Hope is the Thing with Feathers

I begin today with the words of the Author Christopher Cokinos:

“If hope lives not only as a feeling but as a dedication to vision, then hope flames soon enough, some brush of petal color, fruit color, feather color against the dull milky haze of a sky in which we’ve punched holes. These days hope asks much from us. Until recently, I never thought much of osage orange trees, those squat medusas of thorny branches with neither the majesty of a cottonwood nor the quaintness of a redbud. But, once, groves of osage oranges harbored Carolina Parakeets. I hold those trees dearer now.”

Star Trek or birds, you might have guessed we might find wisdom there if coming from me.

The Carolina Parakeet has fascinated me since I first learned of it. I’ve given you all a copy of Audubon’s rendering of them. You can see them hanging boldly on the wall behind my desk and they have always represented something precious and wasted. You see there are no Carolina Parakeets anymore, the last one died in Captivity in 1916 and they were declared extinct in 1936. That’s not even 100 years ago. There are still a few people alive today who just might have seen one when they were little. But most people have never even heard of them. They were once extremely numerous even here in the Houston area. You’ve probably heard of the passenger pigeon, or the dodo, but probably not the Carolina Parakeet.

So taken with them was I, that I talked Heidi Good, a real Ph.d. Biologist who goes to our church to cowrite a paper with me that I ended up presenting at a National Conference. In the course of writing that paper I devoured everything I could find about America’s beautiful lost parakeet. I became obsessed with it for a time and would have Given ANYTHING to get to see one alive. (Or even one of the taxidermied specimens kept in museum backroom storage racks, but alas, I haven’t even had that pleasure.)

In recent days, we’ve all started to hear about de-extinction. The bringing back of extinct animals. A few weeks ago, they just announced that they had brought back dire wolves. That’s a more complicated tale, and one for another day. But, One of the creatures they have on the schedule as well is the Carolina Parakeet and I’m so hopeful to see one, but de-extinction is controversial because we have to ask: “what are these creatures today?” Where do they fit? In the case of the Carolina Parakeet, They lived mostly in the forested river bottoms of North America. Those are all almost completely gone now. Those were the most desirable parts of the world for people and Parrot alike and the people moved in and took what they wanted. It’s one of the reasons that the Carolina Parakeet collapsed. Its habitat was destroyed. So even though I want to see one SO bad, there is no place for the Carolina Parakeet to go. No place where it can resume what used to be. No matter how beautiful, no matter how romantic, no matter how much we wish, You can’t ever really go back. The world moves on. You can remember what it was like before but if you try and go back, what used to be isn’t there anymore either.

We might want to see extinct animals but their world is gone too. That is the danger of nostalgia. It pulls us into a world that once was, when, we could be looking at the world that IS now and try to make it better rather than living in the past. Many argue that, rather than try and bring back extinct creatures, we should be marshaling those resources toward preserving what we have today, toward making the world of right-now better and more resilient.

There is a lot of discourse these days in the cultural winds about going back, returning to a better time, putting things right, but the world is so different than it used to be. We have new medicines, new sciences, a whole bunch more people. Some folks remember the 1950’s as a golden age, but there were only 2.74 billion people in the world back then. Today there are more than 8 billion. That is a different world. Since the 1950s, we have eradicated samllpox, and nearly eradicated Polio, Rubella, Measles, and Mumps. There have been major advancements in treatment for HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, cancer; we can perform liver, lung, and heart transplants, joint replacements, we can do gene therapy, medical and molecular imaging. There are whole host of things that would have killed you in the 1950’s that are no big deal today! That world is gone. We can’t go back there and if we could, who would want to!

There is all that, and then there were the harsh laws of Jim Crow and apartheid that made fellow humans subservient to their neighbors with different colored skin. But we don’t like to add that into the mix when we glorify the past. And lord knows there is still a lot of work to do there even still today.

But at great junctions, and liminal moments of time, the temptation is to look back and remember the good things, while ignoring the bad things, rather than look forward into the unknown. This same idea is what permeates the stories of the Ascension.

Readings-wise, Ascension is an interesting Sunday because we get two accounts of the Ascension from the same author. As you may know, Luke and Acts are actually a two volume set, written by the same person. In the Bible today, John is inserted between them, so that all of the Gospel accounts are put together and then Acts continues on with the story of the early church. But, Acts is really the sequel that directly follows Luke, which raises some interesting questions because the two accounts of the Ascension that the author of Luke gives us are quite different.

In acts we hear that, after spending forty days with his followers, teaching them about God’s kingdom, Jesus gathers them together and tells them they will soon receive the Holy Spirit. They ask him if now is the time he’ll restore Israel, but he tells them it’s not for them to know when. Instead, he commissions them to be his witnesses throughout the world. Then, as they watch, he is taken up into a cloud and disappears. They stand staring into the sky until two figures in white appear and tell them to stop looking up—Jesus will return one day and in the meantime they have work to do. It’s a moment of awe and mission, not just a farewell, but a call to action.

In Luke we hear a bit different tale. We hear that, Jesus leads his disciples out to the outskirts of Jerusalem, near Bethany. There, he raises his hands and gives them a blessing. While he is still blessing them, he begins to rise into the sky and disappears from their sight. Rather than being confused or afraid, the disciples are filled with joy. They return to Jerusalem, go into the temple, and continue worshiping God with great praise and thanksgiving. It’s a peaceful and celebratory moment, like the closing of a chapter with deep hope and joy.

How are these two things true and written by the same author? They have different points and they tells us things are still true to this day about endings and beginnings. You actually need BOTH of these accounts to truly understand the reality of how we humans experience these times.

Luke’s Gospel ends like a liturgy. It reads as a doxology: Christ blesses, ascends, and the people return in joy. It is that moment in those old Disney movies where there camera lens changes and the image is squished and distorted a bit signaling the happy ending is here. Ahhhh. Yes. Fulfillment and promise.

Acts begins like a manifesto. The Ascension is the catalyst for a Spirit-filled global mission. The apostles go from passive watchers to active witnesses. Acts is the beginning of a thing, not the ending of a thing.

The Ascension is both fulfillment and transition. In Luke, it concludes the Gospel. In Acts, it launches the Church. And indeed the Ascension did BOTH of those things

In that ending account and that beginning account, we are not called to nostalgia but to movement. The Ascension is not about looking up—it’s about going out. You can’t wallow in nostalgia forever. You have to move on and get to work. It is fond to remember, but without action we languished. The past can inform our present and teach us how to move forward.

We also hear the promise that, the same Jesus who ascended will return. Until then, we live in the already-but-not-yet, empowered by the Spirit to carry forward his work. We live in the space and time that is between the beginning and the end. We can’t just wish for the past or sit stubbornly and wait for what is to come. We have to go out and through the Holy Spirit, given to the church,bring God’s beautiful justice oriented kingdom into the world now, even as we await the coming of Christ.

In the second reading, Paul says: “God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places,  far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.  And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church,  which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”  — Ephesians 1: 19-23

There is work to do now. There is justice, and love, and mercy, and compasion, and rehabilitation, and empowering, and teaching, and building, and growing, and planting, and all the things we do to build up the Kingdom of God here and now today. We must not look back, but look forward. Jesus, from the right hand of the throne of God, lifted from the earth is now a part of all of time and all history. No longer leading a band of a few but available to all the multitudes of time. Change means endings, but it also means powerful new beginnings.

We are entering a time of our own nostalgia here at New Hope. We are celebrating 50 years of doing Kingdom-making work together. That’s marvelous, and I have been here for half of those 50. We will tell stories of God’s great works in our community, of friends we love as family, both here and passed on, of people that got on our last nerves and how we try to love them, in spite of that. And hopefully, rather than simply look towards glories gone by, we will use all those stories to look to the future and ask “what’s next?!” Our own angels will tell us to stop looking at the sky, because there is still work to be done. We remember the past not to dwell in it, but to step boldly into God’s future. The work of love, justice, and renewal continues—now.

Rather than mourn the past, listening through tears for birds that we will never hear, for things that will never be again, we can remember what we learned in the past and go out rejoicing, looking to great the “new” that is to come.

Amen.