Escaping Grandfather's Mansion

Sermon for Ascension, transferred. May 29, 2022

Acts 1:1-11; Luke 24:44-53

There are times when words fall short, and this week is one of them.  On Tuesday, an 18-year-old entered a fourth-grade classroom in Texas and started shooting children and teachers.  Twenty-one are dead, 17 are wounded, and countless others are scarred for life. 

I don’t want to have to talk about this today.  I don’t ever want to talk about this kind of atrocity again.  After Uvalde, and Buffalo, and all the other places whose names we’ve been hearing in the news this week, I want to be done talking about shoppers massacred in grocery stores or fourth graders gunned down at their desks.  I have no words to make this better.

Yet, at the same time, there are moments when words must be spoken, regardless of how they fall short.  For when we are lost, wandering in the darkness, we need to remember who we are, and whose we are, and what that means for us.  So, let’s start by offering God our pain and our compassion for the people of Uvalde through this prayer from the Episcopal bishop of West Texas, David Reed.  Let us pray: 

O God our Father, whose beloved Son took children into his arms and blessed them: Give us grace to entrust your beloved children of Uvalde to your everlasting care and love, and bring them fully into your heavenly kingdom.  Pour out your grace and loving-kindness on all who grieve; surround them with your love; and restore their trust in your goodness.  We lift up to you our weary, wounded souls and ask you to send your Holy Spirit to take away the anger and violence that infect our hearts, and to make us instruments of your peace and children of your light.  In the Name of Christ who is our hope, we pray. Amen.¹

So, I’m tempted now just to read the names of the victims and have us sit here through several minutes of silent lamentation.  But in this tragic week, we also marked a peculiar major feast of the Church, the feast of the Ascension, as well as Memorial Day weekend.  Now, the ascension of the resurrected Jesus might seem to have nothing at all to do with this tragedy our nation is bearing.  In fact, the cynics might look at this odd juxtaposition of events and holidays and conclude that, indeed, Jesus must have ascended back to heaven, because he sure as heck isn’t preventing the carnage we inflict on each other here.  First, of course, that cynicism reflects bad theology, because God has never been in the business of preventing the carnage we inflict on each other.  Instead, God inhabited our world as Jesus Christ, inaugurating a kingdom of love in contrast to the kingdom of sin and violence that surrounded him – in fact, allowing himself to be sacrificed to sin and violence, in order to defeat them by rising from the grave.  Jesus isn’t about dragging us out of the kingdom of death.  He’s about giving us a different reality to choose – the reality of the reign and rule of God.

In fact, the feast of the Ascension reminds us God’s contrast reality isn’t just a nice idea, a vision of peace and harmony to comfort us.  This contrast reality is the present, active dominion of the Prince of Peace.  The central claim of the Ascension is not that Jesus up and left, heading back to heavenly tranquility.  The central claim of the Ascension is that Jesus is Lord of the Universe, our cosmic CEO, the one to whom our glory and our allegiance must go.  Now, it’s true that we’re empowered by our Creator with free will, the ability to turn against the king, because love cannot be commanded.  But we turn against the king at our own peril – individually and as a broken nation. 

What we see around us is the consequence of the perspective I talked about last week: Seeing ourselves as independent actors, each with the correct answer to any given question and the right to exercise our beliefs as we darned well see fit.  Well, liberty is certainly a gift from God, but as St. Paul said, “Take care that this liberty of yours does not become a stumbling block” to others (1 Corinthians 8:9).  We’ve come to believe so deeply that we are right, and others are wrong, and we can do whatever we want that we’re losing our memory of how to care for one another, how to nurture the common good.  I believe this is our particularly American affliction of original sin: that deep down, we each think we know best and have the right to act on it.  And the more we act that way, the less we can see Jesus beckoning us to follow his reign and rule instead.

Seeing the reality of Jesus’ heavenly reign can be tricky.  In fact, our world conspires against it, turning God’s reality on its head.  To flesh that out a bit, let me share an image I think I’ve mentioned before. 

As a kid, growing up in Springfield, Missouri, my family went to Silver Dollar City just about every year.  At this 1880s-style amusement park, one of the earliest attractions was a funhouse called Grandfather’s Mansion.  The stairs make you lean at odd angles, and the hallways tip you sideways, messing with your equilibrium.  Portraits on the wall change from the faces of kindly elders to demonic monsters depending on where you stand.  You sit on what looks like a level bench and tumble into the person sitting next to you.  You turn on a faucet and watch the water run uphill. 

But maybe the most compelling sight is looking through a window into Grandfather’s bedroom.  Literally everything in it is upside down – a bed on the ceiling, with the bedspread hanging upwards; a chandelier sticking up from the floor; a water pitcher and bowl stuck to a dressing table hanging from the ceiling; and a clock running counter-clockwise, with a long pendulum sticking up from the bottom, arcing back and forth in the air.

As a kid walking through Grandfather’s Mansion, I first found the place deeply disorienting, even frightening; and I wanted to get out because I was afraid of what twisted reality I might encounter next.  But if you spend enough time in Grandfather’s Mansion, your equilibrium sort of adapts, and you can make your way through the off-kilter hallways and down the tipping stairs without much stumbling.  And with repeated visits, of course, Grandfather’s Mansion becomes familiar territory.  You don’t even need to think too much about readjusting your equilibrium to get you through this upside-down world.

I believe we’re living in Grandfather’s Mansion.  More to the point:  I believe we’re choosing to live in Grandfather’s Mansion.  We’ve spent so much time in Grandfather’s Mansion we think it’s reality, that clocks run backwards and water runs uphill.  And it’s long past time for us to make our escape.  This nation of disfigured priorities, this land where me being right matters more than us being safe – this land is not our home.  Jesus, our true Lord, invites us to remember that we are citizens of a different land, a “heavenly country” (Hebrews 11:16) – which specifically does not mean just a promise of peace in the sweet by and by.  It means a responsibility to follow the Prince of Peace here and now, in the twisted reality we’ve created, turning toward his reign and rule instead. 

What would that look like?  It would look like our leaders taking those rituals of failure I mentioned last week and transforming them into kingdom moments, seizing God-awful times like this week and redeeming them by choosing to turn in a different direction. 

Here’s a tiny example.  There was an article in the Star on Wednesday, buried a long way down the feed.  It wasn’t full of emotion or conflict – no police lights or scandal involved.  It was a guest commentary from Bob Boydston, the retired sheriff of Clay County with 34 years’ experience in law enforcement.  Here’s the title of his article: “Don’t say we can’t fight school shootings. Clay County and North KC schools have a plan.”  And the article outlines that plan.  It focuses on achieving what could actually be achieved in this moment, first steps that could make a difference. It would put retired law-enforcement officers into schools at all levels.  This enhanced protection would be funded by taxes on firearms at the points of importation, manufacture, and sale, as well as taxes on video games about killing people.  This tax revenue would also support stronger state mental-health services.²

I raise up this proposal not because it’s “the answer” to gun violence.  I raise this up because it’s one escape window from Grandfather’s Mansion – people coming together to do what they can, in this particular time and place, to reduce gun violence and make people safer.  Now, if we asked the Prince of Peace, our cosmic CEO, whether this is enough, Jesus would say, “Of course not.”  But it’s something – a step toward prioritizing the safety of the vulnerable, putting the well-being of the community ahead of the demands of the extremes.  That sounds to me like a turn toward the reign and rule of God.

We’ve got to start climbing out of Grandfather’s Mansion sometime.  And we’re not going to find the way out by staring up to heaven, like the disciples watching Jesus ascend.  Ultimately, Jesus will return “in the same way as you saw him go into heaven,” as the angels say in today’s reading (Acts 1:11); and we might want to think about consequences for those who ignored his directions now.  Because the Lord of the Universe, our CEO, has already issued his orders for dealing with evil as we await his return in glory.  He’s deputized you and me.  As he said in the reading from Acts and in today’s Gospel, you are his “witnesses” (Luke 24:48; Acts 1:8).  You are the proclaimers of the reign and rule of God in the here and now.  Both the principles of our American democracy and the principles of God’s kingdom point us in the same direction on this one:  We the people bear responsibility to end the madness of one mass shooting after another.  We were not given this nation to turn it into a land where the clocks run backwards and the rivers run uphill.  We are citizens of a better country – and it’s time for us to insist on it.  Because, at the end of the day, we are truly citizens of an even “better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16) – and it's time for us to act that way.

1.      “West Texas Bishop David Reed requests prayers following Uvalde elementary school shooting.”  Episcopal News Service., May 24, 2022.  Available at: https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2022/05/24/west-texas-bishop-david-reed-request-prayers-after-uvalde-elementary-school-shooting/. Accessed May 27, 2022.

2.      Boydston, Bob. “Don’t say we can’t fight school shootings. Clay County and North KC schools have a plan.” Kansas City Star, May 25, 2022. Available at: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/readers-opinion/guest-commentary/article261769427.html. Accessed May 27, 2022.