sermon: the great escape

Sermon: Ascension Sunday, Year A
The Community Church of Wilmette
May 4, 2008

The Great Escape

"Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." Acts 1:11

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

It’s a cry of desperation by a sideshow magician in the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy and her friends have been on a long journey to find the Wizard. He lives in a distant city, far away. He is “great and powerful.” He is to be feared. But he is the only one who can restore them. He is the only one who can give them a heart, a brain, the nerve, and can send them home. So the heroes journey and struggle, obsessed with what lies in Heaven…or Oz…and wonder what kind of wizard the Great and Powerful Oz must be.

Of course, as most of us here know, what they discover is that the heart, a brain, the nerve and the way home were with them all along…and Oz was just an illusion.

This is the nature of speculation. Sometimes it can be circuitous.
Sometimes it can be it’s own trap.
Questions without answers can become distractions, ways to uphold illusion.
They can keep us from the work that is set before us.
This is one facet of the context that Luke speaks from
in this Passage from Acts this morning.

“Tell us about Heaven.
When will Jesus come back?
What will it be like?”

Luke is writing to the second generation of the Church.
He’s trying to tell them how the
first generation of the church lived together.
Acts is the record of that history.
Luke wants this new generation to understand how they should live.
But there seems to be a problem. They are distracted.

You see, from the very beginning of our history,
those who followed Jesus wanted to know
what the Future would bring.
Political reform? Economic renewal?
How would it benefit them?
Won’t somebody tell us? Because God seems so far away.

And when will Jesus be back?

The very first thing that Luke does, however,
is to help his reader to move beyond this line of questioning.

“Our faith is not about predicting the future,” he says.
“Our faith is about redefining the present.”

Jesus will Return. There is such a thing as Hope.
God is not far away.
Scripture is consistent in expressing this.
This is the core to Christian belief.
In the end, God sets everything aright.
Luke expresses this same hope. But Luke also offers a warning.

Do not become fixated upon the Heavens…distracted.
“’Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven…’
…on a pie in the sky…afraid that you might be left behind?
You will, instead, find God in the world around you.
This is Christ’s promise at his Ascension.”

We will receive the Holy Spirit, which is the presence of God in the world. It is a gift given to us. It defines who we are…and empowers us to do the work of the Kingdom.

This is such a strange story to tell. Jesus is lifted up into the clouds. Here it is, like something from the SciFi Cannel. And he opens his history of the Church with it.

But he moves so quickly. He affirms the story. He does not deny this strange tale. But he moves on. He gives it only eleven verses. He rapidly moves on to the history of Being the Church. What does it mean to be the Church? This is the question Luke wants to ask.

In Acts, the followers of Christ still think of Following Christ as a political movement…”When will you restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus’ answer is, yet again, not what they expect. It’s not a timeline or a carefully wrought strategy. The followers of Christ are still struggling with their question. They struggle with illusion. They struggle with how to act…

What do we do? Tell us what we’re supposed to do.
Luke, understanding the nature of such a question, responds by encouraging them to ask another question: Who shall we be?

Michel Quoist is one of my favorite poets. A Baptist mystic introduced me to his poetry many years ago. What I love about Quoist is his willingness to encounter God in any context. This is a poem about just such an encounter. This is one way to answer Luke’s preferred question.

“The Subway”

The last ones squeeze in.
The door rolls shut.
The subway rumbles off.
I can't move;
I am no longer an individual but a crowd,
A crowd that moves in one piece like jellied soup in its can.

A nameless and indifferent crowd, probably far from you, Lord.
I am one with the crowd, and I see why it's sometimes hard for
me to rise higher.
The crowd is heavy - leaden soles on my feet, my slow feet - a
crowd too large for my overburdened skiff.
Yet, Lord, I have no right to overlook these people; they are
my brothers,
And I cannot save myself, alone.

from Prayers by Michel Quoist

This is how I understand the nature and identity of the Church.

It is inseparable from the world.
The salvation of everyone in the Church is intrinsically tied
to the salvation of all Humanity.
It is a chaotic, difficult, and slow business.

Being the Church is complicated and messy…
like soup in a can…each of us moving with leaden feet.
Interconnected…none are to be overlooked.

We are not to be distracted by something else, something distant. It is not the nature of Christ, the Kingdom, Heaven, God, or the Holy Spirit to be distant.

Luke wants us to remember that by being the Church
we give witness to Jesus, Immanuel, “God with us”…We find Heaven in our midst.

Luke tells the story about the Ascension twice…in Acts and in his Gospel. And in each, the response is prayer and worship. This prayer and worship, however, is not an escape, but a recognition of God. This was the character of Christ’s prayer and worship. And it was the foundation to every miracle and act of compassion. Christ’s ministry was about proclaiming the Kingdom of God as present…here and now. His ministry was about showing people God. To do this he took the time to be with God, to worship and pray. This was not an effort to escape the world, but to learn to uncover the illusions of the world and to recognize God’s presence in it.

So much of life is about escaping…finding ways to escape pain, uncertainty, and struggle. We surround ourselves with comforts and successes, to do lists and achievements…always looking to that next distant goal. We try to Escape. What Jesus is asking of us, and what Luke understands to be the identity of the Church is the opposite.

We are to dig in. We are to keep people from looking to some Far Off Illusion. For the Kingdom is not there. God is here. With us. First we pray. First we worship. First we learn to escape the illusion that God is anywhere else but with us here and now.

The World shouts, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” It wants us distracted…trying to find some great and powerful Oz...It wants us lost on some yellow brick road.

But Luke knows the truth. He knows that God is here. The Kingdom is with us. We are to be witnesses.

So, escape illusion. Do not look to some far off heaven. But find Heaven here. Now.

Amen.