Ascension Generosity

Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising (1941) tells the story of the after-effects of the explosion of a munitions ship in Halifax harbor in 1917. Half of the city was destroyed. Having read the novel for grade nine literature, a week spent in Halifax some years ago was a splendid opportunity to see if there were any historical monuments referring to the event. We found it.

To this very day you can see a fragment of that explosion, embedded inside the entry to the oldest Anglican Church in Canada in the Halifax's downtown, and an "explosion window" inside its west wall. These are the accidental memorabilia for which the church is notable, as are the crypts within which contain the remains of illustrious British colonials. Like many other churches in North America, however, it also has affixed on pews, windows, and walls numerous name plates bearing constant witness to Mr. and Mrs. So and So's donations to this historic church. Ascension Day moved me to reflect on this curious juxtaposition of earthly generosity in a space dedicated to the the mighty acts of heaven.

Christ's ascension to the right hand of God the Father teaches us that heaven rules the earth, and that it does so through the merits of Jesus Christ. Christian worship space does so uniquely: its unique configuration and symbols bears constant testimony that Christ submits all things to the glory of God the Father, and that he will come again to judge the living and the dead. Name plates proclaiming human generosity in Christian worship space undermine that sovereignty, contradict the Word with words, deny heaven's decisive role and exalt earthly human deeds.

When Christ ascended into heaven, Paul writes the Ephesians (4:1-13), he gave gifts to the church to declare the glory of God and his Christ. Whether you have the opportunity to visit St. Paul's in downtown Halifax, or any other historic church, enjoy its testimonies to history. May the name plates on liturgical furniture move you to acknowledge that no one but God is gracious enough to deserve constant recognition for gifts we have received from him. Only heaven's generosity merits Name recognition in the church and in all the places that extend its ministry, including schools for training ministers of the Gospel.

WAITING FOR OUR RESURRECTION ON THE NEW EARTH

“In a world of suffering, we cannot afford the luxury of waiting for the kingdom to come in some heaven light-years away.” Thus Sylvia Keesmaat begins her concluding paragraph in a recent Banner (“The Kingdom. On Earth or in Heaven?” April 2011).

Really?

The apostle Paul would have, if possible, completed Christ’s sufferings in his own body. That luxury was denied him; but suffering was not. Paul’s post-Easter Lenten suffering made him strong because of his own weakness (2 Cor. 12:8-10). To argue that Christians deny the suffering that is proper to their pilgrimage on this earth—awaiting the new earth in which righteousness dwells and where tears will not flow down the dirty faces of children rummaging through garbage dumps—undermines fundamental biblical theological themes: waiting for the rest that remains (Heb. 4:8-11), waiting for God to define the kairos of Christ’s coming again, waiting for the gift of an incorruptible body driven by a purified soul.

Waiting is the luxury our Christian pilgrimage cannot do without, especially in a world of suffering, because it places the focus on God. Keesmaat would place it on the human ability to change our condition. Just get rid of heaven.

Keesmaat is correct, of course, when she argues that the goal of the Christian life is a new earth. But erasing heaven from our activist souls would also rid us of everything that makes life on earth a joyful reality, especially in a world of suffering. Who defines the suffering? The justice? The solutions to poverty? Who determines the best economic system for sensitive human development? And, what is the role of the church in all this? According to Scripture, heaven alone, no matter what we think (Prov. 16:1-9).

An earth bereft of heaven’s authority will turn to norms defined by some ideological elite determined to shape the present form of joy and justice from the point of view of an already defined future. Is Jesus’ return from heaven the kairos moment of total transformation or is the kairos moment a conglomeration of human apperceptions of Christ’s presence “here” or “there” on the earth (Mark 13:21)?

Keesmaat writes: “Jesus made it clear that where he is, the kingdom brings healing, forgiveness, and hope.” Absolutely correct! According to the scriptures, and as confessed by Christians throughout the centuries, however, Jesus has ascended and sits at the right hand of God the Father. Thus, healing, forgiveness, and hope come from heaven, not from well-meaning human acts of mercy and compassion performed by people of all kinds of religious persuasions.

Faith in Christ’s cross and resurrection brings one to “the beginning” of an eternal joy which “I already now experience in my heart” so that “after this life I will have perfect blessedness such as no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no human heart has ever imagined: a blessedness in which to praise God eternally” (Lord’s Day 22, QA 58).

Through faith in Christ this too is the beginning of that joy, here—and to be continued in the presence of God on the new earth, in the New Jerusalem—for the grieving in El Salvador, the single mother in Philadelphia, and those kids scrounging a life on the garbage dumps.

In the meantime we have the luxury of self-denial, of waiting for Christ to bring the suffering—spiritual and physical—to an end.

Pick your Psalm Branch Sunday

For members of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA) Jos, Nigeria, has always meant one thing: missions. On March 17, 2010, the world learned that Jos is a place of conflict, a community where the Muslim descendants of Ishmael killed about 500 and burned 75 houses of the Christian descendants of Isaac. In other villages children and pregnant woman were among the dead. The sectarian violence has a long history.

Thousands of women marched with branches protesting the slaughter of Christian villagers in Jos. Will their government hear them? Will the Christian vice-president of Nigeria do anything? Can he stop this violence? Who will end this violence (Gen. 16:21)? Where is God in all this?

That first Palm Sunday was misunderstood by many. Humble, seated on the foal of a donkey, Jesus was anything but a conquering hero. Well, not like a conquering Roman general. Nevertheless, the road to his cross was paved with the laments and cries of distress of the people Christ came to save; the cross itself was a battlefield. Will the risen Christ, seated at the right hand of the God the Father Almighty, respond to the cries of his people in Jos, Darfur, or in parts of Indonesia where certain forces of Islam oppose Christianity with military and political power?

When brandishing branches in churches this Palm Sunday, may Nigerian Christians, should Nigerian Christians, sing Psalm 68:1 and 2? Should their ministers preach from Psalm 79? May the congregations recite all the verses of Psalm 137, ending with the scandalous: “O Daughter if Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us—he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks”? Are only some Psalms appropriate for Christian liturgy? Is any Psalm which petitions God to do justice by his might, right for Palm Sunday?

Fifth Sunday in Lent: Learning to Die

“We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already under way. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. AS children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and heath, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word ‘good’ should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.

“Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.

“Death is the most everyday of everyday things. It is not simply that thousands of people die everyday, that thousands will die this day, although that too is true. Death is the warp and woof of existence in the ordinary, the quotidian, the way things are. It is the horizon against which we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and the next morning we awake to find the horizon has drawn one day closer. From the twelfth-century Enchiridion Leonis comes the nighttime prayer of children of all ages: ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’ I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.’ Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.”
John Richard Neuhaus, As I Lay Dying. Meditations upon Returning (New York: Basic, 2002), 3-4.

“But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam we all die, so in Christ will all be made alive.” (1 Cor. 15:20-22)

Fourth Sunday in Lent: Humility

“Have the mind of Christ Jesus
Who, being in very nature God ,
did not consider equality with God something
to be grasped
but made himself nothing,
taking the very form of a servant.” (Phil 2:5-7)

Perform an act of humility this week.

Third Sunday in Lent: Following Jesus, after Easter

“Then all the disciples deserted him and fled” (Matt. 26-025). There is something cruel in the way that this last phrase reiterates almost word for word the narrative of the initial scenes of vocation. ‘They left everything and followed him’ (Luke 5:11). In St. Luke’s account, after the arrest, those who accompanied Jesus are not called ‘disciples’ (mathetai); later they are called by another name (the Eleven and their companions), and in the Acts of the Apostles, the expression mathetai belongs to the Church.

“The disruption of the disciples at the moment of the Passion is of decisive importance. Between Christ and his first disciples yawns the unbridgeable abyss of the Cross. There the disciples cannot follow. The end of the earthly way of Jesus is the Cross; it is his specific vocation. He alone can submit to it, solitary, bearing the burden of all. The idea of following Jesus is not to be understood as if it were a question of imitating a great man such as we might take as a model for our own life, a Ghandi, a Socrates, for example; Christ and his disciples are not on the same plane. The Cross is unique. Even if the believer of today has in some way the possibility of walking the road that took Jesus to the Cross and resurrection it is still uniquely thanks to the grace of the One risen and glorified.

“It is only after Easter that the disciples are able to follow Jesus to the end, because following Christ reveals itself as being much more profound than a simple invitation of an ethical order, or something merely exterior.”

A Carthusian, The Call of Silent Love (Gracewing 2006), 51-52.

Second Sunday of Lent: The Habit of Faith

“Just as the Christian has his moments when the clamour of this visible and audible world is so persistent and the whisper of the spiritual world so faint that faith and reason can hardly stick to their guns, so, as I well remember, the atheist too has his moments of shuddering misgiving, of an all but irresistible suspicion that old tales may after all be true, that something or someone from outside may at any moment break into his neat, explicable, mechanical universe.

“Believe in God and you will have to face hours when it seems obvious that this material world is the only reality; disbelieve in Him and you face must hours when this material world seems to shout at you that it is not all. No conviction, religious or irreligious, will, of itself, end once and for all this fifth-columnist in the soul. Only the practice of Faith resulting in the habit of Faith will gradually do that.”

C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (Eerdmans, 1995), 41-42.