JESUS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING
A sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

May 24, 2009

Acts 1:1-11 and John 17: 6-19

Memorial Day weekend is one that is filled for many of us with family, faith and national traditions. As a very young man in high school in our rural farming town it was a day that always began with certain obligations. My father was an active participant in the local American Legion organization that would on every national holiday have tailors on hand to let out their uniforms that could no longer naturally stretch to meet the demands of growing waistlines. Once these men had squeezed into their finest military attire they would march, sort of in step, out to the local town cemetery and there we would hold a memorial service. Local clergy would pray, the soldiers would fire a salute, I for three years of my youth would recite from memory Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and there were many tears as soldiers were remembered who were sacrificed for any number of our country's calls to arms.

One week ago Saturday morning at just about this time, five of us from First United arrived in our nation's capital. Four of us came by bicycle and one was our van driver. The last ten miles into Washington, D.C. is mainly downhill, at times in some rather severe angles through a very metropolitan environment that makes one have to navigate very carefully. About two miles out one sees the top half of the Washington Monument just beyond Thomas Jefferson's memorial and the Potomac River.

We were met on the national mall by thousands of people -- few we were sure having come the nearly five hundred miles by bicycle through the West Virginia mountains. We had a certain swagger of accomplishment as we bicycled the streets and toured many of the national sites.

Our group made a special effort to pause at the memorials to the wars of our generations -- World War II, Korea, and Viet Nam. The Korean memorial was hauntingly realistic with the seven and one half foot cast steel soldiers marching out of the woods. Tears of sad respect for the soldiers filled my eyes and anger at the politics of war rolled through my viscera as I approached the long line in front of the Viet Nam Memorial that I had avoided visiting through the years. I found the World War II memorial to be beautiful and so small compared to the magnitude and effect on the world of that war.

Strangely missing is a monument to the acts that gave rise to this national holiday -- Memorial Day. In the year after the Civil War ended, Lincoln now dead, a lone New York Times columnist was assigned the task of reporting on the effects of the war on the local economies of the deep south. He found himself on this particular weekend visiting in Mississippi, and as he was walking into a local village he saw a group of women, baskets of flowers in hand, headed for the town cemetery.

During the Civil War dead soldiers, no matter which side they were on, were buried in the closest available cemetery. There was no way to prepare a body to be shipped to wherever home was. There were over 700,000 deaths during the Civil war, compared to 58,000 US deaths in Viet Nam and 400,000 US deaths during World War II. Death continued to be a great political, social divide in the Civil War days, with the Union soldiers from the north buried in one section of the cemeteries, away from the main part of the cemeteries where the confederate southern soldiers were buried.

What began Memorial Day observances nationwide were a mere three sentences sent back to New York by this roving reporter, in which he simply described the Mississippi women scattering flowers on the graves of both the northern and southern fallen men. These were women who surely had lost husbands, sons and brothers at the hands, guns, and armaments of northern soldiers now killed. But these women had been to church, they had the essence of Jesus in their hearts, who commanded them to love their enemies, and perhaps they had even in their hearts learned the folly of war, that war is politics gone bad, and they demonstrated their faith by showering love on both sides of the conflict. Should not the faithful presence and acts of loving compassion and healing of these women be a major monument that overshadows all the others on our national mall?

Memorial Day in its essence is mostly about deciding what kind of people we are going to be given the death, war, and losses that have preceded our time in history. It is precisely the reality that we find reflected in our faith history this morning as we ponder the Scripture stories of the Ascension of Jesus in the Book of Acts and the final prayer of John's Jesus before his arrest and trial near the end of his life. The early followers of Jesus asked after Jesus' death, after the loss of all their dreams and projections in this one man, “Who are we and what are we to be doing now that Jesus is gone?”

This is the last Sunday of the liturgical calendar dedicated to Easter. After today the white linen comes down and next Sunday, when we next arrive in community, the liturgical color will be red. Next week is Pentecost Sunday. Pente is the Greek word for fifty, and thus Pentecost is celebrated fifty days after Easter in the Christian tradition.

Our faith, of course, is a shoot off the stump of Jesse, Judaism. Early Christians were nearly all Jewish and, as Christianity formed, nearly all of our faith holidays have a Jewish holiday hidden behind them, a forerunner of what we take for granted today. Next weekend, our Pentecost, is a major Jewish holiday called Shavout. The holiday actually has roots even older, back in the days of the Canaanites, the early Palestinians who occupied the land of Canaan before the Israelites. Pentecost was a festival of the first fruits, the new harvests of the new growing season.

If we go to temple next Friday evening at Beth Shalom, they will be celebrating Shavout, the celebration of God's gift of the Torah, specifically the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Torah and all the many commandments, over six hundred in total, is that which informs Jewish people how to live in the ways of God. It is full and complete and, in Jewish tradition, it is from the very essence of God that the Torah has come.

Early Christian story tellers who were Jewish attempted to keep the same patterns with Judaism alive and parallel in the Christian narratives. What do you do within Judaism after Moses is gone? You have the Torah. What do you do after Jesus is gone? You have the inbreathing of the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit.

The traditions about Moses within Judaism vary. Some have Moses dying in an unmarked location. Other Midrashic sources have God miraculously bringing Moses to heaven. This syncs well with a fiery chariot showing up to help the great Prophet Elijah ascend into heaven without having to die. While but one of the four gospels have Jesus ascending into heaven, by the time of the writing of Acts the story line has developed and is celebrated in many Christian circles today as Ascension Sunday. It was for the author of Acts, Luke, a necessary component, getting Jesus off the planet in order to accommodate the infusion of God's spirit directly into the followers of Jesus.

The ascension was not part of the earliest gospel traditions and is most certainly a literary parallel added later to seek to demonstrate that Jesus was an essential part of God's activity, as God was with Moses and Elijah. It doesn't pay to think too hard or to seek to be literal about the ascension story. As many have pointed out, in order for Jesus to have bodily ascended off the planet earth would have required, as we know today, his body reaching an escape velocity determined by the formula that I had printed as part of the sermon title this morning. The escape velocity speed is 25,950 mph -- slower speeds are necessary at higher altitudes.

In the days of old, when the whole universe was perceived as being quite small and three-tiered, this was not a problem. The whole universe was three flat surfaces -- God and heaven existed just above the clouds, and Satan and all things evil were just below ground. Interesting only because people have time to figure out such minutiae, had Jesus' physical body actually achieved liftoff to 25,950 mph starting in the year 30 CE and maintained that constant speed, he would still in our year 2009 not have flown out of our solar system, unless he had access to a warp drive system.

Skeptics would throw out both resurrection and ascension as equally irrelevant to post-modern minds. But resurrection as transformation from the entrenched, normalized injustice of human life to an inclusive, non-violent, radical fairness is a far more meaningful metaphor than one that has us staring up into the sky looking for Jesus returning in the clouds. And, by the way, what are we suppose to be doing while we are waiting?

The reading from Acts' ascension narrative returns us to very practical matters. What shall we do about replacing Judas? How shall we maintain community in the face of the greatest loss we could possibly have sustained, the death and physical absence of Jesus? Perhaps it is time for confirming new members, installing new leadership, recommitting ourselves to the great work of justice, compassion and mercy.

And what follows is the promise that the Spirit of the Living Jesus will be available, present to all who call upon Christ's name and live as Jesus lived. The presence of the Holy Spirit that followers of Jesus experience is the spiritually resurrected, reincarnated witness to the truth that Jesus taught.

In John's gospel lesson this morning, Jesus prayed for what I think is the essence of what he wants for us, those who follow after him: that all might be one as he is one with God. This is not some elevated Christology that only Jesus gets to possess. This is an elevated sense of what can be expected in the midst of our human condition if we allow the fullness of the resurrected spirit of Christ to live in and through us.

What might it mean to us, to you and me, if we really took Jesus' prayer in, really believed that God's children are one because God is one, that the unity of Christ's Body is a consequence of Christ, rather than the end goal toward which we strive, but most often fail?

It is a large leap of faith to accept that, as the result of the life and work of Jesus, all of God's children are already one. Without believing it we might very well think that we can treat those around us as we like until such a time as they toe the line and thereby effect the unity for which Jesus prays. I'll treat that person as a brother or a sister, once they convert to Christianity, once they pay their price to society, once they ask me for forgiveness.

That way lies madness, as they say. As long as we're waiting for everyone but us to meet some standard before we'll declare ourselves to be of the same body as they, we're choosing the thankless and joyless task of monitoring others and perhaps the world itself, for signs of dysfunction and misery.

We, and whoever “they” are, do not have to struggle to become members of the body of Christ -- it is a free gift that God offers, and what we do in response to that gift is up to us. We are members of the Body of Christ not because of what we have achieved but because of who Jesus was, is and has done.

This frees us to acknowledge, with our world of others, our connectedness to them, rather than focusing on our differences. We are all one in God. This might just challenge us to search for avenues of compassion and mercy toward all others, if we are by action of the Creator of the universe one with our sisters and brothers around us. We ought, perhaps, to get used to it, since our fellow members of the Body of Christ will depart from us only when Christ departs, which is sometime between never and later than never, and our central task shifts from trying to find ways to figure out who should matter most to us to one of learning to live as joyfully and lovingly and meaningfully with those with whom, one way or another, we are journeying through this life.

And it might just give us what we need to change the world -- bringing healing to the sick, sufficiency to the destitute, freedom to the captives -- because as members of one Body we are called to witness to Christ's presence everywhere. When we see one in whom we have great animosity, by faith we are to see in them the full presence of God. It is an article of faith of those who affirm the resurrection and reconciling work of Jesus that there is nowhere and in no one that God is not fully present. That faith reality should impact the way we treat them.

To accept the radical reality that God has reconciled the world to God's self, through Christ, already, means that we live in a world being made new by grace and that we are called to respond by extending grace to everyone and everything in all we say and do and vote and sell and use.

Memorial Day 2009 is a reminder that to God there are less differences in our world than there is the commonness that we all live, already in the grace of God, and that our lives ought to show it and live it.

See the grace of God, be the grace God. See the grace God and be the grace of God and at those moments our lives and our world will be whole.

Thanks be to God.