Acts 1:6-11
Ascension
Sunday: June 1, 2014
“Do you have any brilliant thoughts
about what the ascension of Jesus can possibly mean to my congregation in this
day and age?!” I received this email
Monday morning from my colleague, and the only thing that went through my head
was, “I have absolutely no brilliant thoughts on the ascension now that we
don’t really believe in dead people walking around the earth and then being
swooshed up into heaven,” and I emailed as much to my colleague.
But then I got to thinking about it. Maybe the ascension story does speak to us. Maybe it even especially speaks to us. Maybe it is the ascension that puts us most
directly in solidarity with the early Christians.
The ascension marks the moment the
disciples have to start living the life of Jesus without Jesus there. It’s a
turning point that puts them on our side of the whole discipleship thing. Until this passage they have had either the
historical, living Jesus with them, or the resurrected Jesus among them. Today, they lose him…for good. His return is promised, but that never
happened for them – it hasn’t happened for Christians ever since.
We are all required to figure out how to
follow Jesus without him here to follow.
And I think with this story, the ascension, we are given two directions
to look for guidance in that endeavor.
First, we can look back. We can
look to the stories of Jesus, the memories in the case of the disciples. We can look at what he did, how he moved,
breathed, walked. Who he chose to be
with, how he chose to behave. We have
the stories, and they help immensely – they are indispensible.
But they are not enough. They were not enough for the disciples and
they are not enough for us. That’s
because we have cars and combines, hospitals and cat scans, capitalism and
billions of people, bombs, guns, and airplanes.
Jesus healed lepers by touching them and telling them to wash in a pool. For us, we take them to the hospital and pay
for their care. So the stories are
helpful – they are necessary – but they are not enough once Jesus exits the
scene. Our contexts are just too
different.
Jesus tells the disciples what they
will need in addition to the memories.
“You will receive power when the holy spirit comes to you.” The holy spirit. Jesus promises that as they continue their
journey, as they continue to try and live faithfully, they will be helped by
the spirit of God – the living, moving, spirit of God. This divine movement does not die, it is not
constrained by history, it is always contextual, it changes as we change. The spirit – it too is necessary to the
continued life of faith.
Many of you know our Easter person
this morning from the movie “Dead Man Walking.”
That movie is based on real life experiences of Sr. Helen Prejean, which
she had written about in a book of the same name. What Sister Helen has learned over the course
of her life is that if she listens to the stories, words, and actions of Jesus,
she necessarily gets swept up into the movement of the divine spirit in the
world. Then, her job is simply to decide
whether to jump on for the ride.
Sister Helen likes to talk in her
books about something she calls “soul-size” work. She encourages people she talks to – and she
gives hundreds of talks a year – to look for and do “soul-size” work. I love that phrase, and to me it is the same
thing as being moved by and filled with the holy spirit. It means joining with God’s spirit and movement in the world.
And for Sister Helen, she found her
“soul-sized” work in caring for men and women living on death row. And she found it by drawing on the stories of
Jesus and then joining with the movements of the holy spirit.
“My Catholic faith,” she writes, “has
been the catalyst to inspire me to follow the way of Jesus, who sided with the
poor and dispossessed and despised.”
When she changed her life to follow this “way,” things started happening
that she never thought possible, and she has lived a life most of us would call
“soul-sized.”
Sr. Helen actually had a conversion
experience that led her to the work she does today. She grew up in a privileged family – her dad
a lawyer and her mom a nurse. She
traveled a lot with her family, she had great schools, she had all the
resources she needed as a kid and then some.
She carried this privilege with her
when she decided to become a nun. When
she started out, she taught English at a private Catholic school in the
suburbs. In looking back at that time, Sister
Helen writes, “It took me a long time to realize that following the way of
Jesus meant involving myself in the lives of the poor. For a long time, I thought Christianity meant
prayerfulness, charity to the needy, and obedience to the teachings of the
Catholic church…I prayed for the poor and left it to God to take care of them.”
In 1980, Sister Helen went to a
conference and heard a talk by Sister Marie Augusta Neal. “She spoke about Jesus,” Prejean writes, “and
I can still remember the words she said that changed my life: ‘Jesus preached
good news to the poor and integral to the good news he preached was that they
would be poor no longer.’ Suddenly I got
it…humans make people poor, so it is up to humans to change that.”
And so, in 1981 she moved from the
suburbs to the St. Thomas Housing Project in New Orleans to live among poor
African Americans. She moved in with
with four other sisters, and they worked at a place called Hope House. They were the only white folks in the
neighborhood, and until this point, the only African Americans Sr. Helen had
really known were the family’s servants she grew up with.
It didn’t take long after she got
there to notice the greasy track from her neighborhood to Angola, the Louisiana
state prison. The relationship between
poverty and prison – especially death row, a relationship she saw first hand,
would become a constant theme in Sister Helen’s life.
During her time at Hope House, she
grew in her understanding that the life of faith was not detached from action,
relationship, and activism. Christianity
is not just about one’s own personal relationship with God.
She writes, “If Jesus had preached
only a ‘spiritual’ message detached from social concerns, he might have lived
to be an old man, tending a prize fig tree in his backyard. Instead, as the prophets had done, he
radically opposed the society of his day, not only by preaching, but by
inaugurating a new kind of community that erased distinctions of ‘righteous’
and ‘unrighteous’ and welcomed everybody, even despised tax collectors, who
collaborated with the Roman oppressors.”
Sister Helen had found that sweet
spot of drawing on the stories of the Jesus who lived long ago, and being swept
up in the work of the holy spirit. Once
she moved to live among the poor, the spirit caught her and carried her on a
journey she never could have imagined.
As she says herself, “Only when I lived among the poor people did I
become involved with death row.” And
involved she has been. It would be hard
to argue that this is not Sister Helen’s calling.
One day Sister Helen received what
she calls a “casual invitation” to write letters to Patrick Sonnier, a
convicted murderer on Louisiana’s death row.
Two and a half years later, Sonnier would be electrocuted, Sister Helen right
there with him, praying and telling him to look at her face when they killed
him.
As we can imagine, in her work
Sister Helen has faced much hostility.
She has heard it all: “Who’s the
bleeding heart liberal – probably Communist – nun holding this scumbag’s
hand? Why doesn’t she give comfort to
the victim’s families, where it belongs?”
As she walked the path to death with Sonnier, she was catapulted into
the firestorm of public debate. This was
not an easy debate, and she was not on the popular end of it, yet she chose to
not retreat from the conversation.
She writes, “I had been an
eyewitness to state killing, and what I had seen set me on fire. Most people would never see what I did that
night unless I took them there. My
resolve to share my experience was bolstered by trust in the basic goodness and
decency of the American people. My
mission began. I talked to whoever would
listen.”
And as we all know, many people did
listen, including Susan Sarandon and her then husband Tim Robbins. They read her book and decided to make a
movie out of it. Sister Helen was
involved in the making of that movie every step of the way and believes it does
a good job of giving folks a sense of what she saw, and continues to see, in
the death chambers of our prisons.
Sister Helen has been relentless in
her opposition to the death penalty; an activist in the true sense of the
word. It was a calling, but a painful,
heart wrenching, and frankly sickening calling.
After Sonnier was killed, she left there and threw up.
Over the years, in addition to
continuing to walk with folks on death row, she has been active with the
families of victims, and more recently she has been tackling the issue of how
many innocent people have been put to death in our country. This, she argues, is an issue of poverty, and
racism, and violence. Poor, black, men
do not get good defenses. Crazy things
happen that should never be allowed – in one case, a woman was accused of
murder, sentenced to death, but her son later confessed to the crime. That confession was never allowed into
evidence.
Sister Helen also worked with a
man, eventually put to death, who was cognitively impaired – mentally retarded
by federal standards. Laws have changed
on this, setting an IQ level below which you cannot be put to death. However, people with other mental illnesses
can still be put to death, and the IQ level is 65 – lower than the cut off for
people to be considered intellectually disabled by the government making you
eligible for federal and state services.
But it is, of course, not just the
innocent that Sister Helen cares for. It
is not just the innocent who should be protected from the death penalty. For Prejean, it ultimately comes down to the
humanity of every individual. She has
said many times that all of us, guilty death row inmates included, are more
than the worst thing we have done in our lives.
For Sister Helen, this is not some romantic, feel-good notion. She has met people who have committed the
worst of the worst of human atrocities.
And they are not all sweet, kind people.
Most are poor, many have been mentally ill, but they are, nonetheless,
not generally folks you would invite to a barbeque.
Someone wrote summed up Sister
Helen’s life so far in this way: “She has a big heart, big enough for
everyone: She counsels and prays the
rosary with victims’ families. She looks
after the needs of the convicts’ families.
And she never knew what she was getting into when she made a simple
decision, in her 40s, to dedicate her life to the poor.”
The ascension of Jesus in no way
ended his ministry. The disciples were
not allowed to just write off their time with Jesus as an interesting chapter
in their life. As they stand there
gazing up at the sky while Jesus disappears from their lives, two men appear
and say, “Why do you stand looking up at heaven?” Look
around you, they are saying. There is
work to do, here and now; and to do it, at least according to sister Helen, we start
by following Jesus, building relationships with people in poverty, and then we
see where the spirit takes us. Amen.
