the Great Cloud of Witnesses is yet another image used by the church. "He was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight."

It was a poignant time for those left behind without his physical presence. Yes, Jesus promised that they would not be left alone, that they would, indeed, be filled with the same power that he had received from God, but as it is with any of our loved ones, it is that physical presence, that earthen vessel in which we have known this person, that we ache for when they are gone from our sight. And so Jesus prays for them.

In this great, long prayer in John’s gospel, Jesus prays for his disciples who are staying in the world. "Keep them safe," he prays to God, "make them one, as you and I, Father, are one, I in them and you in me." Rather than the language of increasing separation, Jesus talks of ever-increasing union and communion. Just as Jesus had experienced God with and within him, so would the disciples–so would we–experience God with and within them, with us and within us.

The traditional image of Jesus’ ascending into heaven has him then seated at the right hand of God Almighty, "from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead," as the creed says. Over and above. Far off, but having sent a messenger, an intermediary, an intercessor. The Church set itself up in similar fashion–Christ as head, then the bishop or pope as earthly head, then cardinals, priests, ministers over "the people," the laity. It wasn’t all that different a management model than the Empire used for governance.

But listen to this alternative model or image that early 20^th century Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put forth–

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge." [cited by Nancy Rockwell, op cit.]

Teilhard –this Jesuit priest who had studied the footprints of evolution--believed that God’s intention was in fact moving evolution toward an "Omega Point," an ultimate convergence in Christ. "For everything that rises must converge." We rise to communion, to greater union with God. Eternal life, as Jesus described in his prayer in John, is "to know God." The late Biblical scholar Walter Wink saw Jesus’ "ascension" as actually his "descent" into the collective unconsciousness of humanity, planting deep within us the archetype of the Fully Human One, which Jesus was. Let that rise from within you.

So what does any of this have to do with the price of beans or bread, as they say? What possible impact might this ancient, fairy-talelike story have on our lives? It has to do with how we imagine God at work in our lives and what we "give worth to," that is, what we worship. Do we literally spend our lives burrowing down in the ultimate pursuit of money, of power, of success, of some ideal physical form, that sets us apart from others? Maybe above others?

Or do we participate in this rising with Christ, where ultimately we are joined with others and with God? If that is our choice, we will find that we are raised with him from all kinds of death–not only our final death, but also all those "little deaths"–the death of relationships or of dreams, the loss of a job or the loss of our health. Death does not have the final word. Secondly we can leave time and space in our lives for the practices that open us up to the power and presence of God, so that we come together with Christ and with all who, remaining true to the selves whom God created them to be, "move ever upward into greater consciousness and greater love." Practices like prayer and meditation, worship, devotional reading, working together for justice and healing.

This view of how God works impacts how we view others and the world. As tributes poured in this week upon the death of the great poet Maya Angelou, I couldn’t help but smile at the association of one of her best loved poems with Ascension Day, just one day after her death. That poem is entitled, "Still I Rise"--

You may write me down in history

with your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise. ..

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries? ...

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise...

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise. [From The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou, pp. 163-4]

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

May we too rise and come together, sharing the bread and the cup, becoming, as we are, one body, of the same blood, converging into Christ, who is our life, our light, our love. Amen.

Rev. Mary H. Lee-Clark

 

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