A Living Eulogy

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Luke 24:44-53

Ah yes, the eulogy.  It’s not easy to give a eulogy.  The word literally means good word and to eulogize is to speak good things about someone.  In most cases, finding nice things to say about a person you’ve known since way back when is not a difficult thing.  The task is to try to limit what you say and still come out summarizing who this person was.  

As a minister, the task of eulogizing a person at their funeral often falls back on me.  Usually, I get a family together a day or so before the funeral and get them to start telling me stories about who this person was.  I don’t tell any of their stories in the eulogy.  That gathering simply gives me a sense of who that person was and then I try to say how God worked through this person to love or to bless her family, friends, and even whole communities.  Some people are so saintly that I can say that God gave us glimpse of himself through this person.  

But then there’s that odd funeral when trying to find something good to say…weellllll…better talk about something else.  I‘ve had to do that twice in 26 years of ministry, twice too many.  I’ll tell you about the first time.  I was in my first year of ministry down in West Virginia and I hardly a clue what to do for a funeral anyway.  In seminary, they wisely taught us to avoid eulogizing people if at all possible because our role at a funeral is to proclaim resurrection in Christ.  In our tradition, in our theological tradition the service we do at death isn’t a funeral service nor a celebration of life.  In our Book of Common Worship, it’s called a Service of Witness to the Resurrection.  We’re supposed to talk about resurrection.  That’s why if you come to a funeral that I conduct you won’t hear me talking about going to heaven when you die but rather I talk about resurrection in a new creation.  You will also notice that I didn’t take my seminary professor’s advice as I will always say something about the person we’re commending on.

Anyway, here’s what happened.  It started when the local funeral director called me and said a family wanted the Presbyterian minister to do their father’s funeral because Grandma so and so from way back when was a Presbyterian and that’s what they thought they must be.  Being the only Presbyterian minister for miles around I agreed.  Unfortunately, I was unable to get the family to agree to meet with me for storytime.  It simply would have would have been just too difficult for them.  One of the daughters led me to suspect that her father wasn’t all that great of a man.  I also asked a few people who might have known him or at least of him and they all agreed he wasn’t the finest example of a human being.  So, I was left with a mess on my hands.  I had to do the funeral for a man most people regarded as “Hell bound”.  My usual funeral plan wasn’t going to work because I had no evidence that God had blessed this family through their father and he certainly hadn’t been a person you’d look at and say God is like that.  

Well, showtime.  I stood there and did the service before his two daughters and son as they wept.  I sensed there was a lot of unfinished business there.  So, instead of eulogizing I talked a bit about how to deal with grief and that death is not the end of things.  As I expected, they didn’t pay me.  No matter. What really wrenched my gut with that funeral was that I was unable to tell a grieving family that their father was a blessing to them. That’s pretty messed up.  This man’s funeral had no eulogy.  I am saddened with the thought that this man’s life may have lacked God’s blessing and therefore there was no reason for his family to bless God and be thankful for their father.  If assumptions or should I say judgments are correct, this man was one of those people that make it hard for us to say that Jesus Christ is Lord for if he is Lord, why would he let someone be so hurtful to his own family.  We have all known people like this and I’m sure that is a question we’ve all asked.  I don’t know the answer.

Well, this is Ascension Sunday.  Today we celebrate that Jesus the resurrected one has ascended to the right hand of the Father and from there reigns in the power of the Holy Spirit; and by power I mean the power that comes through the vulnerability of self-denying, self-giving love.  We would like to believe that the way God reigns in his creation is through blessing the good and cursing the wicked.  But, thinking of the man I spoke of earlier, we want to ask why God didn’t get that man for causing so much hurt.  I can’t answer that question, the justice question; but with respect to how Jesus reign’s in this world,  I can say that Jesus’ reigning in this twisted world is going to look like his death on the cross.  The cross was his throne and he reigns in unconditional love.  Jesus shows us how God rules in his creation by suffering for us and with us whether the suffering comes as just part of life or because of the bent and twisted will of others not to mention our own.  

To that weeping family I could have said that Jesus was with them in the sufferings they have endured from being the children of that man but I had no details to point to.  I could have said that their expectations of God should be that somehow God was going to take all the hurt that man caused them and instead of letting it remain as senseless hurt, use it as the means of blessing them and others.  The blessing will primarily be experienced as knowing God and God’s love, which tends to heal and change us so that we might be a blessing to others in their suffering.  The reign of Christ is that he will bless us by being present with us in our hurts and then making those hurts to be the means by which he blesses us with new life in himself and then others through us.  He reigns by suffering with his own and healing us in such a way as we wind up knowing God himself, being healed and changed by God, and them being part of God’s blessing to others.

Well, if you are wondering why I’m talking about eulogies and blessing, I have no short answer to give you other than at the end of our passage from Luke he says that the disciples were continually in the temple blessing God.  The Greek word for blessing is eulogia – literally, eulogy.  The apostles spent their days after Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father in the temple eulogizing Jesus.  Ascended to the right hand means what it sounds like.  Jesus is God’s right-hand man so to speak, the one through whom God does what God does in God’s Creation which is to save and heal his Creation and those in it.  What Jesus did as he ministered back then, is what God continues to do through the people of Jesus in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit: healing, restoring, reconciling, resurrecting in the power of self-giving love.  

Immediately after Jesus ascended, the disciples went back to Jerusalem to eulogize him.  The evidence that Jesus Christ has ascended and reigns in this world is that there are those who know him and can eulogize him because he has acted in their lives for healing, reconciliation, restoration, indeed given new life to them by the presence and good work of the Holy Spirit.   These people know they have been in the presence of God and blessed by God and the wish to witness to that, to eulogize.

The Trinity works in our lives and through us by means of blessing us so that we are a blessing to others.  Jesus, the Son blesses us by letting us know that he is the one who suffers with us, who prays continually for us, and reveals the self-giving love of God to us.  This blessing bears its fruit as we get involved with being Jesus’ blessing of others.  If we’ve got a friend at work suffering through a divorce, or grief, or whatever, this means we will be inclined to be part of God’s blessing to them by suffering through it with them.  Be the one who is intentional about being there and listening.  Be the one who gives hope and encouragement.  Be the one who helps people to forgive and reconcile.  Be a living eulogy of Jesus, the proof of his ascension and reigning.  Be part of his good healing work in the lives of others.  Amen.

Power from on High

Luke 24:44-53

On Ascension Sunday we celebrate Jesus’ enthronement a Lord of all creation, his taking his seat at the right hand of the Father.  He has defeated evil, sin, and death through his incarnation and faithfulness in life and his death and resurrection.  All things belong to him, are in his hands.  All power is his. But, and to be frank, saying that Jesus is LORD of all creation is a bit of a hard sell these days.  It's been just shy of 2,000 years.  The world is still full of evil.  The pandemic of sin is still raging.  Death is still the leading cause of death.  What's changed?  Really, what has changed since Jesus was enthroned as LORD of all creation?  One could easily argue that Science and Technology have done way more good than him.  You could even add that religion, all religion, that great “opiate of the masses” has caused more death and suffering than any disease ever has and continues to do so.  How can we talk about Jesus reigning as LORD over all creation when reality is so “obviously” contradictory with it's facts?

One thing we do not do is play that old faith card.  Where we say that faith and reality are two different things.  You just have to have faith.  True faith is not divorced from reality.  If we are going to say Jesus is LORD and that he is ultimately reigning, then we somehow have to work in there that yes, its been 2,000 years; yes, evil, sin, and death are still around; and yes, those who claim to believe in him have done some pretty heinous things.  Indeed, to be faithful to faith, when we go looking for the reign of Jesus we have to go right smack-dab into the heart of all the brokenness and human insidiousness and there we will find both his reign and true faith.

Just before Jesus ascended his disciples asked him was right now the time he was going to set things to right.  Instead of making his victory overtly manifest by putting the world to rights, he told his disciples to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the gift the Father had promised them, the Holy Spirit who would empower them to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth.  They would be clothed with power from on high. 

All power is given to Jesus and he passes that power on to us.  Yet, we have to remember that his power is different than what the world calls power.  His power, the power by God created this universe and sustains it, the power by which the Father raised Jesus from the dead is that of love expressed in humilty and weakness.  Jesus on the night of his arrest did not raise a military.  He stripped down to his under clothing, picked up a towel, and washed his disciples feet and then he died on a cross.  For us, Jesus’ power becomes manifest in us through the futility of prayers and acts of humble service by those who are indwelled by the Holy Spirit.  His Lordship is attested by small gatherings of individuals who have been changed at heart by God's presence in them.  Let me give you and example.  This is an account of a day in the life of an Emerge nurse, Dawn Husnick, that I think speaks loudly to how Jesus is LORD:

            “In my years in the ER, I saw Jesus daily doing his kingdom work in and through a group of his followers.  It was a true expression of church.  One day stands out beyond all others and left me radically changed forever.  It was the day I saw Jesus face to face...

             'Give us hearts as servants' was the song they were singing as I left the church service, heading for my second twelve hour shift in a row.  Weekends in the ER can be absolutely brutal!  I was physically and emotionally spent as I walked up to the employee entrance.  The sound of ambulances and an approaching medical helicopter were telltale signs that I would literally be hitting the ground running.

            'Dawn...can you lock down room 15?' yelled out my charge nurse as I crawled up to the nurse's station.  (When someone asked for a lockdown it was usually a psychiatric or combative case.)  Two security guards stood outside the room, biceps flexing like bouncers anticipating a drunken brawl.  My eyes rolled as I walked past them into the room to set up.

            The masked medics arrived with N strapped and restrained to their cart.  The hallway cleared with heads turned away in disgust at the smell surrounding them.  They entered the room and I could see N with his feet hung over the edge of the cart covered with plastic bags tightly taped around the ankles.  The ER doctor quickly examined N while we settled him in.  The medics rattled off their findings in the background with N mumbling in harmony right along with them.  The smell was overpowering as they uncovered his swollen, mold-encrusted feet.  After tucking him in and taking his vital signs, I left the room to tend to my other ten patients-in-waiting.

            Returning to the nurse's station, I overheard the other nurses and techs arguing over who would take N as their patient.  In addition to the usual lab work and tests, the doctor had ordered a shower complete with betadine foot scrub, antibiotic ointment, and non-adherent wraps.  The charge nurse looked in my direction.  'Dawn, will you please take N?  Please?  You don't have to do the foot scrub—just give him a shower.'  I agreed and made my way to gather the supplies and waited for the security guard to open up the hazmat shower.

            As I waited with N, the numbness of my business was interrupted by an overwhelming sadness.  I watched N, restless and mumbling incoherently to himself through his scruff of a beard and 'stache.  His eyes were hidden behind his ratted, curly, shoulder-length mane.  This poor shell of a man had no one to love him.  I wondered about his past and what happened to bring him to this hopeless empty place?  No one in the ER that day really looked at him and no one wanted to touch him.  They wanted to ignore him and his broken life.  But as much as I tried...I could not.  I was drawn to him.

            The smirking security guards helped me walk him to the shower.  As we entered the shower room I set out the shampoo, soaps, and towels like it was a five-star hotel.  I felt in my heart that for at least for those ten minutes, this forgotten man would be treated as a king.  I thought for those ten minutes he would see the love of Jesus.  I set down the foot sponge and decided that I would do the betadine foot scrub by myself as soon as his shower was finished.  I called the stock room for two large basins and a chair.

            When N was finished in the shower I pulled back the curtain and walked him to the 'throne' of warmed blankets and the two basins set on the floor.  As I knelt at his feet, my heart broke and stomach turned as I gently picked up his swollen rotted feet.  Most of his nails were black and curled over the top of his toes.  The skin was rough, broken, and oozing pus.  Tears streamed down my face while my gloved hands tenderly sponged the brown soap over his wounded feet.

            The room was quiet as the once-mocking security guards started to help by handing me towels.  As I patted the foot dry, I looked up and for the first time  N's eyes looked into mine.  For that moment he was alert, aware, and weeping as he quietly said, 'Thank you.'  In that moment, I was the one seeing Jesus.  He was there all along, right where he said he would be.

            '...Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of theses who are members of my family, you did it to me.'”[1]  Friends, for now it is in the prayers and little acts of love insignificant people of transformed heart do for other insignificant people that Jesus is attested as LORD.  Friends, our God reigns and you are part of it.  Never underestimate what is going on when you feel moved in your very bowels to show kindness to someone.  Amen.

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[1]   McKnight, Scot; A Community Called Atonement; Abington Press, Nashville, 2007; p. 3.

“The Eleventh Dimension according to Theological Science”

Text: Luke 24:44-53

As I was doing a little background work on these passages from Luke (and Acts 1:11) earlier this week, one of my favourite resource sights sent me to a blogger who was having a bit of trouble with the idea that Jesus’ Ascension into heaven was actually a real; i.e. physical, event as opposed to some spiritual thing where Jesus the ghost just disappeared.  He based his argument on a problem he had with Christians using the preposition “up” to describe wherever it was Jesus went.  Our belief is that Jesus ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father.  His point was that physics has successfully demonstrated that in the universe in which we live there is no up or down.  This is particularly true of planets.  Planets are round like a ball, there is no “up” on a ball only an “away from”.  Therefore, his conclusion was that there was no way we can talk about Jesus’ Ascension knowing what we know now about the universe.  I beg to disagree with him.  I tend to think that the more we come to know about this universe in which we live at both the cosmic and the sub-atomic levels the more plausible and truly beautiful Jesus’ Ascension becomes.

The thinking of the blogger erred in its narrow-minded-literalness, the same narrow-minded literalness that he accused the church of having in its thinking about heaven being “up”.  He never gave another way of understanding Jesus Ascension.  Had he done the work of stepping into the Hebrew concepts that the New Testament writers were trying to find Greek words to convey he would have found that “up”-ness in those words are related to worship, of lifting up prayers and burnt offerings.  Luke wasn’t trying to say that Jesus went “up” to go to heaven; and we are being narrow-minded if we think heaven is “up”.  He was trying to say that Jesus went to God the Father as do prayers and the smoke of burnt offerings.  In essence, he was taken up to be enthroned in the heavenly arena of worship which is part of the spectrum of creation.  Jesus, the Incarnate Son of God, was taken into the part of physical creation known as heaven where God’s presence first contacts creation and creates the effect the Bible writers call his “glory”; the place where the Father is hidden behind indescribably beautiful light; the place where Jesus the Son sits in the authority of God as High Priest leading the worship of creation and interceding on our behalf and as King sending forth the Holy Spirit to heal, renew, and recreate this diseased and broken creation in accordance with the Gospel.  The apostle John and several of the Old Testament prophets describe having seen such a place which telescopes and microscopes are unable.  What they saw, they understood to be just as real as you and I sitting here.  A physicist might consider calling it an unseen dimension of creation.

Let’s think about unseen dimensions for a moment.  The science off physics tells us that for our universe to exist, there must be ten levels or dimensions to it.  Humans are only aware of four: horizontal, vertical, depth or volume, and time.  Where are the other seven?  The best way to describe how they exist is to think of what happens to cigarette smoke in a room.  When it’s fresh off the cigarette we can see it.  So these dimensions were at the Big Bang.  Yet, the nature of smoke is to dissipate until it permeates the entirety of the room so that even though we cannot see the smoke, we can smell it anywhere in the room.  So it is with the other six dimensions, they permeate our existence.  That being the case, who is to say that there isn’t an eleventh realm of creation in which it can be described as Paul writes in Colossians.  “He (Jesus) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.  For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities - all things were created through him and for him.  And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent.  For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 3:15-20).  What Paul describes here is a dimension of our reality reflecting its relationship to its Creator something physical science cannot see but theological science certainly can describe because God who appears as hidden to us has and does reveal himself.  The ten dimensions of our universe cannot exist apart from its relationship to the Trinity, the eleventh dimension.

Well, I’ve mentioned the word relationship and in the world of physics this means we should talk about forces.  A force is a relationship or a capacity in which one object can cause another to change.  Think attraction and resistance.  Our physical reality as it presently is has four fundamental forces.  At the moment of the Big Bang there was only one, but as things began to cool that one force stabilized into four.  (Incidentally, there is a growing consensus among physicists that the universe came into being out of nothing.  Chalk one up for their being a Creator.)  Anyway, these four forces begin with gravity which causes objects to attract from a distance.  According to Einstein gravity is like pulling a bed sheet tight by its four corners and setting a bowling ball in the middle which would make a depression that causes lighter objects to roll to it.  Next there’s the electromagnetic force.  That’s the push and pull that happens with electricity and magnets and throw light in there as well.  Moving on there are two nuclear forces.  The weak force is what causes nuclear decay, decay in the nucleus of an atom.  Although it is the weakest of the forces, the sun could not burn without it.  Finally, there is the strong force.  This force is what holds the nucleus of an atom together and is the stuff atomic bombs are made of. 

There’s another something like a fundamental force that physics doesn’t deal with because it is biological in nature: life.  Things live and grow and procreate.  That’s life.  Life happens and we haven’t the slightest idea how.  Similarly, sentience or consciousness and the ability to have relationships are forces as well and once again, we don’t know the first thing about them.  Although the universe could exist without life and sentience, it would be lacking its reason for being.

Let’s talk about a force of a spiritual nature.  Our universe and our Creator have a relationship that involves attraction and resistance and change.  It is inappropriate to say as some do that God is a force within his creation, but there is force involved here.  At our very core we are attracted to our Creator, but sin turns that force into resistance and like a nuclear explosion it causes relational radiation and death.  (This would be a good place to say that nuclear weapons are the epitome of human sin.)  God the Son became human as Jesus and by taking sin upon himself, dying with it, and being raised set in motion the negation or reversal indeed the healing of our resistance to God restoring the Life-giving relationship we are supposed to have with him as his beloved creatures made in is image.  This force is salvation and is powered by God the Holy Spirit.  God’s very self, the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is behind it.  This force of attraction involves communication, the proclamation of repentance and forgiveness in Jesus name.  This proclamation is also empowered by the Holy Spirit, the Loving communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit  so that it is God’s very self that is bringing forth or causing salvation.  This salvation is evident in repentance which is the force of being drawn in by the attracting love of God in Christ Jesus and learning to live worshipfully meaning prayerfully and gratefully according to the Law of Love.  This salvation is experienced as knowing oneself accepted and loved by God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit something Paul calls reconciliation.  There is a healing that comes from experiencing this which compels us to live life compelled by the force of salvation being proactive about forgiving those who have hurt us, damaged us and making amends with those we know we have hurt.  This is life in the name of Jesus. 

I challenge you to wrap your mind around this thought that our lives and the totality of this physical universe are wrapped up in the eleventh dimension of relationship with the Trinity through Christ Jesus in the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit.  Nothing can exist and live apart from this dimension of reality.  The science of theology which is rooted in prayer and praise tells this and the day is coming when physical science will demonstrate this as well.  Amen.