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Getting On With ItMay 20, 2007 Ascension Sunday I was in high school and president of the church youth fellowship when I quietly began telling a few people I was an agnostic. I don’t really know now whether this was true or not. The definition of agnostic that popped up on my computer said that it was “somebody who believes that it is impossible to know whether or not God exists.” In other words, a doubter, as opposed to an atheist who knows God does not exist. In any case, for a while I needed to challenge the religious precepts I had grown up with. In part, I was disturbed by the supposed facts of the biblical stories. Many didn’t seem plausible. Yet they didn’t seem exactly false, either. Still, I was full of my own fanciful powers as I bounded out to college and life beyond. Some folks can stay away from religion or a spiritual quest for a very long time – maybe even a lifetime. Others of us can’t – probably most of us, really – because ultimately we find we’re unable to escape the deep questions of our existence. Pastor Earl Palmer organizes these as half a dozen conundrums that every human being must confront sooner or later. These questions are philosophical and theological; and the answers that we come up with have practical and ethical ramifications in the living of our days. The first question is, “Who am I?” It’s a question about identity. The second is, “Where do I come from?” which points us to our origins. The third question, “Where do I live?” concerns our location in the world. The fourth, “Where am I going?” addresses our destiny. The fifth question, “Who is God, and what does God expect of me?” concerns the boundaries that surround everything in the beginning, and at the end. It’s the great reality question. And the last of the six, “”How do I find the answers to the first five questions?” is fundamental, since humans are the only part of the created order that worries about the first five. [1] Well, whether or not you would come up with a somewhat different list, whenever we begin to sincerely engage the elemental questions of our existence, we begin our spiritual pilgrimage. For most of us, this pilgrimage is full of starts and stops, u-turns and breakdowns. Still, surely everyone here this morning is somewhere on that path. Your presence gives you away. It didn’t take me all that long, really, to find my way to my own honest-to-gosh faith and the church that harbors the Jesus tradition and advances his cause. That’s because I first fell in love with music and, as I discovered, the great music of the world is profoundly spiritual; it evokes a reality that is quite beyond material skepticism. This reality does not fall within the bounds of scientific proofs, even though music obeys the natural laws of physics; the results are not quantifiable. It was through music that God initially became truly real for me. Following the death of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut about a month ago, I read that he had suggested his own epitaph in an interview he gave a year earlier. Vonnegut said, “My epitaph should be: ‘The only proof he needed of the existence of God was music.’” And then he added, “It’s meant a tremendous amount to me. I’m grateful, I’m really grateful for what music has done for me. Why it works, I can’t imagine.” [2] That’s completely consistent with my experience. I don’t understand why it works the way it does either, but music’s language pointed me to God like a compass pointing to true north. Of course, everyone has a unique tale to share concerning how they got started on the Godward pathway. Each of you have your own version. In the first year of my ministry, a woman about the age I now am today told me a part of her life story. She had been a gifted business woman, married, and the mother of three, all lost through the denial of her alcoholism. Years later, with her career and family gone, now recovering for a number of years, she found herself saying at an AA meeting that she was glad she was an alcoholic, for through it she found out who God was and by default, who she was. By that she didn’t mean she was glad she lost her family and career, but she was very glad that, through her disease, she was able to find answers to her own six questions. She was my teacher on that point. Through all sorts of means, skepticism gives way to acceptance that, after all, religious commitment is the appropriate response to life’s questions. Most discover that it isn’t enough to simply acknowledge the possibility of God’s existence, for that’s the barest of acknowledgments and doesn’t long satisfy our deepest yearning. And it matters quite a lot how we think about these things. In reference to Ernst Haekel, an important scientist/philosopher of his day, the famous preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, for whom Riverside Church was built, wrote this: “Haeckel says that there is no God – only, ‘mobile, cosmic ether.’ Imagine a congregation under Haeckel’s leadership, rising to pray, ‘O Mobile Cosmic Ether, blessed be thy name!” It is absurd. Unless God is personal, the deepest meanings of gratitude in human hearts for life and its benedictions have no proper place in the universe.” [3] He wrote that in 1917. Haeckel died in 1919. In here we speak of a radically personal God who was revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Rich stories of faith have been passed down to us concerning him that seem both highly historical and mythological at the same time. Stories that are simultaneously rooted in fact, yet imbued with language of transcendence and the imagination. Stories which at first blush strain credulity, but then again, beg to be re-read and re-read, and pondered, and finally to be understood. So we’ve been sharing the news of Easter over the last two months. We’ve retold the stories about how Jesus was crucified and buried. We read of an empty tomb and cryptic, angelic messages. Women and men reported personal encounters with this man now miraculously alive. To make matters worse for those of us weaned on the logic of scientific inquiry, the stories don’t agree in their details. Yet this is the record that has been passed on through a hundred generations and more of people attempting to make sense of their lives and to find meaning in their deaths. We’re only the latest mortals to find this record strangely and powerfully compelling. It makes music, as it were. And so skepticism gives way to something else – some state of knowing in which we realize that much about our existence is beyond our capacity to explain or quantify. We move into the realm of faith. And faith is not illogical or irrational. Instead it is trans-rational; it’s a larger frame of reference. Faith is a capacity to embrace a truth that’s larger than our language can hold. In the church’s yearly cycle, today is known as Ascension Sunday – the last Sunday in our season of Easter. Our first reading from Acts tells the story known as the Ascension of Jesus. This is a story of faith. It concludes the remarkable events that began with Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. It’s a story of faith because the disciples’ experience could not be contained in the language of material fact. Well, how do you talk about something that is beyond belief yet profoundly true? These early witnesses had this problem. The New Testament text is the result of people struggling to make sense of what they experienced and knew to be true, providing a record as they explained themselves. And what is that they’re explaining here? Acts was written some 20 or 30 years later – time that had allowed the fledgling church to form and propagate, time enough for thoughtful reflection and gathering together the shared experiences of those who knew and were coming to know Jesus Christ. The barest facts were a given: Jesus was a powerful, charismatic teacher/healer; he was crucified as an enemy of the state; he was experienced by many beyond the grave; these experiences came to an end yet his promise of spiritual empowerment was kept, the church was born and his message to love God and neighbor caught hold everywhere it was shared, transforming lives daily. As the story unfolds then, the Ascension is the transition from the specifics concerning Jesus, to the specifics concerning the birth of the church and the spreading of the message – the conjunction. So long as Jesus was around, the message couldn’t be larger than his circle of friends. But the earth could not contain him. His leaving catalyzed the invitation for humanity to assume its proper responsibility in the scheme of things, to become co-workers with God, to become actors on the stage rather than spectators in the audience. And that invitation has been extended ever since. It’s that invitation that’s planted in the heart of all things, that resides within God and comes to every generation. As the author of Acts tells the story, “While [Jesus] was going and [the disciples] were gazing up toward heaven…two men in white robes stood by them. They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” [5] That’sbecause the dawning of their spiritual maturity had arrived and it was time to get on with the work that had been gifted to them. No more gawking, hemming and hawing. Time to get on with it…. What we call the Ascension of Jesus, that is, the exaltation of all that he taught and lived, the triumph of love over death now resident with God, means that each human life is included within the same victory. It’s for this reason that person after person, year after year, generation after generation has found his or her life transformed when introduced to the living God. Consider the testimony of the great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy: “Five years ago I came to believe in Christ’s teaching, and my life suddenly changed. I ceased to desire what I had previously desired, and began to desire what I formerly did not want. What had previously seemed to me good seemed evil, and what had seemed evil seemed good. It happened to me as it happens to a man who goes out on some business and on the way suddenly decides that the business is unnecessary and returns home…his former wish to get as far as possible from home has changed into a wish to be as near as possible to it…suddenly I heard the words of Christ and understood them…and I experienced the joy of life undisturbed by death.” [6] My pathway to faith has been different from this, yet I know what Tolstoy was talking about. I understand his music. I know that God at some point picked me up by the lapels and pointed me in a direction as if to say, “Steve, this is what life is about,” and the gift of faith was given. What I always find so stunning in the Easter season is how the rag-tag and cowardly band of disciples are transformed into persons of remarkable strength and conviction. This is faith. It came as gift and they received it. Their Christ was one with God. With his departure their assignment became clear and they acted. As a result the world was changed forever. It’s an incredible story. It’s our story. This story takes on power afresh whenever people dare to respond in faith. People just like us. _____________________________
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