May 25, 2006
Vacancy
Ascensiontide Mk 16.9-15,19f
When the people in the world of the Bible experienced what they called principalities and powers, they were discerning the actual spirituality at the center of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of their time.
Few today ever consider spirituality that way or as anything other than some vacuous synonym for religion and as a more or less irrelevant matter left to its practitioners. A further phenomenon is to presume that if something is spiritual, it must therefore be good, thus risking our overlooking the daemons for evil that lurk not only in our societies, but also in ourselves. They, too, of course, are “spiritual.” That we allow all this to happen is to our ultimate peril.
But we allow it anyway, even encourage it in our public education systems with their disdain for the libraries and the humanities, the arts and the world’s religions. That we do so has perhaps never been more obvious and reckless than it is today.
All this leaves an empty space in the way we live, a vacancy into which rush the daemons of denial and grandiosity, pleasure and distraction, violence and illiteracy, and whatever else is at hand, thus rendering impotent the possibility of any creative stewardship of our lives.
Something of that order is happening now in places like the middle east. Iraq and the whole miasma of that area is emploding, and we seem helpless to know what, if anything, to do about it, save regime-change by force, all the while in denial of the changes needed in our own house. This, I suspect, is a result of our misunderstanding, just plain ignorance, and, even worse, indifference to how these spiritual energies, these principalities and powers work in societies, certainly in our own, let alone in others.
Mark’s Ascension gospel reminds us of the hapless and frightened disciples demonstrating how the misery of their sudden emptiness does, indeed, love company. Jesus had filled that space in their lives. His energy fed their energy, his charisma gave them enthusiasm, his manifest power gave them courage, his teaching gave them direction, and his confidence gave them hope.
Once Jesus left, the little circle seemed vacant, tattered, needing to be repopulated and reenergized. What had seemed so vibrant with Jesus present now seemed cold and lifeless with Jesus absent. Doubt and fear rushed in to fill their hearts.
The gospel’s inherent irony is perhaps nowhere more poignant than in this scene. They’d already heard that something new and exciting had happened, but they chose not to believe it. Then, Mary Magdalene of all people and whom they knew only too well comes and tells them the good news of Jesus’ new life. Of course, neither did they believe her, even though they probably knew she’d been freshly purged of seven daemons of heavens-knows-what. Even so, the Magdalene was not your average soccer mom, but yet does she become the apostle to the apostles-to-become, and with little tribute to the rest of us males who stand in their succession and who so often miss the point ever so clearly as did they.
In our liturgical keeping of time, we stand in between this time when we remember Jesus’ return to his father and the Pentecost when we commemorate the gift of the Holy Spirit’s birthing the church. Perhaps this, as well, can remind us of our empty spaces and call us to attend to how they will be filled.
Will we, as do so many, surrender to the usual crippled understanding of spirituality as merely another organized and irrelevant religion? Or will we welcome this Pentecost, embracing God’s Holy Spirit to renew us again as church, letting that presence fill the vacancy in our lives, get us past some of our present foolish diversions, feed our energy, spur our enthusiasm, encourage and direct us, give us confidence and hope?
As we observe the eleven disciples in Mark’s story, we know that the work, the ministry, the caring, the healing, the teaching, the conflicts, the suffering, the sacrificing, the storytelling, the recruiting, the dying — is now theirs to bring into this space. They could not just follow Jesus as before. They themselves had to embrace Holy Spirit as did he to fill the space he once occupied. And it is to our eternal benefit that they did precisely that, thanks to God’s gift to them of the Magdalene and others like her.
It was like moving to a new home, into lots of promise and little warmth. It is like starting a companionship with someone who is largely a stranger, or starting a new job and knowing that all the sudden your resumé means next to nothing. We can either just stand there in our religious puffery or we can embrace Holy Spirit in hand and heart, and then go out into the marketplace, into the crowd, into the swirl of pilgrims seeking God. The Spirit did not fashion for the disciples a nest, where they could feel safe and comfortable. The Spirit set them on fire. The Spirit drove them into the wilderness and into the streets.
Dan Corrigan was a few decades ago one of our church’s more devoted and exciting bishops. In the old 1928 prayer book, there was no “dismissal” at the end of the Eucharist as there is now. So he would stand at the altar, pronounce the closing Blessing, pause for a moment… then, in his great, booming voice, literally shout at us…
“Get up! Get out! And get lost!”