Monday Meditation

Hi everyone

I offered my second sermon to the congregation here in San Miguel on Ascension Sunday. Here is a portion. 
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Is this the time Lord Jesus when you will make all things right?

One can understand the disciples asking the question. After all they had experienced enough suffering in the world, including the execution of their leader, to yearn for the promised day when all shall be well on the earth. Is this the time, Lord, when wars shall cease and the rivers of blood shall drive up; when the broken shall be whole, when the number of dead will decrease and not steadily increase? Is this what led Martin Luther King, Jr. to cried out, how long, Lord? How long?

I experience this question – is it time, Lord? – as a prayer. In fact most of my questions for God, and about God’s inscrutable ways (of which there are many,) are prayers. At least I want them to be prayers in the form of yearning for God’s presence in the midst of questions. I hear the heartbreaking stories of war,  see the faces of the bewildered, hungry  and maimed, along with those longing for their loved one to be delivered home to them.  

Surely, anyone alive senses the tension of living in the world, wracked with suffering and estrangement, and the hope for the day when such tragedy shall cease. The question is whether hope will be abandoned in favor of apathy or something else that will reduce the tension. People of faith – the disciples of Jesus - are the ones who live right at the intersection of suffering and hope neither closing our eyes to the pain nor closing our hearts to the hope for God’s promised redemption. That is the cost of living by faith in this world; the alternative is cynicism and despair.

The doctrine of the Ascension is less about the literal mechanics of Jesus’ ascension and more about experiencing the absence of God AND the presence of God.  Jesus says the Spirit will be poured out on us. Not any Spirit but the Spirit of Jesus will be upon us. That must mean at least this: we need not gaze into the skies looking for a a cataclysmic return but rather live right now in this world in the power of this Spirit who has been given to us. 
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“Jesus raised from the dead is the great sign of God’s faithfulness to the world, and as his presence with us becomes the light by which we see everything, and we come to share in the same faithfulness.” (Rowan Williams)

The followers of Jesus live by the Spirit of Jesus, in the way of Jesus, with searchers and seekers and misfits and people from other religious traditions or none. The way of Jesus is the way of hospitality toward strangers, love for enemies, forgiveness to those who have harmed us. It is the proclamation by deed and by word of Good News.  The gift of Christ we receive in the Eucharist is the gift we give to one another and our neighbors. 

The eye of the white-winged dove slays with awe.