Mission Not Absence
And they went forth and they preached the gospel to every creature.
You have to feel for the disciples.
They came to know Jesus in Galilee.
They came to follow him in Galilee,
and they ultimately fell in love with him in Galilee.
It must have been powerful to be with him in person.
He had words that were profound.
He had a way of encapsulating things that no one else had.
Wisdom that no one else had ever heard.
And he healed people.
Everyone around him was healed.
He fed thousands of people just from a few scraps of bread.
It must have been just electrifying being that close to him.
Then comes the crucifixion and he is hung upon the cross,
and they are so scared.
They run for their lives, they hide.
And in the next moment, he comes back to them.
He comes back to them in appearance
and it is not just an ordinary sort of appearance.
The gospels go to great lengths to explain
the physicality of his resurrection.
He asks for some bread to eat.
He tells then, “Look, here are my hands.
Put your finger.
Stick your finger in the hole in my hands
and my put your hand in my side.”
They were elated and they were delighted.
He was with them for 40 days.
Then today, the ascension we celebrate today,
he leaves them again.
This rollercoaster must have been overwhelming for them.
But today is different.
Today, after 40 days of living with the resurrected Christ,
they know something different
because they do not hesitate and
they preach the gospel to every creature.
They are on fire.
Something has changed inside them.
They know that the Holy Spirit is with them.
They now know that they are to called to give witness.
The ascension is more about mission than absence,
more about the mission to proclaim the good news,
the mission to share and to witness what they have experienced.
This sharing, this mission has a movement attached to it.
They are called to go to all corners of the world.
They are called to proclaim the good news to all creatures everywhere.
This movement is a horizontal movement.
But there is also a vertical movement
where they are called to allow the Holy Spirit in their lives.
They are called to feel the love of God in their lives.
They are called to be transformed
by this love of God in their own lives.
That first movement is so critical,
that we feel loved for who we are;
that we understand and really internalize that love in our hearts.
Not just on an intellectual level in the head,
but that we allow it into opur hearts.
Because once we, as I said last week,
once we allow that love into our hearts,
it transforms us completely.
The message is God loves us.
The English have a wonderful way of putting this.
The good news is that God loves you completely.
The bad news, he loves everyone else completely too.
But it is not really bad news.
Of course, it is good news all around.
The challenge then is, is this horizontal movement
where we are called to be the church in the world
where we are called to share this love
where we are called to witness this love in the world,
where are we called to do it to every corner of the earth
But it is not enough that we just do it here.
It is wonderful that we all love our families,
but even thieves and the worst of humanity does that.
We are called to be disciples of Christ.
We are called to love those who on the furthest extremities.
We are called to reach out to those who feel least loved.
This is what Pope Francis calls the peripheries of society.
We we are called to reach out to them and to fold them back in.
That is the mission.
That movement is critical for us.
Father Timothy Radcliffe, the former superior of the Dominicans,
was invited by Pope Francis to give the meditations
before the Synod on Synodality.
One of those meditations called
“home that God makes with us and the home we make with God,”
That is what we call church.
He gives this beautiful metaphor of how we do this.
It is called “baking bread.”
When we think of how we kneed the bread,
we fold the outside and we put it back into the center
and we fold the outside and put it back into the center.
As we push it down and the center becomes the periphery.
And the periphery then becomes the center.
And you keep just doing this over and over again.
That is how bread is made.
It is a beautiful image for what we are called to be as church.
We are called to go to the furthest extremities, furthest peripheries,
and fold them back in to the center of who we are as church.
So who are these people in the extremities?
Immagrants are one group wether they are legal or illegal.
They are people on the move seeking a new home.
We are not called to challenge the politics of it
but we are called to come into the humanity of it,
reach out to them and fold them back in to the center
of who we are as church.
Those people who feel so marginalized like the L-B-G-T-Q community,
we are called to reach out to them,
fold them back in to the center and make them feel at home.
In the center of our church,
we are called to reach out to those who are homeless
and broken by circumstances,
whether chosen by themselves or others, and fold them back in.
We are called to reach out to the divorce, to the remarried.
And again, the same thing,
fold them in to the center so there are no longer any peripheries,
but there is one table at the table of the Lord.
Now if the truth be told, as we do this,
we have to understand that often the church itself
is often the one that wounds.
We have to acknowledge that we are imperfect,
we are an imperfect church.
But where else, where else do we go?
Every other human institution is as equally as imperfect.
What are we called to do?
Because we have so much baggage.
We cannot ignore the baggage of our Church.
When you think of all those
who have been abused by priests in the past,
again, they are on the periphery.
We need to fold them back in and
make them feel part of the center of the church.
This is the process of baking,
of baking who we are as church and what it means.
This movement is a movement of love.
This mission is a mission of love.
We first receive the love of God directly into our hearts,
and then we are called to spread and to witness that love to all.
Every one of us, you and I,
and not some theoretical heads of churches,
you and I are the church.
This is the mission of the ascension and the Pentecost,
the church of today.
And we do so in this broken church in our church.
This is who we are.
This is where God makes his home with us.
And this is where we make our home with God.
We are called it to do so.
We have to be faithful to sharing that love with others
and folding those who least feel loved into the center of our lives.
Timothy Radcliffe, then quoted a beautiful poem by Carlo Carretto
who is one of the brothers of Charles de Foucald community,
a group committed to nonviolent sort of testimony of love in the world.
And this is what he talks about
his own ambiguity of living in the church
that he loves so much. He says,
“How much I must criticize you my church,
yet how much I love you.
How have you made me suffer?
And yet I owe you so much.
I should like to see you destroyed.
And yet I need your presence.
You have given me such scandal
and yet you have made me understand holiness.
How often I have felt like slamming
the door of my soul in your face
and how often I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms.
No, I cannot be free of you for I am one with you,
even though not completely.
Then to where would I go to build another.
But I cannot build another without the same defects
for those are my defects too.
There are the defects that I bear within me too.
And again, if I build one,
it will only be my church and
no longer the Church of Christ. (1)
My friends, the movement, we are called to this mission.
We are called to is one of love,
love to the peripheries of society.
And we are called to fold them back in to the center
and keep doing it over and over again.”
If we do that, we will accomplish what the Lord has given to us to do,
to preach the gospel to every creature,
to the ends of the earth.
And they went forth and they preached the gospel to every creature.