You Are My Witnesses

Acts 1.1-11; Psalm 47; Ephesians 1.15-23; Luke 24.44-53

The passage from Acts 1 we have read just now seems to make four basic points about our lives as Christians:

1. that we are called to be witnesses to Jesus and his kingdom
2. that we receive the power to become his witnesses by waiting, together with our brothers and sisters in Christ, for an empowering that comes through the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit
3. that we are called to be witnesses not only in the comfortable, familiar places where we live most of our lives, but also in uncomfortable, unfamiliar places – like that of another nation or ethnic group
4. that we are not alone in all of this because while Jesus might have gone from us in the flesh, he is still very with us ‘in the Spirit’.  The work we do as witnesses is therefore his own work as well.

This morning I have time to say something about only the first of these points.  The others will have to wait for another time.

I want to challenge you to take this calling very seriously.  Being a witness means being willing to testify, in both word and deed, to the difference that knowing Christ makes in your life.  Since I joined the Uniting Church in 1995, I have observed that Uniting Church people are very good at witnessing to Christ with their deeds.  And that is to be applauded! But many Uniting Church people seem very poor at witnessing to Christ with their words.  How many of us actually talk with our friends or our families about Christ?  How many of us invite our friends and family along to worship, or to a bible exploration, or to a lecture or workshop in which the Christian faith is being discussed? Not many, I suspect. And why is that so?  Well, let me guess at a few of the most common excuses we make to ourselves.  (1) ‘I don’t know what to say’; (2) ‘I find evangelism distasteful – I’m worried that my friends will be offended’; (3) ‘I don’t believe that it is our words that make a difference to people, it is the quality of the lives we live’.  Let’s take a look at each of these excuses, one by one, and see how they look under the pressure of a bit of scrutiny.

What of the first excuse, ‘But I don’t know what to say’.  It is certainly true that many Christians do not know what say by way of bearing witness to friends and families.  So I won’t deny the truth of the excuse.  It is an excuse, nonetheless.  For if we don’t know what to say, then surely there is a reason for that:  either that we do not know our faith very well, or we are not confident in that faith.  In either case, the solution is certainly not to remain unknowledgeable, or to remain unconfident.  It is certainly not to remain an infant in matters of faith, a little baby Christian who can say nothing of Christ to anyone.  It is to seek the kind of help that will enable us to become more mature, more grown-up in the faith, so that we know who we are in Christ and can speak confidently of what we know, believe and feel.  Such help is ready at hand – in the personal counsel of the more mature members of one’s own church, in spiritual directors and mentors from other churches, in courses, seminars and bible-study groups, and in books, videos and websites by the bucket-load.  The resources are everywhere about.  So what are you waiting for?  Take the initiative.  Go our there and get yourself some decent spiritual food.  Grow up in the faith, and start to bear fruit!

What of the second common excuse for not bearing witness to Christ:  ‘I find evangelism distasteful – I’m worried that my friends will be offended’.  Again, I actually believe the people who say this.  I don’t think they are telling a lie.  They do, indeed, worry that bearing witness to Christ will endanger their friendships.  There are two things to be said in response.  The first is that our allegiance to Christ and his commandments will indeed endanger our friendships sometimes.  That is because, as Christians, we are called to listen to Christ first and others second.  If there is a disagreement between what Christ asks of us and what our friends or family ask of us, we must of course do what Christ asks, even if that means offending our friends of family.  That is what it means to follow Christ as our only Lord.  Of course, having said that, we should also remember that amongst the commands that Christ has given us are these:  ‘love your neighbour as you love yourself’ (Mt. 22.39); and, ‘so far as it depends on you, be at peace with everyone’ (Rom 12.18).  What that means in the context of bearing witness is pretty clear, is it not?  That in speaking about Christ to our friends and family, we should do so in a way that is as gentle and respectful as possible.  ‘Speak the truth in love’ say the Letter to the Ephesians (4.15).  That is how we are to bear witness to Christ.  If our witness, a speech that shares Christ with our friends and family, is not couched in a respectful tone and in the context of respectful relationships, then we are not being Christian when we speak.  Word and deed fail to match up.  Yet, we are called to speak.  Even at the risk of being rejected - even as Christ spoke, and was rejected.

And so we come to the third common excuse: ‘I don’t believe that it is our words that make a difference to people, it is the quality of the lives we live.’  What makes this an excuse is the first part of the sentence, the ‘I don’t believe that it is the words that make a difference to people’.  I’m quite o.k. with the second bit, the bit about the quality of our lives, because I certainly agree that the character and quality of our lives bear witness to Christ in very powerful ways.  But that is no excuse for not talking about Christ with our friends and neighbours.  There are several reasons for this apart from the obvious fact that the New Testament understands ‘bearing witness’ as a unity of word and deed.

The most important of these is that speech is the mode by which we make sense of what we do; or, to put it another way, words and speech are the means by which we interpret what we do to ourselves and to each other.  There is a fundamental problem, you see, with assuming that people will always see our behaviour as a manifestation of Christ or the kingdom; or even with assuming that they will interpret our actions as manifestations of a desire for love or justice.  For most people know longer know anything of Christ or the kingdom.  They do not know that Christ, justice, peace and love all belong to a mutually interpretive field of meaning.  Therefore, it is rarely clear to others that what we do, we do in the name of Christ, in imitation of his love.  What we see as an act of faith in God, others may see as a gamble with chance.  What we see as diaconal service, others may see as an unhealthy ‘need to be needed’.  What we see as an act of redistributive justice, others may see as ‘rewarding the lazy’ out of a sense of unhealthy guilt.  See what I mean?  The meaning of what we do cannot enter the public realm, the public realm of a discourse that we share with other people, unless we are able to articulate an horizon of meaning for what we do, first for ourselves, but then for others.  In this sense, the witness to others can perhaps be characterized as a public act of worship.  For it is in worship (as ritual, or 'embodied story) that we articulate the meaning of our Christian lives most profoundly and holistically.  But when the worship of the community comes to a close, the Spirit drives us out into the world to share both who we are, and what we are becoming, with everyone else - in speech as well as in action. Worship is again the model.  In worship we do things, but we also say what we do, we bring its meaning to speech.

SO . . .  there is, is fact, no excuse (if we are Christians) for failing to share our faith with the world in speech as well as in action.  Of course there will be hesitancy. Of course there will be a little fear and trembling.  Indeed, I’d be a little worried if there wasn’t!  But speak we must.  Not, first of all, because we are commanded by Jesus to do so.  No, even before the command there ought to be (surely!) some sense in us that the good news of God’s love is so good that we would be selfish indeed not to share it with our friends and neighbours.  Besides, God has promised that (a) we are not given this task as isolated individuals, but as a community, and (b) we are given this task in the power of the Spirit, who will help and encourage us to say and do what Jesus has called us to say and do.  So, if you are not sharing your faith with others, I encourage you to take a good hard look in the mirror and ask the question:  ‘am I a Christian or not?’  I hope you will answer ‘yes’ and I hope you will join with your brothers and sisters to share our common faith with the world in which we live.

Christ's Ascension: superabundant presence

Acts 1. 1-11; Psalm 47, 32-35; 1 Pet 4.12-14; 5.6-11; Jn 17.1-11

The story of the Ascension, where the risen Jesus takes leave of his disciples and is taken up into heaven by God, can be found only in Luke, the Gospel, and in The Acts of the Apostles.  You will not find the story in Matthew or John, and the reference to an ascension in Mark 16 comes from a very late manuscript which almost certainly relies on Luke’s account.  So the Ascension belongs to Luke.  It is his story.  But why does he tell us the story at all, where the other gospel writers do not?  And why does he think it so important that he tells it not once, but twice—once at the end of his Gospel and once in Acts?  These are questions I’d like to consider today.

One very modern reading of the Ascension is actually a rather distressing story, because it appears to both repeat and fulfill a story that has become very familiar in our modern age: the one about a God who deliberately takes his distance from those who need him, and who, in the end, abandons his people to their own powers of survival.  Even the Church sometimes reads the story thus.  On the television and in the press you will today hear religious voices, voices claiming to speak for the Church, who will tell you that God has indeed left us.  Because there is no longer any authoritative teacher amongst us, they say, we must each of us invent our spirituality, invent our morality, invent our religious practices.  Because Christ has taken leave of us, because God is either dead or permanently absent, we have no alternative except to accept responsibility for our own destinies, to assume the mantel of godhood ourselves. We are condemned, as it were, to a freedom without God.  

In his influential book, After God: the future of religion, the Cambridge philosopher Don Cupitt argues that from now on we must view Christian faith as a fictional novel which human beings, alone, have authored.   In this thoroughly modern schema, Luke’s Ascension story is cited as a one of the primary figures of divine abandonment.  First, God dies with Christ on the cross.  Then he appears as an illusory flash of memory and wishful thinking in the resurrection.  Finally, he disappears entirely into a cloud of superstitious obscurity at the Ascension.  And what of the Spirit that Christ promised, the Spirit who would come to us after he had gone away?  To the modernists, this “Spirit” is just another word for the spiritual life we invent in God’s absence.  The Spirit is our invented meaning-structures, something like a collective unconscious in which we collect the stories we have written to rescue ourselves from absurdity. 

Well, how ought one respond to such thinking?  Perhaps like this.  First, it is important to recognise the legitimacy of the experience from which it arises.  For many folk, Christ has indeed left the stage.  A Catholic friend recently told me she has stopped going to church because of the abuse of children by priests.  She couldn’t understand how a Church full of the Spirit of Christ could allow such a thing.  For her, any residual sense of Christ’s presence in the world has now disappeared.  And who can blame her, or any of the victims of abuse or repression, for seeing things like that?  Certainly not me!  Yet, today I would bear witness to another way of reading the Ascension story, and, as a consequence, another way of understanding the experience of abandonment.  For there is a bigger story here in Luke’s account, and I believe that if we can only allow ourselves this enlarged vista, then even the very real ‘fact’ and ‘experience’ of divine abandonment will turn out to be something other than what it appears to be.

Let me summarise what Luke has to say like this.  While, by virtue of the Ascension, Christ is indeed no longer present as a particular human being who occupies a particular place and time, he is nevertheless, also by virtue of the Ascension, more abundantly present and active than he has ever been before.  And this not as some kind of ghostly presence who hangs in the air but never takes form.  No, says Luke, Christ is now present as the material body of Christian believers, brought into being and inspired by the very Spirit that made Jesus who and what he was.  The Spirit now makes the Church what Jesus of Nazareth was, so infusing and shaping its life and work that the mission of Jesus continues in the Church as a real and tangible Christ-presence for the world.  

If Luke were here today, I think he would say that the modernist use of his story seriously neglects some of the crucial details.  There is certainly a withdrawal of the divine presence here.  Christ is taken from the community into heaven.  But it would be premature and reductionist to then assume that the gap, the emptiness left by God’s withdrawal, may be filled only by the activity and imagination of human beings.  Now, I want you to listen carefully, because this next bit is a little tricky.  Presence is not, as the moderns insist, simply about being able to see and touch things in such a way that we can get our heads around them, to so imagine things that they take on an objective solidity that we can measure and put boundaries around.  Presence is not, as the philosopher Edmund Husserl claimed in 1913, something which human beings make and cause to appear by the power of their thinking.  On the contrary!  Following Luke, I put it to you that presence is more properly what is given us in the resurrection and ascension of Christ - the irreducible power and authority of the Other (exousia in Greek), a presence which so exceeds and overwhelms our powers of comprehension that when God visits us, while we know he has done so, but we are left powerless to explain how or why.  Even to ourselves.  Why?  Because the Other is a strong and passionate love that takes hold of us completely, body and soul, covering and surrounding us like baptismal water, entering our lungs as if to drown us.  In a repetition of the death and resurrection of Christ, our human powers are put to death, our powers to know things, to objectify and use other people, to control who and how God would be.  We suddenly find ourselves dispossessed of even our power to picture what God is like.  So much so, that we imagine that God has abandoned us.  We flounder, we struggle, we suffer terribly.  We feel that God has left the theatre, and we are left alone with nothing but a forlorn hope.  We despair.  We die . . .  But that is not the end.  Finally, this Other arrives in our bodies as the power of a new life, life lived on a plane hitherto unimagined, life lived in communion with the God who is love.  In that power, we are commissioned and sent to bear witness, not to the power of this presence in our lives, but to the power of our lives in this presence, a presence forever marked now by the sacred names of “Christ,” “Spirit,” “Love”.

Whew!  Let me try and say all that in another way.  In the wake of the Ascension, Christ remains present to us, but this presence is of a different order.  It is what Jean-Luc Marion calls a ‘saturating presence,’ a presence which so pervades and infuses the world with God’s glory that it confuses and dazzles our limited imaginations.  Ever heard the expression “He couldn’t see the wood for the trees”?  It’s like that.  While we may not be able to pin Christ down to a particular bodily form and draw borders around him which define where he is an where he isn’t, he is abundantly, even super-abundantly, present in material realities that we encounter everyday:  in the body which is the Church, past, present and future; in the bread and wine broken and poured out for the life of the world; in the Scriptures read and preached; and in the stranger, the widow and the orphan we are called to meet in our ministry of care.  Christ is ascended to the Father so he can be “everywhere present”.  

But how, I hear you ask, does this presence really address our sense of God’s absence?  What good is a superabundant presence if it dazzles our eyes so much that we cannot see that Christ is with us?  Here we turn, for a moment, to John’s Gospel.  We read there a prayer of Jesus for the Church, which comes as the end of a long conversation which John stages at the Last Supper before Jesus is crucified.  It is a conversation about how the disciples will cope when Jesus has gone.  As with Luke, John does not portray Jesus’ imminent disappearance as a withdrawal of presence, pure and simple.  In a profoundly paradoxical statement in chapter 14.28, Jesus says to his friends “I am going away; but I am coming to you”.   Hear that?  “It is by going away that I will come to you”.  For John, the going away is exactly what is needed in order to accomplish a more profound communion with Jesus than was ever before possible, a communion which echoes and redoubles the love which Jesus already shares with his Father.   For Jesus will now come in the Spirit to gather his people into the divine presence by the power (exousia again) of the Name which is “I Am”, the divine name, which signifies here a participation with Jesus in that sacrificial giving and receiving of divine love which we call, in shorthand, the Trinity.  It is a participation which goes way beyond knowing and seeing, or even imagining.  Love, you see, does not cling to the thoughts and images by which we would normally try to master each other.  Love surrenders to the invisible gaze of this other who can neither be seen nor objectified, and learns to do the same by way of return.  Love surrenders itself, as Christ surrendered his self. And in surrendering, it finally abandons its sense of abandonment.  

I conclude with this.  The Ascension is for Christians both a fact and a promise.  The fact is this: that Christ is everywhere present as the authority and power of God, a power which before and behind us, a power which forever seeks our surrender to God’s love.  And here is the promise:  if we will first discipline ourselves, through prayer, to discern Christ’s presence in the midst; and if we will then surrender ourselves to his transgressive love, body and soul; then that wound of abandonment which haunts every human being will ultimately find its healing.  For Christ has not left us as orphans.  He comes to us tangibly and bodily every day, to love and care for us as only God knows how.  If only we will recognise and surrender. 

Garry Deverell