Homily, May 17, 2026. Rev. Holly Cardone

I like a good story. I especially like the real life, Anne Tyler type of books. She wrote the Accidental Tourist and 19 other novels all about relationships, marriage, and family. Her characters are always quirky, eccentric, unremarkable people in ordinary life circumstances. She writes about the American family, the conflict between our need for freedom and the daily responsibilities and commitments that keep her characters in constant tension with where they are and where they want to be. Struggling with their sense of duty, the boredom they experience in the routine of their daily lives and their need for excitement and change. Anne Tyler’s books have a beginning, a middle and an end. Certainly the ending is not always happy, but it’s obviously clear, when you’re reading the story of what is happening, why it’s happening, and there is resolution, not always tidy, but there is resolution. Anne Tyler’s books are straight forward, and I always identify with the main characters struggle with the ordinary details of their everyday lives.

Scripture isn’t like that. The writers of the Bible, as pastor, writer, and public theologian, Rob Bell says, talk about how events unfolding in actual human history reveal a God who is up to something in the world. What the writers of the Bible are interested in, he says, is their readers seeing this movement and finding life in it.  The Bible isn’t a book we pick up and read like an Anne Tyler novel, or a Steven King novel, maybe if we worked really hard we could fit it into the category of apocalyptic, dystopian, mystery, fantasy, existentialist, historical, poetic, philosophical, revelatory biographical memoir, mystery… book or something.

But here’s the thing. It’s not a single book. It’s a library of books written over a long period of time by a bunch of different people! The stories, the ideas, people, places, time, are all in contradiction with each other. One says Jesus was from Nazareth, another from Bethlehem. Sometimes they’re for divorce, sometimes the writers are against divorce. The Gospel of Mark mentions the ascension of Jesus, Luke writes about it at the end of his Gospel and the beginning of Acts as we heard this morning, the other two Gospels don’t mention it at all. There are too many contradictions to count, and focusing on them, trying to rationalize them, trying to understand them and make sense of them misses the point.

Writers of the Bible were writing in a particular time, place, social and historical context and to a very a particular audience, from their own perspective of the events and they are wanting to provoke a particular response from their readers. Rob Bell points out that it was believed, for example, that the Emperor Caesar at the end of his life ascended to the heavens to sit at the right hand of the gods. Is that why Luke ends his book with Jesus ascending?

The point is there’s this book that talks about how events unfolding in actual human history reveal a God who is up to something in the world. And I believe that this man named Jesus of Nazareth, born to Mary and Joseph, this carpenter, mystic, teacher, preacher, had a profound effect on the people around him. He was magnetic and people flocked to him. At first, they may not have even known why they were so drawn to him, so much so that some gave up their livelihoods, their families, what security they had at a time when they were persecuted daily by the Roman empire, taken advantage of, left poor and destitute many of them by an authoritarian regime who claimed rights to their land and property. He had a mesmerizing joy and peace about him; he seemed to know God in a way that his contemporaries did not. Even the religious authority, scribes and priests, didn’t know God the way Jesus did. And the God Jesus knows makes a difference in his life and Jesus has this gratitude about him, gratitude of the simple things in life. Jesus cares about the people he meets, in a way no one had. Genuine care. No agenda, he was there for them. This was the miracle that healed them and gave them hope. So much so that the most broken, the most vulnerable, the most displaced, in his world, the sinners, prostitutes, the tax collectors, the lame, the crippled, the blind, the spiritually dead, the mentally ill followed him and he loved them, and lived among them, and ate with them and healed them. He made such a deep and profound impact on their lives that some of them wrote down their stories of his life and ministry, his miracles, his trials and pain and suffering and death, and resurrection.  

We are closing out Eastertide and the Ascension of the living Christ is celebrated every year on the 40th day after Easter and it’s always on a Thursday. Jesus of Nazareth was murdered on the cross and 3 days later the Christ appeared to his friends. The Christ that has been for all eternity born into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, who lived in communion with God before, during and after, who shared in this dynamic energy of love and healing with God, who taught us that the mystery of God is a verb not a noun.  He appeared to Mary Magdalene at the tomb, one of the women who stayed with Jesus to the bitter end of his life. He appeared to the same friends, who fled the scene, who hid upstairs in fear that the religious authorities would be coming after them next.  He appeared to a couple of guys walking home dejected and depressed because they thought Jesus was going to redeem Israel, restore Israel’s power and might and make it a great nation among all nations. But he was crucified instead. Not the way the story was supposed to go. In Luke these guys on the road to Emmaus tell the stranger that walks with them, “Because of his powerful deeds and words, he was recognized by God and all the people as a prophet. But our chief priests and our leaders handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him.” These two didn’t recognize the stranger as Christ until they sat down and broke bread together later that evening and suddenly their eyes were opened.

He appeared to a group of them when they were fishing. They were fishing. They had spent days and nights with Jesus. Jesus had picked them, taught them, prayed with them, ate with them. I will make you fishers of men, he said to them, and as soon as Jesus is killed, they are lost, hurt, scared, experiencing grief and loss, confused and bewildered.  And the only thing they know to do is go back to the same old routine, their same old lives.

But God is relentless in God’s pursuit of being in relationship with us, and so for 40 days after the resurrection the Christ continues to pursue the disciples. He stayed 40 extra days. He didn’t give up! God never gives up on us. Even when we go back to our same old behavior, when we can’t imagine that anything will ever change, when we don’t have the energy to continue down the road of growth and transformation. When we know we are too broken, too wounded, hurt beyond repair, that’s when God will show up on the shore, and tell us to cast our net on the right side of the boat, and miraculously, we will have what we need to sustain us for the next leg of the journey.  And when you finally make it shore, exhausted and surrendered, God will be like, hey let’s have breakfast.

But God cannot be contained in any one place or time. As much as we like a story to have a beginning, a middle and an end, this is one story we can’t fit into a nice, neat linear equation. There is no understanding this story with our rational, reasonable, analytical, logical mind. We can try to solve the inherent conflicts and contradictions but approaching the spiritual life, the Jesus/God/Spirit/Human story this way leaves no room for the mystery, the surprises, the unexpected, unpredictable nature of God. We might miss the moment, when God is there before us, loving us. We might miss the moment when finally our eyes are opened and we see. Our ears are opened and we hear. Our hearts are broken open and we love. Our minds are opened and we understand. We might miss that moment when God blesses us and sends us off promising the coming of the Holy Spirit, and we gather together in great joy and praise and bless God right back.