Saturday, May 13, 2017

V Easter


V Easter
 May 14, 2017
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

I go to prepare a place for you.

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

Today we hear the beginning of what is conventionally cal-led the Farewell Discourse — St. John’s account of Jesus’ last teachings, set after the Last Supper, after the departure of Judas and the purification of the foot-washing, and before the Passion. I’ve often thought that they might just as well have been spoken on the Mount of Olives, just before the Ascension, which is where we put them in our liturgical lectionary — to be read on the final Sundays of Eastertide. They are packed with important pronouncements about the Identity of Jesus, what He has accomplished, and what the Church can expect.  They have to do with the changes God has wrought in creation: not only the repair of damage done by creatures — visible and invisible — but the elevation of creation to new glory.
Our Lord begins by telling us not to be disturbed in the core of our being by any outward events. “You believe in God, believe also in Me.” Trust Me. He asks us not to believe things about Him, but to trust Him, to believe Him when He tells us “You will do greater works than I have done”. Indeed we have done. We have abolished crucifixion and gladiatorial combat. We have covered the world with hospitals and orphanages. We have very nearly abolished chattel slavery, and achieved formal recognition that it is outside the norm of civilized practice. Same with torture. In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we have laid the foundation for the international law of human rights, based on what our own Baptismal Covenant calls respect for the dignity of every person. This 70-year-old agreement of almost all the nations of the earth is as close as we have come to a charter of the Kingdom of God. The world has learned from Jesus the unique value of every person, without exception. It has learned this through His Church, insofar as we have been faithful to His teaching and kept His commandments. Remembering the important reservation that no human system is, in itself, the Kingdom of God, we may still recognize the work of the Holy Spirit in propagating the Gospel precepts throughout the world, with or without explicit reference to their Author. In my Father’s house are many mansions.
It is possible to seek and serve Christ in every person, as we promise at baptism, without consciously thinking of it as such: without any reference to the Holy Name. Let’s remember Karl Rahner’s famous category of “anonymous Christians:” people who do His will, even though they may not think of it that way.  On the other hand, to acknowledge the Name is not simply a matter of tacking it on to the end of our petitions. It is not a magic formula, which guarantees the doing of our will! To ask anything “in (His) Name" means to ask what is consistent with His Identity, His public reputation, and His Mission as revealed in Scripture and tradition. We cannot expect Him to do anything inconsistent with that, even if we say we are asking in His Name, because we really are not. What we really do in that case is to take His Name in vain! Furthermore, we can never know for sure whether or not our perception of what needs to happen in order to fulfill His Mission is really accurate. Just saying “in the Name of Jesus” doesn’t make it so. We always have to add “thy will be done.”
What our prayers accomplish is mysterious. The great Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the most influential theologians of the last century, who marched with Dr. King at Selma, said:
To pray is to expand God’s Presence.
God’s action in the world sometimes  comes through our prayer, through our bringing God’s will into consciousness and action. Heschel went on to say
For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.
That is what it means to ask something “in the Name of Jesus.”  It is neither a magic word, nor even a conscious glorification of His Reputation, but an act in solidarity with His Mission, which is the Kingdom of God, God’s will done on earth as in Heaven, an act that expands God’s Presence in time and space.
These astonishing sayings, in the Farewell Discourse, unveil more of the Mystery of the Incarnation, and its continuation in time, in the Church – the Body of Christ, living in the world and chan-ging it more and more to resemble His Kingdom. Jesus says He goes to prepare a place for us in His Father’s House of Many Mansions. It may be a mistake to think of that as the preparation of a refuge from the world, a place to which we flee, somewhere out of the world.  The Son prepares the world through us, who do works greater than He did when we really act in His Name, whether or not we know that is what we are doing. The Son also prepares the House of the Father to accommodate us. He says he will come to us again, so that we might be where He is. We usually think that means He will take us out of the world, but what if it meant that He will bring the Father’s House of Many Mansions into the world?
And how in the world (or out of it) can we reconcile the House of Many Mansions with the proclamation that “No one comes to the Father except through Me?" Tune in next week!
Alleluia!
Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling down death by death,
And giving life to all in the tombs.

Alleluia!

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