Episcopal Church of the Incarnation
The Seventh Sunday of Easter Day (Year B)
The Sunday after Ascension Day
Acts 1.15-17, 21-26 Psalm
1 1 John 5.9-13 John 17.6-19
Alleluia. Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed.
Alleluia.
The
doctor of whom I speak retired many years ago.
He went to medical school in a country where the government paid for
your education, but the government required that before you went on to further
training you had to spend your first year as a freshly-minted physician as a
rural health officer. He was assigned to
a small town in the north of his country.
A small town in the early 1940’s, in a corner of the world which
remained quiet from the world war. Most
of the people in the town were agricultural laborers; many illiterate. He probably learned as much about medicine
and people in that one year as in all his subsequent training, training which
included prestigious appointments at the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic,
and in research with a winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
He
once told me a story from that year, a story that I suspect he told because he
remembered it best. He spoke of being
called out in the middle of the night to attend to a woman in childbirth; of being
called out to ride through a windstorm on horseback, with a gasoline lantern
held by the rider before him who knew the way.
The
house was small, dirt-floored, made of adobe.
It was cold, despite a smoky fire.
The woman was young, in active and complicated labor. This was her first pregnancy, and things were
going downhill fast, to the point where the village midwife had backed off and
called for help. A brief examination
indicated a mother in distress and a baby in distress. This looked like a normal birth was not
going to happen, and the focus shifted to a hurried training of the husband on
how to drip ether onto the ether mask in the event a Caesarian operation was
necessary (and how to shield the ether mask from the gasoline lantern!) And then the baby started to present.
When
I heard this story it was thirty years after the event. The doctor still turned a little pale in
describing the scene. The baby presented
in what is known in medicine as a transverse breach presentation. The first part of the baby seen was an arm
rather than a face or the top of the head.
Even in a hospital delivery suite or operating room this would have been
complicated and dangerous. The odds of
the baby or the mother, or both, dying were now as high as they could be, and
it would have been nice to have a full medical and nursing team present, with a
professor of obstetrics in charge. To
call this a complicated birth would be an understatement.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
A
week from now is the feast of Pentecost, which is considered to be the birthday
of the Church, the day when the Holy Spirit came upon believers of all nations
to empower them as one Body to witness to God.
This past Thursday was Ascension Day, the day on which the risen Jesus
ascended bodily into heaven, there to reign.
And here we are, in-between.
We’re in that in-between time which comes just before birth, the time we
would call labor in preparing for the birth of a child. Labor:
as in labor pains, as in anticipation and fear mixed with joyful
expec-tation and prayer, and as in a birth process which can be complicated and
can be dangerous. We’re in the
in-between time on the Church calendar, but on a broader scale we’re in the
time between the proclamation of the Good News and the arrival of the kingdom
of heaven, and it’s on this broader scale that we see labor pains.
Now,
before you start to think that I’m talking about labor pains as the
“tribulation” that precedes Judgment Day, let me make clear that I’m not
talking about the Second Coming. I’m
talking about the birth which happens now.
That’s what Jesus prays about in all of ch. 17 of John’s Gospel, in His
so-called “high priestly prayer,” when He prays that the disciples–the
Church–may be protected and guided in this world; and that’s what Peter talks
about in our lesson from Acts.
Peter’s
speech comes just after Jesus has ascended to the Father. The risen Lord is now not with the disciples
physically. They now gather together in
the same upper room where they had heard Jesus pray to the Father. But, one of them is missing. Judas, the betrayer, is now dead and
gone. Peter speaks of how the betrayal
was foretold in scripture, but his speech continues with a series of
imperatives, speaking of what must happen in order that scripture–God’s
word–may continue. What Peter’s getting
at is that the word of God speaks not only about what God’s will is, but what
we’re supposed to do about it.
God’s
will happens not just by God’s direct action but by the actions undertaken by
His disciples because He has commanded them.
God acts directly, as when He sends His Holy Spirit on the Church at
Pentecost, and He acts through us (His witnesses) when we obey His
commands. You see, as the apostle John
writes, “Those who believe in the Son of God have the testimony [of God] in
their hearts. ... Whoever has the Son
has life ...” (1 John 5.10, 12).
We
have life, the life everlasting which Jesus brings, but in bringing this life
He makes it clear that we can’t just sit here, happy about ourselves. We’ve got work to do. Jesus prays to the Father, “As you have sent
me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17.18). We’ve got work to do. Those of us who have life because we have
Jesus, now must assist in the birth process.
We’re called out on a dark night, to throw light on the way, to make all
the preparations for new birth which the midwife (the Church) and the great
physician of souls (the Son) will allow the mother (God’s Spirit) to bring
forth. It’s a birth process, and so it
is accomplished with labor pains, by anxiety and danger, but in hope and in the
expectation of the joy of new life.
So
what do we do? Do we sit here scared,
worrying about how new life will come forth, or whether it will? Do we sit here worrying that there may be an
operation, and we may even have to assist?
Let’s go back to the story of the doctor now focused on a tiny arm
presenting a baby forth from his mother.
Who’s there with the doctor?
There’s the midwife and there’s the husband. There’s kind of a hierarchy of trust. The husband in this case knows very little,
and so, as scared as he is, he hopes and perhaps trusts that the midwife and
the doctor will know what to do. The
midwife knows enough to be more scared than the husband, but hopes and trusts
that the doctor’s training will allow him to do something. In reality, the doctor is probably the most
scared of the three. He knows all the
things that can and are going wrong. He
knows that life–that lives–are now in a very fine balance.
The
doctor succeeds. The doctor turns the
baby. The baby is born. New life comes forth. It would be easy, and it would be correct, to
say that this is God’s will. But notice
what happened. An angel of the Lord did
not suspend time, enter the house, and deliver the baby. The doctor did. His hands and his training allowed for the
baby to be turned and delivered. His
hands became God’s hands.
When
your eyes see want and injustice, when your heart feels the pain in another,
then you can listen to God, feel His Spirit, and become His hands to lift up
and soothe, His shoulder upon which someone in pain can lean, His back to help
ease the burden of another. You can do
this when your heart tells you that Jesus’ words, “... I have sent them into
the world,” mean that He has sent you.
He sends you. He is with you, and
whoever has the Son has life: life to be
shared; life to be nurtured.
Remember
how I referred to the Church as the midwife attending to the birth of new
life? I said that we are called out into
the dark to help light the way–and we are–but our role is actually even more
involved than holding a lantern. We are
the Church. We are the midwife. The Body of the Church acts through each of
her members, each one of us. Through our
collective experience and action we’re each on first call to help in the birth
of new life, trusting that there is One who can handle the gravest threats to
life; that there is a great Physician who heals life in body and in soul.
Whatever
happened to the baby? I don’t know, neither
did the doctor. He left the village
after his eleven month assignment. I
like to think she grew up to become a midwife.
Alleluia. Christ is risen.
The Lord is
risen indeed. Alleluia.