Homilies for 7th Sunday in Easter

Seventh Sunday in Eastertide

12 May 2001

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

John 17.1-11

Where in the World is Jesus Christ?

Last week in a remote jungle community in northwestern Colombia a tragedy occurred that was not large enough, or closely enough tied to American ‘vital interests,’ to break through into the headlines and occupy the public consciousness alongside Iowa’s exploding mailboxes and Israel’s release of Yasser Arafat from house arrest. At least I only happened to notice this story in the online version of the Boston Globe. The 800 residents of Bojaya found themselves caught in the crossfire of that country’s civil war, which has been going on for 38 years between Marxist rebels and right-wing paramilitary forces. The bullets penetrating the walls of their flimsy wooden houses, about 300 villagers fled to the church, the one concrete building, seeking safety. But during the second day of the firefight a rebel missile smashed through the church roof and exploded near the altar; there, as it happened, was where the people huddled for protection. At last count 117 people, including about 40 children, were killed and another hundred wounded. As the Globe’s correspondent reports: The altar was obliterated, wooden pews reduced to firewood, human remains were scattered around the church. And a shattered figure of Christ stared skyward.

Like the disciples Luke describes in this morning’s lesson from Acts we sometimes find ourselves looking up into an empty sky wondering where has Jesus gone. We know of course that Jesus has not abandoned us. Thus the Swedish theologian Gustaf Wingren writes that it would have been self-evident to Luke’s audience that to ascend to heaven is to ascend to God and that since God as the creator of everything was everywhere, the Ascension means that the exalted Christ does not put distance between himself and this world but instead assumes a closer and more sovereign presence everywhere (Credo, p. 129). And there is the coming of the Spirit, that Pentecost we will celebrate next week. We are not left bereft. Yet, to be honest we say that for us the presence of Christ is under the sign of his absence. In a song about another act of meaningless violence Warren Zevon sings

Time marches on

Time stands still

Time on my hands

Time to kill

And my hands in the till

Down at the 7-11

It's the same old story

Same old tune

They all say

Someday soon

My sins will all be forgiven

Gentle rain

Falls on me

All life folds back

Into the sea

We contemplate eternity

Beneath the vast indifference of heaven.

The reality we confess is that Jesus, first vindicated in the resurrection, then glorified and exalted in the ascension, sits at the right hand of God the Father. Often treated as a kind of footnote, a tying up of loose ends, a contrivance to sidestep embarrassing questions -- well, if Jesus is resurrected where is he? – in reality the event Luke relates at the beginning of Acts lies at the center of the good news. It gives our faith and mission its shape and meaning. We know, as St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians, that by ascending Jesus filled the whole universe with the reconciling love of God (4.10). But the appearance so often is that the savior God has taken his leave for good, and we stand under an unknowing or unconcerned heaven. For we live “between the times:” the great work of God in Christ is already – and not yet – complete. Our task is neither to fall back into despair at the absence of God, nor is it to leap ahead to the glory of the consummation when all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, our task is to bear witness to what was, and is, and is to come.

It’s hard to focus on that role of being witnesses to the great work of God in Christ. In Luke’s account we see this with the disciples. The resurrected Jesus has for forty days been teaching them, speaking about the kingdom of God, yet still they misunderstand; they try to force Jesus into the mold of their preconceptions. They have one last opportunity before Pentecost to get things wrong in a big way, and Luke does not hesitate to show them taking it. “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” They are even now thinking of the national fortunes of Israel, not of the gracious God who in Christ reconciles the whole world to himself. Jesus lets them know they are, once again, off base: their concern isn’t with Israel but to be witnesses to him, and to take that witness not just to the elect of Israel, but – incredibly enough - to the Samaritans and –unthinkably – to the ends of the earth. Leaving them with that appalling charge, Jesus is taken up and lost from view.

Those two men in white robes – angels or whatever they were - sent them on their way, on their mission, not seeking Christ in the heavens to which he ascended and from which he will return, but out into a world no less bloody, cruel and hopeless than our own, testifying that God in Christ has acted decisively to heal and save and forgive.

Thinking about what it means for us to be about this very same mission, a line from our ‘Baptismal Covenant,’ comes to mind. Each time one of us is baptized, we all promise to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.” It’s not that we are not with our whole hearts to be seeking the Christ who is now ascended but that we are to be seeking him in this way, seeking him in one another, looking for him in the faces of strangers, yearning for a glimpse of him even in the angry eyes of our enemies. How assiduously we would seek, how differently we could live, if we were always seeking Christ this way.

A woman who had been adopted as an infant told me of a long period in her adolescence and early adulthood when she became obsessed with finding her biological mother. She said that wherever she went she scanned the faces in the crowd, silently asking of any woman anywhere near the appropriate age: could that be her? The devotion with which that young woman, at heart an abandoned child, sought the person who had abandoned her, was, as you can probably guess, wrongheaded, flowing from a love not to be requited. In the end she found woman who had given birth to her and in her found not the perfect mother, but the person who had cast her off. Her quest for the beloved in the faces of strangers was grounded in need and illusion, but our quest to see the beloved in those around us is grounded in the real and enduring love of God in Christ.

In our world, everyone’s looking for love, for someone willing to accept them as they are, no strings attached. (They are of course at the same time sure that anyone who found out what they’re really like would never love them, so at the same time they pretend to be something other than what they are.) But in God’s world “belovedness is always prior to loving” (Paul Zahl). Being better is always the result of being accepted, loved, esteemed, not a precondition for it. We are called to witness to God’s love, seeing in everyone we encounter someone unconditionally loved by God. And that demands that we strive, often with our sense of what’s proper or even reasonable going badly out of whack, to act the same way, to live as best we can free of the demands of reciprocity and merit.

To seek Christ in all persons means to learn to regard others as bearing his image, as of unlimited value in God’s economy. We live in an age perhaps especially prone to self-involvement and indifference to the reality of others, seeing in them only a reflection of our own needs and desires. Devotees of Garrison Keillor will be familiar with Guy Noir, the down at heel private investigator. One day a potential client arrives at his office, a young man, clearly a yuppie. He’s wearing an exquisite, obviously very expensive designer suit. “Wow,” exclaims Guy Noir, “You could feed a village in India for a year for the price of that suit!” Puzzled, the yuppie takes a moment to respond: “Well, you can’t wear a village…”

The vast indifference of most of us most of the time for most everyone else is a real fact of this world. The absent Christ is nonetheless present in the of love, works done for his sake, but not in memory of him. For in faith they are done because of the present reality of who he is, and the future but certain reality of what he promises. The Athanasian Creed makes the point obliquely when it says:

Who although he be God and Man yet he is not two but one Christ, One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God.

That Jesus who ascended to God was from the start fully God, yet the full story of the Incarnation is complete only with the Ascension, for only then do we see humanity taken up into God, made forever a part of God’s nature, part of who and what God in his sovereign freedom chooses to be. In Jesus the human is beloved, accepted, endorsed, vindicated, celebrated, glorified and made divine. Our task is to witness to this God who calls everyone to himself; this God who becomes one of us by drawing all of us into himself, into the eternal, infinitely joyful life of the Trinity, holy and undivided. He calls us to seek Christ in all persons, for there is no one whose indifference or rejection we can take as the last word that overturns the saving will of God for them. There is no one we can give up for lost, as not part of the humanity the ascending Christ offers his Father. Indifference to other human beings is never justified, for it is in Christ that God in his abiding grace chooses to see all of us, however unworthy or unwilling we may be.

Where in the world is Jesus Christ? Wherever the apparent indifference of heaven, and the very real indifference of humans for one another, is answered by us, seeking and serving Christ in all persons, and loving them as ourselves.

Amen

Seventh Sunday in Easter

24 May 2009 Church of the Savior

Orange City, Iowa

As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. John 17.18

Loving the World

When I was growing up, some things were plainly sinful, like telling lies or swearing, and other things were plainly spiritual, like reading your Bible and praying. But there was an extensive intermediate zone of things which, while not really sinful, were worldly. Worldly things were not exactly prohibited, but you were supposed to avoid them, because they could easily lead to sin. So, for instance, while drinking, dancing, smoking and popular music were not in themselves sinful, they were certainly worldly and not for the serious Christian. And worldly people—anyone who was not, by our rather narrowly focused lights, a Christian, no matter how good they might appear to be­—were best left to their own devices except when being friends with them served the ulterior purpose of witnessing to them. I learned that our calling was to be in the world but not of the world. Too much of an attachment to anything, or to anyone, not clearly connected to the Christian faith was cause for concern that you were worldly, not just putting up with the world but part of it, loving it, and thus not right with God.

In today’s lesson from John’s Gospel, Jesus, like the community that spawned me, is concerned with our relation to the world. The Greek word is cosmos; it occurs thirteen times in this short passage, and once more in the two verses I added. The perspective of John’s Gospel, commencing with its magisterial prologue:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…

is, if anything, cosmic, inviting us to hear God’s word in the context of ancient religious and philosophical ideas. The idea that we inhabit a cosmos is a big deal in ancient thought. We attribute to the earliest Greek philosophers, to pre-Socratics like Pythagoras, the discovery that the world is not just a collection of things, but an ordered, unified reality, an “identity in difference”, a “one in the many,” an integral, rational whole the human mind can grasp. Therein lies the beginning of philosophy and science. But it wasn’t much of a move to start thinking of this cosmos as eternal and divine, self-explanatory and self-sufficient, complete on its own. An idea, it turns out, with staying power. Long after Pythagoras, the late, great Carl Sagan famously intoned (as Vangelis wells up in the background):

The Cosmos is all that there is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

The New Testament challenges this. The cosmos is the world, but just not the world contemplated with wonder and awe; it’s the world seen for what it is: a creation fallen into rebellion and disarray. A creation which, given the chance, would unmake its maker. The cosmos is precisely what cannot stomach Jesus, who unmasks its religion as rebellion, its righteousness as sin, its wisdom as folly, and its power as weakness. The cosmos is where Jesus, judged and condemned, found guilty of blasphemy and sedition, must be disposed of.

Here in John, as Jesus and his disciples linger, the last supper eaten, Jesus inserts a prayer into his long goodbye. The religious, political machinery which will kill Jesus is in motion; Judas has gone out into the night on his mission of betrayal. Yet Jesus prays not for himself, but for his disciples, those he now calls his friends. He prays for their protection. The world will hate them, because they do not belong to it. They belong to Jesus because God gave them to him. Yet Jesus sends them into the world, just as God the Father sends him into the world. Of course, in letting them hear this, Jesus at the same time commissions them; he instructs them to go into the world as he went into the world. Despite the negative light in which the world is cast, and the talk of the world hating Jesus and his disciples, the critical fact is that Jesus sends them into the world for the world: “…*so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (17.21) In light of this, whatever concerns we might have about being in the world or of the world are drastically off the mark if we’re not first--and last--asking what is it to be for the world, to be sent into it, like Jesus, for its sake. Not to condemn it, not to peel off refugees to escape it for some pure and heavenly realm, but to save it. Jesus goes on to make clear that his disciples go into the world in this way, the way he was sent into the world, only when they are one, when they love one another. Belgian priest Louis Evely, once pointed out, “Jesus promised the conversion of the world, not if we love God (this anyone can claim, and no one can verify), but if we realize the miracle, exceedingly rare but unquestionable, of loving one another” (91).

In another place, he muses, “I often say to myself, in our religion, God must feel very much alone: for is there anyone besides God who believes in the salvation of the world? God seeks among us sons and daughters who resemble him enough that he could send them into the world to save it” (96).

It makes me think of Raymond Carver’s story, “A Small, Good Thing:”

One Saturday Ann goes to the bakery to order a birthday cake for her son Scotty. His tenth birthday will be Monday. But on Monday morning, Scotty is walking to school when he is hit by a car. Knocked down, and dazed, Scotty seems not to be badly hurt. He goes home, tells his mother what happened. He seems fine, but then passes out. She takes him to the hospital. The party is cancelled, the cake forgotten at the bakery. Hours pass. The doctors find no signs of serious injury; they reassure the parents, but the boy doesn’t wake up. Monday night passes. The doctors, now beginning to be concerned, still try to reassure the parents. Scotty should wake up at any moment. But he doesn’t. More tests. Tuesday. Ann and her husband are distraught. They stay at their unconscious son’s bedside as much as they can, one or another going home only reluctantly and briefly, to feed the dog, to call relatives, before rushing back to the hospital. When either goes home, even in the middle of the night, the phone rings; it’s the baker, angry about the expensive cake that has not been picked up or paid for. Neither distracted parent manages to explain why they’ve stiffed the baker. They don’t know who this threatening, abusive caller is. Back at the hospital, Scotty slides into a coma. There are X-rays and brain scans, but no explanation. His parents are terrified; the calls at home add to their anguish and confusion. Scotty dies. The doctors are apologetic. It was a one-in a million chance, a hidden occlusion. The broken parents go home. Sitting there in the awful silence, the phone rings. Ann picks it up on the first ring:

"Hello," she said… "Hello!" she said. "For God's sake," she said. "Who is this? What is it you want?"

"Your Scotty, I got him ready for you," the man's voice said. "Did you forget him?"

"You evil bastard!" she shouted into the receiver. "How can you do this, you evil son of a bitch?"

"Scotty," the man said. "Have you forgotten about Scotty?" Then the man hung up on her.

Long after midnight, there’s another call. Again, Ann is enraged. She realizes who the caller is:

Drive me down to the shopping center,

"What are you saying?"

The shopping center. I know who it is who's calling. I know who it is. It's the baker, the son-of-a-bitching baker. I had him bake a cake for Scotty's birthday. That's who's calling. That's who has the number and keeps calling us. To harass us about that cake. The baker, that bastard."

They drive to the shopping center and find the baker. Ann angrily confronts him:

My son's dead," she said with a cold, even finality. "He was hit by a car Monday morning. We've been waiting with him until he died.”

The baker crumples under the weight of shame and guilt. He pleads for their forgiveness. Ann’s rage disappears, gone in a sea of grief. The baker gives them bread and coffee; they sit together.

“Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a heavy bread, but rich." They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

The story concludes with this eucharistic meal, those who by rights should be enemies sitting together, breaking bread, reconciled, united in loss and hope, the life of God taking flesh in a shattered world.

Amen

Seventh Sunday in Eastertide/Feast of the Ascension

Church of the Savior

Orange City, Iowa

1 June 2014

Left Behind

When I was an undergraduate my roommates and I sometimes invited faculty members to our dorm to preside over Bible studies. One of these I vividly remember. The professor, sitting on a lower bunk, read from the Gospels something Jesus said and then said, “Jesus said many strange things.” Without further comment he went on to the next quotation, again following it with, “Jesus said many strange things,” and so on, for the next fifteen minutes. That was the Bible study. It was a formative experience. Too ready to say what we thought Jesus meant, professor Heie showed us that sometimes what we need to do is just listen, and to ask questions we can’t answer right away. Years later, Karen and I visited St. Mary’s church in Scarborough, New York. During the homily the rector said something about the Holy Spirit and then, deviating from his text, under his breath said, “Whatever that means...” Another important moment in my life, to find myself in a place where faith is not necessarily a matter of having the answers, but asking the questions and then going on without the answers that might be a long time coming.

Today is both the Seventh Sunday of Easter and the Sunday after Ascension Day, which was last Thursday. The Ascension leaves us with some of those questions we cannot readily answer, like, “Where is Jesus?” Prior to modern times, when everyone believed that the Earth was near the bottom of the cosmos, and that far above us, beyond the highest heaven, was the abode of God, it made sense to envision Jesus literally ascending to God the Father. After early modern science makes it untenable to identify the heavens with Heaven, the Ascension begins to become an embarrassment. If Jesus was bodily resurrected, yet no longer walking around here with us, then he—his body—must be somewhere. Yet it seems implausible that he is now “up there,” that is, out there in space, in some intergalactic locale, some place in the universe contiguous with, even if very far from, us. Thus the pressure mounted to downplay, and eventually dispense with, the flesh and blood Ascension, and to “spiritualize” it, so that what returns to the inner life of God is not the fully human embodied Jesus, but the eternal divine logos. With this, everything unravels. If the flesh and blood Jesus did not ascend to the Father, and he’s not still here, then how can he have been resurrected in the first place? So that too gets spiritualized; the crazily real resurrection gets downgraded to a metaphor for some plausible spiritual truth. That’s fine, but it’s not going to get me up on a Sunday morning. I can’t let go of the question: where is Jesus?

Luke tells us how Jesus leaves; twice, first at the end of his Gospel and then in Acts, in today’s reading. Jesus brings the disciples to a hill called the Mount of Olives in Bethany, a village just outside Jerusalem. From there, “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (1.9). Left behind, the disciples stand there, gawking upwards. It reminds me of the first launch of the space shuttle (Karen and I had a pass to be there for it): the crowd of thousands standing there stunned, awestruck, speechless, the mountainous column of smoke and flame brighter than the sun beginning to dissipate, the bone-shaking sound of the engines and the waves of sonic booms gradually fading, the spacecraft so massive on the launchpad now a speck far above us. Of course the disciples stand there staring upwards. What else would they be doing? But suddenly two men appear and ask, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

Who are the two men? Maybe they’re the two men that Luke says were at the empty tomb Sunday morning when the women arrived with spices to anoint Jesus’ corpse. Another possibility is that they are Moses and Elijah, and the Ascension somehow connects to the Transfiguration. Recall that as Jesus descended from the mountain with James, John, and Peter he told them not to tell anyone what they had seen until after he was resurrected. Now Jesus is resurrected, and we see what might be a recapitulation of that event, except that now the disciples must descend without Jesus. (It’s worth noting that while Matthew gives no account of the Ascension per se, he ends with Jesus giving his disciples the great commission on an unnamed mountain in Galilee, which is the traditional location of the Transfiguration.)

Whoever the two men are, their question is rhetorical. They’re asking, “Why are you hanging around here, instead of doing what Jesus told you to do?” Why are they still on the hill top, looking up toward Jesus who is no longer in view, rather than heading back to the city, readying themselves to go out as Jesus’ witnesses, first to Jerusalem, then to Judea and Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth? The two men are telling them to get moving. There’s no time to hang around looking up at where Jesus was; look to his work to be done down here.

The same urgency appears in the first encounter with the resurrected Jesus. A few weeks ago we were talking about John’s account of Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus atthe tomb. Overcome with emotion, the woman is trying to bow to and to embrace Jesus at the same time. Here’s one of the many strange things that Jesus said: “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to my Father!” (John 20.17). He tells her to let go, and go tell the men—“my brothers”—that he is ascending to his Father. Leaving aside the fact that this comes across a bit cold-hearted and sexist, it’s puzzling. Why is the fact that Jesus will ascend to the Father a reason for her to let go of him right now? He can’t get off the ground with her hanging on, the extra weight impeding lift-off? Or he doesn’t want her hanging on as he floats upward, lest she lose her grip and drop disastrously from the stratosphere? That’s absurd. And, in any event, despite what it sounds like here, the Ascension is not imminent. In Luke’s Gospel, it doesn’t happen for another week, and in his account in Acts, it’s forty days after the resurrection. Mary won’t hang on that long. And it can’t be that there’s some problem with physical contact. A week later, Jesus, still not ascended, doesn’t hesitate to invite Thomas to touch his wounds.

So how are we to hear Jesus’ strange words? Here, as with the disciples—now apostles—in Bethany, Jesus’ command is to leave and to set out on a mission. He sends Mary to bring the news to the disciples, as he will later send them to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. No time to hang on to the resurrected Jesus. No time to stand around looking up. It’s time to be about the work Jesus gives them to do.

Mary’s demonstrative affection, her tactile hold of Jesus, stands in for all of us and our desire to have Jesus himself with us, in view and accessible, beyond question. Blatantly resurrected. God incontrovertibly with us. Vindicated. Triumphant. Glorious. This is what the apostles are looking for: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1.6). Jesus tells them that it is not for them to know the times, but what becomes clear is that this is not the time. Jesus’ work is completed. Jesus is glorified: already…and not yet. They—and us—are left behind, left between the times.

Earlier in Acts Luke writes that Jesus presented himself to the apostles as alive by many convincing proofs (1.3). Yet whatever was convincing was not simply obvious. The resurrected Lord is known only as he chooses to make himself known. He is mistaken for a gardener, a ghost, a clueless traveler on the Emmaus road, a stranger on the beach. He suddenly appears and disappears; he is incognito and then recognized. Walls and doors, days and hours, don’t confine him. Genuinely embodied in our space and time, yet freely, no longer constrained by it. He is not palpably present to everyone. Every knee shall bow. But not yet.

I mentioned that Matthew’s Gospel concludes with Jesus on that unnamed mountain in Galilee, sending his apostles into the world to baptize and to make disciples. Matthew does not say that Jesus ascends. Indeed, the book closes not with Jesus leaving them, but promising them, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (28.20). How does this fit with Luke? Jesus leaves and he doesn’t leave. He remains with us, and he leaves us behind. He is with us because his Spirit is with us, but his Spirit is with us to comfort us in his absence. He is with us always, but it’s a strange way to be with us. In a way, we’re left holding the bag, commissioned to announce his resurrection to the world, and then having to explain, and go on with his work despite, his apparent absence. Like the disciples, we might well wish for the triumph of the crucified, the glory of God made plain to all, or at least a sensible response to the “Where is he?” question, but, as the great Anglo-Welsh poet R. S. Thomas wrote, often we must leave our questions neatly folded in the empty tomb. Somehow in all this we see the glory of God. This morning’s lesson from John, a fragment of Jesus’ long prayer on the eve of his arrest and crucifixion, is all about the glory, not, at least not overtly, about the departed Jesus, the waiting, the unanswered questions. The Son glorifies the Father, who glorifies the Son, who is glorified in us. This talk of glory is, to modern ears, off-putting. In his wonderful essay, “The Weight of Glory,” which is about God glorifying us, C. S. Lewis confesses:

Glory suggests two ideas to me, of which one appears wicked and the other ridiculous. Either glory means to me fame, or it means luminosity. As for the first, since to be famous means to be better known than other people, the desire for fame appears to me as a competitive passion and therefore of hell rather than heaven. As for the second, who wishes to become a kind of living electric light bulb?

We often hear that God does what he does for his own glory. This might suggest that God is some sort of cosmic egomaniac, obsessed with being well thought of and praised at all costs. But that’s the opposite of the truth. The glory of God is nothing less than God becoming known as he truly is. The glory of God is God giving himself to us. Who God is is made clear—already to the eyes of faith but not yet to all—in the infinite humility of the incarnation and the cross. The God who became human flesh as Jesus is, as Robert Jenson tells us, the hidden God, not because of his remote, ineffable transcendence, inaccessible to the meager human mind, but “precisely by his offensive availability in our world” (Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 233.). We are left waiting for, and bearing witness to, this God who was not content just to make himself known by making our weakness, humiliation, and condemnation his own, but now, though vindicated by resurrection, by choosing to be with us by being hidden. We are left to explain why our crucified but resurrected God is not yet the manifest Lord of all. Why this strange delay, one which seems so long to us, but which God seems to regard as a mere parenthesis, treating it with urgency, as though the time is short, so that like Mary Magdalen and the apostles on the Mount of Olives, we better not linger, longing for our absent Lord, but get on with the work at hand in this little space between Jesus’ departure and return?

Jacques Pohier, one of those 1960’s post-Vatican II priests who was always in hot water with Rome, once pointed out, “God is God, so God is not everything.” God makes space and time for those who are not God, for us. He does not overwhelm, but stands back and makes room for lives other than his own. But he invites us to take part in his life. We are called to share the life of Jesus. Jesus lived an ordinary human life, like us having to trust in a God unseen, a God not tangible but grasped only in faith. And we are called in our small ways to share in Jesus’s death. On the cross, Jesus calls out in desolation, to all appearances forgotten, foolish, left behind. Where is your God now, king of the Jews?! Were is your God now, you disciples of the crucified?! Where is this supposedly resurrected Jesus? Ascended to God the Father, and seated at his right hand…whatever that means, as our rector at St. Mary’s might have said. In another poem, R. S. Thomas, who served most of his life as priest for a remote rural parish in Wales, in his empty church reflects:

Often I try To analyze the quality Of its silences. Is this where God hides From my searching? I have stopped to listen, After the few people have gone, To the air recomposing itself For vigil. It has waited like this Since the stones grouped themselves about it. These are the hard ribs Of a body that our prayers have failed To animate. Shadows advance From their corners to take possession Of places the light held For an hour. The bats resume Their business. The uneasiness of the pews Ceases. There is no other sound In the darkness but the sound of a man Breathing, testing his faith On emptiness, nailing his questions One by one to an untenanted cross.

Faith in Jesus is not untroubled certitude but perseverance in the questions and obediently acting without the answers. It is our precarious life as his church, coming to the table where he is at once present and not present in the wine and the bread, coming to this holy ambiguity with whatever we happen to have: belief, hope, doubt, questions not answered. Amen.