Preached at Good Shepherd Berkeley

EASTER VII (SUNDAY AFTER THE ASCENSION) 5/21/2023

Acts 1:6-14; Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36; 1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11; John 17:1-11

Eastertide is full of strange stories. At the beginning, Jesus is clearly dead and buried. Everyone knows it. But then he keeps popping up—always at unexpected moments. And, of course, it’s hard to recognize him. After all, it can’t be Jesus; so it isn’t Jesus. No, it’s the gardener. It’s a wayfarer who just happens to fall in step with us on the road to Emmaus. It’s a stranger on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, telling us to cast our net on the other side of the boat. Or, maybe worst of all, he just turns up in the locked room where we’re hiding out and mourning our losses. 

And, most eerily of all, this is not a spirit, not a ghost, not a phantom. Jesus is fully embodied. He can pass through locked doors, yes; but he can also break bread with them, eat with them, touch and be touched. This is still the real Jesus. It’s a conundrum. It’s an impossibility. And yet, it expresses the reality that the disciples were encountering. All they could say was: Christ has died. And yet, Christ lives.

And today, the last Sunday of Eastertide, we heard another strange story about the risen Jesus. He has a last meeting with his disciples and then ascends into heaven on a cloud. As they stand there gawking, two “men in white robes” (hint! hint!) explain that Jesus has been taken up into heaven and will return in the same way—with the implication that they mean “at the end of all things.” Jesus was joining a very elite group with just two other human beings who had been admitted to the direct presence of God: the patriarch Enoch, who, we are told, “walked with God; then he was no more, for God took him” (Gen. 5:24) and the prophet Elijah who was carried up into the heavens in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2). 

And now Jesus’ followers are left, it seems, on their own, without even the occasional shock of meeting provided by those elusive encounters on the road or the seashore. Jesus, it seemed, was gone for good, back to the divine throne that the Word of God had left years before to become a human, like us, in the womb of Mary. They cannot expect to meet him again in the body.

So now we disciples appear to have been left behind to fill in for him—rather like a summer intern being left to sub for the CEO. We no longer have Jesus with us to take our problems and our questions to. And yet, Jesus isn’t completely absent, either. For Jesus is one with God, “seated at the right hand of the Father,” as the creeds quaintly express it; and God is everywhere—including right here and now. The New Testament suggests some of the many ways in which this presence makes itself felt. Sometimes it’s through one another, for example at the kind of gathering we’re doing here this morning, learning from the scriptures, singing hymns, celebrating the sacrament. At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, the risen Jesus tells his disciples to go and teach what they learned from him and adds, “And, remember, I am with you always.” In other places, Jesus tells us that we will find him in the people whom we welcome, the people whom we serve, the people whom we comfort and encourage. Our reading from the First Letter of Peter this morning tells us that we will find him when we share his sufferings for the sake of God’s love. And, next Sunday, Pentecost, we’ll be reminded that the Holy Spirit unites us with him as the very presence of God in and with us.

All these thoughts point us toward a mystery that is actually central to being human, the mystery of death and life, the mystery of presence and absence. We think of them as mutually exclusive: you’re either dead or alive; you’re either present or absent. But in reality these are deeply interwoven with each other. How can Jesus be both mortal and eternal? both absent and present? Well, we have some experience of these things already. Our closest friends and loved ones are often a living presence in our lives, even when not physically with us. Sometimes in fact, it’s the very absence of a friend or a family member that helps us understand the meaning and importance of their presence. As I’ve grown older, I become more and more aware how much my parents are still with me—sometimes, even, in me. The dead live on in our own lives in the same way we shape, for good and ill, the world and the lives of the next generations. It’s no accident that one of the oldest expressions of human religion is the honoring of our ancestors. And, indeed, we claim Jesus as our ancestor in the Spirit.

But the mystery of Jesus’ resurrection takes it a step further. He is not just a figure of the past. He can still surprise us in the present, too. The Evangelist John had another way of talking about it. At the Last Supper, he tells us, Jesus said to them, “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” (14:19) We ourselves, as we are shaped by Jesus’ life, begin to share in it and even to find Jesus in ourselves and in one another.

Here, and yet absent. Absent, and yet here. Does all this make sense? No. It’s bigger than that. It’s a mystery. It’s very perplexing—very difficult to talk about or even think about. In some ways, I feel as if I can do nothing but stumble through this sermon. But it’s a mystery at the heart of Christian faith. In a way, it’s the continuation of another mystery—the Mystery of the Incarnation. How could God empty God’s own self into a vulnerable human being and become subject to hatred, rejection, suffering, death? It’s possible only because God is love. There is nothing in God inconsistent with love. And therefore God can be present in our sometimes hate-filled, murderous world without losing Godself. God can endure death and live on. God can be rejected and continue to love. Because of love, God can be God’s own self and yet know us and our humanity from the inside out.

And we see the fruit this bears not only in the stories of scripture, but in faithful people of every age—sometimes in ourselves, even. We are subject to death and yet live. We are absent from God and yet deeply connected. We can bring into this imperfect moment in which we live something of the love that made the world in the beginning. Mysteries, after all, are not puzzles to be figured out; they’re a reality to be lived in and through. They’re a glimpse into a reality deeper than the everyday, one that, rather like the reality of quarks, doesn’t submit to simple, logical, everyday rules of language. And they’re is all the more powerful for that. It reminds us that, in some ways, our own lives are stranger and more wonderful than we had ever dared imagine. 

The strange stories of Eastertide are not riddles to be solved. They’re mysteries to grow into. They offer to enrich our lives. They give us hope and new strength. They can even draw us into the overpowering and life-giving reality of God’s love for us and for the whole world.

Christ is risen!