A sermon from the Rev Linda Mackie Griggs for the Sunday after the Ascension

For about two precious weeks each Spring, the scent of lilacs sweetens the air around my house. During that time I never miss the chance to stick my nose into a cluster of the blooms and take a big whiff. The key is to exhale, completely, so there’s nothing left in your lungs but anticipation. Then inhale—completely. Breathe it all in.

Bliss.

There’s something about finding that tiny point of emptiness before breathing in that makes the scent all the sweeter. Finding that point where you’re waiting to inhale.

Now, hold that thought.

“…as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”

Believe it or not, Luke, the author of Acts, wasn’t really concerned about physics. You might think that the focus would be upon this great upward movement of Jesus into the clouds. My mother (a post-Enlightenment woman if there ever was one) used to scoff and mumble about staring at the soles of Jesus’ feet, and if you google the Ascension you will find a number of interesting images. Actually , mom was in good company—there are theologians who find the whole episode to be a little embarrassing.* The Incarnation? No problem. Resurrection? We can handle that. Ascension? Please. Even laying physics aside, the very idea of God as being exclusively UP THERE no longer works, cosmologically or theologically. While we often still gesture upward when talking of God in heaven, most of us on reflection will acknowledge God as immanent—being all around and within Creation and not just above it.

But Luke was part of a world that believed in a three-tiered universe of Underworld, Earth, and Heaven. In the first century the idea that Jesus would ascend was not in the least bit out of the ordinary. Of course the Son of God would ascend and be exalted to God’s right hand. If you look more closely at Luke’s description of the disciples’ reaction, you see that they just gaze upward—they just watch him go. They don’t fall down in fear like, for example, the shepherds on that first Christmas. In the conventional wisdom of multiple cultures of the time, ascension was what happened to those who were especially favored by God or the gods. Hercules, Moses, Enoch, Elijah, even the Roman emperor Augustus were said to have ascended from earth into the heavens. If Jesus hadn’t ascended; now that would have been a surprise.

But to dwell on this argument is really beside the point; it’s the equivalent of standing and staring upward with our mouths hanging open long after Jesus is gone. The angels bid us to move along; nothing more to see here.

But just because we shift our gaze away from heavenly acrobatics doesn’t mean that this episode isn’t significant. The Ascension story is not as important for what the disciples saw as it is for the fundamental nature of the moment itself. It is in fact an existential moment in the life of the Body of Christ.

I have talked before about something I called the “liminal millisecond”—that fleeting yet infinitely deep moment of God’s time in which everything can change. And the fact is that liminal milliseconds happen all the time; it’s just that you can see some more clearly than others. Like now.

A liminal millisecond is a threshold between the past and the future, when (theoretically) virtually anything is possible. It is moment that often requires a decision: Who or what is God calling me to be now?

It was in such a moment—this Ascension—that we see the completion of Incarnation: When the two men (or angels) tell the disciples to stop looking upward, and when they return to Jerusalem, Luke’s focus shifts from Jesus in the world to the community in the world. What he shows us here is the singularity that will become, on Pentecost, the Body of Christ.

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, to the ends of the earth.”

As usual, this was not the response the disciples expected when they asked if NOW Jesus was going to restore the kingdom. It wasn’t what they expected, but when has Jesus ever given them an answer they expected? But it was the answer they needed. This was not the time to revisit old expectations. This was a time to prepare for something new. The purpose of Jesus’ ascension was to make room for his promised gift of the Holy Spirit.

Waiting to inhale. Just like the lilacs.

What Luke describes here is that liminal millisecond when all is emptiness and anticipation. Waiting to inhale the Spirit.

The disciples, a couple of them perhaps reluctantly, turned toward Jerusalem and an uncharted future, equipped with each other and a promise from Jesus. They faced a world in pain and turmoil. A world of empty places just waiting to be filled with the Gospel.

So here we are, like the disciples, at a pivotal moment between Ascension and Pentecost, facing a world still in pain, still broken and begging for hope. Where do we find the empty places just waiting to be filled with the power of the Spirit?

The thing about emptiness is that it contains its own kind of fullness. On the one hand it can be filled with anxiety about an unknown future. This carries the risk of denial—a desire to dwell nostalgically on a (allegedly) simpler (and arguably rosier) past in order to avoid confronting the challenge of seeing things from new perspectives. That’s a form of gazing upward into the clouds. All we get is a crick in the neck. So what is the alternative? Instead of anxiety we can let the empty places that await us be sources of invitation, drawing us forward to new opportunities for formation and ministry.

For example: St. Martin’s was invited a few weeks ago to the 9^th Annual Interfaith Poverty Conference, and those of us who attended were blessed to hear a bracing keynote by The Rev. Dr. James Forbes of Union Seminary calling us out as God’s “Dream Team” in the fight against poverty in Rhode Island. Conference attendees participated in workshops on immigration issues, minimum wage issues, racial and economic disparities in education and housing, and challenges faced by low-income seniors.

The facts presented were startling. 13.9%. That’s the percentage of people in poverty in Rhode Island in 2015; that’s 141,000 people, mostly people of color living in poverty. 19.4% of children- children—again, mostly youngsters of color, in poverty. And 9.2% of children living in extreme poverty between 2011 and 2015.   Almost one in ten? I have to confess something here. These figures shouldn’t have startled me. And they wouldn’t have, if I had been paying attention. These people are our neighbors. 

You may have heard (and if you haven’t, you have now…) that the Episcopal Church and the ELCA (Lutheran) Church have joined together in a call for fasting, prayer and advocacy on the 21^st day of each month through the end of the 115^th Congress to stimulate awareness and action in combating poverty in this country and throughout the world. Why the 21^st of each month? Here’s another statistic: That’s when 90% of Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program benefits run out. For our neighbors. You do the math.

In our Gospel today we are reminded that God has given us to each other, that we may be one, as Jesus and God are one. And to be blind to our neighbors is to be blind to God’s call to oneness with all of God’s beloved; to commit to compassion, service and justice.

For those of us coming up for air in our first week of The Bible Challenge, there may still be at the back of our minds the lingering question of why we do this—what is the point of reading the Bible all the way through? Here’s a little more encouragement: Did you know that there are over 2000 references in the Bible to issues of the poor, wealth, poverty and social justice? Over 2000. As we engage more and more deeply every day with Scripture, I pray that it becomes not just an intellectual exercise or isolated spiritual discipline that we pick up once a day, like a set of free weights, and then lay aside until tomorrow. This work should be building our muscles to be fit for God’s purpose—the fulfilling of God’s dream of healing and reconciliation. We are not learning just to speak of the faith that is in us, but to live it, in how we engage with the world and with all of our neighbors.

This liminal moment in which we find ourselves as Pentecost approaches is an existential moment. Who are we? What are we becoming? As we wait to inhale the Spirit, filled with nothing but anticipation, may the God who surrounds and enfolds us draw our gaze, not upward, but into the eyes of our neighbor, because it is there that we will find Jesus.

*”Rudolf Bultmann in his essay The New Testament and Mythology: “We no longer believe in the three-storied universe which the creeds take for granted… No one who is old enough to think for himself supposes that God lives in a local heaven … And if this is so, the story of Christ’s … ascension into heaven is done with.”

 

 

 

In the lead up to beginning The Bible Challenge at St Martin’s, there are two key questions that will focus our attention as we go forward. Firstly, how do we approach the language of the Bible? Secondly, how are we to understand what we read there?

The Bible contains multiple literary genres and they can’t all be approached in the same way. For instance, the New Testament contains gospel, letter, historical, and apocryphal literary genres. They are not all nails for which the hammer is always the right tool.

Gospel language is narrative language. Stories unfold through parables, i.e. confrontational tales drawn from ordinary life. Gospel language is rich in metaphor and allegory, both devices hinting at meaning beyond the literal face meaning of the words used.

The N.T. letters use the language of instruction, guidance, and often condemnation. Yet here we find metaphor and allegory used to nudge us in the direction from what is, towards what should be.

Biblical historical writing, unlike modern history, is not an objective analysis of events but a highly constructive arrangement of events to communicate a clear theological meaning.

Apocryphal writing evokes the language of dreams as a response to unendurable suffering, made endurable by a vision of victory in the end.

Acts 17:22-31 is an example of the historical genre. Luke is the historian of the early Church and in this sense, his history is very close to, if not is actual propaganda. His intention as a propagandist is two-fold. Firstly, he writes a history of the early years of the Church to commend Christianity to the wider pagan world of his time. His history is also intended for later generations of Christians, commending us to emulate in our lives the patterns of the first generation of Christians. Luke intends for us to read his history in order to develop a certain spiritual worldview.

A case study in reading history: Acts 17 

Paul had been cooling his heels in Athens for a few days after arriving from Borea, a town south of Thessalonica. It had been a tense time in Jerusalem during the recent council with the other Apostles. But at the council, Paul had won the argument. Gentile Christians did not have to submit to circumcision and the Jewish dietary codes.

Of course, he had known that Peter would eventually be won over; Peter, whose gregarious and generous personality led him to want to agree with everyone. But James? Paul had not been so sure that James, the leader of the conservative faction could have been persuaded. But in the end, James and the others had all agreed to give Paul a free hand in his mission among the gentiles. Buoyed up by his victory, Paul, accompanied by Silas and Timothy had set out immediately on a second missionary journey, swinging through the house church communities in Asia Minor and Greece.

Things had gone badly in Borea, however. There, Paul had encountered strong opposition from the Jews who came to hear him in the synagogue. It had been agreed with Silas and Timothy that Paul should hightail it out of town and go down to Athens and wait for them to join him there.

Paul had spent the last few days just ambling about splendid Athens with its many temples and impressive public buildings. He had never before found himself in such a sophisticated and cosmopolitan city and had been taken aback by the plethora of sects and cults all competing in a boisterous religious marketplace for custom among the curious Athenians. He had to admit he had found it all more than a little shocking. But yesterday, he had come across a temple dedicated to the unknown god. He had been a little amused at how these Athenians liked to hedge their bets. He realized that it really was true what they said about the Athenian insatiable craving for the latest novel idea and exotic practice.

Athens remained the center of learning and philosophy in the Classical World. Rather like the Great Britain of its day, Athens’ political and military power had long ago been usurped by an upstart new power centered at Rome. Yet, Rome still bowed before the hallowed Athenian Oxbridge[1] halls of learning.

This very morning Paul had found himself at the Areopagus, the rocky outcrop where the philosophical schools of Athens met to debate and dispute the pros and cons of various approaches to religion.

He hadn’t intended to speak and no one was more surprised than he when the learned Stoic and Epicurean scholars invited him to address them on this new teaching that seemed so strange to their ears.

In such august company, he had begun by measuring his words; not his usual preaching tactic. He had praised his audience for the quality of their religious thought and identified his new teaching about God with the object of their worship at the shrine to the unknown god. They had recognized his reference to Epimenides, one of their great poets when he had described God as the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being. They had also recognized his reference when he told them that we are the offspring of God, the god they recognize in the unknown one.

Oh yes, things had been going well. They had applauded when he had launched into a blistering critique of the pagan idols all around the city. This sophisticated audience had no truck with the popular worship of gods of gold and stone. Had he not ridden the rising energy of the crowd, now emboldened to proclaim that hitherto God had overlooked times of human ignorance but now called all to repentance through the raising of his son Jesus from the dead.

Having arrived at the crux of his thesis he had been stopped in full flood by the deafening silence in that moment before the whole Areopagus had erupted into scoffing cries of ridicule. Stoics and Epicureans, who agreed on nothing, both scoffed this Hellenized Jew’s ludicrous claim of resurrection from the dead.

Amidst the cries of derision, a small group had come to him and said we will hear you again. Compared to the thousands added to the church day in and day out through Peter’s preaching this was small success. But Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, both seemingly important citizens had been among the small group who had been persuaded by his words. Yet, Paul was kicking himself because he had so easily forgotten that those who consider themselves wise by worldly standards have no need of God.

Reading Luke’s history in Acts is a different kind of experience from the metaphor-rich language of the gospel writers. Historical narrative is less impactful – less heart changing in the moment.

Luke’s historical narrative functions in the same way that we might go to a play. We don’t attend Shakespeare to dismiss his characters because of their lack of historical plausibility. Watching Lear or Macbeth on the stage, they become knowable to us because we are drawn into identifying with them.

There is a tendency in some circles to idealize the characters we encounter in the Bible. We read about Paul’s exploits and we imagine him to be a much better Christian than we can ever be. I don’t regard idealization ever to be very helpful. On the other hand identifying with Paul, allows us to see him as a human being struggling with life in the same way we struggle with life.

I have viewed Paul standing on the rock of the Areopagus through the lens of my own speculations. Paul’s dilemmas and his challenges are so familiar to me. Paul’s way of resolving them offers a model for how we might do the same. Our context differs from his in so many ways and yet across all historical contexts the experience of speaking faith into a faithless world is remarkably the same.

At this point, I could take the direction of drawing out the parallels between the challenges facing Paul in 1^st century Athens and our challenges in 21^st century America. Idolatry – the placing of a lesser object in the place of ultimate concerns, still abound as much now as it did then. Like then, so also now. How are we to speak our faith into our public lives, not for the purpose of telling other people how to live their lives, but because we long to give a good account of the hope that is within us? How do we share the good news with others who like us, are struggling, seeking, and searching for that something more to living? In the midst of a world of material preoccupation, the longing for that something more to living seems to elude us as never before.

Yet, I want to stay close to the questions I mentioned at the outset: how do we approach the language of the Bible, and how are we to understand what we read there?

I propose these as questions to guide us forward as on May 22^nd we begin day 1 of The Bible Challenge. As we have moved closer to the date, the immensity of the challenge comes home to us more and more. Will we be up to it?

The answer will be at times yes we will. But at other times, our answer will be no we are not. The relentlessness of a 365-day reading program that doesn’t even let up for weekends will mean that there will be days, maybe even weeks when we are not up to it. The point will be – are we prepared to keep going or will we take this as a sign to give up?

Any discussion of reading Scirpture has to engage with the really big question. Why should we even consider reading the Bible?

Have you wondered why it is that in a community where most of us pride ourselves on our levels of education and skill amidst the sophistication of our ways of viewing the world, we seem prepared to remain as children in the life of faith, undereducated, unformed, the products of a spiritually arrested development – grappling to apply faith concepts learned as children to the adult complexity of the world? It’s a question to ponder.

To meet the demands of The Bible Challenge within the concept of life-long learning is the only way for us to grow up in our faith lives so that developmentally, our spiritual perspectives match the other aspects of our worldview.

As in all other areas of our lives, this will require commitment, dedication, and most of all perseverance in the face of the temptation to give up because we imagine reading Scripture is all too much for us, or worse, we don’t need it.

Paul’s life mission was to give a good account of the hope that was within him. This is our life mission also. This will require us to bring our faith life up to levels of emotional and intellectual maturity that characterize the way we live, and work, and have our being in all the other areas of our lives?

[1] A term conflating the names Oxford and Cambridge to refer to these centers of hallowed learning.

 

In the 12th-century, St Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the great Cistercian reform of Benedictine life described Holy Scripture as: 

a vast sea in which a lamb can paddle and an elephant can swim.

When it comes to our encounter with the Bible through a regular practice of reading Holy Scripture, most of us will be lambs paddling. Yet maybe some of us if not already elephants swimming the depths will be encouraged to grow in that direction.

In 2015 St Martin’s engaged with a process called RenewalWorks. Our first strategic priority emerging from this engagement became and remains embedding the Bible in parish life. This is a tough sell because Episcopalians have come to share the Liberal Protestant dis-identification with the importance of reading the Bible.

Our dis-identifcation takes two forms. The fruits of 150 years of what’s known as Biblical Criticism has left us feeling that the Bible is for experts, scholars, and clergy trained to be able to unpack the sitz im leben,  which simply means the ability to interpret the text guided by the historical, cultural, and theological settings in which the text was originally written. This has led to a propensity among Episcopalians to encounter the Bible through the lens of commentary. Thus learning about rather than engaging with the text keeps us in our detached comfort zone.

The second form of dis-identificaiton from the reading of Scripture resides in the attitude that the Bible no longer belongs to us because it has been appropriated by them – them – being a reference to the fundamentalists. We not only find literal interpretation uninteresting, but we deeply reject many of the social and theological attitudes such an approach fosters.

Yet our Anglican Tradition speaks in the imagery of the three-legged stool in which Scripture, Tradition, and Reason are held in a mutual tension of equal relationship. We still honor Scripture, but we now only hear it within the context of worship. Outside of the formality of liturgy, we attempt to sit on a two-legged stool of Tradition and Reason. Straddling a two-legged stool requires considerable acrobatic dexterity.

St Martin’s is a community where few of us find it possible to accept faith as a matter of unquestioning obedience to the literal interpretation of words on a page. We are a community where faith depicted as an allegiance to a major life shaping narrative now finds deeper resonance and is taking root. Many of us enjoy the way meaning is conveyed through language that is complex, and nuanced. We are beginning to understand the way story shapes us individually and communally. We believe that metaphor more effectively conveys truth-plus, and that truth is poorly conveyed when limited to the face value of the words on the page.

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The language of the Bible is such that meaning is conveyed imaginatively. Meaning is fluid and open-ended able to speak to the challenges encountered in our lived experience. Stimulated by the power of curiosity we are encouraged to explore beyond the simple meaning of words on the page. A rich appreciation of metaphor allows us to echo the words of the prophet Jeremiah[1]:

When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight, for I bear your name, Lord God Almighty.

Approaching the text for Easter 4 can we discover our experience revealed as truth-plus through the way text uses of metaphor and poetic figures of speech?

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The Fourth Sunday after Easter conveys the arresting metaphor of The Good Shepherd conveyed through the powerful imagery of the 23^rd Psalm and John 10. In 2015 when I last preached on these texts I drew upon what for preachers can become a clichéd contrast between biblical and contemporary images of shepherding. However, coming from a country where sheep outnumber people by 40-1, I am very familiar with the contemporary experience of shepherding sheep.

In 2015 I spoke about my nephew Hamish who on his sheep station in The Lord of the Rings high country of N.Z’s. South Island, shepherds his Marino sheep either from the seat of an ATV or the saddle of a horse, depending on the terrain. In response to a complex set of whistles and verbal commands from Hamish, his dogs dive and dart among the sheep barking and nipping at their heals. With his dogs, he drives his sheep before him in the direction he wants them to go. Hamish and his dogs, together with all New Zealanders regard sheep as animals gifted by the Creator with a double dose of stupidity.

How often our human relationship with God is depicted as a version of modern New Zealand sheep herding; God in the rear driving us on with the dogs of guilt barking in our ears and fear nipping at our heals. Yet, contrast the words of Psalm 23 in which God is the shepherd and we the sheep. God as the Good Shepherd does not drive us before him, setting his dogs upon us whose bark frightens us, and whose teeth nip us into line. Instead, he leads us beside still waters so that we may lie down in green pastures. Even through the valley of death, he accompanies us so that we need not fear any harm befalling us. His rod and staff are not symbols of discipline and control, but of protection and comfort. The Biblical image of sheep is one of cherished objects upon which the shepherd lavishes love and concern.

Again, a contrast between sheep and people reveals that it is not sheep who are created with a double dose of stupidity. Jesus, teaching in poetic metaphors discovers again and again that it’s the human beings that fail to hear his voice. The biblical image draws a distinction between the sheep who hear his voice and the people who are deaf to his voice. Hearing in this sense is a metaphor for knowing, for recognition. 

In John 10 Jesus uses a number of figures of speech centered on the notion of the sheepfold. He speaks of robbers, identified as those who do not enter the sheepfold by the gate. His metaphor for the entrance shimmers between images of gate and gatekeeper before Jesus finally identifies himself as the gate. Jesus is not some arbitrary gatekeeper but with his body becomes the gate across the entrance of the sheepfold, so that those who seek to enter to do us harm must first encounter him.

In response to hearing his voice, the sheep come and go, responsive to the shepherd’s voice, in pursuit of the green pasture. The mention of green pasture is a metaphor for life lived to the full takes us full circle back to the imagery of Psalm 23.

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As lambs paddling on the edge of a vast sea of Scripture we begin to hear in the imagery of the Good Shepherd’s voice our own experience of the world as a place of both safety and danger. Both in Psalm 23 and John 10 danger surrounds the green pasture and still waters. Beyond the safety of the sheepfold lies the valley of death where we risk being catapulted to the precipitous heights of the illusion of self-sufficiency or cast down to the depths of isolation and despair.

As elephants swimming beyond the safety of the shore we face the prospect of no longer living in a place of security, but with a trust in God’s leadership –we swim heeding the sound of God’s voice as we follow with confidence and trust into the more turbulent waters of life’s sea.

But how can we know God’s voice when we have not learned to hear it? The narrative of faith provides a safe space within which our lives can be shaped in the direction of living with confidence and courage. Yet the shepherd does not keep the sheep penned up in the fold. He leads them out, but they can only follow if they follow secure of being able to recognize the sound of his voice.

As we count down the days until we launch The Bible Challenge to guide the next phase of our deepening engagement with Scripture on May 21^st -22^nd, I would like us to understand that rather than ceding control of the Bible to either scholars or literalists, we recommit ourselves to an older and more venerable tradition of engaging with Scripture through concepts of story rich with imagination stimulated by poetic figures of speech.

The ancient tradition of reading the Bible shared by Benedict and Bernard, that reads text through the images of allegory and metaphor invites us to a similar kind of engagement with reading the Bible. Despite the great distances of time, place and mindset separating us from Bernard of Clairvaux, John the Evangelist, the prophet Jeremiah, and the psalmist of the 23 Psalm, we share the experience of being shaped by the power of a poetic imagination whose rich language of allegory and metaphor opening our ears to recognise the distinctiveness of God’s voice among the cacophony of competing, false voices in the world. We may remain lambs paddling on the shores of the great Scriptural sea so long as like lambs we come to recognize the Shepherd’s voice.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Jeremiah 15:16 New International Version