Joining the circus
Thumbnail Image by Clarence Alford from Pixabay. Free for use under the Pixabay Content License
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
May 12, 2024—Ascension (tr)
Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53
For weeks, you have read the signs: brightly colored posters in every store window, tacked to every lamp-post. The Circus is coming! Elephants and lions and clowns, and oh, best of all, the acrobats! Ever since your cousins described the circus they saw, you’ve been captivated by the idea of such agility and strength, by such impossible, amazing, beautiful tricks. You and your friends have spent hours on end in the backyard, imagining and practicing over and over, until you’re exhausted and bruised, and covered in grass-stains, but also exhilarated because one of you finally managed a back-flip.
And now they’re coming! You’ll be able to see them yourself, in the flesh, and you’re so excited you’ve hardly slept for a week. Because the circus. is COMING.
The day dawns beautiful, and it’s possible you drag your parents out of the house three hours before things are scheduled to begin. But you can’t wait, and your joy and excitement sweeps them up and carries them along with you. Clearly, you’re not the only ones, because the atmosphere in town is electric and like nothing you’ve ever experienced. What you thought was just a crowd moving to go see the circus becomes something more, and as you look around, you realize that some of the people you’re walking with are actually clowns, and the woman you thought was walking her dog is actually a lion tamer, and maybe you should all take a step back from that animal! And then you gasp as you catch sight of the ring-master, in his glorious silken striped pants and top hat, and surely you are mistaken that he bears a striking resemblance to your shy and awkward math teacher! You aren’t mistaken, but today, he is alight with a spirit you could never have imagined. And perhaps this is why you begin to tumble, your parents and friends beside you, flipping and twirling and contorting, in an amazing, miraculous display of agility.
The circus hasn’t just come to town. The town has BECOME the circus.
Such is the kingdom of heaven. For far too long, we have misunderstood heaven as a place we are trying to GO too, as if it’s the circus, and our goal is to purchase a ticket. But as scholar N.T. Wright explains in his companion to the Book of Acts, that’s not the way the Bible describes it. The ultimate purpose is not to leave this earthly realm and go to the heavenly realm; if so, why did God create this earthly realm in the first place? The ultimate purpose is for the reality of earthly existence and the reality of heavenly existence to be joined together:[i] at which point, God’s will, as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, will be as real in this united realm as it has ever been in the heavenly realm.
Perhaps disappointingly, scripture teaches us that the full expression of this union will not happen within history as we understand it. Given the (shall we say) complicated nature of humanity, the joining of heaven and earth can only be completed within an eschatological vision: as the centerpiece of the end-times.
The biblical story is bracketed by that vision on one end, and the Creation on the other. They both take place outside of time, and are there not so much as historical guideposts, but to shape the character of our lived reality. Which is to say: from Creation, we learn that we are formed by God, to be in relationship with God, and that we and the world are GOOD, even though we immediately begin making bad choices. And from End-times literature, we learn that God’s greatest desire is not just to be in relationship with us, but for our realm and the heavenly realm (earthly reality and the heavenly reality) to be indistinguishable.
These two spiritual truths bracket the universe, but we don’t live IN either of them. We live between them, in the meantime. And in the meantime, God’s longing to be with us has only grown stronger, as heavenly and earthly reality drift toward and away from each other. Until finally, God can bear it no longer, and God comes to us. In the birth of Jesus, we are given a glimpse of heaven and earth, fully united. Jesus comes, and his life shows us what God’s dream, lived on earth as it is in heaven, actually looks like.
The Ascension, which we celebrate today, completes our glimpse of that union. In the Incarnation, heaven is joined to earth, changing earthly reality forever. In the Ascension, that joining of heaven and earth moves to heaven, assuring us that our earthly reality already resides within the heavens. That we are present there … belong there. That we are known. That heaven and earth are joined already, eternally, in Jesus.
In the meantime, it is ours to claim that reality. To take hold of its power. To be ready for the Spirit’s power that will send us tumbling down the street. And until then, that same Spirit will inspire and strengthen us to practice in the backyard, long past dark. Doing the work, putting in the hours that make the miracles possible. The kindness and compassion and little changes to the way things are. The hard work of peace-making, and confronting the powers, and strengthening righteousness, and healing the wounds of the world, and all of the incredible effort it takes to resist and cast out evil.
These are the tumbling tricks, and the clown cars, and yes, even the monkeys in the circus we have the chance to become (this IS Christ’s circus, and we might well be Christ’s monkeys!) They are all signs of heaven and earth met together: a reality we are not meant to await, but to anticipate. To participate in, here and now. Allowing the Spirit to gather us up into it, and carry us forward through the meantime and deeper into the reality of the dream of God. Which is to say, deeper into the kingdom of heaven on earth. May it be so. Amen.
[i] N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part 1, Chapters 1-12, p. 9