A Reflection for the Sunday after Ascension
All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores,
N.C.
May 17, 2015 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Spring
Living Water
Every week I meet with a group of up to six men who
gather together and ask each other three questions: 1) What in the past week
has been your moment closest to Christ? 2) What have you studied this week? And
3) What was your action plan in the past week to make the Gospel message alive
in the community and how did you do with it?
This last week, as we went around the room, I was
struck by the fact that the answers given to the first question were memories
of a time when each man was connected in relationship with another person. We
found that our study had led us to action as we understood that God was not a
noun to contemplate but a verb in which we join. In the Gospel lesson for today
Jesus prays that the disciples will be one as he and the Father are one. My
study for that morning we met was from Richard Rohr’s writing about the Trinity
in which he said:
The Mystery of God as
Trinity invites us into full participation with God, a flow, a relationship, a
waterwheel of always outpouring love. Trinity basically says that God is a verb
much more than a noun. Some Christian mystics taught that all of creation is
being taken back into this flow of eternal life, almost as if we are a
"Fourth Person" of the Eternal Flow of God or, as Jesus put it,
"so that where I am you also may be".
This
Sunday is the day we celebrate the Feast of the Ascension, when we say that
Christ ascended into Heaven. The story from the Acts of the Apostles tries to
put into written form a spiritual experience that is beyond the power of words
to describe. Let me give you an example of the moment I was closest to Christ
this last week. I was meeting with baby Elizabeth Grace and her mother to prepare for
the baby’s baptism. She woke up and started to fuss, so Stephanie got out a
bottle and started to feed her and write down something at the same time. I
took Elizabeth in my arms and started to feed her the bottle. Elizabeth and my
daughter Shanon were both born at the same time of year thirty-five years
apart, but in that moment, it was as if I had stepped into a time machine, and
so filled with love that across time and space I was able to be with both
Elizabeth and Shanon at the same moment. I could feel it in my arm, the same
arm with which I held my daughter so many years ago, as the muscles which held
the memory of that love were coming to life again, not just with Elizabeth’s
weight but with the combined weight of holding both of them at the same time -
for love, like God, is a verb not a noun. As I was trying to explain this
experience, I got a letter which quoted an insight about the mystic love
connection between God and humans by the 9th century Islamic Sufi
Mystic Mansur al-Hallaj;
I
am the ONE whom I love,
And
the ONE whom I love is I.
Two
breaths and spirits sharing one body.
If
you see me, you see the ONE
And
if you see the ONE, you see me.
Again, if we take the Ascension story literally we
get into trouble if we think heaven is a place up there somewhere. Heaven is
the full presence of the Divine flow of energy, and the story of the Ascension
was an attempt to say that as the Divine came down to human life in the form of
Jesus, so also are we humans taken into the full dynamic presence of the
divine. The wall between the sacred and secular, the temporal and the eternal,
is broken down. The story from the Acts of the Apostles for today sets up the
thread that winds through the rest of the book - that God’s energy is able to
flow through us in this world, to receive what the writer of the Letter to the
Ephesians, Paul’s disciple, says “the fullness of him who fills all in all.”
To be invited into full participation in the dynamic
relationship, which we, for lack of a better name, call “God”, is an act of
adoption by God, so that we are brothers and sisters of the human expression of
God who we call Jesus. God’s adoption is what we celebrate when we do a
baptism. My own theology is that I do not make a sacrament, but I only point to
what God has already done. For instance, when I do a Eucharist, I don’t do a
magic trick and change the bread to the body of Christ or to change wine into Christ’s blood. All I do is point to the bread (or “wafer”,
because as my Liturgics Professor in Seminary used to say as he encouraged us
to get our parish to make bread for the services, “It takes more imagination to
believe a wafer is really “bread” than to believe it is the “body of Christ”) –
I point to the bread and wine and say “The Risen Christ is right here and
now; take God into yourself and realize
you are part of the divine.” So when I do a baptism, I am not “saving” this
child, but I point to the water and the child and say, “This child coming out
of the water of re-birth has already been born into God’s family. We just got
around to holding a party for the adoption papers.”
When I was growing up, I had friends who had been
adopted. Part of my work experience when I worked in Child Welfare was to
supervise Social Workers who did adoptions. I had friends who adopted children.
I never saw the children as second-class members of the family, but they were
part of the dynamic energy of the relationship of the family; they belonged to
the family, were fully loved, and were expected to grow into the relationship
on a daily basis. The children’s identity was being formed by the love that was
being given to them. Love is the only way we are ever able to really know
another person, and it is in being loved that we get to know ourselves.
This
child who we baptize today, Elizabeth Grace Gillaspie Harris, I knew before she was born as I saw the
love between her parents who conceived her. I did not know what she was going
to look like, I did not know what her tests scores were going to be or how she
was going to do in school, but I knew she was loved. At the end of our lives,
we will not long be remembered for how we looked or how many things we
accomplished or accumulated, but more so for how we entered into the dynamic
energy field of love by loving and allowing ourselves to be loved, fully living
into “the fullness of him who fills all in all.”
Here is how I want you to help
Elizabeth Grace and her family grow into the family relationship of God and
this church. I want you to practice each week asking yourself three questions:
1) What in the past week has been your moment closest to Christ? 2) What have
you studied this week? And 3) What was your action plan in the past week to
make the Gospel message alive in the community and how did you do with it?
Spring Living
Water (poem)
The spring
light pours into the
sanctuary,
that holy space now
finding me
standing by baptismal font
cradling this
new baby in my arms
with my hand
pillowing her head.
The living water
bubbles as reaching
Into the
water for sacred actions
of blessing,
claiming and anointing
has to wait
for the now waking baby
to be fed.
Her mother hands me the
prepared bottle
and the baby, to be
christened Elizabeth
Grace, suctions
liquid
daily bread to quench the fear
of being
forgotten by busy adults.
Yet other living
waters of memory
flood into the
muscles of my arms
remembering
decades ago on yet
another spring
morning when before
I passed as
sacred, living only as secular,
I held my
baby making promises of hope.
Now my arm holds
not one but two
as past and present flowing together
into the
sacred reservoir of forgiveness.
The walls
are washed away which divide
past from
present, sacred from secular
and reward
from gift. My prayer turns to
petition
that when looking around the font
into eyes of
those who promise to help her,
she remembers
and see the divine in them
as sacred
time and space is wherever she walks.
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