Three days ago was the Feast of the Ascension, the day on which we commemorate Jesus ascending into heaven after having appeared, risen from the dead, to his followers over a period of forty days.  That puts Ascension Day ten days before Pentecost, the festival of the Holy Spirit, which we will celebrate next Sunday.

Ascension Day always falls on a Thursday, so unless you replace the normal Sunday readings and focus for the Seventh sunday of Easter (today) most people miss it.  It just flits by, unobserved and without further comment or teaching.  I will admit that I have not been good about lifting Ascension Day up before us as a community, so today I would like to spend a little time reflecting on Ascension and its significance for us.

The Ascension is described primarily in Luke's Gospel (24:44-53) and the beginning of Acts (1:1-11), which was also written by Luke.  There is also a one sentence mention of it at the end of Mark's Gospel ("long ending" 16:19).  The description given in Luke goes like this:

"The Jesus led out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands, he blessed them.  While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.  And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the Temple blessing God."

Luke's description in Acts, the second volume of his two volume history of Jesus and the Apostles, has a slightly different emphasis.  It goes like this:

"When Jesus had this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.  While he was going and they were gazing toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?  This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.'  Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day's journey away."

Luke, of course, has his literary interests.  In his Gospel, the story functions as a sort of dénouement to the story of the life of Jesus.  It is the resolution at the end of his ministry and suffering, and functions to set the stage for the next volume of Luke's work.  By contrast, in Acts, the story of the Ascension sets the stage for the coming saga of the Apostles and their experience of the Holy Spirit working among them, despite their well intentioned meddling.

For us today, in our world view and mind set shaped by scientific materialism which encourages a literal-historical reading of these texts, we tend to analyze the "how did this happen" part of the story.  We look for physical and mechanical explanations of the nature of Jesus in his post-resurrection body, the nature of "ascension" as in "where did he go?" and so on.

But the references from letters in the New Testament show that very early on, even before Luke ever wrote his Gospel or Acts, the interest in the Ascension was primarily symbolic, metaphorical, and theological. In his letter to the church in Philippi, Paul implies the ascension in passing as part of his grand schema of Christ Jesus, the one who was like God, but emptied himself, thereby setting the standard and example of Christian behaviour.  He writes that Christ "emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness; and being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death -- even death on the cross.  Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (2:7-11).

In the letter to the church in Ephesus, it says, "God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age, but in the age to come.  And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fulness of him who fills all in all" (1:20-23).

And in the letter to the Hebrews it says, God's Son "is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.  When he had made purification for our sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs" (1:3-4).

In all of these and other similar passages, the event we call the Ascension is glossed over, because as an event it is not significant, but it is rather one part of the overall schema of Christ's coming into the world and returning to the realm or dominion or manner of existence we call heaven or eternity or the spiritual realm.

In later theological reflection, the Ascension functions as the piece that closes the loop of Christ's movement from cosmic Word, born into the world as the human Jesus, suffering, dying, rising, and ascending or returning to take up the place of authority and power ("the right hand of the Father").  In the development of classic Christian theology, this loop is seen as the process of reconciliation between God and the estranged creation.  Just as the nonmaterial God came into the created material world in the person of the Word made flesh in Jesus, so the material human Jesus is taken up into the non-marterial realm of the spirit.  The two realities, spiritual and material, are brought together in Christ, and are taken up into each other.  There is a kind of mutual infusion and embrace.  The two become inextricably interwoven in the person of Christ.

In this framework, the life of Jesus becomes the concrete example of the way in which we can voluntarily and intentionally participate in the bringing together of the two worlds.  As God moves toward us in self-emptying, embracing weakness and humility, so we move toward God in the same way.   Things like insistence on one's own way, pride (in the sense of "I'm better than..."), grabbing after things, every kind of characteristic, habit, or inner movement of the soul which moves in the opposite direction of the healing, reconciling cycle of self-emptying, humility, and servanthood lived by Christ, pulls people apart from each other, and pulls us away from the Divine.  This pulling away happens on the grand scale of human history and current events, but also on the little scale of the individual.  It leads to wars and exploitation, and it leads to abuse and manipulation.  The Christ cycle, the movement of which the Ascension is a part, ends wars, restores dignity, preserves the integrity of the person, and moves toward transparent relationships.

The early theologians and teachers saw Christ's way of being as the original destiny and purpose for which humans were created, but which we forgot.  Although the prophets had been trying to remind us of it for many centuries, it was Christ who most fully and perfectly embodied it.  Thus the Ascension is also the missing link.  While the prophets could say the words, they could not embody the full cycle of emptying and fulfilling completion that the Word made flesh could.  The Ascension is one link in the chain which constitutes the great cycle of reconciliation and healing lived and embodied by Christ, the Word made flesh, the man made God.

We mirror Christ's movement when we surrender our humanity in order to be filled with divinity.  This can sound like an anti-material way of thinking if it is taken out of its full context.  It is not, however.  Rather it is part of rediscovering a healthy, balanced relationship to the material world perceived now from a divine perspective.  Rather than being slaves to the world of matter, instincts, impulses, and visceral reactions, one lets go of that world in order to be able to reembrace it with balanced appreciation.  It is like the saying goes, "You have to let go of something before you can truly embrace it."  The misunderstanding comes when the letting go becomes an end in itself.

In the Ascension, Christ reembraces his divinity and authority, but now does so fully human, the embodiment of the servant.  The mirror movement for us is that after having surrendered our humanity to embrace divinity, we reembrace our humanity, but now as transformed (even transfigured) embodiments of the Divine within the material.  Amen.

      A seventeen year old male sits in class stealing quick glances over at a seventeen year old female.  His heart races.  Deep down within him is a profound yearning to see her, to be with her, to talk to her.  After class, he stands with his friends in the school yard, talking about this and that.  The young woman walks by in the company of her friends.  His friends don't really notice them, but he casts what looks like a casual glance, that is really a shy, hopeful, frightened, exhilarated, look, soaking in for a few seconds her beauty, her form, her presence.  He is in love.  She is not.  At least not with him.

The story could go either way, but each in our own way, we have experienced the feeling of being in love: the intense electricity that runs through the body, the mind clouded with thoughts of that special someone, the fear of rejection, the hope for love reciprocated.

Mystics throughout the ages have understood that the intense feelings of our human being-in-love with someone is a shadow of the intense yearning for us that God has.  In the writings of some of the mystics, God has been called "the lover of our souls."  The roots of this understanding are in the Bible.

For example, in the prophet Isaiah, the prophet offers this song on God's behalf:

"Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard:  My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.  He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines... he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes." (Isaiah 5:1-2)

Isaiah uses the language of human love to sing a song of disappointment on God's behalf.  God had lovingly prepared the vineyard called Israel, but was deeply disappointed by it.  Like a lover who is sad for the sadness of his beloved, Isaiah expresses his sadness for God's sadness.

In a similar vein, in the prophet Jeremiah, God speaks wistfully about Israel, saying:

"I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown.  Israel was holy to the LORD, the first fruits of his harvest." (Jeremiah 2:2-3)

As Jeremiah continues to deliver God's words, God begins to sound like a betrayed lover or husband:

"What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves." (Jeremiah 2:5) In the Old Testament, the concept of "adultery" is used to talk about the worship of idols.  Like an unfaithful spouse, Israel has betrayed the marriage covenant between itself and God by seeking the favours of other gods.  So we hear these words.  Notice that the male and female roles flip-flop back and forth for God and Israel:

"If a man divorces his wife and she goes from him and becomes another man's wife, will he return to her?... You have played the whore with many lovers, and would you return to me?... Return, faithless Israel, says the LORD; I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful, says the LORD; I will not be angry forever.  Only acknowledge your guilt, that you have... scattered your favours among strangers..." (Jeremiah 3:1,12-13)

Perhaps the most expressive, and consequently most controversial book of the Old Testament in this regard, is the Song of Solomon, or, as the title is translated from the Hebrew, the Song of Songs.  Modern scholarship recognizes this book as a collection of royal wedding songs from the time of the kings.  But for people in the time of Jesus, it was understood as an intimate exchange between God and either Israel or the individual worshiper or the soul of the individual, or all three at once.  Legend has it that when the Old Testament was being assembled, many of the religious teachers of ancient Judaism wanted to throw this book out because it seemed so worldly and base.  But one Rabbi convinced the assembly to keep it in by showing how it embodied the deepest mystery of God: God's deep, intimate, impassioned love for us.

Hear these words from the Song of Songs, and listen as Jesus and the disciples would have heard them, as the intimate dialogue between God and each of us.  Here I have chosen the prayers of the worshiper to God:

"Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!  For your love is better than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is perfume poured out... Tell me, you whom my soul loves, where you pasture your flock, where you make it lie down at noon... As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among young men.  With great delight I sat in his shade, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.  He brought me to his banqueting house, and his intention toward me was love... My beloved speaks and says to me: Arise my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come...'" (Song of Songs various verses from chapters 1 and 2)

When the New Testament talks about love, it talks about it in much less intense, much less emotional terms.   It is easy to get the impression that the love of God expressed in the New Testament is primarily an abstract, philosophical kind of love.  And yet if you go below the surface of the texts, you find the same intensity.

In today's reading from John, Jesus says, "Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come and make our home with them" (John 14:23) [i.e., "We love you so much, we want to move in with you"].  In the following chapter, Jesus says, "No one has greater love than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13) [i.e., "I love you more than my own life!"].

In both these passages, Jesus is talking to his disciples on that last night, just as he is about to be arrested, just as he is about to embody God's deep, impassioned love for us in the crucifixion.  At the same time, Jesus himself is about to embody a deep impassioned response to God's love by staying faithful to God's calling to the bitter end.  On our behalf, as an embodiment of total love from the human side, Jesus returns God's love with an act of ultimate love.

The French theologian Olivier Clément once wrote that the self-emptying "of the Son reveals the mystery of God who is love." (Clement: "The Roots of Christian Mysticism").  I would add at the same time that the unwavering faithfulness of Jesus embodies a human response to that love.  In Jesus, the love of God for us, and our reciprocating of that love back to God come together in one person.   Jesus hanging on the cross is a kind of symbol for the place where God's deep, impassioned, yearning, self-emptying love is met by our own desire to return that love in the devotion of a friend or a lover sacrificing him or herself for the beloved.

A seventeen year old male sits in class stealing quick glances over at a seventeen year old female.  His heart races.  Deep down within him is a profound yearning to see her, to be with her, to talk to her.  He is in love.  She is not.  At least not with him.

God yearns to be with us, to love us, to embrace us.  But often we do not see it, we do not notice it, or, we do not want it.  God's love for us is often an unrequited love.  A love that yearns to be completed.   Jesus says, "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love... This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you."

God's yearning for each of us is the yearning for all of humanity to be a reflection of the love that is shared back and forth perfectly in what we call the Trinity.  The Father loves the Son.  The Son loves the Father.  The Son and the Father love the Spirit.  The Spirit loves the Father and the Son.  We reflect the divine reality of love when we love one another.   We fulfill our potential as the image of God when we share back and forth the love that is God.

But God's love goes unrequited among us.  It still seeks its completion among us.  Like a young man or woman, God casts longing glances at us, silently pleading: I love you.  Do you love me too? Amen.

      I believe that the Gospel is a living, dynamic, ever unfolding message of God reconciling the world in Christ.  I do not believe that the Gospel is a fixed message, or a new law of some sort, or a kind of ruler by which we measure people and their goodness.  Rather, I believe that the inner power of the Gospel is so radical, so transcendent of our limited perspective, that in every age there are elements of it that go too far for the people of that time to grasp.  Because of this, what we proclaim as the Gospel in any age is always merely a partial Gospel.  Where the radicality of the Gospel rubs up against our cultural assumptions, up against our mental and emotional limits to conceive of a society that incorporates such a possibility, we begin to replace the Gospel's dynamic, transformative spirit with rules and laws to keep people in their place (or at least away from us) and to make us feel better about ourselves.

In its essence I believe that the Gospel is Jesus and Jesus is the Gospel.  In other words, the Good News is what we see in Jesus.  The messenger is the message.  He lives the life of the New Humanity.  What do we see?  We see the movement of drawing the outcasts and rejected into the circle of the community.  We see incorporation and the crossing of the boundaries enforced by society.  We also see a critique of power and the holders and enforcers of power, especially as this power divides humanity into those who are in and those who are out or those who are at the top and those who are at the bottom.  The key words of the Gospel, of Jesus, are faith, mercy, compassion, and love: trust God above all else, show mercy to those over whom you may have power, have compassion for all, and more than anything else, love -- even the ones you may consider enemies -- because love is the embodiment of God's holiness.

From the beginning, the ramifications of the Gospel have been and continue to be lost on those who embrace it.  In today's reading from Acts we see that the original community of Christians, who were all Jews, had a hard time grasping how God could be sending them to the Gentiles (the non-Jews).  Lucky for Peter that he had a dream in which God showed him that he was not to declare unclean what God had made clean.  The upshot of the dream is that all food and all people are "clean," are acceptable to God.  And yet the Scriptures (remember, the only Bible at this time was what we now call the Old Testament) expressly called certain foods unclean and set strict limits on the interaction of the People of the Covenant (the Jews) with the rest of the world. Here the Gospel transcended the written word and drew Peter and the other Jewish disciples out of their smaller, tradition driven understanding, toward the full Gospel which is the person of Jesus, the Word made flesh, the reconciliation of the world.

The apostle Paul, chosen by God against the better judgment of that earliest community of Christians, played a big part in moving the Gospel out into the world, beyond the social boundary between Jews and Gentiles.  In many parts of his letters you can see that this is his big fight: to bring Jew and Gentile together into one community.  So you will also see him going back and forth, trying to appease this group and then that with concessions, while also trying to push them beyond the preconceptions of what they were raised with into the larger vision of God and humanity reconciled in Christ.

So, for example, we see in I Corinthians 11 that Paul walks the middle road, both opposing the Pharisaic insistence on men praying with their heads covered, while still caving into the custom of women covering their heads, and he uses an interesting bit of quasi-logical rationalization to do so.  And yet, toward the end of the passage, he must concede the ultimate insight of the Gospel on this matter: "Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man or man independent of woman.  For just as woman came from man so man comes from woman; but all things come from God" (I Cor. 11:11-12).  Paul is caught between his own cultural biases, the pressures of his mixed Jewish-Gentile community and his need to keep them together, and the sinking feeling that the Gospel is bigger than any of these.

In Galatians, Paul, perhaps quite accidentally, in a moment of true inspiration or of full insight, declares what even today has not yet become fully realized: In Christ "there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all are one in Christ Jesus" (Gal 3:28).  While Paul himself embodied the crossover between the Jew and Greek, the best he could do for the "slave or free" part was to encourage masters to treat their slaves like brothers; and the best he could do for the "male and female" part was to work with the women of his scattered communities (and many are mentioned in his letters by name) to promote the Gospel.  Once Paul was gone, however, slaves and women seem to have lost any significant advocate in the church, [NB: Here and there are signs of more egalitarian communities.] and so they were condemned to have the organization which bore the message of their freedom insist on their subservience.

The real ramifications of these insights would have to wait nearly 2000 years to come to the beginnings of realization.  The abolition of slavery, equality for women, and a recognition of the evils of Anti-Semitism are things which have occurred only in the last 200 years, even though they were foreshadowed already in Paul.

Although the organized church ended up being on the cutting edge of abolishing slavery about 200 years ago (the hymn "Amazing Grace" was written by a former slave ship captain turned Church of England priest and antislavery advocate), the church has been slower to accept women fully.  It was among the charismatic movements that women were first allowed into the pulpit. Their logic was Peter's logic from our Acts lesson: "If then God gave them the same gift as he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?"  It took the holocaust to finally get most organized churches to renounce Anti-Semitism, which had been such a normal part of church teaching for so many centuries that most people took the holding of a negative view of Jews as a given.  It was only in 1995 that the ELCIC formally renounced the Anti-Semitic writings of Martin Luther.  See how long it takes us to grasp the full ramifications of the Gospel and then to act?!

The work of the Gospel, unfortunately for the many people pushed to the fringes or made powerless in the society or declared unclean by whatever sets of rules we may establish, is a long and slow work of sinking into our social and cultural psyche and gradually percolating to the surface of our understanding until we act.  In the mean time the Gospel continues to be constrained and boxed in by the limitations we put on it when we cling to the legal way of reading the tradition, when we understand the Gospel as a new law, when we read the Bible in a literal manner with a fixed understanding of what it means.  Note that all these ways of going at the matter are driven by fear and the need to have order and control: they are signs of our fearfulness (which is lack of faith) and desperation to impose ourselves on the world around us (which also shows a lack of faith in God to manage the course of history).

Indeed, the struggle of the Gospel itself is a struggle to transcend the limits of time, of culture, of tradition, of the printed word, so that the dynamic Spirit, the living Word who is Jesus Christ, can break through all of the cages and boxes and categories we build for each other.

The Gospel will not be fulfilled until the day when all that stratifies humanity vertically or divides us horizontally is dissolved in the Spirit of faith, mercy, compassion, and love; when the eyes of our hearts are opened to see that we are one and none of us are independent of each other; and we know each other only as beloved children of God.  If there is an enemy, it is the enemy within which we must fight, because that is the enemy from which arise "enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissentions, factions, envy," (Gal 5:20) and all the rest that poison our relationships to each other and with God.

Then, when the Gospel is fulfilled, we will be able to say that John's vision has come true; that the New Jerusalem, the Heavenly City prepared by God, has come down to earth, and that we have indeed made room for God to dwell among us.  Amen.

      What are we about when we do anointing with oil and prayers for healing?  What are we doing?  What are we trying to achieve?

Recently I saw a sign that asked, "Do you just want to be without illness, or do you want to be healthy?"   There is a tremendous truth about that question.  We tend to equate lack of illness with health, but true health is a wholeness, a balance, an equilibrium that involves not simply the body, but also the soul.  Today many health professionals are beginning to talk about the spiritual component to health.

There have been all sorts of studies looking at the relationship between body and spirit in the promotion of well-being.  We know that the two influence each other.  When the body is sick and broken, when there is chronic pain or chronic discomfort of some sort, it drags the spirit down.  You can become depressed or angry or just generally grumpy.

But when the body is functioning on all cylinders (as it were), it can lift the spirit; you just feel better on the inside when your body feels well.

By the same token, when the spirit is broken or sick, when there is a lot of negativity or anxiety or worry or anger or resentment or fear or any of these negative attitudes of the spirit on a chronic basis, it begins to eat away at you emotionally, and therefore (since emotions manifest themselves in the body as chemical responses influencing and activating other physiological functions) in the long term this can begin to put a strain on particular organs or systems in the body.  This then often leads to chronic forms of illness, or it increases the chances of developing something for which you may be genetically predisposed.

But when the spirit is in balance, which from our Christian perspective means, in harmony with God in Christ, and therefore in a healthy and balanced relationship with people and the self, it has a positive influence on the systems and functions of the body.

So the two, body and spirit, exist in a sort of feedback system, playing off each other, influencing and being influenced in a chicken-and-egg relationship.

When our bodies break down we go out there to the medical profession to patch up what is broken.  Rightly, the modern medical system is the place to go when confronted with a physical ailment.  When our spirits are out of whack, the right place to turn is to God in Christ, to bring that spirit back into alignment.

The problem is that it is often hard to tell the true source of an ailment, in the spirit or in the body, especially in the case of chronic things.  Our bodies will sometimes manifest the ailment in a symbolic way, as say a chronic pain in the neck or chronic heart burn or chronic abdominal distress.  Now any of these could be merely a mechanical problem, or they could be arising out of something more subtle, spilling over from the spirit into the body.

This is why spiritual health requires intentional self-reflection.  "Know thyself!" was the battle cry of the Church Fathers.  Know all of your little mind games and your self deluding mental patterns:

(1) Know when you point outward and blame others when you need to take responsibility.  We often do this: "you make me feel mad," "you make me feel sad."  No one makes you feel anything.  This is always simply your patterned reaction to their behaviour.  This then eats away at us and over the long term something somewhere in our bodies begins to manifest some stress symptom.  The gift of compassion is to be able to see past your own ego and need for affirmation or cooperation, and simply be with the person in their actions and reactions without playing the game.

(2) Know when you point inward and blame yourself when you need to let the responsibility lie somewhere else.  This is when we experience survivor's guilt (if I had only dome so-and-so, they might still be alive), or we apologize for the actions of others or are embarrassed by the actions of others because somehow we have gotten our egos entangled in their behaviour.  Parents and children and spouses often have a hard time with this one.

  (3) Know when you excuse yourself for something you should be taking responsibility for.  Sometimes we tromp through relationships like a bull in a china shop.  We think that people should just let us do whatever we want, let the chips fall where they may.  Or we are indeed responsible for someone (as in the case of parents and their children, or a care taker and their charge) but won't take that responsibility seriously.  Whenever this happens we bring suffering to others quite unnecessarily.  Letting someone do the work of picking up the pieces of their own destructive behaviour is necessary suffering.  The suffering put on others for shirking our responsibilities is unnecessary.

(4) Know when your inflated ego takes on what is not rightly yours.  Jesus says "Do not judge," because judgment is God's domain, not yours.  Jesus says, "Why do you judge the servant of another?"  We are all God's servants.  It is not ours to judge and condemn.  That is God's job.  When you judge you make yourself into God.  Your sense of inflated self is verging on blasphemy.  It reminds me of the time a friend of mine had to say to her oldest daughter, who was then about 10, "Back off, your brother doesn't need two mothers."  The daughter was interfering with my friend's role as parent by inserting herself into the role.  The balance in the house was becoming skewed, and the brother was getting increasingly frustrated by having two bosses.  Someone, in this case the mother, needed to reveal this truth to the daughter.

In their extreme forms all of these examples I gave can be linked to both psychological phenomena such as neurosis, psychosis, sociopathy, megalomania, and so on; and to the traditional "passions" ("pathoi") or emotional addictions, as we might call them now, such as greed, anger, listlessness, pride, inflated self-image, and so on.

This is why Confession and Forgiveness are a traditional and natural part of the process of healing.  You have to make your spirit transparent to yourself in order to cooperate in the process of spiritual healing.  But the healing (the "being made whole") ultimately comes from God in Christ.  God is the only one in the universe who knows you, knows me completely.  You and I stand utterly naked, utterly transparent, before God, both physically and spiritually.  We cloth ourselves to conceal the things we are ashamed of, both physically and spiritually, but God sees right through us.  The problem always arises when we forget that we can't hide anything from God.

The act of coming before God, confessing everything that is amiss in us, is for the purpose of beginning to bring an unbalanced spirit back into balance.  Because we cannot ever completely know ourselves -- the Church Fathers say that a part of us will always remain a mystery to us because we are created in the image of God, and therefore share also in the mystery of God on a smaller scale -- because we cannot ever completely know ourselves, in the act of confession, we also have to ask God to reveal us to ourselves.  "Show me, O God, how I really am, who I really am.  Let me see myself as you see me, the good and the bad.  Make me whole!"  If we try to do this on our own, we will often tend to lead ourselves astray with new an ever more clever rationalizations.  God is not merely helpful or useful to the process, God is essential to the process.

When we practice anointing with oil, laying on of hands, and prayer for healing, we are dealing first and foremost with the spiritual side of the health and wholeness equation.  But the spiritual side has an impact on the physical, as the physical has an impact on the spiritual.

The very act -- anointing with oil, laying on of hands, and prayer -- embodies an integrated understanding of the relationship between the physical and the spiritual.  We use oil, a substance out of the physical realm, out of the creation, chosen by God to be a physical sign of God's presence with someone, as we read in many places throughout the Bible; we make physical contact between people, which is a reminder of the importance of community and physical contact with other people in our lives, because that's how God made us to be; and we offer prayers, the expression of our spirits, of our wills, and of our minds directed toward God on behalf of someone, a reminder of the right relationship in which we are meant to stand in the universe.  The physical and the spiritual held together in a sacramental bond -- sacrament in the broad sense meaning "God's use of a physical thing to mark God's presence with us."

That is what we are about today.  We are inviting God into our lives and offering our own cooperation in the process of our healing.  I will do the work of letting go so that God can do the work of making me whole.  The more whole that I am, the more whole my family and community are.  This is a great and important work.  Amen.

      John is a master of building sermons into stories.  The Church Fathers considered John's Gospel the most sublime and the most concentrated. They said that the New Testament was the distillation of the Old; the Gospels the distillation of the New Testament; and John the distillation of the Gospels: in other words the essence of all scripture.  Today we might be hesitant to make such a sweeping statement, but the fact remains that John uses stories as vehicles for "spiritual teaching" (as we would say today) as no one else in the Bible does.

   Today's passage from John 21 is a complex sermon on conversion and following Jesus.  Gathered by the sea shore are seven disciples -- the number associated with perfection or completion.  Five are named, one is the "disciple whom Jesus loved," who is presumably John, but is also the literary device by which the author inserts the reader into the story.  The seventh disciple remains unnamed.

   Peter assumes the leadership role and takes the others out fishing.  We learn that they go fishing at night, but do not catch anything.  Night fishing was and remains common in many parts of the world.  In ancient times people used torches to attract fish and then catch them.  It seems like a fairly fool proof method, but the seven disciples catch nothing.  At dawn, when they head for shore, they see a mysterious figure on the beach who tells them to cast their nets on the right side of the boat, and immediately they catch 153 fish: it was believed in those days that there were 153 kinds of fish.

   The amazing and unexpected catch baffles all.  The "disciple whom Jesus loved" -- again, John and you the reader --identifies to Peter who the mysterious figure is.  Peter, who was apparently naked up to that point, throws on some clothes and jumps into the water.

   Up to this point we have a kind of parable version of the passage that says, "Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labour in vain.  Unless the LORD guards the city, the guard keeps watch in vain.  It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives sleep to his beloved." (Psalm 127:1-2)

   All the work of the disciples is fruitless until they follow the guidance of the Master.  But more than this, the story is also a play on John's contrasting images of light and dark.  The disciples work at night, which in John's symbol system is associated with the world, with ordinary life, life without the Spirit of God.  Jesus of the light that shines in the darkness and is not overcome by it (John 3:19).  Jesus is the light of the world (John 8:12).  Jesus calls his disciples to be children of light (John 12:36).

   But like Nicodemus in the early part of John's Gospel (John 3:1ff), here the disciples set out at night, in the darkness, and their work is fruitless.  At dawn, however, on this the third time that Jesus appears to his disciples after his rising from the dead (on the third day), there is almost a recapitulation of the scene at the empty tomb, where Peter and the "disciple whom Jesus loved" race to the tomb.  Peter goes in first, but the other disciple recognizes and believes -- gets it -- first.

   Coming into the light means; 1) being open to Jesus as the light of the world, 2) trusting in that light, and 3) acting out of that trust.

   So the story continues.  Jesus invited the disciples to have breakfast with him.  He has fish and bread, reminiscent of the feeding stories in the Gospels, but asks the disciples to bring some of the fish as well.  They eat, but are afraid to ask who he is because they know who he is.

   John seems to be taking us to the next step on a conversion journey here.  While the first part of the story we heard earlier, standing by itself, seems to be mainly about light and dark, and following the light.  This section shifts the message a bit.  The disciples have undergone a kind of conversion.  They have had to re-learn to follow: first by coming into the light, then by listening, and now by being fed.  The association here seems to be communion or the agape feasts of the early Church.  We could say that generally what is implied is the need to be fed by Jesus in the context of the community of the followers of Jesus.  The seven, like the seven days of the week, are together with the eighth one, like the Resurrection Day which was often called the eighth day of creation by the early Church.  They are a complete community: all the members are there, and together they are being fed, both by what they bring as the fruit of their faithful following, and by what Jesus brings which is a gift not derived from our work.

   To be converted means to become a part of the body of Christ (to use Paul's term), to be grafted into the vine and be one of the many branches (to use the term from John's Gospel).  In our culture of the individual who goes off and does their own thing because dealing with people and institutions is irritating, this is a hard message to get across.  But the fact is that Jesus calls us into an intentional community.  This is the part of this conversion that we probably have to work the hardest on because it has become the most unnatural.

   Finally in the story, Jesus singles out Peter for a lesson on discipleship.  That lesson can be summarized in two phrases used by Jesus: "feed my sheep" and "follow me."  The process of conversion goes from being fed to feeding.  It is not a complete conversion until the cycle, the spiritual circuit is complete.  As long as our life of faith is about getting, receiving, fulfilling my own needs, and not about then also giving, sharing, and looking after the needs of others, it is not complete.

   And yet, the true shepherd of the sheep is not the disciple, but Jesus.  The sheep know the voice of their true shepherd and follow it (John 10:1-18); and, as Jesus said, "Whoever serves me, must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also" (John 12:26).

   So, at the end, we are also left with a challenge: to be where Jesus is; to follow Jesus both into the community of faith, but also out into the place where light needs to shine.  I think that just as the disciples, who had only recently seen Jesus, had to relearn, we too are always in the process of being converted, of being turned (that's what "converted" means) back to God, back to Jesus, back to the light.  It probably happens every day that we find ourselves operating out of our own ego centres, living in the darkness, when Jesus shines a little light into our egos and beings to turn us toward that larger consciousness which Jesus is.  Then we get drawn out of ourselves, into that feeding community, and perhaps even out to become those who feed others.  Amen.

      Today's reading from John's Gospel is the famous story of "doubting Thomas"; the disciple who had to see with his own eyes in order to believe.  It is a story that raises important questions about belief and faith, and what it is that we are doing when we believe or have faith.

   Let me make some distinctions in order to get at these issues.
(1) Knowing, (2) believing, and (3) having faith are three distinct activities.  Furthermore, there are two types of knowing.  There is the knowing of information (German wissen; Spanish saber) and the knowing of someone on a personal basis (German kennen; Spanish conocer).  I will come back to this last one (the difference between knowing someone and knowing something) later.  First, let's clarify a few things about the distinction (1) knowledge, (2) belief, and (3) faith.

   Of the three, we think that we usually operate out of knowledge, but we actually operate out of belief and faith more than we do out of knowledge.  The idea that we know something is a very attractive idea.  It is comforting and empowering to believe that we know things.  But most of what we think we know, we really only believe or assume.  All we really know at any given time is what is happening right around us.  All you know is what is going on right here, right now.  Although you may think you know what is going on out there, you don't.  You can only assume it or believe it.  In order to know it, you would have to be out there, observing it, and then what is going on in here would shift to the realm of belief or assumption.

   We place great trust in what we believe to be true; we have faith in it.  We have great faith that every day the sun will rise, move across the sky, and set at the end of the day.  We also put great trust in our technologies.  We have great faith that when we put the key in the ignition of the car and turn the key, that the car will start.  When it doesn't start, we are deeply irritated or disappointed, because we have come to believe, and believe strongly, that the norm should be for this complex machine to start.  And then we have great faith in other drivers not to ram us, or cross the centre line, or do other chaotic things.  But of course, we never know that this will be the case, we only believe it to be so, and trust ourselves to this belief enough to set out on the road.

   To be human is to believe in things.  This is why I scratch my head when people set up the false dichotomy between science and religion.  This false dichotomy says that what falls into the realm of science is provable and is about knowledge, and that what falls into the realm of religion can only be accepted on faith, implying that it is neither provable nor knowable.  In other words, according to this commonly held notion, science requires no faith, because it proves itself.  Religion requires all faith because it is not provable.

   I see this as a false dichotomy because it makes science out to be more than it is, and because it dismisses anything that does not fall into the domain of science.  The popular image of science is that it encompasses everything there is.  But science is really only about observing the physical universe, and discerning the patterns, trends, and probabilities in it.  In other words, science attempts to understand physical things via observation and experiment, and relies on being able to replicate results.  We, the general populace, then assume that these repeatable experiments and observations are

when really they are high probabilities.  But we put great faith in these probabilities, and treat them as absolute, knowable facts.

   The religious realm is not really the opposite of science.  It is rather a different way of entering into the quest for understanding.  The classic western Christian definition of the word "theology" is "faith seeking understanding".  The religious sphere begins with a great assumption that is neither provable nor disprovable.  That assumption is that God exists.  The religious realm begins with an act of faith.  Or, to be more precise, it begins with a belief.   The belief turns into faith when we begin to shape our behaviour in light of that belief.  In other words, when we trust so much in the content of the belief, that it begins to govern our decision making, then it has become faith; just as when we trust our belief that the car will go so much that we arrange our lives around the belief.

   Science also begins with a huge assumption, though this is not often admitted.  The assumption is that only the physical is real.  What is not material or is not in some way measurable energy, is not real.  Again, it is an assumption that many place great faith in, but it is still an assumption.  It assumes that what we cannot measure, cannot be.  Science and religion are not opposites, they are rather attempts to understand that have different underlying assumptions, different starting places.  I cringe when people try to use religion to do science, or when scientists make pronouncements about the reality of spiritual things or the existence of that which is spirit.  In each case it is like pounding a square peg through a round hole.  And yet, the two are not mutually exclusive.  Rather, they ask different questions, and really have different goals.

   The classic eastern Christian understanding of the word "theology" could be summarized as "an awareness of the presence of God arrived at through disciplined prayer."  For eastern Christianity, theology isn't knowing, in the sense of information, but knowing in the sense of relationship and awareness.  I think this breaks us out of that false dichotomy a bit.  It also points to the genius of the Gospel reading for today.  Yes, the religious task begins with a huge assumption (that God is), but at its best it proceeds on a relational basis, not an informational basis.  Whenever religion degenerates into information, it has lost its soul and become pseudo-science or wannabe-science, trying to prove the unprovable, or worse, demanding adherence to a particular interpretation of the experience of the numinous.

   The other disciples had to forget "proving" anything to Thomas.  Rather, they had to let him experience the presence of the risen Jesus for himself.  All the second hand information in the world couldn't move Thomas to faith.  But and encounter with Christ could and did.  His response was not to start spouting a creedal formula or making complex assertions about the nature of God.  It was not to say, "Hey Jesus, I know xyz about you."  Rather, his response was a relational act, establishing and affirming the relationship, saying to Jesus, "You are my lord and my God."  In other words, he has made, not a statement about Jesus and God, but a prayer to Jesus and God.

   The author of John's Gospel says that he was one of those who saw; that he was there and came to believe, and I would say, more than this, came to have faith, came to have trust in God as revealed in Jesus.  As he states in today's reading, he wrote these things so that we too might come to believe, and, I would add, have faith.  But if we think that this act of believing is making ourselves hold to a set of beliefs about Jesus or God in the form of information in our heads, then I think we have missed the point and crossed the line from real faith into pseudo-science.  Rather I think that John's assertion becomes an invitation for us to open ourselves to the possibility of God's presence in our lives on a very personal basis.  It is an invitation to come to know God, to come to know Jesus, not as information, but in that relationship expressed by Thomas in the prayer: My lord and my God!  Amen.

      The empty tomb: it is an exhilarating and a troubling part of our Christian faith.  This is the part that is the really big stumbling block for so many people; and with the recent media buzz around the alleged find of the ossuary (bone box) of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and of a reputed son they are supposed to have had together (shades of The Da Vinci Code?), the matter has probably become intensified for many.  So let me play devil's advocate for a moment, around Jesus, his ministry, and some of the more "unusual" aspects of his life...

Birth in Bethlehem?  Okay, we can go with that.  Virgin birth?  Well, we'll think about it -- maybe it was a way of talking about something, but anyway, it's not so important that one can't overlook it.  Healing the sick?  Hmm, I guess it could happen.  Maybe Jesus healed psychosomatic illnesses.  Raising Lazarus from the dead?  Maybe Lazarus was in a coma?  Crucifixion?  Fair enough, it seems to be the part of Jesus' life that gets the most consistent treatment in the New Testament.  Resurrection from the dead?  Now come on!  Who's supposed to believe that?  For an intelligent person in the 21st century to believe that is just too much to ask.  It must be some mythological thing, some after-the-fact thing projected back into history by distraught followers of the dead Jesus who started having visions of him...

   Yes, the empty tomb, the resurrection are truly problematic elements for modern people to accept.  But you know, they were problematic even for people of ancient times to accept.

   I am not going to try to prove to you that Jesus rose from the dead.  No one can do that.  What I am going to do, is open the possibility that one element in particular of the way the resurrection stories go may be a strong indicator that something really strange happened on that morning -- perhaps even the resurrection.

   All four Gospels have one interesting element in common when it comes to the resurrection: none of them describe what happened.  Instead, there is this blank space between the time Jesus' dead body is laid in the tomb on Friday evening, and the time the women come on Sunday morning to complete the burial process with the spices and ointments.  Matthew does describe how a guard was posted, and how when the stone was rolled away by a divine messenger, the guards were terrified.  But we do not have any description of a resurrection.

   So what we have is not really the story of the resurrection, but the description of things that happened at the empty tomb.  If the Gospel writers were simply fabricating this, they could easily have written in a description of how Jesus unwrapped himself, or how an angel came and unwrapped him, or how there was a flash of light and a voice from heaven.  But they do none of this.  Instead, we learn that when people get there, the tomb is empty, and the angelic figures announce simply that Jesus is risen.  Very anticlimactic after the high drama of the crucifixion, or after the dramatic tension of the scene where Jesus calls Lazarus forth from the tomb.

   I think this is telling and is significant.  No one was there to see how it happened, so no one can describe it.  It also leaves a lot of room for the possibility that Jesus' body was stolen.  Again, if the Gospel writers were just fabricating this, they would have done a better job of closing up such a huge loophole in the story.

   Of course, the risen Jesus then begins to appear to people.  He seems to have a form that is both like and unlike Jesus before his death.  He is both physical and not physical.  He is both recognizable and not recognizable.  People at first do not realize who is talking to them, but then they have a moment of recognition.  Interestingly, this is very consistent with encounters that people have with God.  They know at some level that God has spoken to them or manifested the divine presence somehow to them, and yet are never really sure.  Certainty and uncertainty go hand in hand.  The accounts of these post-resurrection appearances sound very much like the recording of people's first hand encounters with something other, something out of the ordinary, something spiritual or divine.  Someone who is too sure that God has spoken to them, is not to be trusted.  Someone who is not quite sure what it was, may have actually encountered something -- or not.  Only time will tell.

   The empty tomb and all of the uncertainty around what it means or what really happened there speaks loudly of the naïve honesty with which these Gospel writers are relating either their own experiences, or the stories they heard from the eyewitnesses or from people close to the eyewitnesses.

   I don't know what happened there at the empty tomb.  I think the followers of Jesus didn't really know either.  But their common experience led them to a frightening and exhilarating conclusion: Jesus rose from the dead, just as he had told them on numerous occasions he would, even though at the time they hadn't understood what he was getting at.

   What was the manner or nature of that rising from the dead?  What happened to the body?  They didn't know.  Jesus didn't explain it.  We don't know.  But something happened; something extraordinary, something inexplicable, something both unnerving and exciting.  And so the first believers, the people who had walked with Jesus, who had learned from him, who had seen his works of power, who had known him on a deeply personal basis, came to believe that God had indeed raised him from the dead.

   It was a message that was hard to sell in those days, and it is still a message that stretches people's ability to believe today.  Sometimes we just have to come to the empty tomb with our puzzlement and our questions and ask them into the tomb, the way Mary Magdalene and the other women did on that mysterious, troubling, hope generating morning.  Maybe an answer will come.  Maybe, by the grace of God, something or someone will speak who awakens faith in us: a human being, an angelic apparition, or a still small voice within.  Maybe, by some unexplained coincidence, we will all be able to affirm together that Christ is risen...

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!
Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!
Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!