Entangled States

Most of us carry, somewhere beneath the surface, an image of how we think we ought to appear before God. It is usually the image of our best self — and more often than not, it is also our younger self. Strong, unbroken, theologically coherent, morally uncomplicated, capable of the kind of sustained prayer and clarity that we may have managed on some good days decades ago and cannot quite manage now. We imagine that to stand before God we must first somehow get back to that self. We have the instinct of the Capitol fresco of George Washington being made a God: the ascension will complete us by removing what time and failure and grief and illness have done to us.

But the prayer that Jesus prays in John 17 is not prayed from strength. It is prayed from within the knowledge of imminent betrayal, within the shadow of the cross that is hours away. And it is in that prayer, that wounded, clear-eyed, unflinching prayer, that the tradition hears the voice of the great High Priest, the holiest intercession in the Gospels. God is not waiting for us to be unbroken before God can hear us.

The Ascension, properly understood, says something startling about your body. About your memory. About the specific and particular history that has made you who you are at this moment. The marks of aging are not disqualifications. The wounds, the ones that healed badly, the ones that didn’t heal at all, the accumulated grief of long life faithfully lived, are not obstacles between you and God. They are part of what is being received.

This is what it means that Christ ascends with his wounds still present. St. Thomas touches them. The disciples recognize him by them. They are not removed in the resurrection; they are transfigured. They become the very marks by which the risen Lord is known. What the light of God does is not erase them – it illuminates them. It passes through them and makes them luminous in a way that unmarked, unwounded glass simply cannot be.

You can view the full sermon here.

In this week’s reading, which follows directly after last week’s Gospel, Jesus reassures the disciples that, even though he is leaving them, his teaching and his Spirit will remain with them. That Spirit — working in them — will fulfill what they lack. The Advocate, the one who will speak on their behalf in moments of judgment and inspire their speech in times of testing, will lead them more deeply into the truth of God’s love and God’s will for the world.

We will hear much more about the work of that Spirit in a few weeks. But for this moment, I want to emphasize what Jesus is telling his disciples as he bids them farewell just before his suffering: If you do what I do, Jesus says, you are doing God’s will. If you do God’s will, you will have the power you have seen in me — and that power can change the world. Not by doing self-serving miracles, but by changing the nature of human relationships.

Remember what Jesus taught them one last time at that meal as a sort of summary of all that he had done with them during his earthly ministry. He washes their feet. It is what we reenact on Maundy Thursday, and it is the act that continues to make us uncomfortable — and part of the reason I think attendance at that service has been declining over the years. To love God is to love Jesus. To love Jesus is to do what Jesus does. Jesus humbles himself, even taking on the role of a servant, a slave, to wash the dirt off our feet. To love Jesus is to do the same for the people around us.

If you are unhappy with the way things are in your life — if you are frustrated by the way things happen in our community — if you despair when you watch the national news — then you should know that there is something you can do that will begin to change things and make them better. You can love your neighbor just as Jesus did. You can serve them and put their best interest ahead of your own. And in doing that you will change them, and you will change your relationship with them, and you will change the world.

The disciples, after the Passion and the Resurrection and the Ascension, did exactly that. Empires fell. How we think about ourselves and each other has never been the same.

And what is remarkable is how this pattern keeps repeating itself throughout history. In moments of despair and confusion — moments not entirely unlike our own — someone rises up and shows the rest of us what it looks like to love God by loving the way Jesus loved.

(It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been able to find the time to record and post my Sunday sermons. I’ve been preaching – many times a week over the past month or so – but between meetings and travel, I’ve just not been able to squeeze in the time to record, edit and post. I’m hoping I’ll get back on track again, but in the meantime, please accept my apologies.)

You can view the sermon recording here.

Jesus’ resurrection and our atonement with God leads us to recognize that we are reconciled not just to God but to each other as well. And more than that — it isn’t simply a remaking of our personal relationships. The Easter event is the foundation for a new way of living in community. It begins a process, still ongoing, of moving us from a world ordered around the way of the Ruler of this World to one in which the Reign of God is made increasingly manifest.

You can sense this by hearing the words Jesus speaks to the disciples in the Upper Room, and to Thomas himself, in light of an earlier moment in the Gospel accounts: the sending of the seventy-two to proclaim that the Kingdom of God has come near.

What Jesus has those disciples do closely parallels the proclamations made regularly by Roman Emperors. But Jesus changes one crucial element, and that change points to an alternate reality that is slowly dawning.

You can watch the sermon by using this link.