Ascension Sunday, Year B
May 20, 2012
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
“…so
that with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to
which he has called you…what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among
the saints…and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who
believe according to the working of his great power.”
Today
we remember the Ascension of Our Lord, the occasion when Jesus ascended into
heaven to be seated at the right hand of God. The central issues of the
Ascension have very little to do with what Jesus was up too once He left the
temporal realm, the realm of time and space, and have even less to do with how
He got there. Rather, the Ascension has
everything to do with what we are up too here and now, knowing that God, at
least God located in the fully human substance of Jesus Christ, is no longer
here or now. I know this sounds
technical if not inane, but if we do not get some of this stuff straight, some
of our understandings in order, the whole thing, the Christian vocation itself
can be nonsensical, or worse, we can be led to idolatry and all other kinds of
bad religion. Right thinking alone will
not get you to God; but wrong thinking guarantees that you won’t.
So what are we to do in the wake of Christ’s bodily
departure? (And no, it does not matter
if it happened this way, rising in glory on a cloud. This is just the story that we have and
stories are generally better at conveying meaning then they are at relating
facts.) In his letter to the church in
Ephesus, St. Paul left us three penetrating questions to consider in a
post-Ascension world. These are the
roots of today’s remembrance. St. Paul
asked:
What is the hope to which we have been called?
What are the riches of his inheritance?
What is the greatness of his power?
These questions really get to the heart of why we are
Christian. Not just worshipers of God,
but lovers of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, the fullness of the Trinity in its
endless numbered days. Where do we begin
with these questions, particularly with the “eyes of our hearts enlightened”?
Well if I had an hour to preach, I could get through all three this
morning. You all game? It couldn’t be longer than last week’s
Mass…
These questions are so important that we are going to
pray on them for the next couple of Sundays.
Next Sunday is Whitsunday, the day of Pentecost, and the theme of the
riches of his inheritance dovetails well into that great Solemnity. And then we are on to the greatness of His
power, a fitting thread to follow through Trinity Sunday on the 3rd. All three questions are meant to be on our
hearts as we transition from this Easter season to the long slow stretch of
ordinary time that is before. So today
we consider Hope.
What is the hope to which we have been
called? This is a trickier question that
it might seem. Hope is slippery. The tricky thing is that hope is not about
specific things to come, specific outcomes in the future. That is not the proper definition of hope, at
least not Christian hope. Christian hope
is not about wishing. Christian hope is
not about longing. Wishing and longing
are grasping, clinging feelings. When we
attach to some specific outcome we stray into the world of fantasy. “I so long to be rich!” “I so wish to get better!” “I need x,
y or z.” Hope like this becomes a sin against hope, it
becomes presumption, anticipated fulfillment (the other sin against hope being
despair, anticipated failure). The
future, assuming that it comes (which is an assumption; the future itself is an
assumption), but nothing in the future, even a future itself, is
guaranteed. The future is so totally out
of our control, and dwelling on specific hoped for outcomes distracts us from
the important work and even more important relationships we have before us in
the present moment.
“It’ll all be better when we die, our future rewards are
in heaven.” When my grandmother died,
her pastor prayed over her body, “We are so glad you are dead, Helen, you are
now with the Father where you have always longed to be.” I wanted to punch him in the nose. “Don’t you be glad that my grandmother is
dead, she’s not,” I thought. This is the classic example of disordered
attachments, of un-Christian hope. It is
this specific form of hope, deferring work towards happiness or well-being (or
justice) in the now in favor of
future heavenly reward that led to Marx’s very correct and highly misunderstood
critique of religion as “the opiate of the masses.” Improper hope distracts us from what we need
to be and do in this world, right now.
That pastor could have prayed much more rightly, “We hope Helen now
rests in peace.” Or, “We hope her family
can bear this loss and find joy in her memory.”
Those are things to hope for.
Hoping to be cured from a disease or recover from an injury is futile
and unrealizable, but hoping in Christ that we have the courage and the will to
live through whatever we face. Hoping for the inner strength to overcome
adversity, for the patience to find solutions, now those are things to pray
for. Those are things to hope in.
Proper
Christian hope… I am going to quote a German theologian, Ferdinand
Kersteins. He is Catholic and not
particularly prominent, but bear with me, it’s good. He writes, “Freedom is the key to the new, to
the coming of what never was before.
History is played out between the freedom of God, the ground of all, and
the freedom of man (sic). Christian hope
fixes its gaze on the futurity which this play of freedom makes possible and
not on a predetermined goal of a development.
Hope looks to history that is to come.”
The
key here is Christian hope’s focus not on some predetermined or presumptive
outcome, that is attachment to a fantasy, but Christian hope focuses on the
interplay of freedom that God has graced existence with. The freedom of God and our own distinctly
human freedom engaged in an amazing, serendipitous, improvisational dance
through the multidimensional stratum of existence… our hope is that the dance
continues and that we abide in the dance, the process of the dance, the
theodrama as one great Jesuit calls it, and not on the specific steps of that
dance.
I
am not a sports fan. No matter how long
we end up living here in Eugene, I do not suspect that I will ever wear any
Ducks gear. I am sorry, it is nothing
personal. I spent most of my life in
Boston, a fanatical sports city, and have never worn anything with even a Red
Sox logo. That said, I was in divinity
school in 2004 when the Red Sox won that first world series in 80 something
years. Even I, the perpetual disdainer
of popular culture, I felt the excitement and even watched two innings of one
of the games. But truly, at divinity
school, there was some debate about whether it was proper Christian hope to
hope for one team to prevail over the other.
(Well, in the pennant race at least, the question was about praying for
the Red Sox to win because even I knew that the Yankees were on the side of
darkness). A legendary old
priest/professor in Cambridge, Ed Rodman, a rabid Red Sox fan and a wise and holy
man, he answered the question for us.
No, it was not OK to hope or pray for the Red Sox to win; rather, pray
for the officials to make the play fair so that the contest may proceed as an
interplay of the perfect freedom of God , humanity and the ground of
being. (I think the subtext was that all
things being equal, God’s thumb would be on the Red Sox’s side of the
scale). But really, Christian hope lies
in the desire truly in “all things being equal,” in equanimity, in balance and
repose and peace.
As we say in the Mass, “In the fullness of
time… bring us to that heavenly country where… we may enter the everlasting
heritage of your sons and daughters…” Hope is all about in the fullness of
time. We cannot even venture to guess what the fullness of time looks like or
even really means, but our faith in hope is that it is going to work out in
kairos, (does anyone know what kairos means?)
…in God’s time. This is the fullness of time. Proper hope now, in the wake of Christ’s
Resurrection and Ascension is that we fulfill our vocation, fulfill our special
purpose, fulfill our obligations as baptized members of Christ’s body and allow
ourselves to be led by God to where ever it is that God needs us.
So
that is nice, this theological exploration of hope. Well thought through, and as I warned, rather
technical if not inane. But, I truly
believe it matters, because with hope rightly understood, the path to prayer is
made more straight. Prayer, meditation,
whatever you call it, that is where God intersects with the world definitively,
particularly in a post-Ascension world.
In prayer the eyes of our heart truly are enlightened. Who we are is exponentially more important
than what we do. Prayer, hopeful prayer,
is a path to realize who we truly are.
We pray not for x to happen,
or y to cease or z to change, but we pray for the courage to be who we truly
are. We pray for the resilience to
weather the storms. We pray for the
wisdom to discern God’s will. We pray
for the patience, the humility, the stillness inside to be an island of peace
in a sea of discontent. Pray that you
are a comfort for someone; pray for the ability to be a good friend; pray for
the gift of prayer. And how do we
pray? How do we hope to pray? Well, that is something that we are about to
begin working on in earnest around here.
Stay tuned. Be hopeful. AMEN
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