Ascension Sunday, Year C
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
May 29, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
The past few days have not been awesome. On a local level—more of an inconvenience to most of us than anything else—the CDC downgraded Doña Ana County from the month-and-a-half we’ve enjoyed of green on the COVID map to yellow, causing a return to mask-wearing at church and suspension of coffee hour and other food-related events for now. It’s certainly disappointing to take a step back like this, but as followers of Jesus and heirs of the legacy of the historical Church, we want to do our best to protect and support the most vulnerable among us. However, while masks may be our most recent bit of bad news, I’m guessing a different event has probably been weighing more heavily on your minds over the course of this past week.
People say that tragedies run in threes, so I suppose we should have expected another mass shooting after the grocery store and church incidents of the previous two weeks or so. It’s Ascension Sunday, and we’re meant to be celebrating Jesus Christ’s return to the Father, but celebrating anything is kind of hard when we and our neighbors continue to be plagued by senseless, needless, and preventable violence.
For me, the scariest thing about mass casualty events in the United States is that they truly are normative at this point. Columbine, Sandy Hook, Pulse, Buffalo, Uvalde (you-VAL-dee)—they’re all a twenty-three year blur, making them the standard life experience of a full generation of young adults—just “the way things are” and the way they always have been. But when we’re honest with ourselves, Columbine was just the start of the most famous ones: others had been taking place here and there for decades, just not quite to the same number of deaths.[1] All along people have mourned and gotten angry and demanded that we do something and said, “Never again!” And all along others prevent meaningful action and in so many words explain that the price we all pay for “freedom” is the risk of random, violent death. So the cycle keeps repeating itself. The killings continue to spread, and more and more innocent people continue to die. Yet most baffling of all, somehow we still want to be able to call ourselves a Christian nation.
So I’ll say it plainly: this is not the way of Christ.
On Easter, we talked about how Jesus’ incarnation, resurrection, and ascension reshaped the ancient Cosmos. Through Christ, God united the heavens, the earth, and the underworld, demonstrably proving God’s complete authority over all three. Looking at it in terms of preparing “the Way of the Lord,” as we did in Advent, Jesus began construction of the Royal Road in the Celestial Realm and, through the incarnation we celebrate at Christmas, connected the first stretch into the earthly sphere. His death on Good Friday continued that thoroughfare into the Hidden Realm where he shone God’s light across the land of the dead and took Death itself captive. On Easter, the resurrection both revealed his overpowering of Death and routed God’s Highway back into the Mortal Plain. His ascension fully completes that circle, creating a looping freeway that unifies the entirety of existence. Now “all that dwell below the skies”[2] have free and equal access to God. The Way of the Lord spans God’s Kingdom, uniting All That Is under God’s Reign and liberating all people to follow and travel God’s path.
Christian tradition is always about preservation of life—at its most basic level, the entire concept of “salvation” is about restoring people from death to life or delivering them from danger to safety and security! From the birth of the Church—the Day of Pentecost that we celebrate next Sunday—Christians have been people of Life. Our predecessors were the ones to take care of victims of disease when no one else dared approach. They rescued babies that had been thrown on the trash heap—one of the traditional ways to get rid of children parents couldn’t support—and fed and tended and raised them among the Christian community. In a time when immediate family was the extent of the retirement system, our early siblings cared for orphans and widows both within and outside the Church. And even when threatened or under active persecution, they gave their lives rather than touch a weapon—all because they were People of Life who served the Living God.
So how is it that so many of us today have become thralls of Death? How can we confuse the God of the Bible with one that entertains the slogan “God and guns?” How can any Christian pronounce their right to wield any tool designed to inflict pain or cause death as an expression of commitment to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our self-giving Savior, who remained committed to God’s pathway of love and peace even through Death and who on this day ultimately revealed the final portion of the Way of Life?
The only answer I can imagine—the only one that makes sense to me and one that, honestly, I have to hope is true—is that we’ve been deceived for so long that we genuinely have no idea what it is we’re doing or who it is we’re worshipping—that constant exposure to the idols of Empire or Ammit or Liber[3] or Molech and continual messaging from the mouths of their prophets makes us unable to recognize weaponry for what it is: tools of death forged in the image of gods who can deliver only death. And if we aren’t actually victims of deception and manipulation, our situation is even more hopeless because either (1) we’ve willingly chosen Death and its minions as our lord and savior, or (2) the God of Heaven and Earth, the God expressed and revealed in Jesus Christ, is simply another mask Death adopts to hide its face!
I wouldn’t be surprised if anyone is upset about some of what I’ve just said. It’s easy to dismiss someone as being political or partisan or something like that. And you’re free to think that if you want. However, I hope you can still hear what I’m saying. Please know that guns aren’t what I’m trying to focus on today. Their glorification and prominence is a presenting symptom of a much deeper problem. Honestly, most of the time, I neither think nor care about anyone’s guns—hunting rifles, pistols, whatever. I care about your heart. I care about your life. I care about who we as the Church currently are, and I care about who we might become.
Others may have wanted me to say something earlier in the week, hoping I’d charge out in condemnation or demand we all take a specific, “Christian” action.[4] They may have assumed at this point that I don’t care. I do care, but as both a slow processor and a deep feeler, it takes me a while to sort out my emotions and decide what to say. I’m not the kind of pastor who’s going to immediately jump out with tweetable statements or force everyone to rally behind my ideas. It’s perfectly acceptable to disagree with me—if you do, feel free to speak about your concerns with me directly. I have no plans to tell you what you have to think or the causes you have to support or who or what you have to vote for. That is not my job, no matter what some people wish or how other religious figures may use their position. My responsibility as your priest is to lead you in worship and to guide you in a path of faithfulness, and for that, I need us to recognize who or what we’re actually worshipping.
Our God is not a god of destruction—or a god of calamity or chaos or panic or ruin or fear. The Creator God of Heaven and Earth is not one who takes “pleasure in the death of the wicked”[5] nor do they play favorites among their children. Christ did not ascend so we might make our home in the grave. Jesus himself tells us that his Father is “God not of the dead, but of the living.”[6] May we then, as Children of Light, as Children of Love, and as Children of Life turn our hearts to fully know, honor, reflect, and reveal our One True and Undivided God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. May our citizenship and heritage be known through our commitment to following and magnifying the God of Life.
[1] For school shootings alone, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(before_2000)
[2] https://hymnary.org/text/from_all_that_dwell_below_the_skies
[3] The goddess Liberty’s husband; see http://www.slouchingdog.com/sermons/2020/09/06/year-a-september-06-2020-labor-day-observed
[4] Although information regarding the Episcopal Church’s response and resources for suggested action are available at https://www.episcopalchurch.org/ogr/resources-to-respond-to-gun-violence/.
[5] Ezekiel 18:23; 33:11 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[6] Luke 20:38