Sunday after the Ascension

May 4, 2008

by The Rev. Constance Jones

This past Thursday was a major feast day in the church, the Feast of the Ascension,
and a hardy band of eleven People of Grace celebrated it right here.
But Thursdays not being regular church days,
and work schedules being what they are,
we get to hear similar lessons from Scripture
on this last Sunday in the season of Easter.
We don't have to miss this astonishing story that Luke tells
in his Gospel and in Acts, about the Ascension.

Jesus was with them.
They'd begun to get used to his being back with them.
The memory of the trial and the crucifixion –the horror and the pain,
their own fear and betrayal of him --
it was beginning to fade.
To seem like a bad dream, a very bad dream.
Yes, he had said he would be taken away from them again,
that he would return to the Father.
But they no more got that
than they'd gotten his prophecies that he would be killed.
Yes, he promised that if they waited in Jerusalem after he left again,
he would send God's Holy Spirit to them,
but what on earth did that mean?

So he was standing with them, instructing them, and whoosh!
He was lifted up into heaven.
There is this one lovely detail in Luke's narrative –
Two men in white, angels we are supposed to guess, stood nearby.
"Men of Galilee," the angels say, "why are you gazing up into heaven?"
Well, as the kids say, Duh!
Why are we gazing upwards?
Our beloved Master was standing right here
and then up he went.

You ask us why we are looking up?
We're waiting for him to come back.

There are zillions of artistic renderings of the Ascension,
most of them featuring, as you might expect, clouds.
Many of the pictures are views from earth, looking up.
Some of them literally show the soles of Jesus' feet –
The way the last thing you might see
(when the funeral home guys come and put the body in their black maria)
is the soles of the feet of your beloved.

I know that the Ascension is a Feast day,
and I know that we celebrate Jesus' Ascension
"so that he might fill all things" rather than be at only one place in one time.

But at the same time
I've always considered the ten days between Ascension and Pentecost,
when we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit and the making of the church,
as a time not only of waiting, but of desolation.
An in-between time that must have been as excruciating in one way
as that first Holy Saturday,
the day between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

No fair saying, we know how it comes out.
Yes, we know that next Sunday we will be celebrating
that rush of wind and fire of the Holy Spirit.
But think during these ten days
of those disciples looking heavenward, seeing all that they had lost.

Because that story might very well be ours.

Last year on the day of the Ascension I buried my husband.
A year before that, I preached in a church in Norfolk
whose rector had just died suddenly the day before.
He was there one minute, and then he was gone.

I guess Ascension is all about the basics.
About the loss, the promise, and the wait.
We could easily find a board of experts right here at Grace Church
on loss, promise, and the wait.
But like the disciples with their faces scanning the clouds,
I'm not sure we know what we are looking for.

This morning I asked Greta if we could sing that old Advent hymn,
"Lo, he comes with clouds descending,"
because it is filled with such lavish imagery.
Christ will come again from the clouds, it says, like those two angels suggested.
There'll be thousands of saints in attendance.
He'll come from his eternal throne, "robed in dreadful majesty,"
the great rapture, the great amens, the final reign,
and all the Alleluias you could ever want!

Now, you folks who've been hanging around Church for a while
know that everything in the Bible is connected to everything else.
There are recurring themes and images,
story-lines that are traced through a thousand pages or so,
or a thousand years.
Listen to this picture drawn in the apocalyptic book of the prophet Daniel,
maybe 200 years before Luke's Gospel.
(This was, incidentally, the Old Testament reading in the daily Lectionary
this past Thursday, Ascension day.)

    As I watched, thrones were set in place,
    and an Ancient One took his throne;
    his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool;
    his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire.
    A stream of fire issued and flowed out from his presence.
    A thousand thousand served him,
    and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him.
    The court sat in judgement, and the books were opened.
    I watched then
    because of the noise of the arrogant words that the horn was speaking.
    And as I watched, the beast was put to death, and its body
    destroyed and given over to be burned with fire.
    As for the rest of the beasts, their dominion was taken away,
    but their lives were prolonged for a season and a time.
    As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a human being
    coming with the clouds of heaven.
    And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him.
    To him was given dominion and glory and kingship,
    that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.
    His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away,
    and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed. (Daniel 7:9-14)

Metaphors, yes.
We Episcopalians aren't obliged to be Biblical literalists, thank God.
But this image is not really other than what those disciples were waiting for,
or what the book of Revelation describes,
or what you and I affirm in our prayers today,
as we wait upon the coming of God.
The story and the promise of the Bible really are coherent and consistent.

God's story in the Bible is also consistent
with all we know about God in our own lives,
all we hope for from God.

We just have to acknowledge
that even when our imaginations leap with hope and break their leashes,
when we reach for the superlatives and Cecil B. DeMille special effects,
we fall short of drawing a portrait of the glory of God.

It's also that when we reach this far we find
not only that our view-finders are too small,
but that we've forgotten what could be called the "middle part,"
just as those who hailed Jesus as the Redeemer King
as he rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday
didn't seem to notice the gathering clouds of crucifixion.

We would like to skip over the crucifixion and suffering part, for one thing.
And what Jesus has asked us to do --
to pray and to be with one another and wait – wait for further instructions.
we don't like that either.
I'll tell you the truth....
Sometimes it's hard to sing songs of praise
when you just want Jesus to show up and fix everything.

It is a cornerstone of our faith that Christ will come again.
We say it over and over here in Church,
Thy Kingdom come,
Christ will come again,
We look for his coming again with power and great glory.
But I think we're both afraid of his coming, and mystified by it.
And it seems so long to wait.

Because we are three days into this time of waiting,
I am not going to close this circle for you,
or relieve the tension that some days
seems to be the very material our lives are made of.

But I am going to tell you that Christ's promise
to send the Holy Spirit to be our comforter,
to lead us into all truth,
and to be the substance and foundation of the Church
will be fulfilled.

I will tell you that I believe that Christ's ascension into heaven
does make it possible for him to fill all creation –
not just for Christian believers, or for the orthodox, or even just for the suffering –
but to redeem all creation.
I believe these things, and I am staking my life on them.

But just for this next week,
I invite you to join Jesus' disciples in that time of uncertainty,
that sense that we don't know what will happen next,
and all we can cling to is Jesus' promise.
All we can hold onto is the mental snapshot
of the bottom of his blessed scarred feet,
and the echo of his promise of God's victory for us all.

Then come to church next Sunday saying a prayer with the disciples
that the Holy Spirit will come and set your heart on fire.