May 8, 2005 At Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK
Acts 1:1-11 + Ephesians 1:17-23 + Matthew 28:16-20
In spite of our privacy fences and gated communities, security codes and monitored security systems, boundaries of geography or politics mean less and less these days. The world is shrinking. While we tighten our boarders to keep some out, we wave others through with a wink and glance the other way to fill low paying jobs. For anyone who has traveled abroad in the last ten years, the boarders between ancient countries in Europe are now simply signs on “auto routes” and “auto bhans” like signs to our north that say: “Welcome to Kansas.” Boundaries mean little. They are in flux all the time.
What separates us is artificial and sometimes it is imposed by incomplete understanding. This fact sunk into my mind this month as I have read an interesting book about the Versailles Treaty and the consequences of the First World War. Most of our political and national strife in the past fifty years finds its origins in the lines the western allies drew on maps in 1919. They just didn’t get it.
With incomplete understanding, worn out from the violence and killing of that war, they rushed to settle things with boundaries that failed to take into consideration many factors of history, language, ethnic and tribal communities. Iraq is just one of the consequences of boundaries they made up in 1919. Boundaries between people are in flux. What separates us is totally artificial.
The Ascension of the Lord is about what unites us and tells the story of how God feels about boundaries. While told in Biblical language and with biblical images, what is really going on here is the breaking of a boundary. Christ’s ascension is the dissolution of the last boundary that keeps us from what we are called to be and from where we are called to be. What that early church discovered after the resurrection was that where God was concerned, there were no more boundaries. As Paul put it after he caught on: “no more Jew, no more Greek, no more male nor female.”
The communities themselves discovered this when the boundaries between Jews and Gentiles began to collapse as the inclusive nature of the Lord’s Table and the Gospel message was appreciated.
It all began as the biggest of all boundaries came down on the day of the Annunciation when young Mary in Nazareth said yes to the divine visitor who came to announce the end of the boundary.
“The Word was Made Flesh”. The boundary between heaven and earth was ended with the Incarnation when God crossed the boundary between heaven and earth. When the perfect obedience of His Son was complete, the last remnant of that boundary came down in a moment more powerful than the collapse of the Berlin Wall or the “Iron Curtain”. A human being crossed the boundary of death to life and of earth to heaven. With that, it was all over for walls, boundaries, fences, and anything else that keeps people apart and people from God.
This is what we celebrate today in our Christian tradition,
the crossing of the boundary, the end of the limits, the collapse of anything that keeps us from the presence of God.
And so, what matters today, in our lifetime, in this age of history
is not what separates us, but what unites us: our life in God through Christ in the Holy Spirit. We cannot be faithful to Christ and this plan of God and willingly settle for boundaries that divide and separate.
As he crossed the last boundary, the risen Christ who had already left behind the boundaries of human flesh and blood gave a final instruction and mandate to those who would follow him across the divide. They were to translate words into works, decisions into deeds,
and goals into achievements. Cheap talk was to become precious action. There were walls to take down, fences to remove, bridges to mend, and a divine plan for creation to complete. It is our mission,
our purpose in life, and it becomes more than our vision,
it becomes our very identity, who we are and what we are:
healers, forgivers, builders, disciples – regardless of the name or what we are called, the mission is the same.
As we stand between the two advents of God, we are not called to stand back and critique the world. We are sent into it to prepare
for the final perfection of this world as the Paradise, Heaven, the Kingdom of God.