|
When We Were Orphaned
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis May 8, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Acts 1:1-11 John 14:18-29
We come this morning in the church’s calendar to what has been called by some a “significant pause” between the mighty acts of God, a time when all there is to do is wait and pray, “Veni, Creator Spiritus: Come Holy Spirit!” Forty days had passed since that first Easter morning—not forty days as we would mark them on a calendar, but forty days that recall the forty days of the flood or the forty days of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness: forty days that hold a place in the story of God’s saving purposes before the next chapter begins. In these forty days, the risen Christ appeared to many around Jerusalem, speaking of God’s Kingdom and of the Spirit that soon would be known to them in power. Some say the story before us was invented by the early church to silence the appearance stories that continued to proliferate long after Easter morning. I think the scriptures mean to tell us more. At the end of these forty days, “as the disciples were watching,” reads the first chapter of the Book of Acts, “Jesus was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their site.” This cloud was neither a dark cumulus nimbus nor an ephemeral cirrus but a cloud that revealed, in a hidden sort of way, the glory of God. Surrounded by God’s glory, Jesus disappears into “heaven”: a word that is biblical shorthand for “the inaccessible and incomprehensible side of the created world.” The Son of God who had humbled himself and been born in human likeness, who had become obedient to the point of death, even death upon a cross…now was the same Son of Man exalted by God and lifted up, the first-born returning home from a far country, the Royal Man seated at God’s right hand. I will admit, except for learned theologians, even these images disappear into the inaccessible and incomprehensible side of the church’s faith! The only crowd for whom this story is a literal “no-brainer” is the crowd whose noses are buried in the latest Left Behind sequel and, as far as I am concerned, no-brainer pretty much says it all! Yet these human words on the page are metaphors from scripture that stretch language to the limit, that try to tell us the meaning of what happened when Jesus no longer appeared to the human eye. “There is no sense in trying to visualize” the scene wrote one theologian, “like going up in a balloon. The achievements of Christian art in this field,” he says, “are amongst its worst perpetrations….[I have not seen the Dali exhibit and so do not know if his ascension—showing only Jesus’ feet and the light—is included] The point of the story is not that when Jesus left His disciples he visibly embarked upon a wonderful journey into space, but that when he left them He entered the side of the created world which was [for now] inaccessible and incomprehensible, that before their eyes He ceased to be before their eyes.” The Sunday, then, is Ascension Sunday which coincides this year on the culture’s calendar with Mother’s Day. Not by chance our text for this morning from John’s gospel turns us to both markings of time with a new eye as we think about the time when we were orphaned. Our text presumes, in the words of Jesus, that there was a time in human history when we were without God in the world, when we were orphans. The author of Ephesians says as much: “…remember you were at that time…strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” Paul also employs the metaphor saying that we “groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” John speaks of this time in prospect, a time between Christ’s ascension and the Spirit’s arrival. But what if we were to understand the time as a type of time: a time when what faith once saw so clearly is gone from our sight, a time between our comprehending very little about God’s purposes and our understanding in part, a time between our longing for God’s nearness and the Spirit’s embrace? We dwell, for all we know, in the time before the time when God’s Spirit has given us understanding, in a world that does not see him. The only real difference between us and that world is this: we miss him as orphans miss the parent they have yet to see. To wit: “‘Good night!’ [Dr. Larch] would call [to the boys after “lights out”]. ‘Good night—you Princes of Maine, you Kings of New England!’ Then, bang!—the door would close, and the orphans would be left in a new blackness. Whatever image of royalty that they could conjure would be left to them. What princes and kings could they have seen? What futures were possible for them to dream of? What royal foster families would greet them in sleep?…And when would they escape the darkness left them after Larch closed the door, after they could no longer hear the retreating squeaks of Nurse Edna’s and Nurse Angela’s shoes?” These were the orphans of St. Cloud’s Maine, orphans whose time was properly a time of waiting and praying for adoption. In a very real sense, Jesus is saying, in the first place, that we are like these boys in relation to the One for whom we were made, the one who has promised to make a home with us. Though we have heard of him through the words of these witnesses, we will not know him until God’s Spirit should intercede between these words and our lives. Faith would be our waiting for this Spirit, our praying to him in the darkness, our not knowing but living in hope that finally we will be taken in by love and for love’s sake. Faith would be, according to St. Cloud’s resident orphan, in the meantime, being of use because “of use was all that an orphan was born to be.” John Irving’s Cider House Rules is the story of this one resident orphan, an orphan named Homer by Nurse Edna and Angela. “Here in Saint Cloud’s,” wrote Dr. Larch in his diary, “we have only one problem. His name is Homer Wells. We have been very successful with Homer. We have managed to make the orphanage his home, and that is the problem. If you try to give an institution of the state, or of any government, anything like… love…and if the institution is an orphanage and you succeed in giving it love—then you will create a monster: an orphanage that is not a way-station…but an orphanage that is the first and last stop, the only station the orphan will accept.” Short of believing in Him who dwells on the other side of comprehensibility, it seems we have chosen to believe in institutions—the family, say, or the nation or the church--more than God. We are drawing direct lines these days between the family and faith, between making children the center of our lives and discipleship, between championing the institution of the traditional family as the cornerstone of our culture and our badge as a true believer. We have a problem, in the words of Dr. Larch and in the second place. The problem is not the family, per se, but our inordinate love of it, our love of it as an institution worthy of our worship. Forgetting that we are orphans, we have created a monster: an institution that is not a way-station but the first and last stop in our pilgrimage, the reason we offer for not doing something brave, the excuse for a kind of blessed narcissism that does no one any favors, least of all our children. “How I resent fatherhood!” wrote Dr. Larch in A Brief History of St. Cloud. “Loving someone as a parent can produce a cloud that conceals from one’s vision what correct behavior is.” We are orphans, says Jesus, insisting on Mother’s Day that we see things truly, and so turns us toward the way of love revealed as he vanished from our grasp. “When I was a boy,” writes then priest and now novelist James Carroll, “Mom refused to leave me to myself. She shook me, challenged me, called me. I responded. I formed the habit of getting up. Of going out. Of living….There is,” Carroll says, “an Abba for me in that, a basis for my communion with what is beyond me, [incomprehensible to me] calling, demanding, coaxing, encouraging”: letting me go as the supreme act of love. Then in the final place, John Calvin says of our text, “This passage teaches what [mortals] are and can do without the protection of the Spirit. They are orphans, exposed to every trickery and injustice, unequal to governing themselves and, in brief, unfit to do anything of themselves. The only remedy for such great weakness,” he says, “is for Christ to rule us by His Spirit, which he promises to do.” Not coincidentally, Dr. Larch writes to the director of The New England Home for Little Wanderers that an orphan “should be adopted before adolescence…before they embark upon that necessary phase of adolescence: namely deceitfulness….It may be especially easy to deceive loved ones,” he goes on, “…but if you love no one, and feel that no one loves you, there’s no one with the power to sting you by pointing out to you that you’re lying. If an orphan is not adopted by the time he reaches this alarming period of adolescence, he may continue to deceive himself and others forever.” Unequal to governing ourselves, says Calvin; no one with the power to sting you by pointing out to you that you’re lying, says Larch. We are surely a nation of adolescent orphans if these are the marks. Yet within this community of faith, we are more. That six adolescents will stand before us next Sunday—one among them to be baptized and the others to confirm the baptismal vows taken for them when they were infants—is to act out the Spirit’s adoption of these six as God’s children. Orphans we are, but “I will not leave you orphans,” Jesus promised. Baptism reminds us that we belong--body and soul, in life and in death--to God who is our Judge as well as our Redeemer, who will come and make a home with those who love Him. By water and the Spirit, my friends, we are taken in, given our true name, graciously stung by God’s truth and relieved of the lie we were living without God. This is not to deny that we will orphan ourselves again along the way, take off by ourselves for a far country, loose our way as we wander alone on a craggy cliff. But even in those times we may, while we are waiting, like Martin Luther in the dark when the door shut on this side of God’s incomparable and incomprehensible love, write in the dust with our finger: I am baptized. The gospel for Mothers’ Day and Ascension Sunday, you see, is the same: “I will not leave you orphaned,” Jesus says. “I will come to you.” Veni, Creator Spiritus, Veni! |