And Crown Him Lord Of All (A Sermon from First Church in Cambridge)

First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
23 May 2004

J Mary Luti

And Crown Him Lord Of All

The Book of Acts says that forty days after Jesus' resurrection (which is Bible-speak for a good long time, enough time, the right time), Jesus said goodbye to his disciples and returned to heaven. It's quite a scene—Jesus ascends skyward and eventually disappears into a cloud. Of course the point of the story is not to be found in that old cosmology that has Jesus lifting off like a Saturn rocket and burning his way into a stratosphere to where heaven is kept. The point of the story is rather, in Peter Gomes' phrase, that we have now come to the end of the beginning—the end, that is, of the first phase of Jesus' ministry, the ministry of earthly presence.

That first presence was just like the presence you and I have with each other— limited by space and time, such that even Jesus could not be in two places at once. The Ascension story is meant to help us understand that Jesus' circumscribed presence has given way, because of the resurrection, to a new ministry of omnipresence. From now on, Jesus will have unbounded availability and unrestricted freedom.

The story of the Ascension is our forebears' way of telling us what they believed to be true because they experienced it as true in their own lives—namely, that Jesus is unutterably near all the time. In the act of raising Jesus from the dead, God did not separate him from us; in the Ascension, God did not remove him from us. Rather, God unleashed Jesus and "spread him out" in the cosmos. God made him a person without frontiers, made him closer than ever to all creatures—so close and so available that everyone who did not share his particular time and space is now forever and everywhere able to know him, love him, follow him, and receive life from him.

The Letter to the Ephesians spells out another dimension of the Ascension story. The Ascension is the moment of Jesus' return to God, but it is not just any sort of return. Jesus does not slip in the back door of heaven and go right to his room! Instead, he arrives home in awesome triumph and is seated at God's right hand. From that supremely privileged place, the Letter proclaims, he now rules the cosmos on behalf of God. All things have been "put under his feet." His authority is above all other authorities, his dominion above all other dominions. What the Ascension affirms about Jesus, then, is the same thing that is said about him in another place in the New Testament, that because he emptied himself and did not cling to God-like privileges; because he became an obedient servant, accepting the limitations of earthly existence and even our earthly unjust deaths, God vindicated and exalted him. God gave him "a name above all other names." As we just sang together so well, God brought forth "the royal diadem and crowned him Lord of all."

We should note this, too: the account of the Ascension we have both in Acts and in the 24^th chapter of Luke's gospel strongly implies that Jesus returned to God in his body— "they saw him go up"—which is to say that upon entering God's presence, he did not leave his full humanity behind. We don't know how that could be, but at the very least, metaphorically we are confronted with the Church's conviction that Jesus' full humanity reigns forever in heaven; and we know that if Jesus' humanity is there, then so also is ours, for such is his solidarity with us. Your humanity and mine are permanently lodged in the very heart of God's being. The body matters eternally to God.

Now this is all very interesting and symbolical and metaphorical and mystical and biblical, but for a long time it was hard for me to make a connection between this event and me! What does this great triumphal return, this ubiquitous Jesus and his sovereignty over all creation have to say to us and to the world we live in? What does it really matter to say in our songs of praise and our prayerful proclamation that Jesus Christ is alive in his full humanity, that he is no longer contained or constrained by any limitations, and that he is the one to whom the powers of this world must answer?

I've been reading a slim volume about the Resurrection by Rowan Williams. It's tough sledding, but it has helped shed some light on this question for me. Williams suggests that we try to hear the claim that Jesus is the living Lord of All the way a first century pagan might have heard it. If you told an educated Roman that someone had risen from the dead, he would have been shocked and frightened, not filled with hope and joy the way we expect people to react when they hear the Good News. He would immediately and anxiously have asked, "Were you able to put him back into the tomb again?"

The difference lies in the way the ancient pagans thought of death and the departed. For our cultured Roman, the dead were consigned to a shadowy world where they led, as Williams describes it, "a half-life of yearning and sadness." The boundaries between worlds were strict. You did not want to be where the dead were, and you did not want them to return and approach you where you were. Resurrection was thus a grotesque and alarming suggestion. It was also potentially very dangerous. Williams points out that whenever the dead did appear in visions or dreams, they did not return for consolation; rather, they returned to finger their killers. (We have a remnant of this idea in Shakespeare—remember the ghost of the king in Hamlet?)

Now, ancient empires were not dainty about killing. They specialized in mass slaughter. The imperial project demanded the sacrifice of huge numbers of expendable human lives. The imperial system created victims, and once empire was done with them, they simply disappeared – out of sight and out of memory. But, Williams asks, what if they didn't just disappear? What if the dead return, and what if the one man who (as the apostles claimed) had in fact already risen was precisely one of those numberless faceless and forgotten victims?

For empire, there could be no more alarming a message—an executed criminal, a nothing in the eyes of the State, instead of just disappearing into oblivion as he ought to have done, is back among the living. And he turns out in fact to be (as all unjustly killed victims are) God's favored one, and—if the apostles are to be believed—he has commanded that his friends speak to his killers in his name, but not to take his revenge or bring wrath upon them, but to invite them, for their own sakes, to trust him, to believe that he has made peace for them with God.

But there is even more dangerous news than this, Williams notes. Those apostles of his are preaching that this risen one was only the first. His resurrection and ascension to sovereign power over life and death was a sign and a pledge that others would also be raised. In fact, it was a guarantee that everyone could be raised, and that no life would ever again be so obliterated, so forgotten. All the dead will live! This could only be sobering news for empire, for empire has a great deal of blood on its hands.

We have become accustomed to the idea that every life is precious beyond telling, that all have equal worth. We do not routinely live as if this affirmation were true, but at least we hold it as a conviction and a value, and in our best moments we act on it. In antiquity, however, there was absolutely no such assumption. Under certain circumstances, fathers had the right to kill their children, and masters their slaves. Crowds lusted for blood, killing was a spectator sport, and massacre was a normal method of making war. The Christian Church did not leave this violence behind altogether; indeed it contributed its fair share over the centuries to this sorry pool of madness. But, Williams reminds us, when all is said and done about Christianity's mind-numbing failure to live up to its own values of mutual love, justice, human solidarity and compassion, the fact is that the impact of the new faith upon the old empire was incalculable. It created an irreversible shift in the culture after which a person's worth could not ever again so easily be erased by violence or death or the innocent forgotten with absolute impunity.

The risen and ascended Lord, we have said, is now sovereign and ubiquitous—he is in, over, under and through everything, and he has dominion over all. That includes the dead. The rising and ascending of the dear Lord Jesus means, among other things, that here and now lives that have been wasted, violently cut short, damaged by oppression, and thrown onto the garbage heap to be forgotten forever are not forgotten at all. He holds onto them, they are in his hand, and they have infinite worth in God's sight. As Rowan Williams says, "if God can raise and exalt a man who has been through the dehumanizing process of a Roman state execution, a process designed to humiliate and obliterate the self"—a process with which we in the United States are now becoming all too horrifically familiar by virtue of grotesque photos and videotapes—"then all imperial powers everywhere must begin to worry."

When we contemplate the 20^th century, unspeakable waste arises before our eyes. The imperial attempt to obliterate victims was raised to a fine art in those 100 years —the Holocaust, the purges of the 30's in the Soviet Union and the revolutionary years in China... The people who perpetrated these things carried them out blandly on the basis of the same assumption held by our educated pagan—namely, that people can be murdered, oppressed, buried and forgotten, and no one will care. Of course, this assumption is not the private property of empire. Cambodia and Rwanda and the Balkans teach us that "it may be your closest neighbors who turn into murderers."

Now none of us here by the grace of God is guilty of this kind of bloody horror. We did not swing the hatchets and the clubs in Rwanda; we did not rape women in the Balkans as a routine tactic of war. But we have often forgotten. We have acted—or not acted—as if the assumption upon which this slaughter and degradation rests were true after all. By the world's guilty and self-justifying indecision, and by our own chosen, comfortable distance, we have said it loud and clear: Some lives are expendable, some lives forgettable.

This morning as we worship peacefully here there is carnage in Northern Uganda. It barely registers on any newspaper's front page. Most of us in the West are not even aware of the nearly one million displaced persons in that region. Most of us do not know or cannot attend to the fact (being busy and all) that, according to some calculations, hundreds of thousands of children as young as 7 have been and are still being kidnapped to be soldiers, to kill and be killed. Who are they? What were their names?

This morning as we worship here happily, our own government resolutely keeps track of only the number and names of the American dead in Iraq. Not the Iraqi. We do not want to know who they are or the names their mothers gave them. They are enemy combatants, collateral damage, the tough fruits of necessary and noble violence for the sake of empire. But when deaths like these are forgotten, as Williams notes powerfully, the gospel of the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus roars at us with judgement.

We forget, but Jesus, the Lord of All, does not forget. The dead who die unjustly, the dead who die alone, unwanted and unremarked in our world — the Ascension tells us that they are not forgotten by God. Their dignity is held and affirmed in God's hand, the same hand that (as Jesus preached) counts every hair on every head of the victim, including the victims of mystery— those who disappear into the tragedy of dementia, who suffer the random or freak accident, who are struck down too young by monstrous diseases, predatory violence, or familial neglect.

Williams asks us to remember the days when death squads operated unfettered in countries like Argentina and El Salvador. In those heart-breaking times and places, Christians developed a dramatic way of celebrating their faith in Jesus' omnipresence and sovereignty. It was a ritual that united their own hope and courage to Jesus' hope and his courageous resistance to the amnesia of empire and the sinful forgetfulness of all us weak and self-protective human beings. At the communion liturgy, someone would read the roll of names of victims of the regime, every mother's son or daughter who had been killed outright or who had been, in that awful verb coined during that time, "disappeared." For each name called out, someone else would shout from the midst of the congregation, Presente, "Here!"

When the Christian assembly is gathered before God, when Jesus is truly present among us, the lost are indeed present. And when we pray at our own communion liturgy with angels and archangels and the whole company of the saints in heaven, Williams reminds us that it is as if we too are shouting "Presente " on behalf of all those that the empires of this world (including us) want us to forget, but whom God remembers."

They are here and we are with them. With angels and archangels; with the butchered Rwandans of ten years ago and the butchered or brutalized Ugandan children of last week; with the young woman dead of an overdose and the childless widower with Alzheimer's; with the thief crucified alongside Jesus and all the thousands of other anonymous thieves crucified in Judaea by an efficient imperial administration; with the whole company of heaven, those whom God receives in mercy." And with Jesus, son of Mary, child of God—presente! With the firstborn from the dead—presente!

By his sovereign omnipresence and his solidarity with our flesh, "our sinful forgetfulness and our lukewarm love can and will be forgiven and kindled to life. He leaves no human being in anonymity and oblivion, but gives to everyone the dignity of a name and a presence." He is risen indeed! He has gone up to God! He is not here—not here, that is, in the way he was before, local and circumscribed. And we, like the disciples who saw him return that day, should rejoice and be glad at his departure, for now he is at God's right hand, living in God with his humanity, and therefore also with ours. Now he is present everywhere in the cosmos, present to all, and remembering. We, all of us, cherished and remembered, belong to him.