Keep in touch - Peter Steele

Ascension of the Lord

Matthew 28:16-20

This is the feast of the Ascension of our Lord into heaven, so I shall say a few words, briefly, about Garrison Keillor. Garrison Keillor will be known to some as the man who has mounted a weekly radio program called A Prairie Home Companion for the last 32 years, broadcast out of the Fitzgerald Theater on East Exchange Street in downtown St Paul, Minnesota. This program was immortalised two years ago by the great and late director Robert Altman in the film of the same title starring Garrison himself, along with other great actors such as Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline, Tommy lee Jones and Woody Harrelson.

In the second hour of each program, he sits down and speaks about the sayings and doings of a fictitious township out on the prairie in Minnesota, called Lake Wobegon. Like millions of other people, I have heard a lot of these programs, and although I know that they are about a fiction I also know that they are telling many truths. So I am well-disposed towards Garrison Keillor.

A few years ago, when I was doing some teaching in Washington DC, I found that Keillor had another program on the radio. This was a daily one, and it was very short—about five minutes long. It was called The Writers Almanac. It is still broadcast to this day.

It had a few details about various writers, ancient and modern, and often a poem being read. But it always ended with a wish, or a directive, from Keillor, which went: ‘Be well: do good work: and keep in touch.’ I liked this saying very much, and I still do—partly because it fits so well with today’s feast.

Our Lord, in the gospel passage for this feast, leaves his followers with a triple charge. Firstly, he reiterates his own authority as God’s own Son, and he authorises those who believe in him to bond others with themselves in a belief in him. He tells them—he tells us, which is the reason we listen to his word today in the Eucharist—he tells them, and us, to keep in touch with him, and with one another, and with those among whom we move.

This sounds fine as a formula, but since we are all adults we know that it is also exacting. It is exacting because most of us feel so clumsy when we pray, and therefore wonder whether it is worth while; and it is exacting because busyness, or worry, or boredom, or scepticism, can slow up our readiness to go on opening our hearts and minds to our fellow Christians; and it is exacting because plenty of Australians want no part not only of the church, or of Christianity, but of anything religious or sacred at all.

And still, in the Australia of today, the Lord of heaven and earth, the wounded and radiant Jesus, presses us to try once more to ‘keep in touch’ with God, and with our fellow Christians, and with our fellow citizens and compatriots.

So much for keeping in touch. There is also the matter of doing good work. In our gospel passage, the Lord gives his followers tasks. He tells them that they are to win the various countries and cultures to allegiance to him, and that they are to steep them in an awareness of God’s creative and saving presence, and that they are to offer just such illumination as Christ brought to his first followers.

Well, this is good work: this is worth the venture: worth our intelligence, and our passion, and our being re-made in whatever ways are necessary so that we can play our part. When you think about it, those great culture-heroes of Christianity whom we call saints—the old ones and the new ones—are never remembered, or cherished, simply because they can be certified as having had appropriately pious attitudes. They are remembered because they got on with doing something about the divine and human vision which had been offered to them, as it is offered to us.

Sometimes what they did took the form of creatively accepted suffering—which is hard enough work, God knows—and sometimes it took the form of almost ceaseless exertion. But the animating element in it all, like the filament in a light-bulb, was their consciousness that Christ had worked on our behalf -- teaching, healing, and (perhaps hardest of all) listening and listening -- to bring humanity, once and for all, into God’s own milieu. That was good work: and it still is.

Garrison Keillor’s first tag of all was, ‘Be well’. I used to listen to his short programs while I was shaving in the morning, and at such a moment I did not feel at my most commanding. It was after all the helplessness of sleep, and before the coffee kicked in. So to ‘be well’ sounded, partly, like just another thing to cope with, and certainly not something entirely at my command.

But the slogan can still heighten our alertness to the fact that God himself is our resource, and our recourse: that God is our health. Which means that health, at least health of spirit, is there to be had: and that to be with God is a healthy way to be.

This is not a glib saying. Our Lord, who called himself the doctor or healer, and who healed bodies, minds and hearts, was utterly realistic about the common run of human affairs—if you want to know about sickness, ask a doctor or a nurse. And, at the end of his short life’s exertions for us all, he was not, to put it mildly, a well man. But at the very end, in the gospel account, he surrendered his mortal being to his immortal Father, the source and vindication of his life, as the Father is the source and vindication of our lives.

Our Lord, a teacher to the last, was showing us where health’s wellsprings lie: he was offering himself to be touched back to unkillable life, and, in love’s embrace, offering us as well for that same touch. He was, himself, for all his drastic need, being well. In doing this for no other reason than our need, he was doing good work—the best in fact.

And, supremely, he was keeping in touch with the Father, and with that Spirit who is Love personified for Father and Son and our own needy selves.

I don’t know how Garrison Keillor is these days (he’ll be 66 this year): we might all spare him a prayer, since I hope that his words have been doing us some good. What I do know is that the Lord of health and good heart, the Lord of worthwhile tasks carried through to the end, the Lord of unbroken solidarity with divinity and the children of divinity—that Lord goes on towering before us today.

Whatever else the Feast of the Ascension means, it means that Christ is walking tall still, and walking for us.

You can listen to current and future editions of A Prairie Home Companion here, or Garrison Keillor’s Radio Show here in Australia on Radio National at 7.00 pm on Sundays. You can download to your computer or your iPod old and current editions of ‘The News From Lake Wobegon’ here along with daily editions of The Writers Almanac here.