Last Thursday evening during a delightful camp out with the 5th grade in Yosemite, I was sitting at dinner with a group of
St. Paul's parents and somehow the conversation drifted to the subject of a woman who had given birth to twins in her
fifties. After the usual round of "how could she do that?" I found myself answering, "Obviously her life, having been rich in
many ways, was lacking in the virtue of humility, for nothing on earth is more humbling at any age than becoming a
mother."
I feel kind of the same way this morning as I stand with today's readings on the one hand and Mother's Day on the other. In
our church calendar, we have evolved through the season of Easter and have come to the Sunday after Ascension and
before Pentecost. Jesus, having been resurrected from the dead at Easter, is taken up into heaven forty days later. Our
Ascension Sunday texts shimmer with heavenly mystery, glory and prayer.
This year, Ascensiontide also coincides with Mother's Day. And if Ascension is about heavenly things, what could be more
down to earth than our annual celebration of motherhood, with its cards, brunches, carnations and hugs?
And yet, is either Ascension or Mother's Day really as simple as all that? What do women who have lost children feel when
Mother's Day rolls around? How about children who have lost their mothers? How did Mary feel as she prayed in the
Upper Room? How do women who can't have children observe Mother's Day? Or mothers and children who are estranged
from one another? Have they gone and locked themselves in grief in their own Upper Rooms until Mother's Day passes?
And finally, what about those who have no Upper Room at all because the landlord, bowing to market forces, has evicted
them and closed the door in their face, leaving them with no place to lay their heads?
One Friday, not so long ago, I was dismissing Middle School. Across the street in the Veteran's Green, a mother and her
daughter were playing with a little black Lab puppy. Our students were stopping to admire the puppy and I could hear their
"oohs" and "aahs" from all the way across the street and I was selfishly and secretly hoping that the puppy wouldn't leave
before I, too, had a chance to go over and play with it. I got done crossing the kids and when I looked back to the green,
the woman, the child and the puppy were gone. Oh well, I thought in disappointment. But as I turned to go back into
school, there they were, waiting for me. Almost at once my joy turned into sorrow. This was not a pampered family with
puppy. The mother looked twenty years older than she was because of the stress of living on the edge. Her twelve year old
daughter had beautiful, blond curls framing a copper colored face but her wardrobe hinted at poverty. And the dear little
black Lab puppy was clearly much too young to be anywhere than with its mother. When I took the pup into my arms, I
could feel it shivering from cold and fear. I invited them to come inside. Once we were settled, in my gentlest voice I asked
how old the puppy was. "One month," came the answer. I said, "A puppy this young should be with his mother." "I know.
The mother dog's owner had all the puppies in a box. She was letting them go into the street to be killed. I'm trying to save
it."
In an instant, I understood. I felt the fierce rush of that woman's maternal tenderness. We talked puppy care. She knew
a lot about how to help vulnerable beings thrive against the odds. Meanwhile, the little pup had curled up tightly under my
jacket and was sleeping soundly. And after all that, the reason they were here had nothing to do with any of them, but
involved an older daughter who was recovering from spinal meningitis and needed a prescription filled. Did we have
medical vouchers? I said we didn't, but with my own brand of maternal fierceness sure wished we did, because I liked this
mother and thought it was so unfair that poor people, who, thanks to the hardships of poverty, need medical care the most,
are typically, as a result of market forces, the last to receive it. After about a half an hour together, I gave them all a hug
and a blessing and whatever I had in my wallet and they left. Now, you can't be in this world without some ability to stand
firm in the face of things, but after meeting this mother, I found that the only thing I could do was cry.
At Ascension, too, part of me wants to cry. Jesus leaves us. It seems an odd ending to the miracle of Easter, that we should
get Jesus back only to lose him a second time. He has taught us that this must be, that we cannot receive power and the
Holy Spirit until he is fully ascended up to God, but it still seems strange. We are Christians. We take seriously the words
and deeds of Jesus' ministry. Most, if not all of us have been baptized with water. But do we feel powerful? Do we feel that
we can continue Jesus' ministry of healing and reconciliation in this broken world? Wouldn't we like him back, our parent,
teacher, healer, reconciler, rebuker, the one who always knows what to do and can bind our every wound?
"The Glory of
God is the human being fully alive;" writes the Second Century saint Irenaeus, "the life of a human being is the
vision of God." Ascension marks the next to last moment in the Jesus narrative which begins each year in Advent with a
pregnancy and grows into the story of a ministry that shows the glory of being fully human. Jesus' life encompasses
wholeness and healing, suffering and death. It addresses our delight in earth's gifts and wonders and our very real and daily
fear of "being limited by time and by the body." Jesus lives in the world without the complication of complaint. He has
nothing to prove but the reality that God is love. So Jesus lives and Jesus dies and Jesus' body descends into the dead, is
reborn as bread and wine in the Eucharist, and as a full and nourished body in the resurrection. Easter teaches us again and
again (for it takes many tellings for us to learn this) that what we call death is in fact a transformation, is in fact a birth. But
even that is not the full story.
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"The Glory of God is the
human being fully alive;" writes the Second Century saint Irenaeus, "the life of
a human being is the vision of God."
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If God has sanctified the material world of earth and the body by coming into our midst and breathing life over the still
waters of creation, Jesus' ascension does the same thing but in the other direction. Earth, in the form of his body, is
received into heaven, transforming dead matter into live space. Nor is Ascension a purely Christian experience. Enoch in
the book of Genesis ascends bodily into heaven in the days before there was any religion at all. The prophet Elijah ascends
into heaven in a chariot of fire. Mohammed ascends to God in his famous night journey of Sura 17 in Qur'an. Lord Buddha
goes to heaven to teach his mother who had died when the young prince was less than a week old. Physicist Brian Swimme
reminds us that we are composed of the same matter as the heavenly stars. This day promises that some day we, too, will
ascend and see God. The season of Ascension opens to us year after year (for this story, too, requires many tellings) the
door between heaven and earth. Finally it is through that door that the Holy Spirit will come to fill us next Sunday at
Pentecost, the birthday of the church, when the annunciation that God made to Mary is made to us all, each in our own
language, each according to our own experience. Within each one of us is the child of God waiting to be born.
Jesus may be God's son, but the church is her daughter. We are "Mother Church." "Mother church" is not an abstraction.
That brave mother I met on the corner fighting for her daughter's life was being the church. Her motherhood, like Jesus'
ministry, was a process of passionate nurture. With two daughters to raise, one of them deathly ill, she did not hesitate to
rescue a tiny puppy and share the fierceness of her life force with yet another life. That is Christian ministry and I was
privileged to witness it.
Homelessness, poverty, these are things that tarnish a human being's right to be fully alive. It is hard to see God's glancing
light when the streets are darkened by despair. It is hard to see the door of our heavenly home open in welcome when all
over earth market forces are closing doors in people's faces. "All mine are yours," Jesus says, "and yours are mine; and I
have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy
Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one."
How can we be one when some of us hold so much and some of us hold so little? We at St. Paul's have done a great thing
by asking that question. Along with others in Oakland, we are asking God to help us look long and hard at the complex
problem of homelessness in our community. This seems a daunting task, no easy answers. But remember when your first
baby was small enough to fit into the crook of your arm and you stopped being able to sleep at night and wondered how
you were ever going to take care of this helpless little being and pay the bills and all those concerns? And the child grew
and by some miraculous grace you did it?
Ministry to the homeless is a lot like motherhood. We don't know how to do it. The economy seems quite stacked against
it. But God knows, and my friends, if God can lift Jesus into heaven and open doors to those who keep the faith, God can,
if we ask, surely show us way to reach out our arms in love and become living proof that in God's kingdom it is indeed
possible to go home again. AMEN.