Let the Mystery Be

Let the Mystery Be

Psalm 139: 7-12

Today is Ascension Sunday.  This is the day in the church calendar when we remember that in two of the four Gospels, Jesus leaves.  Where does he go?  He goes up.  What does he do when he goes up?  The answer I learned as a confirmand was that, “He sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.”  What’s the plan?  The plan, according to many of the very earliest Christians and a few Christians still today is that he’s going to come back down again.  

Now, you may already be detecting my own discomfort with Ascension Sunday.  “Up” just kind of doesn’t do it for me.  I think part of this, literally, is being a child of the twentieth century.  Until the last 125 years, “up” was one of the greatest mysteries.  It took us centuries to understand what stars were.  (They’re not pinholes in a curtain up there that let the light in?). It took us centuries to understand that we are not the center of the universe.  (What? Everything doesn’t rotate around us?). Like angry two year olds who have discovered this truth, we raged at the wise people who dared to suggest that the whole universe didn’t revolve around us.  (In fact, we imprisoned and even executed a few of those folks for telling the truth that we didn’t want to hear.)

Back in the late 1950’s and 1960’s with the dawn of the space program in the United States and in the Soviet Union, there were a lot of people—not scientists—who wondered what we would find when we went “up.”  The further “up” we went, the more people worried or at least wondered whether we would be invading God’s space because God was still thought of by many people as being “up there.”  Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut in space, was said to have declared, “I see no God up here.”  Since then, we’ve learned that he never said that, that he was, in fact, a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, and that the statement likely came from the Soviet authorities who were opposed to religion. 

With the reckless abandon of someone who is soon to retire, let me tell you what I think about when I think about Ascension Sunday.  For over forty years now, I’ve been walking through the end of life and death, itself, and the process of grief that follows with a lot of different people.  Some of those people have been devoutly Christian.  Some of those people have been asking questions about mortality and whether there is something more beyond this life that we know for the very first time.  Modern life tends to shield us from mortality in a way that we would not have been shielded if we still lived on farms or if we still, largely, never went near any kind of modern hospital.  So, my familiarity with the end of life and beyond makes me a bit of a unicorn in this world.

Here’s what resonates with my experience when I read the texts around the end of Jesus’ life and beyond.  First of all, it was true in Jesus’ final days that terrible things happened, that his suffering was very real.  In words that I’ve been saying to you for a while now, we do, in fact, live in a “Good Friday” world.  It may not feel like Pilate is announcing our death sentence but it is terrible when our doctor tells us the news that we don’t want to hear.  It challenges us and our faith when something terrible happens to someone we dearly love.  Like the disciples, it remains tempting to run the other direction.  Like the women, we struggle to just keep caring, to keep trying to do the next loving thing.

So, the first thing that’s true is that life includes some very dark moments.  Part of what I’m convinced that we need to do is just keep trying, just keep loving, just keep doing the concrete things that we can do to bring love to life.  Over the years, I have seen a parade of casseroles arrive at the right moment.  I have watched as people showed up, without a clue as to what to say, with real fear about what they were going to see, but they showed up, anyway.  In Jesus’ story, it is the women who show up, who can’t really do anything other than be witnesses.  Or, it is the man who is called from the crowd to carry Jesus’ cross for just a little while.  In our story it is all the simple acts of care that say, “I cannot change this but I will not let you go through this alone.”  When people show up like that, God arrives.  God is always present.  The question is whether we can be brave enough and bold enough to go to hard places and allow God to become present through us.

The Psalmist, in our text, is declaring two things to us:  God knows us and God is with us—always.  This is a pretty radical strand of the Old Testament that is largely found in the Book of Psalms.  In other places in the Old Testament, God is present only to the select few:  the religious authorities, the prophets, the kings, an occasional Moses or Abraham.  God chooses sparingly to be known by some very special people and the job for the rest of us is to trust those special human beings:  “God told me to tell you…” In contrast, the Psalmist says God knows you in the most personal ways possible and has known you your whole life long.  And, there is nowhere that you can go where God won’t already be there.  God isn’t “up there” on some mountain top or in space.  God is all around us. In this life, God is accompanying us every step of the way, through joys and sorrows, through light and darkness.  The Psalmist writes, “Darkness isn’t dark to you.”

So, the suffering that occurs at the end of Jesus’ life still speaks to us in our own suffering, saying that there is still faith to be lived whether you are the one who is suffering or the one who’s heart is breaking in the face of the suffering of someone you love.  Don’t give up.  Don’t despair.  There is love to be lived and that love can make all the difference in the world.

So, it is entirely necessary for me, living in a world in which suffering is a part of life, that suffering was a part of Jesus’ life, too.  Again, God’s presence can feel like more of an absence in our hardest moments not because God has gone anywhere but because we are so totally rattled that we can hardly remember who we are.  Then, though, when the casserole arrives or the card that speaks the truth arrives or the person arrives who is just willing to sit in silence and be present with us, God’s presence shines in the darkness in ways that feel like we might be blinded by that light.

Suffering and death are real.  However, they are not the last word.  That’s the Easter truth in a Good Friday world.  Someone voiced this to me in a way that totally echoed my experience recently.  They had been with someone who died.  It was their first experience of being present in that moment.  They looked at me and leaned in and said, “Where did they go?” Purely at an experiential level, this is always my experience.  In words that echo the angels in the Easter text, there is a voice inside of us that announces, “He is not here,” or “She is not here.”  If you haven’t been there at that moment yet, maybe you will remember what I’m saying this morning, when, someday, you are.  That person is gone.  Their body is all that remains.  Where did they go?”  At which point, my response is to smile and shake my head in wonder and say, “What a mystery, right?”  As a person of faith, I am absolutely convinced that when this life is done, there is more.  As a person of faith, I think our job when it comes to answering what that “more” is, is to smile and let the mystery be.

So, suffering and death are real.  And, the “leap of faith” leads us to believe that there is more to come on the other side of death.  That’s what it means to be an Easter people in a Good Friday world, that the hard stuff won’t keep us from doing the loving stuff.  Or, to put the matter in the light of the Psalmist’s words, the God who knows us and is present with us will not abandon us but will accompany us into the mystery.  

For those who are the caregivers, especially those who have lost someone we dearly loved, there is an interlude after that person is gone when that person still feels close.  They are no longer in that body but it feels like they might be just around the corner or they might be that cardinal that keeps singing to us or they might be speaking to us through the words of a stranger or through the song we shared that mysteriously just played on the radio.  Others might tell us of the dream they had of our beloved person or we might have that dream ourselves and then desperately, upon waking, try to fall back asleep again, because they felt so real in that dream.

If we haven’t been around death and dying much or we’ve avoided it like the plague, we may not have had this experience.  However, if grief has gutted us, if it has broken our hearts, then we hear about the interlude when the risen Jesus was present and we think, “Oh, ya!  I get what these people are talking about!”  For a while, it was like he was right there.  The risen Jesus spends time repairing things:  consoling the inconsolable, getting the disciples past their fears and their shame, getting Peter back to a place where he could lead the church and not just beat himself up for his failures. 

Here is the truth for so many people who have known grief.  For a while, it feels like the beloved person whom I miss so much is right here with me.  It can even feel like the message of the dream or the memory or the song that we shared is redemptive and healing.  Maybe the underlying message is, “I’m okay.”  Maybe it is as simple as a final, “I love you.”  Maybe the good news is that it’s okay to let all that hard stuff go, that it’s the good stuff that’s worth remembering.  However, the truth is that at some point that profound sense of presence gives way.  They are no longer here as they were for a little while and the truth is that you miss that presence ever day.  However, deep down, trusting that they’re okay, you choose to carry them in your heart.  Eventually, you return, a step at a time, to the business of living, caring and sharing and loving your way back to life.

May God make us brave enough to go to the hard places and open enough to discover God’s presence, even in the darkest days. May God make us faithful enough to embrace the mysteries that follow.  And may God’s light and God’s love shine through us all.