What Next?

Image from the Chapel of the Ascension at Walsingham, England.

I want to begin with a small detour familiar to many of you from previous Ascension Day sermons from me. Nestled in the lush, if rather damp, countryside of the county of Norfolk lies the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

Next door to the Shrine Church the Chapel of the Ascension, built in the dispiriting modern style of the 1960’s, the style that festooned the US with hideous A-Frame churches, nevertheless has one most astonishing feature. On entering the chapel one’s attention is immediately drawn to the ceiling where two feet dangle at the center of a rosette of gilded clouds punctuated by lightening forks representing the only remaining part of Jesus’ body still visible after one imagines him squeezing through the gilded rosette into heaven on the other side of the ceiling. Those of you participating via the livestream will be privileged to this truly baroque sight – all the more astonishing because of the chapel’s otherwise plain sheetrock walls and ceiling.

The Ascension, which today is treated as a rather non-event. Always occurring on the 40th Thursday after the Resurrection – to accommodate the reality that most Episcopalians rarely venture to church except on Sundays – the current custom is to celebrate the Ascension of the Lord on the Sunday following. It’s Luke who gives us the most vivid narration of the Ascension scene.

If constructing stories and weaving narratives are the ways we make sense of our experiences in the world, what is the nature of the relationship between story and material experience? In other words, do narratives – our human need for stories simply interpret and explain our material experience, or do narratives construct our material experience through the power of language to bring to awareness the objects and meanings of which it speaks.

This tension surrounding the function and power of language is especially pertinent when it comes to religious-spiritual stories. Narrative Theology asserts that spiritual meaning lies not in the literal veracity of the events depicted – did they happen or not – but in the function of story to construct and convey purposeful meaning and truth- and here it’s helpful to paraphrase the late biblical scholar, Marcus Borg who used to say that the Bible contained many true stories – and some of them actually, happened.

Does a story construct meaning and purpose that we can trust as a source of understanding of the divine which enriches and empowers us to live our best lives?

Spiritual stories recycle elements from human imaginative memory. Clearly, Luke’s graphic account of Jesus’ ascension borrows extensively from Elijah’s ascension in a chariot of fire buoyed upwards by heavenly steeds amidst billowing clouds that obscure heaven from earthly sight. In like manner – as the mantle of Elijah fell upon the shoulders of Elisha – giving him a double portion of his master’s spirit, the double portion of Jesus’ spirit falls upon his disciples -clothing them in preparation to take up the work Jesus had begun.

The resonance between the two ascension stories is unmistakable. Now skeptics will say – ah-hah, so you admit that Luke copied an earlier story that is a feat of imagination to start with. Well yes, I’m happy to admit this, because both stories function not as eyewitness accounts of actual events but as ways of making sense of a meaning and truth capable of changing lives and altering the trajectory of history. By the way – even eyewitness accounts of actual events are never photographic but interpretations – colored by the contents of individual memory. The problem in crime solving is that no two people will recall the same event in the same way.

In Luke’s chronology of events from Calvary to Pentecost, his story of the Ascension of Jesus forms a transition point bringing the earthly ministry of Jesus to a close to prepare his followers for what was to come next. The question underlying the Ascension event is not how, when, or if it happened, but what light does it shed on the question of what next?

Can we trust the meaning inherent in the story of the Ascension of Jesus, even though most of us accept it to be, as all stories are, a construction of imagination? By focusing the stories meaning on the question what next – this becomes a story sharply focusing the choices to be made, the actions to be taken, and the directions to be followed that transform our perceptions of the world and our role in living our best lives by furthering the work Jesus began.

By substituting the traditional heaven and earth spatial metaphor of up and down for one more suited to contemporary imagination – that of heaven and earth as side by side – the Ascension becomes a story of a conduit event linking our space and divine space.

The two essential points in the Ascension story now come into focus.

In his return to the divine space, Jesus does not jettison his humanity like a suit of worn-out clothes – but carries the fullness of his humanity – perfected through suffering, death, and resurrection – to be received by God – incorporating the essence of humanity into the divine nature. The first collect for the Ascension captures this: that as we believe your only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into heaven, so we may also in heart and mind there ascend, and with him continually dwell. The we here is not us individually, but the essence of our humanity which now constitutes an element within the divine nature.

In receiving the gift of Jesus humanity perfected through suffering, death, and resurrection the gift of the divine spirit of Jesus is released to make the return journey back into our space – or as the second collect for the Ascension captures it: our Savior Jesus Christ ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things and to abide in his church until the end of time.

As Jesus ascends, we become Christ’s mystical body on earth – now prepared and empowered as the Church for the continuance of the work Jesus began.

The Ascended Christ bearing our perfected humanity is received into the heart of God so that henceforth, in the imagery of the book of Revelation, the home of God is to be found not above in the clouds but here on the earth among mortals. Now we come to the most extraordinary assertion of Christian faith – that from henceforth to be most fully human is to be most like God.

As the disciples gawk stupefied after the Lord’s disappearing feet, they are told to stop looking upwards. In other words, there is nothing to be found up there. Instead, we need to look around us for signs of God’s continued presence in our world through the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Ascension of Jesus begs the question of what is next in God’s work of renewing the creation. Such a question throws into sharp focus the stories we give allegiance to that for good or ill will dictate the choices we make, the actions we take, or refuse to take – setting the direction we follow either towards or away from a fuller participation in God’s dream for creation – when we tire that is of gazing heavenwards.

May 31, 2025 0

Building Heaven on Earth

I am struck by the fugue-like nature of the themes in the readings for the fifth Sunday after Easter. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines a fugue as a musical composition characterized by systematically imitating a main theme, called the subject, across multiple voices or parts. It typically includes an exposition where the subject is introduced, followed by development sections that explore variations and interactions of the theme.

Working with the fugue metaphor, we hear the central melody in Luke’s account of Peter’s dream—a rich melody introducing a new vision for human community based on radical inclusion. The central theme is further developed in the second reading from the book of Revelation, where it is expanded into the cosmic key of God’s announcement that heaven is to be found on earth. The gospel reading then restates the central melody in the tone of Jesus’ teaching on love as action.

Staying with the musical metaphor, there is a brilliant summation of the melodic interplay I’ve just described in Belinda Carlisle’s legendary 1987 hit single Heaven on Earth:

Ooo, baby, do you know what that’s worth? Heaven is a place on Earth.
They say in heaven, love comes first. We’ll make heaven a place on earth. Ooo, heaven is a place on earth. Lyrics by Rick Nowells and Ellen Shipley

In Surprised by Hope, N.T. (Tom) Wright describes Jesus’ resurrection as the beginning of God’s new project—not to snatch people away from earth into heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. It’s somewhat amusing to find the great Tom Wright channeling Belinda Carlisle.

Christians today, in the main, think that resurrection means spiritual life after death, as in we all will go to heaven to live with God when we die. While liberal Christians have a straightforward inclusive notion of who gets into heaven, basically everyone, conservative Christians still cling to the idea that entry to heaven is conditional on right believing and ritual formulas such as Jesus died for my sins – Jesus as my savior, etc. But both agree on the point of Jesus’ resurrection as a promise of life after death – an announcement of future life with God somewhere else after biological death.

The notion that we leave our bodies behind to ascend as souls to some other place is a deeply anti-Christian idea firmly rooted in Classical Greek thought. The NT does not talk of the separation of body and soul; it speaks of the integration of body and spirit as dual aspects of human experience in the material dimension of time, space, and matter. Belinda croons, “Ooo, baby, do you know what that’s worth?” Heaven is a place on Earth. They say in heaven love comes first. We’ll make heaven a place on earth. Ooo, heaven is a place on earth.

Christians need to understand Jesus’ resurrection, not as an individual event, something that happened only to him, but as the first fruits, the inauguration of a project of changing the world, redirecting our attention away from pie in the sky when we die back to the current state of life on earth.

The concept of our souls’ future fulfilment requiring the jettisoning of our bodies invites us to care more about the life to come than the life to be lived now. Christians who are most focused on their destination in heaven are likely to neglect the duty to leave the world in a better state than the one they came into.

Resurrection as an internal, individualized, spiritual experience of future fulfilment breaks the continuity linking the resurrection of Jesus to the ultimate resurrection of the whole of creation.

Through the Hebrew prophets, God continually affirmed the goal of the resurrection project, as nothing short of the remaking of heaven on earth. It’s only within the continuity of this promise for the whole creation that the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Day makes any sense.

Revelation’s melodic expansion – See! the home of God is among mortals … see I am making all things new – is a further development of Luke’s central theme of radical inclusion before the gospel’s final restatement in Jesus’ teaching on love as the engine for transformation.

Tom Wright speaks of Jesus’ resurrection as a foretaste of the future brought into real time, God’s promise of the kind of future we should anticipate in the present. Anticipating the future—now, there’s a challenge. Because the shape of the future does not arrive preformed of its own accord. Our anticipation today shapes the kind of future that will arrive through the actions we take or fail to take now.

The radical vision of an inclusive community is where the home of God is to be found. The struggle within human communities to translate love into justice is where the power of remaking a new heaven on earth can be seen. As Christians, we do not look forward to a future heaven for the righting of all wrongs and the wiping away of every tear. We grasp the challenges of working towards these goals today by

loving as we are loved
behaving towards others as we expect to be treated
agitating for human dignity as a foundational right for everyone, and not something to be dictated or denied by the exercise of power.

The radical vision of the home of God at the heart of the human community is centered on the cherishing and protection of human dignity. In Dignitas Infinita, the late Pope Francis laid out the four aspects of human dignity.

Ontological dignity – the dignity of being made in the image of God, loved and cherished by God as a reflection of the divine nature.
Moral dignity – the exercise of freedom and fidelity to the dictate of conscience – not only a requirement for right action but also for right motivation and intention
Social dignity—the means to prosper in a society that affords the social, economic, and environmental protections necessary for sustainable living with dignity.
Existential dignity involves combating serious illnesses, domestic violence, gender and racial scapegoating, pathological addictions and their social causes, and other hardships that debase a person’s ontological dignity. Existential dignity also affects those who may enjoy the material prosperity considered essential for a dignified life, yet struggle to live with hope and the experience of joy in their hearts.

What God has made clean, who are we to call profane? Who are we to reject and exclude those whom God has included through the Holy Spirit’s outpouring? For see the home of God is to be found not in heaven but here among us, where through loving action we support God’s reign of justice. When love is realized through action, justice becomes its name.

Or as Belinda Carlisle croons: Ooo, baby, do you know what that’s worth? Ooo, heaven is a place on earth. They say in heaven, love comes first. We’ll make heaven a place on earth, Ooo, heaven is a place on earth..

May 17, 2025 0

Of Shepherds and Other Things

In John 10, we encounter Jesus’ riff on an extended metaphor of sheep and shepherds. I am the Good Shepherd. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life – that is, life no longer subject to the restriction of temporal time.

Here are two seemingly contrasting shepherding images.

My nephew, Hamish, is a sheep farmer in the South Canterbury high country in the foothills of the Southern Alps – the mountain backbone of New Zealand’s South Island. This is Lord of the Rings country. Not the idyllic landscapes of the Shire but the astonishingly majestic terrain framed by the dark mountains of Mordor. Across 60,000 acres of tussock grassland, amid rocky crags and sharp ravines, Hamish runs around 12000 Marino sheep bred for the fineness of their wool, much prized by Italy’s fashion houses.

One day, during a visit some years ago, with Murray, Hamish’s father, we suddenly stopped as Murray leapt out of the cab of the truck and bounded down a steep-sided gully to where a ewe had been caught by its dense wool in a thorn tree, known locally as a Lawyer Bush because the saying goes, once caught you’ll never get free. Cutting the ewe free, he hoisted it in one smooth movement onto his shoulders, and with the ewe draped around his neck, he climbed back up, depositing it on the truck bed before we drove off.

B.W. Johnson in The People’s New Testament, his 1891 bible commentary, recalls the following.

As we ate and looked, almost spellbound, the silent hillsides around us were in a moment filled with sounds and life. The shepherds led their flocks forth from the gates of the city. They were in full view and we watched and listened to them with no little interest. Thousands of sheep and goats were there in dense, confused masses. The shepherds stood together until all came out. Then they separated, each shepherd taking a different path, and uttering, as he advanced, a shrill, peculiar call. The sheep heard them. At first the masses swayed and moved as if shaken with some internal convulsion; then points struck out in the direction taken by the shepherds; these became longer and longer, until the confused masses were resolved into long, living streams, flowing after their leaders. Such a sight was not new to me, still it had lost none of its interest. It was, perhaps, one of the most vivid illustrations which human eyes could witness of that beautiful discourse of our Savior recorded by John.

Johnson’s almost biblical depiction of shepherds leading their sheep over rocky hillsides is not an image that translates well to modern NZ shepherding. The NZ sheep farmer is more herder than shepherd as he stands to the side, he commands his sheepdogs with piercingly high whistles produced by use of a flat plastic device held between the teeth. With much barking and nipping of sheep heels the dogs gather and drive the herd on.

Unlike Johnson’s scene, which is so strongly reminiscent of Jesus’ Good Shepherd imagery, there is little sense of this kind of intimacy between Kiwi shepherd and sheep. Yet, in the moment when Murray bounded off to retrieve his solitary ewe, the power of the biblical image of the Good Shepherd who leaves the 99 to go in search of the one lost sheep communicated an unexpected intimacy.

I am the Good Shepherd. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life – that is, timeless life as in life unrestricted by the limitations of temporal time.

In 2025, the good shepherd imagery of Jesus in John’s Gospel occurs on the second Sunday in May, otherwise known as Mother’s Day. Whether by design or not, it’s an interesting coincidence that emboldens me to reframe Jesus’ good shepherd metaphor as: I am the good mother. My children hear my voice. I know them, and they trust me. I give them eternal life—a life of relationship with me that cannot be measured or restricted by the limitations imposed by temporal time.

We hear Jesus’ voice -to quote from TS Eliot in Little Gidding:

a voice … not known, because not looked for -but heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea.

The voice of the good mother is the voice heard, and yet not heard, remembered, and yet not looked for, but viscerally felt; a voice we trust because it resonates through the finely tuned strings of our memory.

This half-remembered yet forgotten voice enters our lives through the earliest experience at our mother’s breast—if not while we are still in utero. Nurture echoes nature. The human bond of mother and child echoes the bond between God and humanity. Jesus says, I am the good mother. My children hear my voice, I know them, and they trust me.

In John’s Christology, there is no distinction between Jesus the Logos and God the Creator; in each, the other finds its reflection. God, the good shepherd, enters our human experience at first as God the good mother. We learn to trust God, the good mother, who calls us each by name and protects us from danger, because like a mother, God has first loved us with a quality of unconditionality that is breathtaking to contemplate.

Imagine being loved because you are already good enough. The problem for many of us is that it requires courage and faith to see ourselves as God, the good mother, sees us.

Jesus’ voice is heard and yet half heard, remembered, and yet not looked for, but viscerally felt; a voice we trust because it resonates through the finely tuned strings of early memory. Jesus, the good shepherd, enters our lives through our experience of the divine good mother.

Donald Winnicott, the renowned 20th-century British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, coined the phrase “good-enough mother.” Winnicott’s legacy has been a formative influence on my evolution as a psychotherapist and priest.

By good enough, Winnicott meant that mothers did not need to be perfect. The mother-infant relationship, though vulnerable to mishap, is also robust and able to withstand imperfect conditions. The reminder that mothers need to be good enough and not perfect is a reminder that the quest for the perfect in this arena of life is certainly the enemy of the good. The essence of a good-enough experience of mothering lies in our experience of love that is simply consistent and unconditional.

Many feel as a lifelong absence the early lack of the unconditional love of the good-enough mother. Maternal failure is often due to a perfect storm of emotional and environmental failures that interrupt or prevent the formation of a good-enough mother-infant bond. Yet, if we didn’t find the memory of good-enoughness in our early experience with our mothers, maybe we found it through good-enoughness in the love of a grandmother or grandfather, in the compensating love of an aunt or uncle, or even later, a devoted teacher or mentor. Good-enough mothering, though more usually exercised by women, is nevertheless a universal human quality found in the rich variety of human relationships.

Yet an early experience of a disinterested or unavailable mother will leave its mark. An early experience of the promise of love being restricted by conditions – I will love you only if — is not an uncommon experience. Yet, there are very few people who cannot locate an experience of unconditional love somewhere in their early formation.

Jesus says I am the good-enough mother. I have no choice; for I cannot -not – love my children and give them eternal life, that is, life that cannot be restricted by the limitation of temporal time.

Our lives are bounded between the bookends of Jesus’s resurrection as the first fruits of the hope for new life and the promise of the resurrection of the entire creation at the end of time. Jesus said, “I am the Good Shepherd. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life. Eternal life is realizing the promise of good-enough love extended to all.”

America stands out among developed Western nations as a society that continually fails those entrusted with the sacred responsibility for mothering. In a country that eulogizes motherhood and apple pie, the US ranks very low on the scale of nations where public policy concretely supports family life and child development. A society configured by the divine mothering template will ensure maternal and paternal paid leave, supported childcare, public pre-school and kindergarten education free at the point of use. The paradox at the heart of American society concerns the disproportion between our passion for the unborn and our social neglect of the born.

Human mothering only needs to be good enough, not perfect. For some of us, Mother’s Day will be an opportunity to reaffirm the heart-felt forgiveness that soothes the discordant strings of early memory. For most of us, Mother’s Day will be an opportunity to express feelings of gratitude for the love our mothers gave us. Whichever may be the case, for each one of us, the divine good mother encourages us to be good-enough mothers to those who trust us to love and care for them.

I am the good shepherd. My sheep hear my voice – a voice … not known, because not looked for -but heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea; – a voice not heard but remembered; a voice not looked for but viscerally felt; a voice we trust because it resonates through the finely tuned strings of our memory.

My sheep know my voice, they follow me, and I give them eternal life – a life that is not restricted by the limitations imposed by temporal time.

May 10, 2025 0

On The Damascus Road

In the early weeks of the Easter Season, the Lectionary focuses on a series of appearances in which the post-resurrection Christ – still recognizable as the pre-resurrection Jesus – drops in on the ongoing lives of his disciples. The gospels contain 13 post-resurrection appearance stories. The gospel for the third Sunday after Easter from John 21 offers us a classic example of Jesus appearing to the fisherman disciples – wearily returning to the shore after a fruitless night’s fishing.

Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances often spark an arid debate about whether he physically appeared to his followers or whether they simply imagined him doing so. We have a ridiculous modern preoccupation with dividing human experience between what might be called external, verifiable, objective experience, and internal psychological-imaginative, subjective experience. Put simply, the argument is over whether they happened or were the product of imagination.

This debate rests on some big materialist assumptions about what is real and what is not. This is an arid dispute, argument, debate, or however you want to describe it, because it misses the essential point of the reports of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances are real if real is defined as having an impact to change lives.

Alongside John 21, on the third Sunday after Easter, we have an epistle reading from Luke-Acts chapter 9, describing Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance to one Saul on the road to Damascus. There is no debate to be had here. This is a psychological-spiritual event that registers in Saul’s imagination. Only he sees the blinding light and hears Jesus’ voice. Nevertheless, this is a real event if real is defined by discernible and verifiable impact, i.e., the power to change the direction of Saul’s life.

We know Paul through his letters to his fledgling house church communities. We also know Paul through Luke’s account of his missionary journeys. Luke begins his missionary biography of Paul with the famous incident on the Damascus Road – a devastating spiritual confrontation that was to change everything for Paul. Thanks to Luke, we come to know Paul, less as the writer of letters but as a protagonist in a grand historical drama chronicling the spread in antiquity of what will come to be known as Christianity. Yet, Luke is not only interested in recording the grand epic of the Church’ rise but also has an ear for the personal. In Luke-Acts we meet Paul as a man struggling with an internal identity conflict. For Paul was once Saul and it’s with Saul that Luke begins his biography of Paul.

Saul was a product of the amazingly cosmopolitan world of antiquity. Born into a family of the Jewish diaspora living in the Greek-speaking city of Tarsus in the Roman province of Cilicia, and thus a Roman citizen, Saul was educated in Jerusalem – a student of the famous teacher Gamaliel. Educated in the strictest observance of the Pharisee tradition, Saul became zealous for the God of Israel.

While traveling on a commission from the Sanhedrin to root out the followers of Jesus in Damascus, Saul is blinded by a blazing light – a moment of complete sensory overload. Blinded, he falls from his horse and hears a voice saying, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Left in a state of physical blindness and bodily paralysis, the voice tells him, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Picked up from the ground by his startled companions, Saul – now blind – is led into the city.

Saul is sequestered for three days. Luke does not want us to miss the symbolism of Jesus’ three days in the tomb. Saul, neither eating, drinking, nor sleeping, remains in this state of extreme sensory deprivation as he undergoes a death of self involving a dramatic spiritual and psychological reconstruction. With the return of his sight, a new worldview greets him. Symbolic of this dramatic change, the zealous Saul has been reborn as Paul, transformed by his encounter with the post-resurrection Christ.

The expression a Damascus Road experience has become an idiom for a 180-degree change in a person’s view of self and the world. After his encounter on the road to Damascus, Saul has a kind of death, resurrection, and Pentecost experience rolled into one – after which he too can claim to have seen the risen Lord. Like Peter and the other disciples – who by their encounters with the risen Christ are transformed from disciples – followers, into apostles – messengers, Paul is similarly transformed – but for him the transformation is from persecutor to apostle. Paul leaves behind his national-ethnic God of rage and fear, a God of them and us, a God whose followers must find an endless supply of scapegoats to carry away their unacknowledged projections of guilt and fear – and encounters a God of love, mercy, and inclusion.

Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, through his letters to the various churches that sprang up in the wake of his missionary journeying, continued to articulate his experience of living in the painful tension between divine judgment and acceptance. Thus, at numerous points his letters make difficult and confusing reading as he flip-flops between being a truly ground-breaking visionary and remaining a man of his own time and place.

Our experience of the world is articulated through the stories we tell, both to ourselves and to one another. We are shaped and our world is given meaning by their telling. This is a good and a bad thing because if the story is poor, which I mean does not offer enough room for growth, we become constrained in our sense of identity and worldview. On the other hand, if the story is expansive, allowing us space to grow, then our sense of self and view of the world expands to include more and more of what is needed.

The resurrection is an expansive story that changes lives. It’s not a story to be believed or explained but to be lived. In living it, the resurrection story shapes the way we understand the nature of the world around us. The question I ask myself is one I also put to you – how do we live the resurrection story?

For some of us like Saul, being changed by an encounter with the risen Christ is a dramatic and devastating indictment on our former lives. Yet, for most of us, we encounter the risen Christ in the subtle opportunities for change amidst the routines of everyday life. We encounter the power of the resurrection story:

when we chose to be more courageous and less risk adverse
when we become more accepting and less judgmental of difference
when we face down our fears and cease being driven by them to seek others to blame
when we come to experience mercy as the first attribute of God
when the God of Mercy becomes also the God of Justice, that is love in action.

Today as we look at our world, among those who claim to speak for God it’s not hard to distinguish Saul’s voice from Paul’s. So many politicians and church people speak with the voice of Saul. This is the paranoid voice that demands the protection of religious liberty as the fig leaf for the denial of difference. It’s the voice that celebrates the limitations of culture as a rejection of God’s open-ended invitation to enter the new.

For Saul, persecution, imprisonment, and murder were all necessary tools to protect an angry God not able to withstand the imagined trauma of human questioning. For Paul, all that was needed was the law of love manifesting in vulnerability. After his experience on the Damascus Road, Paul knew that because of his vulnerability and weakness, God chose him to be the greatest apostle of inclusion, which is simply a way of describing the divine call to love in action.

May 3, 2025 0