The Seventh Sunday of Easter

St. Peter says that we should always be ready to give an account of the hope that is in us. When we give the account of the hope that is in us, what will we say?

When we look at the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we see that, as books, they are different in many ways, not the least in the ways they end.

Most scholars believe that Mark was the first to write a Gospel. His account has sixteen short chapters. If we disregard the final paragraphs of chapter sixteen, paragraphs which were almost certainly added later by someone else, we see that Mark ends his account with his report of the resurrection.

In Mark, Mary Magdalene and some others find the tomb empty, and a man who is at the tomb tells them to go tell the disciples that they will find Jesus in Galilee. But Mark's last word is that the women fled from the tomb in terror. They told no one, because they were terrified.

That's it. That's the end of the story as it's told by Mark. It's almost as if Mark is suggesting that we conclude the story for ourselves. He gives us his report and leaves us with an implied question or challenge: Christ is risen. What shall we do now? You figure it out.

John is perhaps the latest of the four canonical Gospels. And John ends his account by reporting the resurrection, and by saying that the risen Lord told Mary Magdalene to go tell the disciples that he is ascending into heaven, ascending to his Father and her Father, to his God and her God. And he says that Mary went to the disciples and gave them Jesus' message.

But unlike Mark, John then goes on to tell us about three occasions on which the risen Lord appeared to his disciples. During the third appearance, the risen Christ tells Peter to follow him. He doesn't say where Peter is to follow him, but he suggests that Peter is to glorify God by dying the same way Jesus died.

And then John says that Jesus did a lot of other things he doesn't have time to tell us about. But if they were all recorded, he adds, the world could not hold the books that would be written.

Again, the question for the disciples seems to be: What, exactly, do we do now?

Matthew almost certainly had a copy of Mark's account when he wrote his own. We can see Mark's order of events in Matthew's Gospel, but Matthew gives us a lot of information about Jesus that we don't find in Mark.

Matthew ends his account sort of the way Mark does, except that instead of saying that the women were terrified when they found the tomb empty, he claims that they left the tomb overcome with joy, and that they ran to tell the disciples that Jesus was going ahead of them to Galilee, where they would find him.

But while the women were on their way, Matthew says, the chief priests and the elders heard that Jesus wasn't in his tomb. And they were not happy about that, because they had killed Jesus to get him out of the way, and out of their lives. They were in charge, they thought, and they intended for Jesus to say dead. And they didn't want any reports circulating about Jesus' having risen from the dead. So they bribed the soldiers who were supposed to have guarded the tomb, says Matthew, telling them to tell everyone that the disciples came during the night and stole the body.

But -- and this is Matthew's final word -- the disciples went to a mountain in Galilee, and there they saw Jesus. Some worshipped him, Matthew says, but others doubted. And then Matthew says that on the mountain Jesus came near to the disciples and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore to all nations and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And teach them to observe all that I have commanded you. I will be with you always, even to the end of time."

Matthew, unlike Mark and John, at least seems to think that Jesus gave his disciples some specific things to do. The instructions are not very detailed, but they're specific: the disciples are to go to all nations, they are to make disciples, and they are to teach the disciples to keep Jesus' commandments. And then Matthew says that before Jesus disappeared, he left the disciples with a promise to be with them always.

Luke's account of the hope that was in him is the most complex. Like Matthew, Luke had a copy of the Good News of Jesus as Mark reported it. And also like Matthew, Luke follows Mark's order of events for the most part, and adds some things of his own.

At the end of Luke's account, the women discover the empty tomb, and they are told that Jesus is not there. Like the women in Mark's account, and unlike the women in Matthew's, they are terrified. In Luke the women do go to tell the disciples what they had seen, but the disciples won't believe them because their story seems like nonsense.

Then Luke tells us about three appearances of the risen Lord, but they aren't the same three appearances John tells us about. And at the third appearance in Luke, the risen Lord tells the disciples that he will send them a gift promised by his Father and that they are to wait in Jerusalem until they receive it. And then Jesus blesses the disciples, and leaves them. Disappears. Goes away.

That's the end of volume one of Luke's account. But in volume two, in The Acts of the Apostles, Luke picks up the story where he left off in his first volume. And there, in Acts, Luke says that when Jesus appeared to the disciples and told them to wait in Jerusalem for the promised gift of power, he also told them that they would bear witness to him in Jerusalem, and throughout Judaea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

At that point, says Luke, "Jesus was lifted up before their very eyes. A cloud took him from their sight, and they were all gazing intently into the sky as he went."

It's as if Luke is leaving us with the same question Mark leaves us with: What do we do now? How are we to deal with Jesus' disappearance? Now that he's really gone, how are we to live?

And then Luke tells how the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles, and how Jesus appeared even to Paul, and how the apostles, Peter and Paul and John and Stephen and all the others, took the story of Jesus and his resurrection into every corner of the world they knew, even at risk to their own safety and lives.

Somehow, like Matthew and Mark and Luke and John, we all have to deal with the departure of Jesus, don't we? If Jesus is Messiah, if Jesus is the hope of Israel and the hope of the world, we have to deal with the fact that he's no longer walking around among us in flesh and blood, healing and teaching and preaching.

The Ascension is Luke's way of dealing with this fact. He says that after appearing to the disciples over a period of forty days, Jesus "was lifted up before their very eyes, and a cloud took him from their sight." "Ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father," we say in the Creed.

We also say that in 1625, Charles I ascended the throne of England. When we say that, we almost never get a picture in our minds of Charles climbing some steps up to a big chair where he sits down, because that's not what we mean when we say that Charles I ascended the throne of England in 1625. What we mean, the thing that is really important, is that in 1625 Charles I assumed royal authority over England.

The British had a coronation ceremony, I imagine, where Charles actually climbed some steps to a throne where he sat down and where a crown was placed on his head, not because anyone really cared much about the chair, but because the coronation was a liturgical way of the people's acknowledging the king's royal authority over them, and their allegiance to him.

That's what the Ascension is all about, too. Luke didn't much care about the direction we call "up." The Ascension is Luke's way of saying what Matthew and John also say in their Gospels in other ways, that even though Jesus is no longer here to be seen in flesh and blood, he still has authority over us. He is saying that the risen Christ has assumed royal authority throughout the world, just as Charles I assumed authority over his subjects.

Sue Armentrout says that "if the Ascension means that Jesus is now at God's right hand and is King above all heavenly and earthly powers, it surely means that Christians risk blasphemy in all the talk about being so chummy with Jesus." She says she's getting tired of "The-Almighty-as-Best-Buddy" theology, and she would like to declare a year of emphasis on the Ascension of Christ to remind us that we are human beings, mortals. Mortals who are, to be sure, in the service of God, but mortal beings who are in relationship with the Creator as creatures, as subjects under authority. Not so much "pals with Jesus" as redeemed creatures sent by the risen Christ to announce good news to the poor and to proclaim liberty to the captive, to the ends of the earth. That's what Sue Armentrout wants to make clear in the account of the hope she has in her.

Huston Smith also wants something made clear in the account of the hope he has in him. In Why Religion Matters, the book we're going to discuss next week, Smith cites Oliver Wendell Holmes as suggesting that "science gives us major answers to minor questions, while religion gives us minor answers to major questions." And Smith says that the spiritual malaise of our day stems from our modern willingness to be satisfied with answers to questions that are too small.

Amazed by the power of modern science to describe the way the material universe works -- the universe we can see and measure with our eyes and our instruments -- and overwhelmed by the way science can manipulate and use that universe, often for our benefit, we have surrendered hope, along with faith and love and meaning, because we have surrendered to science the authority to define reality. If science says that it cannot see or measure something, and that because it cannot see or measure it, that thing must not exist, we say, "Well, OK, you're the experts about reality, the priests of our day, so you must be right."

So we no longer seriously ask questions about realities which science cannot see and measure, questions about meaning and causes and values. We no longer take seriously questions like these: Where did the world come from? What does it mean? Does it mean? Who caused it? Why? Who governs the universe anyway? Is it governed? Is one thing better than another thing? What are faith and love? What is hope? Is hope? What's the point of human existence anyway? Because we no longer ask questions like these, we no longer have any account to give for the meaning of our own lives, and so we founder spiritually.

Is it true that science gives us major answers to minor questions, while religion gives us minor answers to major questions? What would major answers to major questions look like? Are there any?

Well, religion certainly does offer some minor answers, and maybe that's because, as Smith says, religion, in our day, has surrendered even the right to ask major questions. So religion ends up offering minor answers to minor questions, like the one William Willimon saw advertising the sermon topic for Mother's Day outside a church. "Virtues are learned at mother's knee, vices at some other joint," it read. Or like the minor answer of the following week's sermon: "Killing time makes you a murderer of opportunity." "What if some unchurched person driving by reads that, and thinks that is the Christian faith?" Willimon wondered. Is this all the account the Church now has to give of the hope that is in it?

Well it's not all the account St. Luke has to give for the hope that is in him. For Luke, and for Matthew and Mark and John, there is hope, and it is a major answer to a major question. The God who created the universe, and all that is in it, loves the world so much that he has paid us a visit, they tell us.

Caesar and his chariots ruled the world, we thought. Caesar and Herod and his priests? They were why we lived, we thought. They were the point of our existence and the purpose of our labor, our only gods and our only hope. The size of our questions and the shallowness of our vision had diminished the size of our hope.

But then we heard the angels sing. "Glory to God in the highest," they sang, "and on earth peace, good will toward men on whom the favor of God rests." And we heard the song his mother sang when he was born:

The hope we find in Luke is the size of God himself. It's the hope of our mother Mary, the mother of our hope. Hers is a major answer to a major question: God has paid his lowly servant a visit. God, not Caesar, is the One who turns the world upside down. God is the One who casts the mighty down from their thrones, and who lifts up the lowly, filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. He scatters the proud in their conceit, he remembers his promise of mercy, and he comes to the help of his people, on whom his favor rests.

This is the hope of Christmas at the beginning of Luke's account, and it is the hope of the Ascension at the end: The One whose birth was announced by the angels and whose life among us was the life of God himself; the One who lived a life of mercy and peace and good will in our streets and in our homes; the One who lived the life of a humble servant to the lowly and dispossessed, the life of forgiving brother to prodigal brothers and sisters, the life of a willing washer of feet; the One whose death betokened the love of One who lays down his life for his friends; the One whom God raised from the dead; this One has turned everything upside down, and has scattered the proud in their conceit, whether in Jerusalem or Rome or Washington or Colorado Springs, and now sits at the right hand of God, the ruler of all that is, the meaning life, the point of all existence.

This is the account Luke gives of the hope that is in him. It's a hope as big as the questions he asks, a hope that has no ending because he sees that God is in charge, not Caesar. And not even science. And not religion either.

When the evangelists talk about the Ascension of Christ into heaven, this is what it's all about. It's about their faith that God is in charge, about their faith that the life of the One who died on the Cross for the sake of the world, and who was raised on the third day, sways the future.

When we give the account of the hope that is in us, how big will ours be?

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.