Sent Into (Not Out of!) the World - A Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter

A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, May 12, 2024.

Today we find the disciples after the Lord’s Ascension, waiting for the coming of the Holy Spirit. The One who cannot be locked down, pinned down, or nailed down appeared to them repeatedly in the forty days after his resurrection. In that time they began to recognize him in strangers as he showed himself to them, doing the kinds of things he always did: gathering, teaching, feeding, healing. And then he ascends into heaven, vanishing from their sight so that they will find him everywhere. The Ascension which we celebrated on Thursday, 40 days after Easter, is an essential bookend: the eternal Word who become flesh, who dwelt among us, who took up our human nature and human life and human form, who lived through all our human fears and human struggle, who didn’t shirk even from our human death—this God who descended below all things has now ascended into heaven, completing this arc of incarnation, descending and ascending to fill all things with his presence, that Christ may be found all in all. In his resurrection and ascension, Christ, who fully entered into our human nature and took it up, now takes our human life directly into the heart of the Triune God. The way is opened for us. The author of our salvation has marked out a path for us through the seas of death and hell. So the Ascension marks the completion of this returning arc of the incarnate Word: thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!

Jesus says he goes to prepare a place for us and promises not to leave us comfortless: he tells the disciples to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit: the advocate, the guide into all truth and the comforter. In the Spirit, we are drawn into the divine life, drawn into the intimacy Jesus shares with his Father. Far from jealously guarding this relationship, Jesus wants to share it with us, too. He prays that in him, we may be one, as he and the Father are one. Each of our human lives drawn into the heart of the Triune God. In the Spirit we are invited into the closeness and intimacy Jesus has with the Father. This is a closeness that doesn’t require sameness; an intimacy that honors difference and reverences the particularity of the Other. The life of the Triune God is a continual stream of living water, a dance of pouring out for the other and receiving that gift, and giving it away again. 

Planted there, receiving our life from the streams of living water that is the very life of God, we can’t help but flourish as the unique persons we were each created to be. Psalm 1, the opening of the psalter, gives us this tranquil, sturdy image of the tree planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither: everything they do shall prosper. Everything they do shall prosper!

Does anyone else hear some alarm bells here? What kind of prospering are we talking about? What kind of comfort is Jesus sending us? There is such a thing as unholy comfort in the name of God. When we wield religion to shore up our own position and certainty, or to facilely reassure ourselves in a deeply unsettled world, when we find ourselves using the language of faith to keep pain at arm’s length—our own and other people’s—we might be engaging in unholy comfort, preaching a false gospel of prosperity where God is simply a plot device to make things go how we want them. God as vending machine, God with a magic wand, or as someone told me recently, God as a capricious Willy Wonka figure, who if you are really good might just give you the golden ticket. The righteous—those who do what God says—will prosper, and the wicked, the rest of us who have lingered in the way of sinners and may indeed have season tickets in the seats of the scornful—the way of the wicked is doomed. But if you call this toll-free number on your TV right now, for a small fee and a prayer you can get back into God’s good books—and so will your bank account. 

It’s a terrifyingly common and idolatrous picture of God. And it’s not just the televangelists, either. When the prosperity gospel looks like building a high tower to get to heaven, or schemes to get rich through prayer, those are easy cons, obviously false. It is more difficult to see through our own subtle versions of that fantasy that faith will get us what we want: save us from suffering and pain. This is faith as an escape route, or an insurance policy against tragedy. How many of us still harbor strains of belief that if we are really planted by the stream of living water, then we won’t have to struggle? Remember, Jesus’s high priestly prayer comes right before he is betrayed and arrested. On the threshold of death he is praying for his disciples, for all of us, everyone the Father has given him. His intimacy with the Father is the sturdiest thing, yes, an anchor in a time of storm, steady, sturdy and yet it is no escape from arrest, humiliation, torture, and crucifixion. Jesus cries out on the cross: I thirst! The one who is always planted by living water, the one who is living water itself, his lips are parched, his mouth dried out like a potsherd. 

Or take Job, a righteous man, one who meditated on the law of the Lord day and night, roots deep in the stream of living water—yet he loses everything. His friends come to comfort him, and they do very well at first. For seven days they sit with him in the dust in silence. They accompany him in his sorrow and affliction, they bear it with him, they don’t distance themselves from his harrowing grief. That is compassion, that is true friendship, that is “I will not leave you or forsake you.” And then. The pain of it is too much, they simply can’t stand it anymore, and so Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar get up and start making speeches. These are longwinded things, speeches that go on for chapters and chapters: they tell Job that everything happens for a reason, that these horrible things he is undergoing surely have a purpose and he shouldn’t complain, they scrutinize Job for the hidden faults and sins he must be hiding that have brought this calamity on him as a punishment, they tell him God just needed ten more angels, that’s why all his children died and that if he would just pray more, have more faith or less pride or just believe harder or confess his sins, God will fix everything! 

The violence of these speeches becomes apparent as they continue to accumulate, as they build in weight, stacking a babbling tower of words that don’t begin to reach heaven: Job is distraught, under the assault of this unholy comfort, these pious speeches. No more of these terrible words about God! Job demands an advocate, someone who will stand up for him. Finally God appears to set the record straight, speaking out of a whirlwind that blows the speechifying apart. The polyphonic voice of love like a hurricane speaks of the height and breadth and depth of all creation, which cannot be explained or rationalized, but calls out to be loved, and calls out in praise of the Creator. God shows up not with answers or explanations in suffering, but with abiding presence, and a testimony to the full range of creation still groaning in longing, still hungering and thirsting after righteousness, still waiting to be born. 

We have not been left comfortless. Jesus has loved us with a love that will be in us. “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us,” he prays for us. He has united his life with ours and will never leave us. God so loved the world that he sent his only Son to die for us. Which is to say: God has heard our cries and come to us, in this world, in our pain and heartache and our million ways of numbing and avoiding pain and heartache. Christ has descended below all things, and he has ascended above all things, right, so that he is with us in simply everything. This world is where God meets us. In God’s passionate love for human beings, Jesus has endured our human life and death, every inch of it. God has invaded Godforsakenness, and so there is nowhere we are left alone. 

In the abiding power of this love from which nothing can separate us, we are sent into the world. Jesus isn’t praying to remove us from the world, he says. Faith is not an escape route, it’s not wish granting, there’s no golden ticket. Not that kind of surface prosperity. But we are sent into the world as bearers of his love, the sturdy love that is with us in everything and through everything. Sent to flourish as the ones we were created to be. Sent also to invite our thirsty neighbors to the healing streams where they too can be refreshed. There is a buoyancy and resilience in this rootedness. Leaves that endure the noonday heat, may flag and sag at times but do not ultimately wither. Planted in our crucified Lord’s promise to be with us always, to go ahead of us and prepare a place for us.

Meanwhile, we wait for God’s whirlwind. For the rush of winds at Pentecost as God the Holy Spirit speaks through the disciples with tongues of fire. We attune and attend to the movement of the Spirit: you hear the sound of it but like the wind you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. You can’t purchase it or control it. Waiting for God’s voice, we attend to his testimony. We meditate on the word, day and night. Let our roots grow deep into those life-giving streams of water in the very first psalm—nourished by the connection to the source of all being, all beauty, the cool drink of steady abiding presence right with us in simply everything, never abandoning or running off as we do—one who never goes fishing on us, no out-of-office reply, no defensive speech-making but simply this promise: I am with you. Even here. In cancer, in grief, in isolation, in times of transition, in pain and hunger and war and broken relationships—I am still with you. I will not leave you or forsake you. I did not lose any of those the Father has given me. No one can snatch you out of my hand. Amen.