gospel stories | Michael Valliant

Why Ascend? And then what?

Context: The first Sunday in June was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. We celebrated and talked about Jesus’s Ascension into heaven, marking the end of the Easter season, moving the church calendar to Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit. This is the text of the sermon I gave.

Why Ascend? And then what?

A couple years ago, I saw a comic strip about Jesus’s Ascension that sticks with me.

It’s Jesus and three disciples standing around. Jesus says, “Gotta go guys. Don’t forget what I taught you.” And then it shows Jesus’s feet as he ascends out off the page and the disciples say, “Bye, boss.”

They are standing around together and one asks, “So what have we learned?”

“Pretty much it’s love God and love your neighbor.”

“Well, that seems pretty simple, I don’t see how we can mess this…”

It shows a group is coming over the hill in their vestments and robes, with their hats and staffs, books, and scrolls. And the disciple says, “Uh-oh… Here come the theologians.”

And it sticks with me both because it strikes me as funny and that it’s on to something.

Jesus didn’t come to confuse us or complicate us. He came to set things right, so that we could get off the hamster wheel of sin and that instead we might have life in all its abundance.

We don’t have these stories and teachings in Scripture to vex us, but to help us.

In today’s reading, as he is about to leave the disciples, Jesus says:

“These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you– that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled… Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

Jesus has done what he came to do. The Word became flesh, lived among us, taught us, performed signs, died for us, conquered death, came back and showed us and told us all about it. As he is leaving, he is connecting all the dots and making sure the disciples get it.

He’s not giving them new information or teaching, he’s just recapping, reminding them. This is all part of the plan.

Jesus has to go so that he can send the Holy Spirit to do things that he couldn’t do in his bodily form. He could only be in one place at a time. There is more to do.

Jesus becoming incarnate: good news.
Jesus dying for us: tragic and horrible, but still part of the good news.
Jesus overcoming death: good news.
Jesus ascending and sending the Holy Spirit: all part of the same good news.

We talked a bit last week on Zoom and at the Healing Service about how things are going in the world with the Holy Spirit and the church and whether we might not prefer to have Jesus back in the flesh. Sometimes it might be nice to be able to ask Jesus something directly and have him settle the debate right then and there.

Two things come to mind with that: Jesus has already given us everything we need, to know what he would do, how he would answer questions, what we are supposed to do. Those answers aren’t going to change.

The fact that we, as people, aren’t loving God and loving our neighbor, the fact that we aren’t loving each other as Jesus loved us, isn’t because we don’t understand or we don’t know how.

It’s because we don’t want to.

It’s because it’s hard. It’s because it costs us—we have to sacrifice in order to do it. It’s because while we are living in the ways of the world, it’s not popular—people might think we’re weird or soft or whatever word you want to use.

There are stories that have been written that suppose that Jesus comes back just as he was before, preaching the same love, doing the same good works, and what ends up happening is that either the church or the government kills him because his message is a threat to their power.

Does that sound familiar? We just read that story a month or so ago.

Our world hasn’t changed so much since then. But it’s supposed to. And that’s up to us.

Jesus ascended into heaven because his work was done, and he was giving the ball back to his followers to move things forward.

I’ve shown you everything. Now it’s your turn.

The Ascension of Jesus Christ, gold mosaic; in Neamt Monastery, Rom.

If we look at the disciples during the two or three years Jesus was with them, Jesus did all the work. He was teaching them and showing them what to do, but they depended on him to do everything.

Here is what the SALT Project says about Jesus having to go away in their commentary:

“The fact that Jesus departs at all is worthy of reflection. Many founders of movements — or companies or political parties — stay around as long as they can (often staying too long!), and according to the Gospels, the risen Jesus is presumably impervious to death, and so could have remained indefinitely. From this angle, the fact that he leaves reveals what sort of movement he has in mind: a community not standing around admiring him (“Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?—as we heard in Acts), but rather active and present in the world, carrying on his work of kindness, justice, humility, and proclaiming the dawn of God’s joyous Jubilee. In the end, the Ascension itself is meant to invite and empower the church to be all the more down-to-earth. Into the world, for the love of the world!

For Jesus, it wasn’t about his ego, his pride, or any accolades. He leaves so that even more amazing things can happen with the Holy Spirit dwelling with and within us.

This is what spiritual maturity asks of us and looks like. Peter and the other apostles do not look and sound the same in the Book of Acts as they sound in the gospels. They carry on. They put in the work. They wait for the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus told them to. And after Pentecost, they are lit on fire with the Spirit and the early church is born.

The apostles accept that they are Jesus’s “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

There are no “thoughts and prayers” in the apostles action plan, their response to Jesus, as ours is in our Baptismal Covenant, was:

“We will, with God’s help.”

As we remember and celebrate Jesus’s Ascension; as we look to Pentecost next week and the coming of the Holy Spirit; and as we move into Ordinary Time, the Season After Pentecost—it’s the same Holy Spirit with and within us now as came to Peter and the apostles. It’s the same Holy Spirit that has inspired and guided the community of saints over the ages. It’s the same Holy Spirit that has used ordinary people and their ordinary lives to do extraordinary things for God’s kingdom.

The church has moved in fits and starts and stalls and sputters over the last couple thousand years. There have been miracles and signs and there have been tragedies and disgrace. When the church falls away from the Holy Spirit and from Jesus, it loses its way.

It’s during those times that we need to regroup, refocus, remember who we are and WHOSE we are and allow the Spirit to move through us to be the body of Christ, the church, Jesus’s hands and feet and love in the world.

This is our time. We can’t look around and expect someone else to do it. WE are why Jesus came. WE are why Jesus died. WE are why Jesus overcame death. And WE are why Jesus ascended and gave the world the gift of the Holy Spirit.

What will we do with it? What does it look like to have the Spirit in us?

Here is the SALT Project:

(changed to present tense)

“It looks like Jesus, and at the same time, it looks like us — that is, it looks like us being true to ourselves, the people God made us to be. In a word, it looks like love: incarnate, tangible, down-to-earth love. And from another angle, it looks like peace: not just any peace, but what Jesus calls “my peace,” the shalom of God, a buzzing, blooming, fruitful community, coming and going, alive with the Spirit, healthy and whole.”

We look to the characters in the Bible for our answers, as if their lives were more spiritually significant than ours. Here’s the thing:

When they were living out all these experiences, their stories hadn’t been written down. They were figuring it out, reading the stories they had, just like we are.

We have Scripture for our learning, so that we can continue these stories, live spiritually significant lives, be a part of God’s love story in its unfolding.

We have a chance to write the next chapters—to inspire, connect, and allow God to use us just as he used the first apostles. That’s what “apostolic” is all about—being sent out.

Jesus wants our stories and our time to matter just as much as the apostles in Acts. We have same Holy Spirit and we are proclaiming the same good news.

WE can be that community. That’s who we are called to be. It’s who we were made to be.

Will we? Our best answer:

We will, with God’s help.

No labels, just love: the woman at the well

“I want to love like Jesus”—that’s a goal that’s thrown around by both fans of Jesus and maybe even doubters. Most people agree that Jesus knew something about love. And that that was and is a good thing.

How many people can tell us more about what that kind of love looks like? Is it just a hopeful thing to say without any real substance behind it? Or are we willing to look closer as to what it might mean to love like Jesus.

John’s Gospel story about the woman at the well is a great model for what that kind of love looks like in action.

Throughout each of the Gospels, Jesus makes a point of reaching across cultural, social, and religious boundaries and barriers to include people who were cast out or left out.

True to that form, the woman at the well, per culture and circumstance, is someone Jesus should not have been talking to.

Going through Samaria, Jesus was in a region and among a people the Jewish people didn’t look kindly on.

It’s the middle of the day, incredibly hot, a time when no one would have been at the well. And here comes a woman to get water.

Bible scholar N.T. Wright spells it out:

“In that culture, many devout Jewish men would not have allowed themselves to be alone with a woman. If it was unavoidable that they should be, they certainly would not have entered into conversation with her. The risk, they would have thought, was too high to risk impurity, risk of gossip, risk ultimately of being drawn into immorality. And yet Jesus is talking to this woman.”

If her being a woman wasn’t bad enough, on top of that she is a Samaritan. The Jewish people and the Samaritans didn’t mix. The Jews wanted nothing to do with the Samaritans. And no way in the world would they have considered sharing food or drink with them, much less sharing a drinking vessel.

Jesus reaches out to the woman by asking for a drink. He puts himself out there. Asks for hospitality. He makes himself vulnerable.

And who does he do this to? A woman who is coming to the well in the middle of the day to avoid having to deal with people, someone who has a stigma on her, a shame.

Debie Thomas in her book, “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories” makes the point perfectly:

“The Samaritan woman is the Other, the alien, the outsider, the heretic, the stranger. Jesus breaks all the boundaries he is not supposed to break to reach out to her.

What Jesus does when he enters into conversation with a Samaritan woman is radical and risky; it stuns his own disciples because it asks them to dream of a different kind of social and religious order. A different kind of kingdom.”

Maybe that’s a clue for us. Loving like Jesus asks us to envision a different kind of social order, a different kind of kingdom.

I picture this woman and the gossip about her, the things said to her, the looks, the scorn, the judgment. And here is Jesus, a Jewish teacher, and how does he talk to her? Without judgment, without shaming, without looking down on her, and at the same time fully engaging with her and fully seeing her for who she is.

John, as the writer, packs a lot into this story:

This conversation is the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in any of the Gospels.
In John’s Gospel, this woman at the well is the first person to whom Jesus reveals his identity as the Messiah.
She is the first believer in any of the Gospels to become an evangelist and bring her entire city to a saving experience of Jesus.

All this for a Samaritan woman. This encounter was a big deal to John for him to give it so much space and meaning, and it was a big deal to Jesus.

So how does Jesus go about revealing his identity to the woman? Does he prove himself by healing the sick? Does he feed 5,000 people? Does he raise anyone from the dead or turn water into wine? No. He has a conversation with her.

He offers her “living water,” which she doesn’t understand. But he sits with her, listens to her, speaks to her, and reveals who he is.

Cynthia Kittredge in her book, “Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of John points out:

“That Jesus’ revelation and the woman’s realization of him come through dialogue is an important feature to notice… Jesus does no sign here. There is no miracle.” He makes a claim which then takes a dialogue, a back and forth to make sense of.

“This is a type of dialogue in John’s Gospel which reflects a way individuals and people come to faith—through a process of effort and discussion.”

Jesus reveals himself with no miracles or signs, simply with conversation, insight, and presence. He hears her, he sees her, he doesn’t dismiss her—he shares with her.

How did the woman respond? She goes running off to her town and tells absolutely everyone there. And Jesus stuck around and confirmed her testimony for people. She went from scorned outsider to credible witness.

Jesus restores her and transforms her.

Is this what it looks like to love like Jesus? Is this something Jesus still offers us today?

Here’s where Debie Thomas asks questions that we need to ask:

“Just as he does for the Samaritan woman, Jesus invites us to see ourselves and each other through the eyes of love, not judgment. Can we, like Jesus, become soft landing places for people who are alone, carrying stories of humiliation too heavy to bear? Can we see and name the world’s brokenness without shaming? Can we tell the truth and honor each other’s dignity at the same time?”

In the six-plus years I have been at Christ Church Easton, being a part of small groups has been a revelation for me in witnessing what becoming this kind of soft landing place can do.

For several years we ran the Alpha Course after our Saturday evening service, and we had between 90 and 100 people who would meet in the Parish Hall for dinner. Our youth group and leaders were a part of that number as well. Our Parish Hall was packed with food, laughter, and new relationships forming. Everyone sat and ate together before breaking into small groups, and over the course of 11 weeks we also went on a weekend retreat together.

That program became a landing place for people in recovery. In many cases these were people who were getting clean through Narcotics Anonymous. And it was a huge leap of faith for them to walk through the door of a church. Repeatedly we heard, “I didn’t think a church would want someone like me here.” People named and worked through shame they carried. They shared stories of why they started using; of their low points, in some cases being in prison; and they shared hopes and dreams—things like being able to be present, to be a parent in the lives of their children.

They went deep when they shared. And that gave permission for everyone else to go deep with their own struggles and failures. We had a congregation of people come to know by name someone who they might have dismissed, labeled, and judged. Which would have been the congregation’s loss.

Middle schoolers in our youth group would find and sit with—both in church and at dinner—the friends they made, in some cases big dudes covered with tattoos, who came to absolutely love these kids. There were no labels, just love. There were no more outsiders or outcasts, just a community of people, a group of friends. It has a holy thing and a holy time.

It looked a lot like Jesus with the woman at the well.

Fr. Gregory Boyle in his book, “Tattoos on the Heart,” tells a story about a former gang member who lived near their church and who liked to hang out his window to talk to people on their way by. One day Boyle was walking by and the guy yelled out, “Hey G, I love you,” and waved him by like he was blessing him. Boyle thanked him, and the guy’s reply was, “Of course, you’re in my jurisdiction.”

Boyle uses the idea of “jurisdiction” to talk about the area of our love, and he talks about God’s jurisdiction, the area of His love, which is all-inclusive.

When thinking about how to love like Jesus, we need to expand our jurisdiction to be as inclusive, as expansive, as Jesus’s. In the story of the woman at the well, he gives us the example of what it looks like to expand our love and compassion to include someone who had been left out.

We don’t need miracles or signs to accomplish this—it is something any of us can do. And we do it with presence, vulnerability, empathy, dialogue, listening, and seeing.

I want to leave you with some of Fr. Gregory Boyle’s words about expanding the jurisdiction of our love:

“Close both eyes; see with (eyes of your heart). Then, we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments, our ceaseless withholding, our constant exclusion. Our sphere has widened, and we find ourselves quite unexpectantly, in a new, expansive location, in a place of endless acceptance and infinite love.

We’ve wandered into God’s own jurisdiction.”

That’s how we love like Jesus.

Amen.

* On Saturday, March 11, I preached at our Iona Eastern Shore seminary class (at Old Trinity Church in Church Creek, MD) on John 4:5-42, the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. The text above is the sermon that I gave.