Luke 24:44-53
SERMON Dude from Galilee
The Christian Century, established in 1884, remains the journal of record for Mainline Protestants in America, even as both print publications and Mainline Protestant churches have been in decline for years.
In the May issue, the Rev. Rachel Mann, a Church of England priest and author, reflects on the Ascension of Jesus, technically last Thursday on the liturgical calendar but celebrated today in many churches, including ours. Mann finds the Ascension to contain absurdity and a bit of low comedy, and wonders if Jesus ascended slowly, smiling and waving to his disciples, or quickly, like a rocket ship or a superhero. She finds meaning in the words of the poet John Donne, whose sonnet “Ascension” includes the line “O strong Ram, which hast batter’d heaven for me!” She ends with a both/and, both absurd narrative and important theology.
Jesus as battering-ram does not improve matters for me. I cannot take the Ascension literally, and now that I have read Mann’s piece, I’ll be forever stuck with the image of Jesus slowly ascending, maybe with a thumbs up and a wink to those below, like a sky-bound Buddy Christ from Kevin Smith’s 1999 film “Dogma.” At least that movie gave us Alanis Morissette as God, every bit as plausible as Morgan Freeman or George Burns.
The Ascension has theological meaning, as Mann points out, as captured in John Donne’s sonnet, and it solves a practical problem in the narrative, and that matters too. The story as a story has a power of its own, even if the story as we have constructed it from the four gospels and the actual historic Jesus, as best we can understand him, are not a perfect match.
I am able to love both at the same time, the beauty of this narrative arc that runs from Incarnation to Ascension, from angels in the sky to Jesus in the sky, and the dude from Galilee preaching a Jewish reform in the tradition of the prophets who came before him, a revolutionary murdered by an occupation army and the collaborating leaders of his own people. There is Jesus, and there is the Christ, sometimes but not always the same.
Religions sometimes grow out of transcendent experiences, sometimes out of absolute madness, and sometimes out of willful fraud. The motivation of the putative holy person, the founder, is a black box, forever sealed. Still, I tend to think the best of people, at least most people most of the time, and even if I didn’t, natural selection seems to apply to culture just as it does to biology, even if it takes longer. Ideas that have lasted must have some adaptive power, must contribute to spiritual thriving in some way, even if that function is not always obvious. I like to think generation after generation of observance wears the rough edges off of a religious tradition.
The heart of Christianity is still sound, even as the idea of America is still sound, even if both were imperfect at their founding, and imperfect in their application today.
Still, when I say that I know what is “up,” and it isn’t heaven, that neither Elijah and his chariot nor Buddy Christ ascending had much chance in the fatally-cold vacuum of space, when I say I understand why the early Christians thought Jesus was born of a virgin but I took biology so I know how things actually work, people assume that means I have thrown off the faith altogether.
That may be true for folks who buy the idea that we are bound by ancient creeds, that the world is either/or. I just don’t happen to be one of them. The right of Christian conscience, the right to decide what you believe, is part of our religious DNA, inherited from one of the five streams that form the United Church of Christ. I live in a both/and world.
On a practical level, a resurrected Jesus that does not disappear in some way, this dude from Galilee, would what? Suddenly become the conquering messiah of nationalist dreams, sitting on a throne in Jerusalem, immortal and ruling forever?
Creation, this wild and vibrant thing that is constantly changing, constantly evolving, producing beauty then crushing it under catastrophe to make room for what’s next, would be emptied of meaning. Haven’t we seen enough episodes of Star Trek, read enough dystopian teen fiction, to know that paradise is never actually paradise?
The late Scottish author Ian Banks sort of captures the paradox in the novel “Look to Windward,” published at the start of this century, when a character discussing heaven says:
“If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual’s circumstances—and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse—then you don’t have life after death; you just have death.”
Jesus, dude from Galilee, was a revolutionary preaching a re-interpretation of the Mosaic Law. This new way of being Jewish had redemptive power. His gospel also called for a radical re-orientation of daily life, of society itself, called for an end to exploitative economics and self-serving religion, called for restorative justice.
Jesus, dude from Galilee, clearly did not intend to found a new religion.
Even Paul, who was a key figure in founding this new religion, never understood himself as anything other than a Jew. The resurrection of the dead, the universalism of salvation, were not new concepts introduced by Jesus or by Paul.
It is absolutely true that Jesus preached about God and Paul preached about Jesus, and somewhere along the line the Jesus of Paul became this abstract Christ.
Paul’s Christ is not the messy human of the gospels, the dude from Galilee who can snap at his disciples, insult the Syro-Phoenecian woman, and admits his own ignorance when it comes to God’s plan.
I’m okay with believing that Jesus was part of God, certainly in a general way, maybe even in a specific way. No question that his followers experienced him as God-touched, having what Friedrich Schleiermacher described somewhat awkwardly as “perfect Christ consciousness.”
But this manufactured Christ of Paul and credal Christianity is something else: as much a demigod as Hercules of Greek Mythology; an unblemished sacrificial lamb despite hanging on a tree, a cursed death under Jewish law; an immortal human ascended to the place of God or the gods, depending on whether you are in Jerusalem or Athens.
At least Jesus and Psyche didn’t have to fight their way through a hornet’s nest of Starlink satellites on their way to immortality.
If we trust tradition and the best guesses of scholars, the active ministry of Jesus started just about two thousand years ago. In four years, many will celebrate the two thousandth anniversary of his execution on a cross and his resurrection from a borrowed tomb. He clearly mattered as Christ, as the catalyst for a new religion about him, and that sometimes was about his teaching.
But as we look at the perversion that is Nationalist Christianity in America, every bit as dangerous as Nazi Christianity in Germany in the last century, let us turn our eyes from the sky. Christ has been raised from the dead and risen into the sky. Jesus is still here, sometimes hungry, sometimes feeding the hungry, sometimes facedown on the pavement, defying the power of Caesar. May we see her everywhere we go. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
In September 1851, Henry David Thoreau listened to the wind in the telegraph wire, and wrote in his journal of its message, that there were higher planes than this one. But it was injustice on this plane, a war he believed was immoral, that provoked his civil disobedience and a night spent in jail, an episode he recounted and explained in an essay that would inspire later heroes like Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Let us pray.
Eternal Christ,
Did we feed you when you were hungry?
Did we find you in the cemetery,
healing you even as your demons resisted?
Did we welcome you when you arrived
speaking your native tongue,
missing your native land?
Have we experienced you here
where we gather in your name?
Hear our prayer,
that even as we celebrate Ascension,
attend to higher planes,
we seek to go deeper
in our experience of the holy,
in our embrace of the best parts of our tradtion,
in our commitment to the gospel,
which calls us to love first,
and then to love some more.
Provoke in us a holy fire
as we move toward Pentecost,
that we might warm cold hearts,
and be refined,
impurities burned away,
useful and pleasing in the sight of our Creator.
You were and are with us
in ways we don’t always understand,
in the person of Jesus,
and in our neighbor,
so we pray as you taught us, saying:
Our Father