May 4, 2008                                                                                               Vance L. Toivonen

READING                   Acts 1:6-11

 

When they were together for the last time they asked, "Master, are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now? Is this the time?" He told them, "You don't get to know the time. Timing is the Father's business. What you'll get is the Holy Spirit. And when the Holy Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all over Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world." These were his last words. As they watched, he was taken up and disappeared in a cloud. They stood there, staring into the empty sky. Suddenly two men appeared—in white robes! They said, "You Galileans!—why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky? This very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly—and mysteriously—as he left."

 

READING                   Robert Farrar Capon, The Mystery of Christ

 

To say that only the church is the locus of the Mystery of Christ – and that the world is therefore devoid of that Mystery – is dead against the New Testament. That just makes the church a club for Christians…It’s like a dance…that everyone is already invited to and present at…the dance of the Mystery of Christ…The music of the Mystery, of course, is hidden music: we have to trust that it’s being played – and for anyone who doesn’t trust, it’s just as if there’s no music going on at all. Christians, therefore, are not some select group who have music nobody else has; they’re simply people who by faith – by trust – always hear the music of the Mystery of Christ that the whole creation has been provided with. And so the real job of Christians as far as the world is concerned is simply to dance to the hidden music – and to try, by the joy of their dancing, to wake the world up to the party it’s already at, even though it thinks it doesn’t hear any music at all.

 

SERMON

 

In the summer of 1988, 300,000 copies of a book titled 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be in 1988 were mailed free of charge to ministers across the United States, and 4.5 million copies were sold in bookstores. The book was written by Edgar C. Whisenant, a student of the bible, and it really caught on. He predicted in this book that Christ would come again to rapture faithful Christians during the Jewish observance of Rosh Hashanah, between September 11th and September 13th, 1988. Devout Christians throughout the country took this prediction seriously. Some quit their jobs and awaited the glorious event. I need not tell you, it never happened.

 

Impervious to the failure of his prediction he updated his forecast to a precise 10:55AM on September 15th; and when that fell through he shifted to the 24 hour period of October 3rd. By now those jobless folks were once again looking for employment. According to Richard Abanes, writing in his book End Times Visions, the story continued as follows:

 

Even when that date passed, Whisenant remained undaunted: "The evidence is all over the place that it is going to be in a few weeks anyway," he told Christianity Today.

 

After his "few weeks" had transpired, Whisenant finally saw his error. He claimed that he had made a slight miscalculation of one year because of a fluke in the Gregorian calendar. Jesus was actually going to return during Rosh Hashanah of 1989! Whisenant published his discovery in The Final Shout--Rapture Report 1989. "The time is short," he said. "Everything points to it." This publication was subsequently retitled The Final Shout--Rapture Report 1990 and has since been re-titled yearly as The Final Shout--Rapture Report 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 and so on. He continues to revise his date annually. (ETV p. 94). (Note: Last published in 1997).

 

Ever since Jesus died in the mid-first century, his followers have speculated about his return. The roots of this speculation are expressed in this story written by Luke in the first chapter of Acts some time in the late first century, a story referred to in short as The Ascension. History is riddled with doomsday predictions, and cults that focus anxiously on end times prophecy. In recent years, the fictional work of Tim LaHaye has sold millions and millions of copies in what has come to be referred to as The Left Behind Series. In the first century, in the time of the writing of Acts, religious persecution was a primary factor in this speculation, in this hope for deliverance from pain and suffering. There are many reasons why people have longed for Jesus’ return, both understandable and inconceivable.

 

The Ascension text in Acts is a precursor to the Pentecost story to come. As for those who would like more information about the calendar of God, Jesus says, “You don't get to know the time. Timing is the Father's business.” This should be answer enough for those who wish to speculate about end times dates. For those who seek to live in the moment as a spiritual path and process, speculating about the future is not recommended anyway. I have heard about the latest doomsday prophecy, that of 2012, and Planet X, and so forth. You can do what you like with that stuff, but I’m not going to bite. I will take Jesus’ advice to leave times and seasons to God. I’ll check the radar to see where its raining before a I schedule a round of golf, but that’s it for my efforts at forecasting anything.

 

Jesus follows up his corrective line about living in the present with a small prediction. He says, “What you’ll get is the Holy Spirit.” I haven’t talked a lot about the Holy Spirit here. The roots of the Holy Spirit in biblical tradition go back to the creation story in Genesis, where the Spirit hovers, or broods over the face of the primordial soup, the void, the nothingness that existed before the Big Bang. The meaning of that word, spirit, is also wind; and as we know all too well from wind storms, we do not, and cannot control the wind. We can harness wind. We can learn to utilize wind and be empowered by wind, but we cannot control it. So in this regard, the Holy Spirit, the divine wind, is much like the calendar of God…it is God’s business, not ours.

 

What happens after Jesus’ death is that his followers miss him terribly. They miss his teachings. They miss his wisdom, guidance, and inspiration. They gather into community. They tell his story. Eventually they write his story, many different versions of his story. And throughout all of this they have a strong and abiding sense of his presence. It is a mystical presence. The two men in white robes, probably angels, say to the followers of Jesus standing there with their mouths open, “You Galileans!—why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky? This very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly—and mysteriously—as he left."

 

In that second reading today Robert Capon suggests that the Christ is alive and well and living on planet earth; that the Christ is, in fact accessible to the whole of Creation. We might get lost in all of these labels for God-presence, so let me simplify it just a bit. As a Christian and a mystic, I seek to have a strong sense of the presence of Jesus of Nazareth in my life in the here and now. Jesus is for me an embodiment, an incarnation, of the divine presence, what John Dominic Crossan calls God in sandals. The Holy Spirit is another way of talking about this divine presence. And all of it in a nutshell is the mystical presence of The Christ.

 

To use Capon’s analogy, the Mystery of Christ is the music that plays the will of God into our hearts and minds, the music that directs our feet and our lives toward God energy, the music that dances light and hope and peace into the darkness and turmoil of our chaotic existence. There is a lot of different music in the world. How do we know that we’re hearing the music of the Mystery of Christ? The answer to this question is found in a mystical process that incarnates the Christ in us time and time again. It is an act of conscious and deliberate realization, an act of rematerializing the God in sandals from the first century into what is now the year 2008. It is an intentional anchoring of our choice-making in the life and teachings of that one that meant so much to folks in the first century that they decided they could not live without him. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung said it this way, “Christ in us and we in Him. Why should the activity and the presence of the Son of Man within us not be real and knowable.”

 

Returning to Capon’s analogy, we can ask ourselves whether or not we hear the music. Are we dancing to it? Is there joy in our dance? Will others see us dancing and wish to join the dance? The Christ comes again, and again, and again, and again to this world in the lives of those who seek to follow him still, who seek to ride the wave of his spirit, who seek to live as Jesus once lived on this planet, who seek to confront the darkness with light, who seek to lift up the oppressed and outcast as the kings and queens of God’s kingdom, who seek to challenge the power and authority of those who choose human domination over the primacy of a loving, gracious, and merciful God, who seek to love enemies rather than crush them, who seek truth and enlightenment over deception and manipulation, who seek relinquishment over acquisition, who seek risk-taking over safety and security, and who seek unconditional love over fear.

 

The Christ never ascended into heaven. Heaven was just where people thought God was at the time. But God is here, and God is now, and the Mystery of Christ is that someway, somehow whatever was alive in Jesus is alive in and among us still in a spirit that is holy, to be sure. There is no doubt that if you seek the presence of this Mysterious One, you shall certainly know that presence; and you shall dance.