Give us your continual blessing, O Lord, that we might
be empowered to proclaim the grace and love of your name to the whole world.
Amen.
Ask any author, director, gymnast, or preacher and they’ll all tell you the same thing – endings matter. If you don’t stick the landing, points will be deducted. I often tell my preaching students at Hood Seminary that the majority of their creative planning in crafting a sermon needs to go into the conclusion. Yes, the introduction matters, but the conclusion is what people remember and either gives the people a handle to take the sermon with them, or the sermon just evaporates into a bunch of “sound and fury signifying nothing.” As we celebrate the conclusion of Jesus’ incarnate and earthly ministry on the Ascension, we see how Luke ends the Gospel narrative.
We
heard, “Then Jesus led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands,
he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was
carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with
great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.” As always,
the grace of God always precedes us. Before we are to do anything, Jesus’ word
of blessing is spoken over us, just as in Creation, God calls us “good” before
we’d done a single thing to deserve such an affirmation.
Often
the Church talks about things like mission, calling, and vocation – and those
are good things. As we pray in the Post Communion Prayer, we seek to “do all
such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in.” But we must remember
that our good deeds are always done in response to God’s grace. God is always
the initiator of good works. And this is what we see in the Ascension, Jesus’
blessing comes before our mission.
What
we see in the Ascension is the economy of blessing, which has its source in
God. But what is a blessing? Throughout Scripture, a blessing is a set of words
that are meant to convey and enable the flourishing and multiplication of life.
The words from Genesis, “be fruitful and multiply” are a blessing. A blessing
is not about giving someone special powers or anything like that. That would be
the heresy of the so-called “Prosperity Gospel” where health and wealth are
signs of divine favor. No, Biblically speaking, a blessing is an expression of
intimacy within a relationship in which the desire for wholeness, peace, and
abundance is expressed.
When such a blessing
comes from God towards us, the words enable us to participate in God’s mission
of reconciling love. These are the terms by which the blessing is described at
the Ascension. We heard that Jesus tells the disciples that “repentance and
forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed” and that we are “witnesses of these
things.” The blessing that we are given is that of forgiveness. Forgiveness is
what enables us to live a flourishing life.
You all know that there are
different ways to translate the Lord’s Prayer, especially that line about
forgiveness. Some ask for trespasses to be forgiven, others sins, and still
others debts. Which of those, or other, translations is best isn’t my concern
this evening. What is important though is the sense that things are out of
balance. This is where the “debts” translation is helpful – sin creates a
discrepancy in the balance sheet, so to speak. Things aren’t adding up. We have
been given the blessing of abundant life, but we and society are not
flourishing. We do not use the blessing to promote and further justice,
dignity, and abundance for all.
In fact, things are so
out of order that the debt that we would need to pay to make things right is
impossible. It’s not as simple as us owing a million dollars but we only have a
thousand. No, with enough time and creativity, we might be able to bridge that
gap. The analogy is more along the lines of we owe a million dollars, but we
only have access to Monopoly money. We are unable to satisfy this debt. And
this is where forgiveness comes in and is so liberating.
Just like the debt
forgiveness that the President and Congress are fighting about, the forgiveness
of sins is a wiping clean of the ledger. God’s forgiveness is about God saying,
“I know that you can’t pay this debt, and so I’m adjusting the books. You don’t
owe anything.” As a priest, one of the questions that I get most often is
related to our very human struggle with forgiveness. People will say to me, “I
just don’t know how to forgive them after what they did to me.” I counsel them
that forgiveness is not condoning, it is not forgetting, and it is not passive.
Forgiveness is actively
canceling the debt. Forgiveness is saying “There is nothing that you can do to
fix what you broke, so instead of me waiting for you to do the impossible, I’m
not going to wait for that to happen.” Because if someone is in debt and owes
you something, that means you are incomplete, that you are lacking something
that belongs to you. God can never be lacking, and so God forgives our sins,
wiping clean the slate. What is so liberating about this notion of forgiveness is
that it changes our perspective. No longer do we have to worry about the past
and stress about solving the unsolvable, but rather we can put our energy into
moving forward in a new and holier direction. Being forgiven, unshackled from
the past, is the blessing that allows us to move forward into the flourishing
that God intends for us.
As a point of
clarification, reconciliation is not the same as forgiveness. We can forgive
someone and never be reconciled or restored. Sometimes, especially in cases of
neglect and abuse, that’s the healthiest and best way forward – to forgive and
go separate ways. Furthermore, being forgiven does not mean we ignore questions
of restitution. A lot of times, what is needed to move forward in a different
direction is to address and correct the harm done in the past. It’s why
conversations about restitution and reparations always have a place. No, we
cannot change the past nor erase those sins. But we can make sure that the
brokenness does not carry forward. Forgiveness is not a free pass into the
future, it is simply letting go of past debts with the expectation that we will
move forward in justice and peace.
And, along with
forgiveness, this movement forward is the other blessing bestowed upon us by
Jesus. He says that we are to proclaim this forgiveness to all nations – this
is what we are witnesses to. There is an expansive and unboundaried
universality to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s not that our sins are forgiven
and theirs remain. No, of course not. That wouldn’t be grace. We are witnesses
to the Gospel truth that St. Paul records in Romans, that “God proves his love
for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” We did nothing
to earn our forgiveness, rather we get to enjoy our forgiveness. That’s the
wonderful, freeing, and joyous message that we are witnesses to. We get to
proclaim to our friends, neighbors, coworkers, and even our enemies that God is
love and that they belong to that love that is making all things well. It’s
such an exciting, glorious, and important message – and it is ours to share.
Imagine what our inner
thoughts would be if we trusted that we belong more than we worried that we
were out of place; if we knew that we are loved instead of trying to make
ourselves seem more loveable; if we saw others as our companions instead of
people judging us. What might our community look like if we all were honest
about the fact that we’re doing our best, but we’re still prone to make
mistakes; if we gave each other the benefit of the doubt as much as we give it
to ourselves; if we realized that there is far more than unites us than divides
us? Well, we’d be a bit closer to the blessing that God intends for us. And
this is why we are given the holy work of being evangelists, witnesses to this
forgiveness and repentance that paves the way for restored and renewed
relationships. God’s love is more than strong enough to overcome our sins,
fears, and doubts. It’s the blessing that Jesus gives us at the Ascension.
And the first step in
receiving this blessing is to bless God. We read that “And they worshiped him
and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the
temple blessing God.” Our blessing God is, of course, different than God
blessing us. When we bless God, we offer our words and our lives as an
expression of our intimate trust in God and our gratitude for all that we
receive from God. Another way to say “they were blessing God” is to say that
they were praising God in recognition of and as a response to God’s grace. We
can bless God with hymns, with acts of love, with gifts of generosity, with
truth-telling.
The blessings of God
exist in a perfect economy – God blesses us, we bless God in gratitude for
these gifts, and we bless others by witnessing to this love which is also for
them. This cycle of blessing is how Luke wraps up the earthly story of Jesus – with a perpetual and abundant flow of grace.
We gather tonight though because this isn’t really the end of the story. Yes,
perhaps the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth is no longer found on earth, but
his love and mercy remain.
As we prayed in today’s
Collect, “our Savior Jesus Christ ascended far above all heavens that he might
fill all things.” The one who blesses us fills all things. In our struggles, in
our conflicts, in our fears, in our pains, in our joys, in our busyness, and in
our silence, the love of God in Jesus Christ fills all things. As the Christmas
hymn puts it, “he comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.”
And this one who blesses
us now sits at the right hand of the Father, which is a way of saying that the
blessings of God are always with us – not bound by space, time, or condition.
We are forgiven. We are witnesses to love. And we are sent out with this holy
and life-giving message. Praise God from whom all blessings flow, for, indeed,
we have been blessed in the loving, liberating, and life-giving name of Jesus.
