[Propertalk] 7 Easter c rcl

[Robert P Morrison]

I began this more than a week ago, then came back to it through this week. I'm still looking at it 8 - )

Bob

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY   THE SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER C RCL
ACTS 16:9-15	                        THE SUNDAY AFTER THE ASCENSION
REVELATION 21:10, 22 – 22:5	                 9th MAY, 2010  
JOHN 14:23-29		   	   PSALM 67

	Three years. That’s all the time Jesus had in which to get His ministry off the ground and beyond the initial stages. Three years. Do you think you could do it?
	Three years Jesus had. On the plus side, he was there “In the Beginning”, so knew pretty much how things were shaped in creation, what the basic ingredients were.	
	On the negative side, however, it seemed that he had to learn just how high and how low was the range of humans’ capacity to understand and to engage with one another in such a way that there could be some semblance of compassion, of mercy, of love, of justice. THAT Jesus had to find out the hard way and, I assume, He began experiencing that from about his second or third year of life when He had to leave wherever He called home and take refuge as an illegal alien in a foreign country. Even as a child, He would have been bewildered by more than just the need to move from the familiar to the unfamiliar.
	Growing up in the carpenter’s surroundings, He might have experienced sharp-practicing contractors and government officials who’d try to squeeze the best deal for themselves, no matter how badly it hurt the sub-contractors and the day labourers.
	Then He began His ministry in earnest – or rather, changed vocations and took up itinerant preaching, healing and forgiving. That couldn’t have been the most stable situation either. We know from what we read about the twelve members of His Board of Directors that things didn’t always go smoothly. We know from the comments Jesus’ first followers left that the general crowd which tagged along after Him from time to time weren’t exactly the most reliable bunch. And then there were those in positions of authority – you might call them the CEOs and the upper echelon of the rival religious companies, plus the law enforcement and political junkies – they didn’t show ANY sort of understanding of what Jesus’ start-up company was all about.
	So they lynched Him. They ran smear ads wherever and whenever they could. They spread rumours about whether or not He’d really served where He had and done what He and His Board said He’d done. They discredited those who attended His meetings. They did everything in their power to run Him down – THEN they ran Him by two quick terrorist courts and slammed Him on a tree.
	Three years. That’s all Jesus had to work against ALL of that and get the company up and running after it had been ground into the dust.
	Even so, three years is a lot to give – so you and I might be forgiven for having serious reservations about the wisdom of Jesus taking off when things were still so shaky, and the corporate wolves were still howling at the door.
	What on earth WAS God thinking about when Jesus was recalled? Why start something promising, only to pull the top official and leave everyone else to pick up the pieces. It seems crazy. Even given God’s limitlessness of resource, and so on, this seems such an unwise move. 
	There MUST have been a reason for it, though. The phrase that comes to my mind is one of those said at burials today – “Yet even at the grave we make our song Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!”
	Of course, it WASN’T Jesus’ grave – THAT He demonstrated to His friends. There was no human action that could keep Jesus down. But so soon after His resurrection? Why DID Jesus leave? Surely that was precisely the time to build on the newsworthiness of His resurrection and on the momentum that had grown slowly in the fifty days since the empty tomb. 
	I don’t know how I’d have felt had I been one of Jesus’ followers. It would have been traumatic, of course. First the week leading up to what we call Good Friday. Then Easter Day, then the few visits and conversations, only to end again with Jesus’ disappearance – what a way to run a business!
	It would probably have taken me quite some time to get any sense of confidence back, so that I could assimilate everything I’d known and experienced about Jesus into my reality. 
	Think about who these followers were, though – they were in their late teens or early twenties, at the most. These were men and women who were trying to get their lives focused. Even given earlier maturation at that time, they’d still have been feeling their way around, trying to get a handle on what they’d do, how they fit into their community. Probably for at least the first ten to fifteen years of their lives, outside of the traditional trips to Jerusalem for the festivals, they’d never have expected to have left their villages. They’d only have begun their adult lives. And THESE were the ones who Jesus left, with only a promise.
	Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think this Feast of the Ascension which we celebrated last Wednesday night and Thursday has a large role to play in our lives, even today.
	Here we are, promised the company of Jesus, promised His support, told of God’s undying love for us. Yet we may be little different than those teenagers – we may have an intensely difficult time coming to grips with what’s going on in our lives as individuals, as a congregation, as Oregonians, and so on. How are we to face uncertainties? What keeps us going when, for instance, we have to choose a university or a vocational training centre, never mind discerning our vocations? What helps us NOT fear isolation and loneliness when we have to say goodbye to family members and friends, whether it be at the nativity of adulthood or the maturity of a life well-lived? How do we get through the period of waiting between the first “Oh-oh” of a health care provider, verbalised or not, to the moment when we hear the diagnosis? How we do deal with what follows? Two friends recently have been told that it could be five years – maybe two – probably more than one year, before they die.
	Life isn’t easy – no matter how much we develop technologically. And I’d be willing to bet that most of us would rather have someone stick around personally as opposed to someone saying, “I’ve given you the name of a good friend” – even IF that Friend happens to be God.
	Why on earth DID Jesus leave? Come on! Three years, and then He was out of there!
	But maybe there’s an incredible blessing in all of this. Somehow, despite the separation, we’re coaxed into confronting aloneness, and change, and struggle. Somehow we’re invited to live with the incredible tension, and to allow the parting words of Jesus to resonate through our lives and to colour everything that we do, and have to decide to do. Life always involves struggle with adversity. Faith doesn’t obliterate any of that. It simply helps us deal with everything that seems so unfair, so irrational.
	The other evening I was reading a book whose author I’d heard being interviewed on the radio a month or two ago. It’s an account of what was going on the late sixties. It’s an attempt to try to understand War, specifically involvement in Vietnam, and how every member of military personnel dealt with it differently.
	Here’s how Tim O’Brien described how he felt.
	“I spent the summer of 1968 working in an Armour meatpacking plant in my hometown of Worthington, Minnesota. The plant specialized in pork products, and for eight hours a day I stood on a quarter-mile assembly line – removing blood clots from the necks of dead pigs. My job title, I believe, was Declotter. …
	“The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968. It was a humid afternoon, I remember, cloudy and very quiet, and I’d just come in from a round of golf. … I remember a sound in my head. It wasn’t thinking, just a silent howl.. A million things all at once – I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn’t happen. I was above it. … Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude and president of the student body and a full-ride scholarship for grad studies at Harvard. …
	“At some point in mid-July I began to think about Canada. The border lay a few hundred miles north, an eight-hour drive. … I couldn’t make up my mind. …
	“ … what I have never told is the full truth. How I cracked. How at work one morning, standing on the pig line, I felt something break open in my chest. … I remember dropping my water gun. Quickly, almost without thought, I took off my apron and walked out of the plant and drove home. … I remember taking a hot shower. I remember packing a suitcase and carrying it out to the kitchen, standing very still for a few minutes, looking carefully at the familiar objects all around me. … My house, I thought. My life. …
	“I drove north. … I had no plan. Just hit the border at high speed and crash through and keep on running. …
	“ … in the late morning I began looking for a place to lie low for a day or two. I was exhausted, and scared sick, and around noon I pulled into an old fishing resort called the Tip Top Lodge. … The place was in sorry shape. … I got out of the car and walked up to the front porch.
	“The man who opened the door that day is the hero of my life. How do I say this without sounding sappy? Blurt it out – the man saved me. He offered exactly what I needed, without questions, without any words at all. He took me in. He was there at a critical time – a silent, watchful presence. Six days later, when it ended, I was unable to find a proper way to thank him, and I never have, …”
	Elroy Berdahl and I “spent six days together at the Tip Top Lodge. Just the two of us. …
	“On my last full day, the sixth day, the old man took me out fishing on the Rainy River. … 
“It struck me then that he must have planned it. …
“Even in my imagination, the (Canadian) shore just twenty yards away, I couldn’t make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was.
“And right then I submitted
“I would go to the war – I would kill and maybe die – because I was too embarrassed not to. …
“I don’t remember saying goodbye. …
“The day was cloudy. Passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again.” 1
	I’ve never been in any situation as traumatic as that, yet I HAVE had decisions to make which at the time seemed highly stressful. And, yes, there have been times when I’ve felt, I’ve wondered if I HAVE been alone – maybe even abandoned, probably just as Jesus’ friends felt.
	Somehow, Tim O’Brien’s angel, Elroy Berdahl, helped him live through the stress. Somehow, Jesus’ friends must have found people helped them through THEIR darkness. Somehow, you and I have had people present, bodied or disembodied, to help us come through all our doubts in the past. Somehow, it’s been enough that Jesus shared His glory with us – like giving us the Name of His Father – and giving God OUR names.
	And that’s enough to take us through whatever lies ahead, no matter how tough, how lonely, how painful. Jesus’ three years and His Promise WILL NOT fail us. It hasn’t yet! 8 – )

NOTE:
1	“On the Rainy River” in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. Broadway Books, New York © 1990. Excerpted from Pages 41 – 61.

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Robert P. Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban,
P.O. Box 1556,
Albany, Oregon, 97321

541-921-1076 (cell)
541-967-7051 (church)