Coming Down The Mountain
Category: Bishop's Sermons
Speaker: The Rt Rev Mark D.W. Edington
Tags: leader, unity, ascension, follower
May 29, 2022 • Sunday in Ascensiontide
Saint Paul’s Within the Walls, Rome
Text: John 17:22: “The glory that you have given me I have given them,
so that they may be one, as we are one.”
We have arrived today at the most dangerous moment of the church year, the one Sunday of the greatest peril we face every year. At least—if you take the calendar of the church seriously—this is the one Sunday of the church year we have the most to worry about.
That is because on this one day of the whole church year, we are left without adult supervision. Now I know, for at least some of you, you think that means: Father Austin is away, and we are stuck with this substitute teacher for two weeks, and maybe we should see what we can get away with.
But actually it means something far more serious for your eternal soul. If the purpose of Holy Mother Church in giving us the annual gift of the church calendar is to give us the chance to live something like the experience the disciples had—and that is, at least, one of the reasons why we have this cycle every year—then on this one Sunday every year we are at the single moment after the Ascension of Jesus and before the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We are—make no mistake about it—alone.
Remember that on Ascension Day, Jesus said to his disciples—you remember this, right? You were all here on Ascension Day this past Thursday, weren’t you? Well, before he ascended, Jesus promised his disciples, promised us, that he would not leave us comfortless.
But the comfort hasn’t come yet. Just for a moment, put yourself in the midst of that little crowd of eleven disciples up on the mountain. For forty days—that’s a number with real meaning for people shaped by Jewish tradition—for forty days after his resurrection, Jesus appeared to them, walked with them, talked with them, ate with them—even made them breakfast. It was just about enough for them to believe that, yes, he really had been raised from the dead. It was impossible to grasp, and yet there he was, right with them, just like old times.
They must have started to wonder whether the adventure would just continue from here, whether they would start going around again feeding lots of people and healing lots of people and doing things that got the Pharisees’ noses out of joint. But Jesus didn’t seem really eager to go out on the road again; it seemed like he only wanted to spend time with them, almost like he was preparing them for something.
And then came the drama of the Ascension: that walk up the mountain, and those words of assurance, and the cloud, and then—and then, well, he was gone.
Imagine for a moment being part of that little group walking back down the mountain. If we are in that group, we are certainly not coming down that path in silence. We are asking each other—What do you think that was about? What just happened? What do we do not? Do you think he’s coming back? No, that seemed pretty final. At least not anytime soon. Okay, but what did it all mean?
That walk down the mountain is the beginning of a conversion experience for the first followers of Jesus. And we do well to pay attention to it, because after all, we are meant to follow their example. With each step down that mountain, they are being changed—changed from followers into leaders. Before that moment they have been tagging along, one or two steps behind, trying to understand. Now, the leadership of the church, the whole future of the faith, will fall on them. Now, they are in the front.
Remember, all the way down that mountain, and today, when we catch up with them, they had no idea what would happen next. Jesus had promised they would not be left alone. But boy, they sure felt alone. One day passed after another, and it became clearer and clearer that he wasn’t coming back to them. It must have felt a lot like being abandoned.
And right here is probably the uncomfortable moment for the preacher to say—doesn’t that seem like our moment, too? These days, do you struggle with the feeling that somehow God has abandoned us? There is a war happening in Europe today. There are six million refugees from that war in the European Union. Many of them are being served right here in the JNRC. Not a single one of our congregations in Europe has not seen the struggle and sorrow of refugees in their communities.
We have practically forgotten the bloody conflicts between Christian and Muslim communities in Nigeria, or the suffering of the people in Yemen, or the desperate plight of the Rohinga people in Myanmar.
And if you pay attention to the news from the United States, you cannot be untouched by the sheer depravity of gun violence in our country. It has somehow become within the normal range of expectations that children should be murdered in their schools from time to time as the price of our infatuation with firearms.
And the makers of culture have contributed to this, by normalizing violence and murder and death in practically every movie, every television drama, offered to our eyes.
Have we been abandoned?
Maybe a better question is the one asked in the 1960s by the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel. Writing after the devastation of a world war and the horrors of the Holocaust, Heschel said that “the problem of the twentieth century is not whether we can believe in God anymore; it is whether God can any longer believe in us.”
Has God given up on us?
No—certainly no. Not now, not ever. But there is a clue in the gospel reading today about not just why, but how, we are falling short of God’s hope for us. And in that clue is a suggestion about what our task is now.
Just like those disciples, we, too, must make the transition on the mountain path. We can no longer be followers—at least, not just followers. We are now the leaders. The church is up to us. The future of the faith, the work of the Gospel—that is ours to do.
No one else is going to do it for us. Not the government. Not the culture-makers. Not the authors or the songwriters or the fashion designers or the influencers.
Maybe we first came here to be comforted. Maybe we came here looking for answers, or mourning a loss, or needing our wounds bound and tended. All of that is fair.
But that can’t be all. We can’t be here just for comfort. Not anymore. And here is the clue: Jesus tells those confused followers of his, and he tells us, that we will be given his glory. Not because we deserve it; not because we have earned it. no, Jesus is very specific: “The glory you have given me, I have given them, so that they may be one.”
There is a purpose in all this, my brothers and sisters. That purpose is something far higher and far more meaningful than our comfort, or our assurance, or getting the church to affirm the things we already believe in.
God’s purpose in all of this is to get us past our differences and into unity.
It is to get us to see how much all of us, individually, as societies, as nations, as the human race depend on God for what is truly meaningful in this life.
A full human life, full in the way it was intended to be, depends on our having a relationship with God—on our being not just physical, not just intellectual, not just emotional or political or cultural, but spiritual. And not just spiritual: Spiritual in community together. The glory we are meant for comes from overcoming our differences and being one.
A lot of people are making a lot of money and grasping a lot of political power these days by selling us the misbegotten idea that we are meant to be divided; that the differences between us are dangerous, that they are more important than our common dependence on God, that we should fear those different from us and hate those who don’t think like us or believe like us.
Human beings are driven by fear, and fear is what drives us away from God, and in case you never noticed it that is the reason why the proclamation of the Gospel, at the beginning and the end, is: Do not be afraid.
We fall short of the glory of God when we choose to live in fear. Faithful people have no business being fearful. And we cannot do the work of community if we try to build on a foundation of fearing others. Eventually, if we do that, even our best intentions will come to nothing.
Giving in to fear is easy. The work of love is hard. Even on good days it demands a lot of us—forebearance, and forgiveness, and compassion, and sometimes just a graceful capacity to forget things.
But the work of love is the way we overcome difference. The work of love is the way we find the means of making community with others. The way of love is the discipline by which we learn how to trust those who are different from us, at least enough to build something together with them.
And that, that unity—it is God’s intention that that is how God’s glory will be revealed in this world. We share in Christ’s glory when we break down barriers and overcome hate, not when we indulge in it.
We are coming down the mountain, church. We went up as followers; but now we must return to our lives and our world as leaders. We are the ones to whom God has given the task of leading past division and into mutual trust. We are the ones who are called to stand alongside those ones who are hated and scorned, to defend those who are vulnerable or trafficked, to preach and practice love with those who glory in death.
We do this not because of the reward, but because God, who has saved us, will be glorified by it; and the better we do it, the more the hatred of this world will be overcome by that radiance. The world is waiting. Let’s go. Amen.