What Are Christians Looking For?

Transcription

1 George A. Mason Ascension Sunday Wilshire Baptist Church 1 June 2014 Dallas, Texas What Are Christians Looking For? Acts 1:6-14 Unlike the resurrection of Jesus, where no human eye witnessed the moment, the disciples witness Jesus leaving their presence to go into the presence of God. The ascension might have looked like another rising, but this time it isn t rising from the dead but from the living or better, from the seen to the unseen. Jesus ascension takes him behind the scenes but not off the scene. He ascends to heaven to continue his work from there. And that s confusing for us because of all the ways we think of heaven nowadays. Let s review: heaven is not a holding warehouse for souls where nothing happens or a final destination of eternal bliss for only the good people. It s where God, the angels, and those who have died in the Lord are actively present now. It s the invisible world in which we now live. They are here in some mysterious way. Christ himself is among us. He hasn t left our company, only our sight. Earth is the visible side of God s creation. It s the Bible s language for where we live, even if we re in a spaceship looking back at the planet. But it s more than that: earth is the place where we await a future where God s will will be done as it is in heaven. Earth is the place where disciples look longingly up into the heavens and need angels to remind them that they ought to be looking around rather than looking up. Get your heads out of the clouds, the angels say. Heaven is counting on you. So get to work, earthlings. Be witnesses. The ascension takes place 40 days after Easter and 10 days before the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Jesus is with the disciples. He s proven himself very much alive. Their hopes have been cheered after all the crushing events of his arrest, conviction and crucifixion. So what s their question to him now? Sadly, the same old question: Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? I can almost see Jesus eyes rolling back into his head at this point. I can almost hear him mumbling, Dear God (or Dear Me, which in his case would amount

2 to the same thing, don t you know?!). It must have been another one of those moments when Jesus wanted to sigh and say, How long have I been with you and you still don t get it? Their question indicates what they are looking for, and it challenges us to ask what we are really looking for. The first problem is the word restore. It assumes a Golden Age we can look back on that has somehow fallen from our grasp. Everything was better way back when. We re sighing for Eden. Even the songwriter and singer Joni Mitchell no conservative she penned the Woodstock lines: we are stardust, we are golden and we ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. It s an allusion to the Bible. But keep in mind when the origin story in Genesis 2 ends badly and the first humans are kicked out of the Garden, God places an angelic guard with a fiery sword at the gates to prevent their return. And in the last book of the Bible, which records where we re going rather than where we came from, the metaphor used is a city the New Jerusalem not a garden. In other words, we are heading toward something more than what we started out from. We are moving toward greater complexity rather than simplicity. And yet we hear people all the time longing for a return to simpler times. I understand that, because we might have understood things more clearly when there wasn t so much to understand. Kim longs for a day without smartphones like the one she accuses me of being on all the time. I accuse her of wanting to go back to churning her own butter. Seriously, we do miss some things like air travel pre-9/11, say. What a pain now to live in a security state where we fear terror strikes. We don t let our kids out to play unsupervised for fear that some pervert will abscond with them. We long for the good old days. But were they all that good? Do you want to go back to a time when women were confined to the kitchen and the bedroom? Should we divide the races again and claim that whites are superior to blacks? What Golden Age do you want to go back to? What about the church? Lord, will you at this time restore the glory of your church to the way 2

3 it was in the 1950s, back when things were simpler? When everyone went to church every Sunday. When people put on their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and ate fried chicken in the afternoon before taking naps and finishing off the day with lemonade on the front porch because we didn t have air conditioning. Look, looking back is good for some things, like what values ought to endure and how we might find inspiration from the courage of our forebears. This is where conservatives get things right. But God built change into the fabric of creation, and if we are to be faithful Christians, we have to change in order to keep up with the Christ who is calling us into a kingdom that is emerging among us at every moment, not slipping from us unless we restore it. This is where progressives get things right. I was in Nashville two weeks ago for a conference called Faith Forward. It wasn t called Faith Backward. Too many Christians think that our job is somehow to stand in the middle of Main Street holding up a sign that says STOP. We are good aginners, as we don t say in Brooklyn. We re against this and against that. Well, it s about time the church learned to say what it s for. We have a generation of young people who have plugged their ears to our spiritual Throwback Thursday song-and-dance. They are moving on with or without us. Some are leaving the church; some are even leaving the faith. They aren t going to stay with our us-against-them version of the faith, in which you ve got to have an enemy all time in order to know who you are. They haven t got all our years of church enculturation, but they have the right instinct about the gospel: it s about inclusion, not exclusion. And that brings us to the second thing. It s not only not about Will you at this time RESTORE the kingdom to Israel? It s also not about Will you at this time restore the kingdom to ISRAEL? Jesus has ascended to heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. That s the Apostles Creed, by the way. He had not gone to judge the enemies of Israel and set up the kingdom for Jews alone in Palestine. Yes, he was a Jew. Yes, he was the Jewish 3

4 Messiah. But a bigger yes is that he is the savior of the world. He makes no distinction between Jew or Gentile, male or female, slave or free, American or non- American, single or married, child or adult, straight or gay, Christian or Muslim. The kingdom Jesus is bringing is one in which we are not a humanity divided by our differences but united in them. Our differences enrich us and give us a sense of the true vastness of God s love for each of us and for all of us. Heaven is not a place where Christians go when we die while everyone else goes to hell. Heaven is where the witness of Christians to the unfathomable love of God through Jesus Christ is vindicated forever and ever. There are no Christians in heaven. There are no Jews or Muslims, either. There are only men and women, boys and girls, all made in the image and likeness of God, all loved and died for and forgiven by the God who cannot stand to see one of us lost. So let s be done with identity politics based on religion. The idea of a kingdom for Israel or a Christian America or an Islamic state is dehumanizing folly in the face of a kingdom that is coming by the Christ whose rule is emerging among us. Christ s kingdom operates differently. Last year Sports Illustrated printed a story about an Idaho researcher named Sharon Stoll, who studied the moral reasoning of football players. She was particularly interested in whether Christian athletes had a different attitude because of their faith. Not so much. As part of the project she interviewed a West Point football player who was also active in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter. I quote: One of the linebackers says, Ma am, my job is to kick them in the head, knee them in the groin, stand over them and tell them never to get up." Stoll then asked how the linebacker would play against Jesus. And the guy looked at me and said, Ma am, I m as Christian as the next guy, but if I m playing Jesus the Christ, I play the same way. I leave God on the bench. 1 Listen, this is exactly what we should not be looking for as Christians a divided kingdom. We are looking for a united kingdom in which enemies are turned into adversaries, and 1 /magazine/mag /2/index.htm 4

5 adversaries into competitors, and competitors into allies, and allies into friends. If you want to know the direction the Christian faith is being drawn to by the risen and ascended Christ, this is it. We will either be witnesses to this or we will be part of a world that is passing away. I was just on vacation in Scotland with some friends and learned a phrase that just keeps cracking me up. It s a way of saying that you are all clear and can proceed because of whom you know. Like someone at the airport who looks at your papers with a wink and says, Quick as you like; Bob s your uncle. Well, it got me thinking: what if Jesus were Bob and uncle to us all and from his place in heaven is now able to grant access to God? What if we could stop thinking about his coming again as a way of sorting out who s in and who s out but instead a way of celebrating the victory of his peaceable kingdom over the violent and divisive kingdoms of this world? arrival makes evident his rule. If we could imagine the work of the ascended Christ going on right now behind the scenes through his witnesses who are empowered by the Holy Spirit, we might begin to see the invisible come to be visible. When the men in white tell the disciples they will see him come again in the same manner they saw him go, they are telling us to watch for his appearing among us perhaps in this gradual way of coming into view that matches the way he left their sight that day. In other words, the Second Coming is the great emergence of Christ s glorious presence here and now rather than some spectacular fireworks display on the literal Mount of Olives someday. In this view, whenever we are his true witnesses, the world is able to see his living presence and his gracious rule a little more clearly here and now. And that s something worth looking for. The Greek word parousia means either come again or come to be. It literally means the being beside or the personal presence, as of a king whose 5