The month of May is a time of transition. We are entering the
part of the calendar that greeting card companies label “Dads and Grads”. It’s common right now to open a newspaper and
see a photo of a college commencement and read an extract from a graduation
address. “Commencement”, of course,
means “beginning”. These ceremonies
celebrate a double-edged kind of change. One part of life comes to an end,
another one begins. For the graduates,
commencement is a time of liberation and hope.
For parents it may signal both an achievement and a loss.
In the church year,
May marks another kind of transition, one that might also be characterized as a
mixture of achievement and loss. Last Thursday
was Ascension Day, when the church proclaims that the risen Jesus left the
world for good and ascended to be with the Father. A week from today will be Pentecost, the day
on which the church receives the gift of the Holy Spirit, understood as the continuing
presence of God in, among, and with us.
For Jesus’s companions, the Ascension was something like a
commencement: Jesus has been vindicated,
and he is now at God’s right hand. But
that vindication comes with a price: he
is no longer here. They are on their own
in the world, seemingly bereft of Jesus’s continued presence.
We have a ten-day period—a
stretch of time between Ascension and Pentecost--when Jesus’s companions wait
to see what God will do. Jesus is gone. He has promised us that we will not be
left alone, but we have no idea of who will be with us next or how. The great
20th century theologian Karl Barth called this ten-day period between Ascension
and Pentecost “the significant pause”. God has promised to act, but that promise
has yet to be fulfilled. We live life in the pause between promise and
fulfillment. It is a time of watching and waiting, a mixture of anxiety and
hope. This ten-day pause is an epitome of the life of faith—indeed of all
life—itself. We all live in the gap between promise and fulfillment.
So here we are alone
with each other in the world. Our Gospel
for today—from the 17th chapter of John—pictures Jesus expressing a
rather negative opinion of “the world”.
Here again is part of what Jesus says as he prays to the Father on his
companions’ behalf:
I
have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not
belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you
to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.
They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify
them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I
have sent them into the world. [John 17: 14-17]
The Greek word “world” used here is
the word kosmos, the root of our word
“cosmic”. In Greek, kosmos has several meanings just as
“world” has in English: it can denote
the universe, the earth itself, the human family. It can also mean “the ungodly multitude” of
those alienated from God and also “the whole circle of earthly goods which lure
us from God.” So the Greek word kosmos, like the English “world”, points
us in two directions: it’s the whole
created order, and it’s also the shallow, false God-denying part of that order. There are times when John’s Jesus uses
“world” in its negative connotation, as in today’s Gospel. There are times when John shows Jesus using
“world” more positively, as in John 3.16, the passage often held up on placards
at ballparks: “For
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes
in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
We are here on our own
in “the world”, and Jesus prays that we may be kept safe as we engage the world
in all its many aspects. And I suppose the first thing that
needs saying this morning is yes, there is a lot of bad stuff out there from
which we need protection. The world is full of bad values, bad ideas, and yes,
even bad people. Every one of us here
has some acquaintance with all that. We make our way through that vain world as
best we can, praying for God’s guidance, protection, and judgment.
But
it would be a mistake—and many Christians over the centuries have made this
mistake—to assume that Jesus is condemning “the world” in all its other senses. In today’s Gospel, when Jesus says that we do
not belong to the world, he is not asking that we disengage from the planet,
the human community, or the created order.
Anyone who has followed Jesus’s ministry and teachings can see that he
lived his life in full engagement with everyone and everything around him. So, as we contemplate our ten-day sojourn
toward Pentecost in this significant pause, the question remains: what are we Christians to do about and with “the
world”?
And
here I need to suggest something that will sound sacrilegious to some and
liberating to others I want to say, in the spirit in which I believe Jesus
would say it, that it is in fact “the world” that has kept the Christian
community honest. When we think of ourselves as the enclosed, protected, world-denying
community of the saved who keep themselves clean from outside influences, we
can become ingrown, and ingrown communities often turn into hothouses of
injustice. Just think of the way the Roman
Catholic hierarchy has handled the priest abuse scandal. The world rightly has a say in what we
believe, do, and proclaim. Without the
world we would be lost.
Think
about the great theological movements of the last 50 years: each of them has, in a sense, been foisted on
the church by “the world”. We were quite
content to be a segregated church until the Civil Rights Movement forced us to
engage the sin of racism. We were quite
content to be a male-dominated church until the Women’s Movement helped us see
that the presence of women in Holy Orders would lead to a life-giving renewal
of the church and its ministry. We were
quite content to bless the systematic degradation of the planet (except, of course,
our own manicured acres) until the environmental movement invited us to re-read
both the scriptures and the tradition in the light of a theology of creation
spirituality. We have been quite content
to persist in discrimination against gay and lesbian people until the emergence
of an LGBT Christian community demanded its full rights as members both of
church and society. I’m sad to say this,
but literally every step in the direction of hope and justice the church has
taken in my lifetime has come into it from the outside. And I’m even sadder to say that every step
backward, every retreat from human justice and decency, has been led by those
who want to keep us saved Christians pure and protected from “the world”. Left
to our own devices, we would still be a white, straight, male-dominated
denomination bent on exploitation of the earth and the human community. “The world”—those outside us-- has opened us
up to Jesus and his priorities, just as Jesus and his community opened the Temple
cult to God’s priorities. The persistence of the world’s address to us, and our
sometimes halting way of opening ourselves to hear and respond to that address,
is an ongoing sign of God’s grace.
To
say what I’ve just said is not unthinkingly to endorse the culture we live
in. There are a lot of bad ideas abroad
in our world, many of them accepted at face value by otherwise thoughtful
people. That is why the church has
always seen itself as both a participant in and critic of the culture it
inhabits. Christianity was critical of
Roman values, of Medieval values, indeed of all forms of social, political, and
economic organization. It was critical
of the Gilded Age and of both the complacent consumerism and state socialism that
marked much of the twentieth century. In
any culture in which it finds itself, Christianity always stands for the poor,
the weak, the outcast, the lonely, the oppressed. It always stands against power and the forces
of bigotry, hatred, and division. The
relationship between the church and the world has always been something like a
dance. They need us and we ned them. The
world needs the church to remind it of the deep values of Jesus and the Gospel;
the church needs the world to hold before us the rights and claims of those we
would otherwise ignore.
It
is this ongoing dance, this mutual relationship between church and world that
has characterized the Episcopal Church and Christ Church Cranbrook at their
best. The reason I have continued to
hold up our parish relationship to Detroit arises precisely out of our call to
be open to the pains and hopes of the world.
Christ Church Cranbrook has always been unique among affluent suburban
churches in America. We exist not only
to care for each other. We exist to
save—and be saved by—the world. And for
us in Southeastern Michigan, the world will always mean Detroit. In this
significant pause between Ascension and Pentecost, we Christians find our
bearings not by huddling together but by opening our hearts and minds to the
world. And here, for us, “world” has to include Detroit.
You
and I inhabit a world in which God’s values do not always prevail. We inhabit a church in which the same thing
can often be said. Only when world and
church engage with each other can we truly be made open and alive to what God
means and desires for us. The older I
get, the more grateful I am for the church, because its life and witness have
kept me from living the meaningless, hollow kind of existence I would no doubt otherwise
have led. And the older I get, the more
grateful I am for the world, that it has continually placed in front of me the
pained, wounded, oppressed people I could so easily live my life ignoring. Together, as they’ve done their dance, the
church and the world have kept me—and I hope you—open to the possibilities of
what the reign of God might actually look like in the here and now.
So here we are, together, in the church
and in the world. We are not here on our
own. God is with us, not only in here but
out there. For that presence, for both its
assurance and its challenge, we proceed in the Eucharist to give thanks. Amen.
