In the Ascension, the Triune God draws human life into the inner life of God and makes it possible for the Spirit of God to live in our humanity, joining us with God forever.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Ascension of Our Lord
Texts: Luke 24:44-53; Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

It’s strange: what God does today is opposite of what we think.

Look at Luke’s second Ascension account, in Acts. Jesus is “lifted up,” a “cloud [takes] him out of their sight.” And the disciples stand there, gaping up at the sky.

And why not? The focus of their life for three years, God’s presence in their lives, has just . . . well, they don’t quite know what he just did. So there they stand.

Until two beings in white robes appear and ask the obvious: “what are you doing staring into heaven?”

But for most of human history, people stared up into the sky for God.

We know “heaven” isn’t a location reachable by space shuttle, above a sky dome that keeps the waters of creation at bay. But before our age, nearly every human culture who worshipped gods envisioned their home as “up”, above the clouds, on top of mountains.

And even with our scientific understanding, we’re still looking up for God. Humanity still tends to view whatever god they worship as “apart,” somehow far away. Even Christians too often default to this.

Now, the Church claims that God took on human flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. Came near.

In this Palestinian human male of 2,000 years ago, we believe the Creator of all things is found. As a human being, Jesus was the focus of the lives of all who followed him. He was their beloved Master, their gifted Teacher. He bore God’s healing and creative power. He embodied God’s love and forgiveness. In his brutal crucifixion and utterly astonishing resurrection, Jesus’ believers ultimately saw him as not just human, but God Incarnate.

Having him back in these forty days after Easter was a grace and a blessing. Still teaching, still loving, Jesus was back and all was well. They knew where God was again – in Jesus. Once again, Jesus was their focal point.

And then he was carried away. Gone. For a brief moment, God was with us. And now we’re back to looking at the sky. We’re back to God up there, us down here, just as we’ve always thought.

“You’ve completely missed the point,” those white-robed messengers say.

It’s not a question of God’s presence leaving you, it’s the opposite. Just wait, and God’s Spirit will come upon you, just like with Jesus.

This is the first astonishing truth about the Ascension: in taking Jesus, the embodied, Incarnate God-with-us, away from walking on earth, the Triune God will no longer be embodied in just one person, but in all of humanity.

This is foundational to Luke’s understanding. Everything he claims about Jesus comes from the Holy Spirit of the Triune God flowing into Jesus, from his conception to his baptism, to his ministry, to his death and resurrection. And in Acts, Luke says God’s Spirit is doing exactly the same thing with the Church. As Jesus is the Incarnate One, filled with the Holy Spirit, so now is the Church.

This is the heart of God’s plan.

As long as Jesus remains here, only he could be the focal point of faith, and only where he was in person. Even raised from the dead, everyone would look to Jesus for help, or to do what God needs doing.

But God lifted Jesus back into the inner life of the Triune God, Paul says, made Jesus the Christ, so Christ’s body now could become the Church, and the Incarnation now could happen in humanity.

In all the diversity of human race and gender, gifts and cultures, God is known. We don’t have to look up, or believe God has gone away. Paul says we are given the Spirit of wisdom that reveals to us God working in all things, embodied in all people, with more hands and voices and feet and skills and gifts than we can count, bringing God’s grace and love to all.

But there’s another mystery about the Ascension.

Jesus of Nazareth, God-in-human-flesh, is lifted up into the life of the Triune God.

That means not only is God embodied in humanity through the Holy Spirit in the Church. Humanity is embodied in the life of God.

This is such deep mystery that we can’t look at it without confusion. In the Ascension, the Triune God has not only brought the Christ back into in the inner dance of the Trinity, the seat of divine love from which Christ came. The Triune God has brought the Incarnate Jesus into the life of God.

Jesus doesn’t lose his body when he ascends, leaving it lying on the ground. That’s all we know. We don’t know what that truly means in the life of the Trinity. But Jesus, the Christ, crucified and risen, still bearing the scars of his torture and death, was carried into the life of God. Human life in some way has been brought into the life of God for eternity. And surely even God is changed.

You see why it’s a waste of time to look anywhere for God, other than amongst us?

In the Ascension God made the Church possible. We are literally the body of Christ, the Incarnation, in this world. We’re not witnessing to something that happens “out there,” apart from us, when we speak of God’s love and grace and salvation and healing. We witness it with our very bodies and hearts and voices and hands.

And somehow, in ways we dare not try to imagine, in the Ascension our humanity lives in the heart of God. We are so joined to God that nothing can separate us.

Today’s not a day of farewells and absence. It’s the day when humanity and the Triune God fully join together in the new creation God is planning, in the healing of all things God so deeply desires.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

God needs to crack your heart – the center of all you are – open, and pour God’s word of love inside; then everything is transformed.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Sixth Sunday of Easter, year C
Texts: Acts 16:9-15; John 14:23-29

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Consider a new sidewalk, six inches thick, six feet wide, a stream of solid concrete running the length of a block.

There’s no green; whatever warm earth was there is covered up by cold, hard, walking surface. But during the winter the earth resists, heaves, and a tiny crack is made. A seed falls into that crack. In spring, against all odds, a plant rises from the midst of that barrenness, eventually breaking it. Life happens. Green reaches to the sun.

That’s what God did to Lydia on the banks of the river. Luke says God “opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul.”

God opened her heart. Now, the ancients understood this better than we do. We divide heart from head, often pitting them against each other. For the Greeks, the heart was the center of your being, where everything – mind, spirit, emotions, thoughts – dwelt. God opened Lydia up at her very center, to make her eager to hear Paul.

That means this conversation with Paul wasn’t merely a question of convincing Lydia’s mind; her whole being was opened to hear. Her mind, her feelings, her desires, her hopes, everything that made Lydia Lydia was opened to hear about Christ and the Good News of God’s love.

There is a Hasidic story that speaks of this.

“The disciple asks the rabbi, ‘Why does Torah tell us to “place these words upon your hearts”? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?’ The rabbi answers, ‘It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.’”^[1]

If we stop separating heart from head, stop acting as if we are divided beings instead of the unified, beloved children of God that we are, we can understand the rabbi. Whether it’s a closed mind, or a closed-off love, we know what it is to be resistant to God’s Word.

We need God to break open our hearts – sometimes through suffering, sometimes through compassion, sometimes through confusion, sometimes through insight; there are many ways God does this – and open us up to eagerly hear what Christ is calling to us.

We need God to break us open like Lydia so God’s Word of grace and life and love falls into our hearts. When that happens, when we are broken open and God’s Word drops in, when we realize we follow a vulnerable God, whose own heart was broken open for the world, whose very woundedness heals the universe, we grow into people willing to be broken open for the sake of the world.

And when God does this, everything changes. Healing begins. Our lives are transformed.

Look at Lydia. She’s an outsider, a “God-worshipper,” someone who’s found hope in the God of Israel, but isn’t yet Jewish. Together with other women – probably both Jewish women and God-worshippers like Lydia – she comes to the river to pray because as women they aren’t considered part of the synagogue, they didn’t count, and weren’t welcome to pray there. God has already opened her heart to know God through these other women, and now as Paul and his companions come, God opens her even more.

And see what she becomes: this story is the birth of the Philippian congregation, and Lydia almost certainly is the head of that congregation. The congregation Paul loves so much, whose letter is still beloved to us, all this rises from Lydia’s openness. From her heart, her being, cracked open by God, the life in Christ that grows from there.

This is the transformation we saw with Peter and Paul last week, too.

Their whole beings were cracked open by God in Christ to see things differently, to center their lives on following the Spirit of God, wherever the Spirit led. Jews and non-Jews, all were loved by God in Christ, they learned. And Christ’s mission exploded across the Mediterranean world.

Even today, Paul’s center, Paul’s heart is broken open again. This wasn’t a head decision to go to the women gathered by the river. There’s no strategic advantage in that culture for Paul to convert women. He could have, as he often did, just gone to the synagogue. But he goes here, is opened to these women, and God makes a new congregation that becomes a source of deep love and grace for Paul in his later imprisonment.

You can’t know what your transformation will be like until you’re open to God doing it at all.

So today pray for these two things: first, that Christ give you the peace he promises the disciples today, a harmony that will bring your whole being – mental, spiritual, emotional, physical – into one center, one heart.

And then pray that God crack open that center, that heart, breaking through both your rational and your emotional objections, anything that is closed off, so you can, like Lydia, “eagerly hear” what Christ is calling to you. The breaking of your heart will hurt. Vulnerability isn’t always fun. Having all your defenses knocked down and your protections moved aside will be frightening. But the opening made in your heart will allow God’s Word of life and love, sitting on the outside, to fall through the cracks into your center and start to grow and blossom.

Lydia had the right idea: let’s find a beautiful place, maybe by a river, maybe in this room, and pray together. And God will make an opening for the Word to flourish in you, for your healing, and the healing of all things.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

[1] Jacob Needleman, as told to Parker Palmer, and related by Palmer in “The Broken-Open Heart: Living with Faith and Hope in the Tragic Gap,” Weavings XXIV:2, May/June 2009.

 

When Christ calls us to follow, when the Spirit fills us to serve as Christ, God is always on the move, leading us to unfamiliar and sometimes challenging places, but always so God’s love is known by all.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fifth Sunday of Easter, year C
Texts: Acts 11:1-18; John 13:31-35

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Do you realize Jesus is usually on the move when he says “Follow me?”

Sometimes he stops for a moment, often for a meal. Whether it’s a large picnic on a Galilean slope or breakfast on the beach, sometimes Jesus sits still.

But then he’s on his way. “Follow me,” he says to Nathanael, and heads off. “Follow me,” he says to the brothers fishing, and he’s moving up the shore. “Follow me,” he says to Matthew at his tax booth, and Matthew has to move quickly not to lose him in the crowd.

Jesus’ ministry was one of movement, trying to get to as many people and as many places as he could. “Follow me” meant, keep up, we’re going.

And after Pentecost, the newborn Church realized following the Spirit was going to be the same.

Acts is the story of the Church trying to keep up with the Holy Spirit.

At first, they’re all gathered together, ten days after Jesus ascended. He did tell them to stay in the city until they received power from on high, but it was also pretty easy for them to stick together, inside.

Then came the Holy Spirit, with the sound of a roaring wind, pouring fire into their hearts, into their limbs, into their very voices, and they were on the move. Going outside and preaching to representatives of nearly every people on earth. Baptizing thousands, establishing a community of mutual love, preaching God’s raising of the Christ: the Spirit moved and the Church went along.

When Christ caught Paul on the Damascus road, in only a couple days he was sent out to witness. When the Christian community in Jerusalem grew large enough some people were missing out on food, the Spirit raised up deacons to organize Christ’s ministry of loving each other. When an Ethiopian eunuch struggled to understand Scripture on his journey, the Spirit literally carried Philip to where he was needed.

There’s no sitting around when God is out and about. If you’re called to follow, get ready to move.

But, as with Jesus, the Spirit usually leads the Church into challenging places.

Today Peter faces angry criticism in Jerusalem for eating and drinking with Gentiles while up north in Joppa. Peter moved outside the boundary of what is acceptable to those faithful to the God of Abraham, and his fellow Jewish Christian believers want an answer.

This particular movement of the Spirit is so important to Luke, he tells the story twice. In Acts 10, he narrates the story of the Roman centurion Cornelius, his vision sent by God that he should seek for Peter, and Peter’s vision of the lowered sheet of animals. And the most astonishing part: while Peter’s proclaiming to Cornelius and other Gentiles about Jesus’ teaching, death, and resurrection, the Holy Spirit pours out on them exactly as at Pentecost. These Gentiles start speaking in tongues and praising God, just as Peter and his companions had experienced.

Today we hear the same story in the next chapter, Peter’s telling of it. Luke wants his readers to clearly understand this sequence of events: God called to Gentiles, sent them to Peter, gave Peter a vision saying this was acceptable, and then, as Peter proclaimed Christ Jesus, God’s Spirit poured into them.

This is all God’s doing, Luke says. And Peter wisely recognizes it. “Who was I to hinder God?” he says. The Holy Spirit was already there. Of course I baptized them. Of course I ate with them.

That’s the problem with a moving God. You can’t control where God moves.

The Jerusalem believers comfortably sat in their city, proclaiming Jesus to Jewish people, rejoicing in the Spirit’s blessing of their ministry. Things were going well, nothing threatened their faith practices.

But that comfort is ending. Peter, the leader of the original twelve, has crossed a line, claiming to follow God. Paul, the persecutor turned apostle, has gone off to Asia Minor believing the Spirit has led him to embrace Gentiles into the body of Christ, without circumcision and food restrictions.

As long as the Spirit was going on familiar roads, following comforting rules, doing things that felt right, following was fun. But now this seems too far.

To their credit, in a few chapters they’ll have a conference in Jerusalem where they prayed to the Spirit and approved the mission to the Gentiles, with a few restrictions.

But it wasn’t up to them where God would make the body of Christ. It wasn’t their conference decision that moved the Gospel to the whole world. The Gospel was already there, already moving, carried by the Spirit to every corner of the earth. Remember: both Easter and Pentecost happened during major Jewish festivals, with Jerusalem full of international visitors. Twice, huge numbers of people went back to their faraway homes and told what they had seen God do in Jerusalem. The Spirit always meant for this. But now the Jerusalem believers realized the impact on their lives.

We could learn from their experience ourselves.

We hear Christ call “follow me” in our seats. We love to sit and talk about what that means, chat about the limits and challenges to following. Like the Jerusalem church, we assume we have control over God’s work as we gather in congregational meetings and in synods and in churchwide assemblies to decide the mission we will do.

But our only mission is to look up and see where the Spirit is already going, and either follow or quit. We often pick on Peter’s stumbling, but after Pentecost he followed only one path, the path where he saw the Spirit leading. Whether it’s in a trial, or in jail, or watching uncircumcised Gentiles aglow with the Spirit speaking in tongues, Peter has the wisdom to say, “I’m not getting in God’s way. I’ll go there, too.”

Our challenge is to see the new places, even the hard places, the Spirit is leading us.

Here at Mount Olive we can get a little full of ourselves. We think we’re loving, progressive, welcoming, and Christly, and sometimes we are. We all could make long lists of Christians we think haven’t heard Christ’s message to love and welcome all, Christians we wish didn’t call themselves that.

But we are not the epitome of what Jesus had in mind when he ascended into heaven. Whether it’s our latent racism we really don’t want to admit, or our participation in systems that crush and oppress, or our instinctive sexism that subtly affects how we look at women and men in general, and in leadership, even if we deny it, the Spirit is moving to places we’re often not ready to follow.

We need the Holy Spirit to awaken our vision to see these new paths and give us courage to follow. It’s too easy to be complacent, saying, “Things are going well, we see God everywhere, and what’s great is we don’t have to change anything hard about ourselves.” But that’s not how the Spirit works.

So please, pray about where God’s Spirit is leading you that you’re not ready to go. Jesus commands you to love as he loves, the only commandment that means anything to Jesus. That’s where the Spirit is leading you. Ask the Spirit to show you those whom you don’t love, so you can learn to love them, go where the Spirit already is, even if it’s challenging.

And together, let us pray, because the Spirit isn’t just calling individuals to follow.

We are called as a community by the Holy Spirit to go and love as Christ loves, to keep up with where the Spirit is blowing, to find those the Spirit has already blessed and rejoice with them. We can’t sit back thinking we’ve got this Christian community thing solved. Cornelius is looking to hear of Christ from us, there are outsiders, even some we don’t like, whom the Spirit needs us to love and proclaim Christ with our lives.

Peter shows us it’s not complicated, just keep your eyes and ears and heart open to where the Spirit is moving. But be ready for moving. Following means getting on the road and, well, following.

But following God’s Spirit means the Spirit is always with us on the road, giving courage and strength to go to these new places. We’re not alone, so all will be well. But it’s time to get moving and follow.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen