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“We don’t know where….” Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis May 4, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Acts 1:1-14 John 13:31-14:14
“Fate,” writes philosopher Glenn Tinder “is all that threatens and befalls us. It comes upon us from without, often strange and uninvited, always at enmity with personal being.” No doubt the disciples could have understood the most recent events in their lives as events that had come upon them from without, strange and uninvited, at enmity with their personal being. They had left everything to follow a Messiah who indeed had been raised from the dead but whose resurrection had yet to fulfill their expectations: Israel remained under occupation. Not only that but now it was the fortieth day after Jesus had been raised. According to Luke, this was the day when Jesus appeared one last time and then disappeared out of human sight. Left behind and alone in a world against them, what were the disciples to do? They could have returned to Jerusalem as men and women who believed themselves to be victims of circumstances at enmity with their person being, outside of their control. Instead they returned to Jerusalem as victors of whom it soon would be said, “They are turning the world upside down!” Why? According to both John and Luke, the reason had everything to do with the destiny disclosed in Jesus’ ascension. “Lord, where are you going,” Peter had asked in the upper room. “Lord, we do not know where you are going,” Thomas said. “How can we know the way?” “I am the way,” Jesus told them as he prepared them for his return to the Father. But clearly his work continued: “I go to prepare a place for you that where I am there you may be also.” In saying this, Jesus was saying in a Word-the same Word that became flesh and dwelt with us: our destiny is God. Now destiny defined without reference to the God revealed in Jesus Christ can sound suspiciously like fate. In the 1913 edition of Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, destiny was first defined as “a condition foreordained by the Divine or by human will; fate; lot; doom.” Or in the second place, destiny was said to mean “the fixed order of things; invincible necessity; a resistless power or agency conceived of as determining the future, whether in general or of an individual.” Yet the destiny Jesus speaks of in John and the destiny Jesus’ ascension reveals in the first chapter of Acts is a destiny that claims and sends each disciple into the world to live, again in Tinder’s words, “at once freely and as one must.” There no longer can be a question of fate determining the events of human life or an unalterable order imposed from without (Rome and death will have no power over them) because God reigns. They are free! But at the same time the disciples live as they must, seeing in the events of their lives the unfolding of the inner necessity of their unique and unrepeatable calling (God in Christ will have become the power within them). From now on they will live as they must. You and I, in our baptism, have likewise been claimed as Christ’s own, a people sent into the world to live at once freely and as we must. We, of course, do neither! Rather with no savior in sight, we believe ourselves left to ask as Peter and Thomas and Philip once asked: Lord, how we can know the way? Therefore we would do well on this Ascension Sunday to revisit the conversation between the disciples and Jesus, both in the upper room and on the mount called Olivet, lest we miss the destiny that has claimed us and the Christ who has sent us into the world to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. Having just told the disciples that he must leave them at the end of John’s thirteenth chapter, Peter is the first to ask after Jesus’ destination: “Lord, where are you going?” Jesus answers: “Where I am going you cannot follow me now; but you shall follow afterward.” Peter objects: “I will lay down my life for you.” But having no idea where Jesus is going or to whom, Peter denies him in the face of the reality of his own death, denies him in order to control what he fears to be his fate. Only later will he lay down his life for Christ not as an act he courageously wills but as an apostle destined by God to live freely and as he must for Christ’s sake. “To speak of choosing your own destiny,” writes Tinder, “as we so often do, reflects a misunderstanding of human beings and their power—a misunderstanding at the heart of the present crisis of civilization.” No doubt we freely direct the details of day to day existence. Moreover as a people privileged by our economic and social class we seem to have the luxury of many choices offered us at every turn in the road. But our destiny can only be a destiny if it is given to us. “What is at stake is not a personality structure that one might vacate as though it were a house….What is destined is what must be if you are to be yourself. ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’” In this sense, destiny is a constraint that “comes from the life one feels called upon to live,” a constraint most evident says Tinder “when fidelity to a destiny requires risking one’s life.” That is to say in the words of the poet, “Life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.” Yet we daily refuse the life we have been given by God to lead and instead gird our loins to do battle against fate and death. We spend our precious breath asserting hapless control over circumstances we finally cannot control. And if by God’s grace we should wake from this illusion, we often wake in midlife to the dizzying realization that the happiness we have pursued according to social norms has enslaved us to a life no longer worth living. Ironically such is our chosen fate unless, above the din of social and biological necessity, we should confess “We do not know where…” and find ourselves [literally find our selves!] turned to receive our lives not as we will but as God wills. Our destination revealed in Christ’s ascension--the destiny that holds in solution our humanity--is not the grave we have dug for ourselves; rather our destiny is the God for whom we were made. In the risen Christ’s last conversation with Peter, according to John’s gospel, Jesus says to him, “Truly, truly I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would [in control of your fate!]; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not want to go [God being your destiny].” Then in parentheses the writer tells us “(This he said to show by what death Peter was to glorify God).” The second disciple to ask Jesus where he was going…or rather to confess that he did not know the way…was Thomas. “How can we know the way?’ Thomas asks. When put alongside his propensity to doubt, Thomas’ unceasing inquiry is misunderstood by those in search of certainty. “We have wanted truth,” says Tinder, “that we could hold securely in our possession, demonstrate in order to silence doubters, and use to bring the world around us under control….It is apparent” he goes on, “that the religious dogmatist and the atheist are akin. Both try to bring everything within the scope of rational explanation.” But Thomas, at the end of the day, is neither a dogmatist nor an atheist. His persistent questions put him in a relationship to Jesus that is, at once, receptive and humble. Thomas is the patron saint of those who are humbled by the truth…who “must await its disclosure and might live in its presence but never possess it….” I think Jesus’ response to Thomas’ question—a response that dogmatists have used to batter the hell out of unbelievers—is rather an invitation to set out accompanied by Christ and in a hope that is neither certain nor assured. Thomas has, as we have, only Jesus to go on. “Our ultimate aim in all serious inquiry (and no one is a more serious inquirer than Thomas), is to glimpse [God’s Word]” says Tinder, “[glimpse] the destiny that we all share but that each one must enact in a singular life.” To live inquiringly in relation to Jesus is to seek him who has first sought us on the way to God. To know him is to arrive at the humanity for which we were made. To be accompanied by him all the days of our lives is, I say again, to live in a hope that is neither certain nor assured this side of the grave because God alone is our destiny. Finally Philip asks, point blank, to see his destination before he arrives. “Lord, show us the Father and we shall be satisfied.” God in Christ has but because Philip longs to see exactly where and to whom he is going, he misses the God mediated in human flesh who has come to him. And like Philip, short of seeing God our temptation is to think the Christian life should be spent gazing into heaven to catch a glimpse of the Almighty—spirituality I think this is called today. Instead Jesus says to Philip, in so many words, you have seen as much as you are ever going to see: you have seen me. Believe it…or not…but in either case get to work! Notice here what Dietrich Bonhoeffer noticed: In the command to be about his work, Jesus “gives…no intelligible programme for a way of life, no goal or ideal to strive after. It is not a cause which human calculation might deem worthy of our devotion….[Rather as the eleven had to know on this day in Olivet] the disciple is dragged out of…relative security into a life of absolute insecurity, from a life which is observable and calculable into a life where everything is unobservable and fortuitous, out of the realm of finite into the realm of infinite possibilities.” We do not know where, says Bonhoeffer, because there is no road to faith or discipleship…only obedience to the call of Jesus. “Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge,” Brother Martin once wrote as though speaking to us in the voice of Christ. “Behold that is the way of the cross. You cannot find it yourself, so you must let me lead you as though you were blind….Wherefore it is not you, no [mortal], no living creature, but I myself, who instruct you by my word and Spirit in the way you should go. Not the work which you choose, not the suffering you devise, but the road which is clean contrary to all that you choose or contrive or desire—that is the road you must take. To that I call you and in that you must be my disciple.” Thanks be to God. |