High Expectations: Ascension and Angelou

Today the church celebrates the feast of the Ascension. As the disciples gathered around Jesus that final time, as recorded in the book of Acts, they placed at his feet their expectation:  Aren't you now going to restore the kingdom to Israel? They were thinking of things temporal of course, things based on ages of traditional religious teaching, but it was a narrow and limited expectation.  

Jesus points them and us to a larger picture of how things will be restored and directs them and us as to the part we will play:  "You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."  Peter, and John, James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James, son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, Judas, son of James, and the women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, and you and I and the millions set between them us proclaim our witness still.

Through this powerful witness we proclaim that all things earthly ultimately belong to heaven; that God so earthbound in Jesus was on the fortieth day of the resurrection returned to the heavenly realm.  It is on this collective body of testimony that we have laid our faith and based all our expectations, present and future. 

Christian faith is nothing if not an expectant faith. That is to say, we do not merely hope for things but see the world through eyes of hopeful expectation.  We expect that God's promises to us will be realized.  We expect that God is now and will be ever present to us, never more so then in our own hour of need.  We expect that our prayers will be and in fact are being answered. We expect that when we die that life will not be ended, but merely changed. We expect to be reunited one day with the ones we love who have gone on before us.  We expect miracles: the healing of the sick, the raising of the death, the life everlasting.  We expect that God is acting for good.  We expect to know God just as God has been revealed in Jesus.  We expect to share with other Christians in the sacredness of life and its preservation.  We expect to share with one another our common commitment to promote peace over war. We expect to share with one another in the building up of the body of Christ. We expect to share with one another in our love of neighbor.  We expect that our shared faith can change the world. And those expectations bind us together into one people despite our individual differences.  These expectations promote action and the breaking of silence, they make the unseen seen - justice and injustice alike, they shed light in the darkness and assure us that the light has had victory over the darkness, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Some might say these are high expectations and lofty ideals.  But for Christians they are foundational; they are the place from which we begin when we say, "I believe," and are at the same time the place where we end up. Our expectations give us eyes to see the world as it really is, and eyes to see how it could be, should be. Our expectations lend to us a vision of a path that cuts straight through injustice and leads right into the heart of God's own hope for the world. It is our expectations that make us a prophetic people. It is the prophets, ancient and recent, who have and continue to articulate the realization of our collective expectations.

Maya Angelou is one of our prophets.  She died this week and was preceded in death by another prophetic agent, Vincent Harding, who passed on earlier this month.  Coincidentally, both were influential acquaintances of Martin Luther King, Jr. whose prophetic voice cannot be overstated. Harding was a close adviser to King and wrote his anti-war speech, Beyond Vietnam: A time to break silence.  In this speech, which was delivered in April 1967, King said the following as he explained each of his reasons for opposition to the war: 

"My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."  

In the same way, Maya Angelou's poetry stands as a living and timely testament to the power of the prophetic witness of Christian expectation. Let us now pause for a moment from our busy lives on this first day of June, as we observe the feast of the Ascension, in the quiet of this house of God of which Jesus Christ himself is the head and hear words of great expectation delivered in Angelou’s poem, A Brave and Startling Truth.

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it. 

I ask myself:  How did these people come to do what they did? What moved them to what they wrote? What formed them, influenced them, spoke to them, inspired them?  How did they get from ordinary like me, to the extraordinary people they became?  But I know the answer. They were possessed. They were possessed by the expectations they held for God and for us.  They expected God to act. They expected us to act. They expected hardened hearts to change.  They expected justice.  They expected righteousness.  They expected peace to reign over war.  They were possessed by their love for Jesus. They were possessed by the Holy Spirit, and molded, formed and shaped by an expectant faith.  

What do you expect?