+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I am too old and probably too self-serious to have appreciated it, but I have a goddaughter who was just the right age to become obsessed with the Disney movie Frozen, and in particular the song “Let It Go.” One critic referred to the song as “musical crack” which “sends kids into altered states” which I can confirm anecdotally. I’m not sure if the message of the song is meant to be “be yourself” in the way that young people should hear or if it’s more like “you have no obligation whatsoever to respect social norms and the reasonable expectations of your fellows” which I think is not a great message at this time in our common life. Either interpretation could stand up, but probably best for all of us if I don’t spend any time subjecting you to my analysis of a cultural product that is beyond my ken.
I did read a book last week, though, which gets at a similar question of letting go—Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel Klara and the Sun. I particularly love literature that deals with philosophical questions of identity and perspective and metaphysical issues like “what is the soul?” and this book had all that, which is why I read it, but it also focused, in my reading anyway, on this moral and spiritual issue of “letting go” (particularly in parent-child relationships, but in other ways, too). I won’t spoil the book; it’s a good read, and I commend it to you. Ishiguro is a lot less whithholding than in some of his other novels, and he gives a lot of “grist for the mill” in dealing with some pretty heartbreaking stuff.
Anyway, this all got me thinking about this difficult issue of “letting go”, which presents itself in at least three ways in the lessons assigned for this Sunday after the Ascension. I’ll take them in ascending order of difficulty, at least as I see it, though your ranking may be quite different from mine.
First, the very first verse of our lesson from Acts. The disciples have spent forty days seeing the risen Lord come in and out among them, they were all witnesses to what is not just the greatest miracle of all time, but what we might think of as a happening beyond even the term “miracle.” (For what it’s worth, I’d class the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection as sui generis occurrences, so glorious that even the category “miracle” is insufficient.) So they are witnesses to something indescribably great, and yet what is the question they ask on the last occasion they’ll have to speak with Jesus before he goes to the Father? “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” It’s not “how shall we get by without you?” (He had warned them he was leaving.) It’s not “how shall we pattern our lives as we await your return?” It’s not “any last pro-tips for evangelism, since that’s the mission you have set for us?” No. “We have this political problem. We don’t like the Romans and we were really hoping you’d be our king? I know you said your kingdom is not of this world, but can’t you be a little flexible on that one?”
What I’m about to say is not to diminish the fact that Christians are called to work for the common good. We should be good citizens, not quietists. Christian ethics can and should be applied insofar as our lives intersect with the political realm. All that said, I believe that if one’s Christian identity can be reduced to a political party or platform, then something has gone very wrong. Namely, we have set up a false soteriology, a misguided view of salvation, which holds that the promises of the Gospel are to be achieved by human effort in establishing a particular civic order. This has been attempted over and over again throughout the church’s history, along both what we might anachronistically term “conservative” and “liberal” lines, and the Kingdom of God, it turns out, never managed to get perfectly established on earth.
I’m aware that I’m not preaching before the United Nations or a joint session of Congress this morning, but this can affect each of us. I know people whose spiritual well-being seems entirely dependent on whatever is happening politically (in the world, in our nation, in one’s community) at any given moment. I know people(not in this parish, by the way, but who knows) whom I’d rather not ask “what is your prayer life like?” because I worry the answer would be something like “well going to this march or holding this listening session is a sort of prayer.” It might be, but it seems to me that you’ve got to get on your knees and talk honestly with the Creator of the Universe sometimes, too. So, the first thing I’d suggest trying to let go is the belief (implicit or explicit) that all our hope is to be founded in human efforts at establishing a more just society. We should hope and pray and work for that, but it’s ultimately not the Kingdom of God we’re building here.
Second, and more difficult in my experience, we should try to let go of anxiety. “Cast all your anxieties on [God],” wrote St. Peter in today’s epistle, “for he cares about you.” I am fully aware that just saying “don’t worry” is mostly unhelpful, even if that is followed up with good evidence for why the worst case scenario is unlikely. Some of you know that I have a relationship with a schizophrenic man, Bruce, and that while my legal obligation is simply to handle his finances, the actual responsibility I have goes much deeper and touches every aspect of his life. So, I have learned the hard way that saying “calm down” to someone in a psychotic state does not work. Actually, it rarely works for someone fully in his or her right mind.
The only advice I can give as far as this goes, is “stay prayed up” and know that you are being prayed for. For all their blundering and the myopia which led them to use their last chance to ask Jesus for a political solution, the disciples finally seemed to get it, as they returned from Olivet and went directly to the upper room to devote themselves to prayer with each other and with our Lord’s Blessed mother. The more frequently and consistently I pray, the less nervous I find I am about the changes and chances of life. It just works. And you are being prayed for. Among the handful of things I pray for in the wee hours every morning, before I’ve had sufficient coffee to actually pray morning prayer formally, is for this parish, and that includes each of you and all your troubles and concerns. I bet there are others praying for you on a regular basis. I know that our Lord Jesus Christ is; he is ever making intercession to the Father on your behalf, and he says as much in his high priestly prayer, part of which we heard as this morning’s Gospel. Fully integrating the knowledge of this blessed, comforting truth may, in time, be enough to let it go.
Finally, most difficult of all perhaps, even more difficult than letting go anxiety as it relates to our own lives, is trusting other people enough to live as adult Christians, free moral agents, people who are going to make mistakes and sometimes surprise us by demonstrating that they know more about themselves and the world than we do. Maybe that’s just a “me problem”; I try not to be paternalistic, but I realize that this can be my natural modus operandi, and I don’t even have children (perhaps for the best, then).
Because I don’t have children, and my only frame of reference is found in literature like Klara and the Sun, and particularly since I have lots of opinions that nobody signed up to be subjected to, I’ll not get into the most fraught manifestation of this need to “let go”—namely, how to calibrate that against a host of other concerns during a person’s journey through adolescence and into adulthood. (Plus, even though I’m of the right age to have adolescent children I’m very much behind the times; if I wanted to go to the mall, my parents would say “take the bus”, but now there are no malls, there are no buses here, and if there were you might get CPS called on you for letting junior go on one by himself!) I will simply say that this difficulty applies to all sorts of relationships, the whole web of complicated obligations that every human being has with his or her fellows. Just from a personal standpoint, as some sort of spiritual leader, I find the line between proferring wise and reasonable advice when it’s sought and trying to impose my will on somebody when I think I know better can be dangerously fine.
Here, I think, as ever, the model can be found in our Lord. We may think of the Ascension as the moment when the disciples had to let Jesus go (or rather, let go of relating with him as they previously had done). But it seems to me that it is just as much (if not more) about Jesus letting the Apostles go. He would always be with them in an important, spiritual sense, and we’ll celebrate next week the fact that he had a further provision for them, the Holy Spirit, to keep them on the right track. But no longer was it just as simple as telling Peter or Philip or Thomas or the others to straighten up and fly right the moment they said or did something silly or counterproductive. Jesus had to let them go, to make their mistakes, to learn from them, to pray for his help, and to get on with it as mature disciples, shepherds of his beloved flock, sent out to spread the Good News. We are in this together, we are the body of Christ, but none of us is the head, so we don’t get to control the whole body, even if we think we’d do it better.
And just like problems one and two, just like the danger of placing our hope for salvation where it doesn’t belong and just like getting over our anxious cares and worries, the best approach here, I think, is simply to pray, by yourself and with others. Staying grounded in the glory of God, which now that he is ascended illuminates every inch of the earth and every corner of the human heart, is not a matter of being good or becoming a spiritual athlete. The capital “S” saints got partway there during their mortal pilgrimage, and were the happier for it, but all of us need simply to say our prayers and read our bibles and try to be regular and honest and vulnerable in our approach to the one who loves us and will give us all we need. As for the rest, if you can, let it go.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.