An Ecology of the Cross

based on Acts 1:6-14 and John 17:1-11 for the Sunday after the Ascension, Year A
On the Sunday after the Ascension, we find the disciples doing something entirely reasonable: standing there, staring up at the sky after watching Jesus disappear into clouds. Two figures in white show up and ask why they're still standing there looking upward. This sermon takes that question seriously. Not as a scolding, but as an invitation to think about what it means to hold both the vertical reach toward transcendence and the horizontal stretch toward one another at the same time. Drawing on Acts 1 and John 17, this reflection proposes a move from theology of the cross to ecology of the cross: a framework that insists God shows up at the intersections of active awe, wonder, suffering, and joy — and that the cross is not a past event but a pattern that keeps forming, without end, wherever love meets the cost of love in a world that resists love.

Two figures in white. Everyone standing there, necks craned upward, watching Jesus disappear into clouds. And then these two strangers arrive and ask: "Why are you looking toward heaven?"

…<side eye> because someone just made like a helium balloon and floated on up into the sky? What were they supposed to do? Look the other way and pretend not to notice?

But my real point here: has anyone ever been asked something in that tone? Not those words, but that energy — the "you're looking in the wrong direction, you're stuck, why are you standing there?" kind of energy. What does it feel like to be asked that — especially when what you're doing makes complete sense from the inside?

If one of the disciples had piped up and said "leave us alone! We just saw something extraordinary!"  Well, frankly, I wouldn't blame them. It's not a wrong response at all. It's pointing at something true and important and wonderfully human, but also innately more-than-human in all of us. The vertical pull is real. The upward reach toward transcendence, toward wonder, toward something larger than us — that is not naivety or escapism.

There's a professor and psychologist over at UC Berkeley, Dacher Keltner, who has spent years studying awe. Not the dramatic, Guinness Book of World Records kind — the everyday kind. The thing that stops you on a walk kind of awe. What his research keeps finding is that awe is not a detour from being present to the world. Awe is what makes us more present to the world. It recalibrates us. It shrinks the ego's grip just enough that we can actually see what — and who — is beside us. Awe and wonder make people more generous, more connected, more willing to act on behalf of others.

This is not soft new-age spirituality. This is peer-reviewed data: wonder is so powerful it is world-remaking.

So the disciples standing there, stunned, necks craned upward, with two fancy divine messengers questioning their posture? They are not failing. Even if it seems like they're being scolded a bit. What they are doing is engaging awe and wonder. And honestly, the challenge is that the stop for awe and wonder can't be the only thing they're doing. And it wasn't. Eventually they went and did exactly what people do when they've been stopped by something enormous: they gathered, they prayed, they tended one another. So in this Acts excerpt, there is a really strong vertical axis (looking up toward heaven in awe and woder)— and a really strong horizontal axis (going on, eventually, to pray with one another).

And because this is real life and not a diagram, these things also go the other way. Sometimes looking vertically is not where you find awe. Sometimes looking up, reaching for transcendence, asking where God is in all of this — is the place of unanswered prayer, unresolved grief, the exhaustion of frustration with God's absence. Sometimes vertical is where you go and nothing happens and you come back emptier than you left.

Conversely, sometimes a few horizontal glances (like an ordinary Tuesday, the meal with someone you love, the small ridiculous joy of something that just worked out, a text from a friend at exactly the right moment) is where simple, uncomplicated awe and wonder actually lives. 

An ecology of the cross — yes, I said ecology, not theology — does not assign permanent meaning or relationship type to a vertical or horizontal axis. An ecology of the cross doesn't claim, for example, that vertical is always the place of wonder and horizontal is always the place of difficulty. Instead, the ecology of the cross claims that both axes are alive, both move, both are operating with us and with God, and neither one cancels the other out.

This fluidity, the way joy and frustration and wonder and grief migrate between the axes depending on the week, is not a sign that the system is broken. It is a sign that the system is alive. It is relational. And honestly, I think it's a big part of what Jesus has been trying to show us all along.

But why are you standing there?

The excerpt we received from John today takes place before the ascension. It's well before anyone was standing there staring up at the clouds watching Jesus float away. In fact, people will be looking up to see Jesus shortly after this but  that look up in the timeline on this excerpt will be seeing Jesus on a cross, not floating into heaven. So here is Jesus, and he is praying, and what he is praying is enormous. Frankly, it should be striking some awe into people: All mine are yours and yours are mine. All of them. Everyone who comes after them.

This is not a small or private prayer. This is a performative moment. Jesus doing this rather loudly, so they all hear and see, reaching outward in every direction. Upward, downward, laterally... across time, across difference, toward people not yet born, toward communities not yet formed, toward everyone sitting in a room two thousand years later (that would be us).

There is a principle in art and geometry: a line, once drawn, has no end. It just keeps going. Sure, we might look at it and say "well the end is right there, where the ink stops" but the theory is that the line never actually stops. It's now implied. It keeps on keeping on.

Jesus, in this excerpt from John, is drawing two lines at once. Kind of like what we saw in Acts, there is a strong vertical axis and a strong horizontal axis — but Jesus uses different words for them.

Vertical: I came from you. I return to you. You are in me.
Horizontal: They are in me. I am in them. And everyone who comes after them too.

And if lines have no end, well, you can see what shape those vertical and horizontal lines make as they inevitably intersecct, right? 

And, notice: Jesus doesn't leave and leave a vacuum in his absence. Jesus leaves, intersections expand.
Whether it's Acts or John, the vertical axis is met with a strong horizontal axis across all kinds of people. Both movements are present. None are abandoned.

Why are you standing there?

Lutherans are devoted fans of Martin Luther's theology of the cross (the concept that says God is most fully revealed not through triumph, power, success, certainty, or glory, but through suffering, vulnerability, hiddenness, and the crucified Christ). A theology of the cross is not wrong, exactly. But it can become catastrophic for anyone living at any marginal social intersection. It can, inadvertently, encourage sanctified passivity, romanticize pain, spiritualize abuse, and (perhaps most perniciously) treat joy, beauty, and pleasure as somehow suspect.

Rev. Dr. Traci C. West, in her book Disruptive Christian Ethics, asks a question that highlights some of the trouble that can accidentally crop up with unexamined language and behaviors around theology of the cross gone wrong. She asks about what we are doing when predominantly fair-skinned communities build their entire theology of salvation around the suffering of a brown-skinned man. What are we doing when we speak of sacrifice of a brown man for our sake, as we approach a communion table--meanwhile, outside the sanctuary, brown and Black bodies are still being subjected to violence that no one is calling redemptive.

Rev Dr. West is not saying: abandon the cross or abandon communion. She is asking in some way however. what is your theology of the cross actually doing in the room and in the world? Who benefits from a framework that centers suffering? Who has historically been asked to suffer more as a result? What does it mean to proclaim the redemptive death of a brown body among people who hold social power over brown bodies in the world outside these walls?

This is uncomfortable. It should be. Discomfort is not the enemy, it is the beginning of honesty. And that honest discomfort is exactly where an ecology of the cross begins. Or, to use a great old Lutheranism: this is where we begin calling the thing a thing.

This is precisely why the move from thinking theology of the cross to living an ecology of the cross matters — not just in our brains, but for our whole earth. An ecology of the cross is an ongoing, ever-moving series of intersections, continuously demonstrating that God refuses to exit, even when the intersection becomes violent.

The cross is not the mechanism of a transaction. It is the shape love takes when it refuses to extract itself from a world that is causing harm. An ecology of the cross is what happens when the vertical and horizontal are both held fully — at cost, without flinching.

An ecology of the cross keeps us mindful that the cross is not behind us. The cross is a pattern that keeps forming, and re-forming, at every intersection of the vertical and horizontal, in every ordinary week, wherever love meets the cost of love in a world that resists love. Every time those two lines cross (vertical- awe, wonder, horizontal- community, one another, creation relationships) the cross is happening again. And because lines have no end — it keeps forming. Outward. Without end.

But, why are you standing there?

The horizontal axis of this whole situation can be really difficult, too. Relationships are genuinely hard. Community is hard. The work of showing up, again and again, in the same room with people who are different from you, who sometimes hurt you, who sometimes need more than you have, who you have to set and re-set boundaries with, who are aging or dying when you don't want to see it happen is really, really hard.

I am not convinced this is a sign that something has gone wrong. I'm not even convinced that the difficulty of the horizontal axis is an obstacle to knowing God. Based on Acts and John today, it seems to me these difficulties and challenges become the primary sites where God is known.

In Acts, the disciples move from their stunned awe to praying with their community. In John, Jesus specifically performs a prayer that speaks of how all his are God's and God's are his, praying for the unity of all in the same way that he and God are united. It's a whole ecology of knowing God and God knowing us.

In a living ecosystem, health requires that everything participate in the upkeep of the whole. Robin Wall Kimmerer (in her book Braiding Sweetgrass) calls this Reciprocal Maintenance. It doesn't have to be done perfectly. Nor without strain. But persistently, reciprocally, with the understanding that your participation matters to the whole even when you cannot see how.

This is what the horizontal axis of the ecology of the cross looks like from the inside: showing up anyway. Tending what is yours to tend. Being a truth-teller (this is also known as prophecy). Accepting repair when it is offered. None of this is glamorous, unfortunately, and none of it moves at the speed of ascension.

In fact, all of this unglamorous work moves at the speed of human relationship and trust, which is slow, and sometimes painful, and absolutely necessary. And yes sometimes this also means knowing when a particular relationship is asking more than is yours to give. The ecology of the cross we see illustrated for us here in John and Acts does not demand infinite self-expenditure. Jesus himself told people to shake the dust off their feet. There is a difference between reciprocal maintenance and unilateral depletion. Knowing when to stay and when to go is not a betrayal of that horizontal axis of care and community-- it is part of tending to the ecology of the cross with prophetic honesty and care. The cross is strong and alive enough to hold that discernment. 

And remember what I said way back at the beginning of this longer than usual reflection: this is real life, not a diagram. The horizontal aspects of the ecology of the cross are not all a downer. Sometimes these are the site of awe and wonder, too. So:

Why are you standing there?

I can't be sure about your core answers and convictions. But I can tell you that I am standing here because this — right here — is where the lines intersect for me. The difficulty and the joy and the awe. The tension of the vertical reach and the horizontal stretch. The frustration and the wonder. All of it.

 This is where God keeps showing up, and so this is where I am also called to keep showing up.

We can't let the weight of the world, the exhaustion of the moment, or even the supposed pragmatism of a worldly "wisdom" that says there's no time talk us out of awe and wonder.

Why not proverbially look up for a while, once in a while? Awe and wonder are not a luxury. Keltner's research shows that clear as day. The disciples standing there, stunned and still, show the very same. Wonder is world-remaking-- it's 50% of the ecology of the cross that Jesus so beautifully illustrated for us, and we need it to keep going. Because living an ecology of the cross includes encountering people and situations across every difference and challenge you can name, and plenty you haven't even thought of yet- and those differences without awe and wonder to help us along, will zap all of our energy and joy and ability to be present to one another, connected to one another (and therefore also connected to God). And, mind that the unity Jesus prays for in this excerpt is not uniformity. It is mutual indwelling across all of our individual particularities. Which is harder than sameness — and more beautiful. All the more reason we need to make sure we take time for wonder and awe.

The cross keeps forming, again and again and again. It has been forming since before we arrived, and it will keep forming after we leave. God keeps showing up at the intersections- in the vertical reach and the horizontal stretch, in the upper room and in the ascension cloud, in the frustrating prayer and the unexpected weekday gladness, in the sufferings and the joys — just waiting for us to join on in.

Why are you standing there?

Maybe because it's time to move to the next intersection.
Maybe because it's exactly where you need to be.

with joy,
Rev. Sam

This sermon is inspired by, and built in no small part on the brilliant work of: 
Dr. Dacher Keltner: his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life is a genuine gift.
Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass is an outstanding read for any and every person who wants to live life well.
Rev. Dr. Traci C. West, whose book Disruptive Christian Ethics is brilliant, and full of questions and challenges the church desperately needs to face and wrestle with.