21 May 2023
Acts 1:1-11
Once again this week, we encounter a text we need to read as story rather than as history. I mean, maybe Jesus floated up into the sky, but as John Lennon famously sang, there is no hell below us, above us only sky, and then a solar system and a galaxy and a universe. So where did he float off to?
Which is not to deny the possibility of heaven, because creation is cool and weird and who knows … just not that, Yahweh in a big chair up in the clouds and Peter at the Pearly Gates.
Besides, surely we can come up with some better bling these days than pearls, classic as they may be. I mean, if there are bedazzled gates, I sure hope they’re rhinestone when Dolly Parton gets there.
Even the most diehard Christians have accepted that we are not the center of the universe, at least not spatially, and the Roman church has sort of conceded they were wrong about that whole heresy and house arrest thing against Galileo, albeit 350 years too late.
Yet, the religious imagination still holds on to this weird sort of “up” because we haven’t found new language for our confidence in the eternal goodness of God’s love. We might want to work on that.
And some live in the cognitive dissonance of a heaven that is up somewhere even as they (mostly) accept that we have landed on the moon and sent probes to Mars.
Some cling to primitive belief despite the evidence, either ignoring contradictions like, you know, the actual universe, or simply pretending facts aren’t true, like natural selection and evolution. It is as if one horse gets out of the barn, and the whole herd will get loose, a stampede of deconstructed myths and fractured fairy tales. Though given the number of horses that died at Churchill Downs this year, the on-going destruction of those animals in the cruelty of horse racing, I’m all for getting horses out of some barns, literal and theological.
Barns always remind me of a short poem by the great Japanese poet Matsuo Bash?, who wrote: “My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon.”
But this isn’t a sermon about having a positive attitude, as important as that is. It is about that barn and what happens when the doors come off, because folks, they are off and laying in the pasture. Things we thought were true or pretended were true are glaringly untrue.
If that barn, the barn of doctrine and dogma, has served you well, good for you. But it hasn’t served all of us well. It has not given shelter to queer folk, and the shelter it has provided to women has come at tremendous cost.
Religion as humanly constructed, that barn as constructed, is old and dilapidated, built on a foundation of violence with a super-structure of patriarchy and is made bright with gaslighting as those who benefit from inequality explain that their privilege is divinely granted, or as today’s “Prosperity Gospel” mega-MAGA-Christians might say, they are “blessed.” The part they only rarely speak out loud in their theology is that those who suffer deserve to suffer.
But God, the God that Jesus calls “Abba,” is with the suffering. God has always been with the women, and the queer folk, and the oddballs and street corner prophets. God sits with Rosa on the bus and chucks her size 14 heels at a cop at Stonewall. God has no time for barred doors, whites-only water fountains, or stones trying to trap us in the tomb, for God is life.
Up is out and out is freedom. The door is off the barn and there is no heaven just above that thundercloud. Doctrine and dogma be damned! Let it burn! The tightly-wrapped religion of the past is collapsing around us, because it was too small and too rigid. God and life are bigger and wilder than all that.
God is holy mystery beyond our knowing but we can experience God in this good creation and in the best of ourselves, in our art and our love and our justice making, in restoration and constant reformation, for our God is living and so are we and so is our faith. The Christianity we are building today, each for ourselves and together as a community, is open spaces and the unpredictable, is as transformative and transgressive today is it was when Jeremiah raged in the streets of Jerusalem, as it was when Jesus proclaimed good news to crowds in Galilee, as it was when women went to a tomb to clean a broken body and instead found a love that could not be contained.
And while we are loosing horses, let us also be honest about our nation, as we are in our words of welcome every Sunday, admitting that we have not yet lived fully into our promise, for oppression was hard-coded into our Constitution, and even the best democracy, the most functional democracy, is only as noble as the majority population, for a democracy that refuses rights, equality and opportunity to minorities is not worthy of that name. Our American story is one of white supremacy and Christian nationalism, and that barn does need to be burned to the ground, because we can be something better together.
Just as faithful people can wrestle with scripture and admit the reality of the solar system, so patriotic people can confess our history and strive to do better, for our God is a God of second chances, of restoration, of rebirth.
Let’s be honest about our economy and those “blessed” mega-MAGA-Christians, because you didn’t pull yourself up by the bootstraps if daddy owned an emerald mine, and plenty of folks bust their butts their entire lives and get nowhere.
We might have been able to pretend we believed in a moral economy and the free market twenty years ago, but now we know the truth. Our system is not moral, is not amoral. It is immoral. American corporations do not care about the harm they do in pursuit of profit, and the law protects their evil They manipulate us to keep us hooked, doom-scrolling on Facebook and binge-watching on Netflix, face-down in our phones, and that is if we are lucky enough not to have become addicted to the opioids they pushed, have not lost the rent money gambling on our smartphones.
I mean, who could have predicted that allowing betting on college athletics would lead to even more corruption in that racket? Shocking, shocking I tell you, that a Division 1 baseball coach has already lost his job.
No one is coming to rescue us. The Jesus who flies down with an army of angels went with the old barn. And it turns out that Kate Spade handbag and new set of golf clubs with the engineered titanium faces aren’t really going to fix much of anything, not even your swing.
Years ago I bought my niece, still a little girl at the time, a t-shirt that said “Self-Rescuing Princess.” God has given us all the resources we need, imagination, diligence, and centuries of inspirational stories of people who believed things could be better and went out a did something.
Most of us sitting in this room were born with extraordinary privilege, even if we bear thick scars. Most of us can be “self-rescuing,” then, once we have broken out of the barn of doctrine and dogma, of propaganda and consumerism, of the soul-sucking addictions of our daily lives, we can turn to our neighbor, our neighbor with fewer resources, our neighbor in the ditch of racism and exploitation and our systems that all too often trap people in cycles of poverty.
We cannot control for every disaster, for this spinning jewel of a planet is a maelstrom of colliding physical forces, and life, for all of its beauty, is a bit of a cut-throat competition at times, alligator and virus, but we are an intelligent and social species.
The barn door is gone, the horses of old belief are gone, and we know what we know even if we pretend not to know what we know because knowing brings responsibility.
Don’t look up, women and men of Jerusalem. Jesus is not there. She is walking across the failed narco-state of Mexico. He is addicted and stole a bike in your neighborhood last night. She can’t read, because she is too hungry to concentrate. He can’t get a job, because he made a mistake five years ago, and even if he could find an employer to hire him, all of his wages would be garnished, so he might as well get high. She pulled her kid out of Little League after scraping up the money to get him in, because its just a matter of time until one of those screaming dads pulls a gun.
Then again, maybe there is nowhere to go but “up” from here. One a foundation of love and of community, let us build together. Amen.