It gets
weirder.
It turns out
that Gagarin never said anything one way or the other about seeing God out the
window of Vostok 1! But we do know this: in the days before his rocket lifted
off from Star City on the Wednesday after Orthodox Easter, Gagarin took his
daughter, Yelena, to be baptized that Easter Sunday.
The infamous comment was actually made by Nikita Khrushchev about a month or so after the flight. And he
didn’t quote Gagarin but rather, in an attempt to mock religion, he said what
he thought Gagarin didn’t see. The Western press, perhaps spotting an
opportunity for propaganda (and probably also unable to understand Russian)
immediately attributed the words to Gagarin.
Never missing
an opportunity to have fun, the speech did inspire a 1963 film called Heavens Above!, a screwball British comedy starring
Peter Sellers who plays a naïve but well-meaning vicar who is accidently
appointed to small parish basically run by the wealthy lord of the nearby
manor. The new vicar started doing exactly what Jesus taught: he gave away
food to poor, sold all his (and his parish’s) possessions, and welcomed the
poor into his church, becoming such an annoyance that the folks complain to the bishop. But he has generated such publicity that they can't really remove him, so instead he is appointed as the
new Bishop of Outer Space, stuffed into a Mercury-like capsule, and shot into
space. From there, as he orbited the earth, he read the psalms over the radio
from his space capsule.
A more famous
(and lasting) response to the Gagarin mis-quote came from three real American
astronauts, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman as they orbited
the moon in Apollo 8 seven years after Gagarin's flight on Christmas Eve, 1968. The three
astronauts took turns reading Genesis 1:1-10, the creation story, on the same flight that gave us the
iconic image of the earth rising over the horizon of the moon.
Which just goes
to show that the geography of holiness is a tricky and dangerous thing!
The Feast of
the Ascension, which comes forty days after Easter, describes and celebrates
the return of the living, crucified, and resurrected Jesus to heaven. Many
people, especially today, when we can peer into deep space at other galaxies,
get hung up on what is meant by “up.”
Which raises a question: which way is "up?"
What is
described in both the Book of Acts and in the Gospel of Luke is not a mere
disapparation. Jesus doesn’t just disappear into the ether, but instead
physically rises up into the sky, leaving the disciples staring into the
heavens, mouths agape, until an angel comes and tells them to “snap out of it!”
and come back to earth.
As
sophisticated as we are, no matter how many airline flights we take, and no
matter how many space shots we’ve witnessed, we still tend to think of heaven
as “up” and hell as “down”, with us living somewhere in the middle. But as
interesting as this cosmological hot-hero sandwich might be, the real
significance of the Ascension is not geography but relationship!
Our catechism
in The Book of Common Prayer reminds us that “the mission of the Church is to
restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” (p. 854)
In both the
Gospel of Luke and in the Book of Acts, before he returns to heaven, Jesus
tells his friends and apprentices to stay put in the city and await the gift
that God will send them.
He also teaches
them one last time how everything they have seen and heard fits together as God
intended. We discover that the disciples, in this period between resurrection
and Pentecost, were not powerless, alone, nor afraid but spent their time
together in what must have seemed like a transformed community: they prayed and
sang and worshipped. They were not hiding but lived out in the open going
between their home(s) and the Temple through the streets of Jerusalem for all
to see!
What changed
was the geography of holiness. Their place, their city, once a place of
foreboding and death, is now a place of wonder and worship. They saw the world
and their place in it with new eyes, and this even before the Paraclete, the
Holy Spirit, would arrive on Pentecost!
You see, the
Ascension didn’t just take Jesus back into heaven, into God’s realm in the
cosmos, the Ascension revealed how the friends and apprentices of Jesus were
now living in a new relationship with God and each other through Christ because
heaven had come to earth! And this changed
them! Their relationships with God each other and even with the world around
them was transformed because they were restored and renewed.
Finally, the
Ascension shows us the sneakiness of God. Its importance is exactly backwards
from what we expect. We think it is about going “up,” when in fact it is God
coming “down,” to meet us and all humanity and creation right where we are, tuning our hearts and our senses towards Christ! Giving us the
gifts, the power, and the skill, to see humanity and creation more and more
through God’s eyes. The Ascension shows us that that prayer we pray every day
us, the one that Jesus taught us, that God’s will be done on earth as in heaven
is in fact happening—all around us!
So which way is
“up?”
The Ascension
shows us that as we are drawn to Christ, to each other, and to the world, we
are being drawn to God. That way is “up!”
The Ascension
reminds us, as Orthodox bishop Metropolitan Anthony Bloom once said, “that the
realm of God is dangerous. You must enter into it and not just seek information
about it.” Look at what happens in Luke and Acts. Jesus draws to heaven and
invites us to work in The City—in the places and in the relationships where God
has placed you. And the only place where we can receive “power from on high” is
in “the city,” where we, his people, live, pray, work, and worship.
This is the
geography of the holy. We don’t need to go elsewhere to find God because God is
right here, right now!
It is said by
some who knew him, that Yuri Gagarin carried in his pocket a small icon, right
up until he died in a plane crash in 1968. I don’t know. But I do know this: we
here in this city, in this place, in our witness, worship, and in our holy
work, we baptized people are icons of the holy. What God is doing on earth with
us now is what happens in heaven, just as Jesus said when he taught us to pray.
No comments:
Post a Comment