Ascension Sunday 2010

Sorry it took so long for me to post this. I had a few life changes in the meantime.

Offered May 16, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Murphys, CA, UCC

Luke 24:44-53
Acts 1:1-11

"Was That a Threat or a Promise?"

One of the first things to know about me as a theologian and a speaker in churches is that I’m a big lectionary fan. I really like the way we follow a set of church holidays and readings every year in a three-year cycle. There’s something about the orderliness of it all that is very attractive to me but there are a couple of places in every church year that I struggle with and Ascension Sunday is one of them. I don’t know about you but the whole “ascension” part of the death and resurrection story of Jesus has always left me a bit out of sorts. I mean, we have the whole passion week; it’s filled with introspection and a living out of the expectation of the grief of the crucifixion on Thursday, the burial on Friday, the waiting on Saturday and then, “POW!” Easter Sunday and the Resurrection celebration and Easter Egg hunts and all the Spring falderal. Then we get this procession of second, third, fourth, fifth and so-on Sundays after Easter, during which we read the same stories out of the Gospels of Luke and John, until we celebrate the Ascension of Jesus on the seventh Sunday after Easter and Pentecost is finally celebrated on the eighth Sunday after Easter...and it happens in this same order of time every year. I just always feel like the ascension story is a sort of anticlimax after the resurrection on Easter and why does it always preclude Pentecost?

I have a colleague in Long Beach who likes to collect Bible story action figures with which she then illustrates some of her more lively sermons. I remember one year she very excitedly showed me an item she had acquired for celebrating ascension. Does everybody know what a “floaty pen” is? It’s usually a cheap ball point pen with a fat, hollow chamber in which there is water and some sort of scene or figure that floats either up or down the length of the pen so that when you turn the pen one direction the scene floats toward the end that’s down and then you turn the pen over and it floats toward the other end, again. Well, she found a “Jesus’ Ascension” floaty pen. Except that it worked in a rather peculiar way.

You see, when you looked at the pen “right side up” there was Jesus with his right hand up, pointing toward his destination in the clouds. In order to make the Jesus figure move however, you had to turn the pen upside down, which had the effect of dropping Jesus head-first in a decidedly downward direction. Well I didn’t find that very satisfying so when he reached the “top” of the pen I turned it right-side up so he was pointing in the right direction but then he just floated down out of the painted clouds to land on the ground again. I remember finding this arrangement to be somewhat disappointing and I spent a good half of an afternoon trying to figure out how the pen could have been designed so that Jesus actually ascended, rather than descending. I was eventually given that pen and here it is. I've never really figured out a way to make it work to my satisfaction and that’s actually the way I have felt about the entire Ascension celebration for most of my life.

I never understood the reason for this seemingly “second” resurrection-type event until I went to seminary and began to learn about how long an interval of time there was between the life of Jesus and the writing of the gospels. If the reckoning of the time of Jesus’ life is factual then he was born five or six years before the time we mistakenly labeled, anno domini, the year of the lord, and then he died some 33 or so years later, sometime between 27 and 28 of the first century. By our best guestimates, the gospel of Luke and it’s sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, weren’t penned until possibly as late as 65 or 70 of the first century; an entire generation – and then some – after Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Bishop John Shelby Spong, a renowned theologian who has worked for the reform of the Episcopal church and for the wider Christian church body for most of his life, speculates that the story of the resurrection event itself, particularly as we read it in the gospel of Luke, is a story several decades in the making and that by the end of the fifth and sixth decades of that century in which Jesus lived there was a great deal of speculation about the reality of that story, much less the teachings and activities of Jesus. There had been talk, early on after he died, of Jesus’ imminent return and a promise that all believers would be taken up with him at the end time and would never experience death in the new life Jesus had promised. But by the time Luke was written the apostles themselves were probably either dead or dying and many of the first followers had also died.

The supposed “end time” kept getting pushed further and further away. Jesus had yet to return and set everything to “rights,” as it were. Believers were persecuted and were even hunted down and killed. They were tortured and murdered in the Roman arenas for public amusement. Where was the justice of God, now? Where was Jesus? Was his appearance after the resurrection just a story? Why was God allowing all of this suffering to continue? Jesus had taught about a new society, a new world, in which the poor were blessed and the wicked were finally punished, and he even taught that the kingdom of God was right here around us; so common and ordinary that we don’t even notice it, like leaven in our bread, or like the mustard bush. Well, bad things are still happening to good people and believers are still dying. The world is “going to hell in a handbasket” and it seems like Jesus just isn’t paying attention. He’s not here! How often do we feel like that these days?

Maybe the ascension story is about this feeling that Jesus in NOT present in the world. He’s been taken up and he isn’t with us, in the flesh, right now.

Rev. Ted Smith, an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church USA gave an address at their denomination’s Covenant Conference in 2009. This was a conference to address the disparity in the church’s teachings and practices surrounding gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons. Rev. Smith addressed the particular absence of justice regarding this group of people and what he considers to be a blatant disregard for the teachings of Jesus and equated it with a theology of the ascension of Jesus that I find to be quite gratifying and illuminating. He said:

Christians in the wake of the Ascension see both [the] presence and absence [of Jesus in the world]. They sit in the dark of absence long enough that—in the phrase we learned from Howard Thurman via Gregory Bentley—the dark becomes luminous…Such faith is a miracle. It involves seeing enough of the presence of God in the life of the church that you can’t let go, but then finding yourself broken open by the depth of the absence that presence discloses … and then finding yourself, in that breaking, bound yet more tightly to the one broken for us.

In other words, in our churches, in worship and in studying the records of Jesus in the Bible and in declaring that “God is still speaking,” we experience Jesus; living among us, teaching and preaching and performing miracles, filing our heads and our hearts with a joyous vision of the realm of God in this world that is so compelling that we can hardly wait for its manifestation; so that in our hearts we cry out, “Lord Jesus, quickly come!”

Then we focus our gaze just a little bit over Jesus’ shoulder...and we see a world still full of suffering and strife. We see poverty and famine. We see greed and gluttony. We see blatant disregard for creation and its stewardship. We see hatred and fear and war and death and injustice. We experience betrayal and loneliness, anxiety and despair. We see dishonesty and corruption and hypocrisy everywhere, even within – and sometimes especially within – our own churches, the supposed “body” of Christ; so that in our hearts we cry out, “Lord Jesus, quickly come!”

How terribly disappointing; how dispiriting it sometimes is, to live in our reality when we know, in our hearts, what Jesus was talking about, what he was teaching, what he died for and what he now – our faith tells us – lives for; the love and the will of God realized; that is, "made real," in this world. And it is this disappointment – the same disappointment that the early believers felt – that is addressed at the end of the ascension story when Jesus says to those waiting, “I am sending upon you what my Father promised.” And in Acts he says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.”

What? What power? The Holy Spirit? Was that a threat or a promise? And if we read further in the book of Acts – which I strongly encourage everyone in the congregation to do before next Sunday, when we celebrate Pentecost and the birthday of the church – if we read further in Acts we might well ask, "Is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit a threat or a promise?" because it is this Spirit of God...of Christ...within us, that reveals to us the very absence of Jesus in our streets, in our schools, in our homes, in our governments, in our societies, and particularly in our churches. It is also the Spirit of God within us, the hope of life to come, that gives us the courage and the strength to endure the world as it is and to work toward its time of reconciliation with the will of God. Rev. Smith calls this – and I agree with him – faith. He says:

This is the kind of faith, I think, [to which we are called.] To say that Christ is the peace, unity, and purity of the church is to proclaim a kind of presence. It is to say that where we see only conflict, Christ has already made peace. It is also to refuse every other source of community as false. It is to say no to peace built on agreement about how to vote, or whom to ordain, or how to interpret Scripture, or what kind of worship we prefer. Ascension faith has the courage to refuse alternatives like these. It has the tenacity to wait for the peace of Christ by the peace of Christ. Ascension faith has the capacity to yearn. It knows how to yearn for the body we can see from here. (Emphasis mine.)

Our faith informs us that despite all of the trials and tribulations we see and experience God is with us. Recall last December 19, 2009; it was the third Sunday of Advent and we read from Matthew, chapter 1, verse 23 – which is supposedly a quote from Isaiah 7:14 – that “…she will bear a son and will call him Emmanuel, which means ‘God with us.’”* Even when we can’t perceive that holy presence, God is with us and that presence is right here! Right now! In this very moment we are in the presence of the divine and the ground upon which we are standing is holy!

When we invoke the Spirit of God, when we apply our faith to every circumstance, every encounter, we bring with us the presence of Christ. The Holy Spirit is our spotlight, if you will, to illuminate every dark corner where the will of God is not present so that we can manifest Christ in the world. That is the power Jesus promises. Is it easy or comfortable? Heck no! But real power never is. Sometimes we would just as soon not know there was another way. It would be so much easier to say, “Well, that’s just the way it is,” and not feel compelled to work toward “righteousness.” The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is both a threat and a promise, just as Jesus is both present and absent in our world. It is this seemingly mutual exclusivity in which we live and move and have our being and in which the story of the ascension of Jesus makes a kind of hopeful, "upside-down" sort of sense as the preparation story for the Pentecost celebration, when we celebrate the anniversary of having become Christ’s ecclesiastical body in the world and take up the power for change that we, as members of the United Church of Christ proclaim when we declare that God is still speaking. And that, my friends, is a promise.

*Epilogue: I nearly dropped my teeth in the moments during the service just before I delivered this message as the choir -- without any prompting from me concerning the theme of my message -- sang an anthem called, "Emmanuel: God is with us." How often does a choir director choose such an anthem in May? I was stunned and awed. It was one of those hair-standing-on-the-back-of-your-neck moments. I still get chills just thinking about it!