This sermon was preached on May 17, 2015 at Grace Episcopal Church in Medford, MA. The texts for this sermon were: Acts 1:15-17, 21-26, 1 John 5:9-13, John 17:6-19, and Psalm 1.
This past Thursday we celebrated Ascension Day--another new liturgical holiday for me. On that day, we remember how Jesus was lifted into heaven after his resurrection. But when I was asked on Thursday to describe a recent ascension experience of my own, I had a lot of trouble answering the question--or even articulating why it was so difficult.
You see, to me, the act of ascension--rising above the world--seems entirely un-Christian. Ascension is the singular moment when following Jesus does not mean following his actions but following the parting directives he left to his disciples in those last days, some of which are included in our Gospel passage from today.
Although John's Gospel doesn't include an account of the ascension, it does include the text of Jesus's prayer for disciples at the last supper before he is crucified. We started in the middle of that prayer. Addressing his holy father, Jesus asks that his disciples be blessed and sanctified and protected in their work. He acknowledges how hard this will be, saying, “The world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world." Then he says this: "I am not asking you to take them out of the world…As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world." Jesus specifically says that he is not asking God to help the disciples ascend out of the mess of humanity and rise with him to heaven. He’s asking God to help them be where it is hardest to be--where they are rejected and hated and do not belong.
This past week was also National Nursing Home Week. It has nowhere near the legitimacy as something like Ascension Day, but it mattered to the nursing home we work with down the street so it mattered to us. And here's where I confess a few things. It feels a little weird to celebrate nursing homes. I really believe that the people who live in nursing home deserve to be celebrated as the holy men and women they are--and that the hard and difficult work of often over-worked and underpaid nurses, staff and administration deserves to be appreciated as well. But at the end of the day, our outreach ministry team has uncovered many emotions surrounding nursing homes in our work--how it feels to move into one, to work in one or to send a relative to live in one. We’ve encountered fear, resignation, relief, guilt, despair. Celebration is not the word that comes to mind. In fact, one of the difficulties of having a shared goal of bringing hope and brightness into a neglected and desolate space is resisting the urge to plaster over genuine pain and suffering and boredom with smiley face stickers.
And here's the other confession I have for you. Every time I go over there I feel awkward and uncomfortable and out of place. It is painfully clear that I do not belong. I am young and healthy and free to go where I please, what am I doing there?
One of my first times visiting Medford Rehab and Nursing Center I sat down next to a woman in her mid-to-late thirties who was sitting somewhat apart from the others. I asked her how she was doing. She was raised by a single mother with her sisters, the woman told me right away, and they needed her. Why had they put her here, she asked me point-blank. “Take me home,” she said, fixing her eyes on mine. “I’m not supposed to be here.” When I didn’t know how to respond, she told her story to me again and then a third time, always with the same plea. “Take me home.” Of course, I could no more take her home than I could cure her of whatever mental illness had robbed her sense of reality, or reverse the aging process of the twenty-odd people around me.
So I sat with her. I sat with her and remembered all those times when my own soul had cried out, “Take me home.” All those moments when I knew I was somewhere I did not belong. I thought of my experience living in Jordan last year, sitting in room after room packed with Jordanian officials and religious leaders, the only American, the only woman, the only non-Arab, lost in a swirl of Arabic dialects and religious and cultural references I barely grasped. I thought of moments in churches all over the country and around the world where I sat in pews and folding chairs and on the floor and listened to a sermon I did not agree with and heard a version of Christ I could not follow. I thought of all those times in high school when I felt weird and different and misunderstood.
“They did not belong to the world, just as I not belong to the world."
Perhaps you too have sat in a room where you were the only person of your race, gender, age, economic background, or culture. Perhaps that’s how you’ve lived most of your life. Perhaps you’re not sure if you belong in your family, in your own body, or sitting in these pews.
If you have ever felt out of place, this prayer is for you. Christ prays it for his disciples and he prays it for us. And he tells us three important things in this prayer. He tells us why he asks his Holy Father to protect us--so that we may be one. He tells us that he, too, knows that feeling of un-belonging. That he shares in that experience of un-belonging with us. And he tells us that despite all that un-belonging, we are sent. We are sent into places we are hated, or ignored, or ridiculed. We are sent into places that make us feel uncomfortable, unsafe, and unloved. And even though we may not feel like we belong, even though we may be hated by everyone around us, it does not mean that is not where we are meant to be, where we are sent to be.
Whenever we set foot into places of forced institutionalization for people with nowhere else to go, whether it be a prison, a homeless shelter, a hospital or a nursing home, and we feel weird and uncomfortable and out of place, we can know this: many of the people there feel like they don’t belong either. It is no more home to them than it is to you or me. I believe that we as Christians are called to be there with them in that unbelonging-ness, just as Christ is with us in ours.
I’ll leave you with one last image. It's an old black-and-white photo of a young African-American woman sitting in a classroom, motionless, looking determinedly straight ahead. All around her are white teenagers, leaning out of seats and twisting their necks to gawk at her, mocking and jeering. The woman in the photo is fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts, one of four black kids who dared to attend all-white high schools in Charlotte, North Carolina in September 1957. And it’s clear from this picture that her classmates hate her. They hate her because she does not belong to the world they’ve constructed out of prejudice and exclusion.
Dorothy endured four days of bullying and harassment after the photograph was taken, bombarded with spit and rocks and sticks and death threats, before her parents forced her to withdraw from school out of concern for her safety. Yet this moment of defiance and courage lives on in that photo as a prophetic testimony. A witness to the brave individuals of the Civil Rights Movement, and all throughout history, who have gone where the world has told them they do not belong, because they knew it was where they were meant to be, where they were sent to be.
I think that the condition of un-belongingness leaves us Christians with a choice. We can use as a way to ascend from this world, and separate, look down upon it. Or we can look around us and see how this broken world tells so many people that they do not belong, that they do not matter. We can listen for how we are being sent into all those places we ourselves do not belong and sit with the people we find there, sit with them in their un-belongingness. Because that’s where you and I are sent to be.
This past Thursday we celebrated Ascension Day--another new liturgical holiday for me. On that day, we remember how Jesus was lifted into heaven after his resurrection. But when I was asked on Thursday to describe a recent ascension experience of my own, I had a lot of trouble answering the question--or even articulating why it was so difficult.
You see, to me, the act of ascension--rising above the world--seems entirely un-Christian. Ascension is the singular moment when following Jesus does not mean following his actions but following the parting directives he left to his disciples in those last days, some of which are included in our Gospel passage from today.
Although John's Gospel doesn't include an account of the ascension, it does include the text of Jesus's prayer for disciples at the last supper before he is crucified. We started in the middle of that prayer. Addressing his holy father, Jesus asks that his disciples be blessed and sanctified and protected in their work. He acknowledges how hard this will be, saying, “The world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world." Then he says this: "I am not asking you to take them out of the world…As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world." Jesus specifically says that he is not asking God to help the disciples ascend out of the mess of humanity and rise with him to heaven. He’s asking God to help them be where it is hardest to be--where they are rejected and hated and do not belong.
This past week was also National Nursing Home Week. It has nowhere near the legitimacy as something like Ascension Day, but it mattered to the nursing home we work with down the street so it mattered to us. And here's where I confess a few things. It feels a little weird to celebrate nursing homes. I really believe that the people who live in nursing home deserve to be celebrated as the holy men and women they are--and that the hard and difficult work of often over-worked and underpaid nurses, staff and administration deserves to be appreciated as well. But at the end of the day, our outreach ministry team has uncovered many emotions surrounding nursing homes in our work--how it feels to move into one, to work in one or to send a relative to live in one. We’ve encountered fear, resignation, relief, guilt, despair. Celebration is not the word that comes to mind. In fact, one of the difficulties of having a shared goal of bringing hope and brightness into a neglected and desolate space is resisting the urge to plaster over genuine pain and suffering and boredom with smiley face stickers.
And here's the other confession I have for you. Every time I go over there I feel awkward and uncomfortable and out of place. It is painfully clear that I do not belong. I am young and healthy and free to go where I please, what am I doing there?
One of my first times visiting Medford Rehab and Nursing Center I sat down next to a woman in her mid-to-late thirties who was sitting somewhat apart from the others. I asked her how she was doing. She was raised by a single mother with her sisters, the woman told me right away, and they needed her. Why had they put her here, she asked me point-blank. “Take me home,” she said, fixing her eyes on mine. “I’m not supposed to be here.” When I didn’t know how to respond, she told her story to me again and then a third time, always with the same plea. “Take me home.” Of course, I could no more take her home than I could cure her of whatever mental illness had robbed her sense of reality, or reverse the aging process of the twenty-odd people around me.
So I sat with her. I sat with her and remembered all those times when my own soul had cried out, “Take me home.” All those moments when I knew I was somewhere I did not belong. I thought of my experience living in Jordan last year, sitting in room after room packed with Jordanian officials and religious leaders, the only American, the only woman, the only non-Arab, lost in a swirl of Arabic dialects and religious and cultural references I barely grasped. I thought of moments in churches all over the country and around the world where I sat in pews and folding chairs and on the floor and listened to a sermon I did not agree with and heard a version of Christ I could not follow. I thought of all those times in high school when I felt weird and different and misunderstood.
“They did not belong to the world, just as I not belong to the world."
Perhaps you too have sat in a room where you were the only person of your race, gender, age, economic background, or culture. Perhaps that’s how you’ve lived most of your life. Perhaps you’re not sure if you belong in your family, in your own body, or sitting in these pews.
If you have ever felt out of place, this prayer is for you. Christ prays it for his disciples and he prays it for us. And he tells us three important things in this prayer. He tells us why he asks his Holy Father to protect us--so that we may be one. He tells us that he, too, knows that feeling of un-belonging. That he shares in that experience of un-belonging with us. And he tells us that despite all that un-belonging, we are sent. We are sent into places we are hated, or ignored, or ridiculed. We are sent into places that make us feel uncomfortable, unsafe, and unloved. And even though we may not feel like we belong, even though we may be hated by everyone around us, it does not mean that is not where we are meant to be, where we are sent to be.
Whenever we set foot into places of forced institutionalization for people with nowhere else to go, whether it be a prison, a homeless shelter, a hospital or a nursing home, and we feel weird and uncomfortable and out of place, we can know this: many of the people there feel like they don’t belong either. It is no more home to them than it is to you or me. I believe that we as Christians are called to be there with them in that unbelonging-ness, just as Christ is with us in ours.
I’ll leave you with one last image. It's an old black-and-white photo of a young African-American woman sitting in a classroom, motionless, looking determinedly straight ahead. All around her are white teenagers, leaning out of seats and twisting their necks to gawk at her, mocking and jeering. The woman in the photo is fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts, one of four black kids who dared to attend all-white high schools in Charlotte, North Carolina in September 1957. And it’s clear from this picture that her classmates hate her. They hate her because she does not belong to the world they’ve constructed out of prejudice and exclusion.
Dorothy endured four days of bullying and harassment after the photograph was taken, bombarded with spit and rocks and sticks and death threats, before her parents forced her to withdraw from school out of concern for her safety. Yet this moment of defiance and courage lives on in that photo as a prophetic testimony. A witness to the brave individuals of the Civil Rights Movement, and all throughout history, who have gone where the world has told them they do not belong, because they knew it was where they were meant to be, where they were sent to be.
I think that the condition of un-belongingness leaves us Christians with a choice. We can use as a way to ascend from this world, and separate, look down upon it. Or we can look around us and see how this broken world tells so many people that they do not belong, that they do not matter. We can listen for how we are being sent into all those places we ourselves do not belong and sit with the people we find there, sit with them in their un-belongingness. Because that’s where you and I are sent to be.
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