Scripture: Luke 24:44-53
“Ascension Sunday, 2019”
The disciples gathered around him trying to take in every sentence, every word, every syllable, every last bit of wisdom that he could impart on them. After all, they had already lost him once and now that they had him again the surely were not going to let him out of their sight. He had been their leader, their teacher, their friend. He had pulled there out of the menial, the mundane, the fleeting. He had shown them all the power and abilities that children of God possessed when they wanted to touch the souls of other children of God. He had helped them see the holy realm erupting all around them. And yet now they had these new images in their minds to contend with as well. Because, if they closed their eyes each of them could still replay the whole scene in their mind. The trial before Pilate, the crowds turning, the scourging, the crucifixion, Jesus’s lifeless body declaring, “It is finished,” before the last of his spirit was commended back into the hands of God. The sadness and fright that had overwhelmed them that Saturday. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. Holed up in a room for fear that those who had taken Jesus’s life would return for theirs as well. Then that strange knock on the door. Mary, the one closest to Jesus, so out of breath, so excited and yet not really making any sense. Peter and the other running out the door and tearing down the street, racing one another to get to the empty tomb, to see for themselves, with their own eyes, this thing that Mary had told them about. Mary, returning to the garden, still so confused, so filled with sadness, so unable to see the risen one in her midst. Until that two word conversation, “Mary,” “Rabbouni” and the scales fell from her eyes and she could see the light of God cascading across the whole of creation. To that day in the upper room when they were still locked away trying to make sense of everything they had seen and heard following Jesus’s resurrection, yet still deeply in fear for their lives, and there he is again, as if he had passed through the locked door into their midst. “My peace I give you.” That breath, the air seemed to fill the room with a sense of holiness, of divinity, of spirit. They could see it all, and yet there was so much more. Jesus had spent the last 40 days with them. Appearing and then disappearing. In their midst one moment, and then, poof, gone again. All this played over and over again in their mind like a loop. But something strange happened in the midst of all that looping, all those memories, all those little episodes of life and death and new life all over again. Somewhere on that road, their fear dissipated. Somewhere along that journey, a hope arose in their souls. Somewhere along the way, a faith that could move mountains had exploded in their spirits, as they had seen him die and yet be raised again. And now, in this moment, the knew and believed that his spirit dwelt deep within them. And so maybe it seemed completely normal, this walk they were taking with him today. Maybe it was a walk like all those they had taken from hamlet to hamlet and town to town along the Galilean countryside. But on this walk, there was something different. Something different about his words, his mannerisms, his lingering looks at each of them. He always sought to teach them, to help them see the world in a fundamentally different manner, but this time? It was like he was giving them all the secrets of the universe in one single lesson. He spoke of the ancient books, the foundational books of the tradition, about their shared history, about their shared past and yet they were all, for the moment, speaking about him, in the present, like everything they had read was coming to life right before their eyes. About how he had to be offered up because of the sin of the world. How he had to suffer and die so that he might be raised again, so that all would know that the love of God can overcome everything, even death. How he had to testify to all these things, his life, a living sacrifice, that God’s hope and grace for all the world might be made manifest. And then he spoke of their sending, their new mission. First to Jerusalem, then all of Israel, then everywhere. God’s love, proclaimed for each person. A knew knowledge and reality that nothing you have said, nothing you have done, is beyond forgiveness, beyond grace, beyond the reconciliation offered to you by God. And all of this was made all the more real as he spoke of a final gift. A new spirit that would traverse the distance back and forth between God and humanity. A Holy Spirit that would be the new driving force in their lives and in the world. Whereas before they followed Jesus, now they would be driven out into the streets, alive with the love of God, moved by the movement of the Holy Spirit. Wild, chaotic, unpredictable, yet always with a purpose—a shared mission—to call all of the children home. To call all creation back to love and grace upon which it was founded.
But then, something new. He was moving back and forth, taking a moment with each disciple, whispering in his ear, until a mixture of tears and laughter enveloped their whole face. Then to the next. And the next. Until he had reached each one. And then they gathered around him one last time. He raised his hands, a final blessing between the disciples and God. And with that he began to return to God. The Bible tells us that he was carried up into heaven. And you have to wonder if the disciples peered into the sky watching Jesus for as long as they could. I wonder if they stared up and followed his presence going higher and higher until they could not see him anymore. Until he was a single speck. And then, gone. We are told that after this they returned to Jerusalem “with great joy” and they were continuously in the Temple from that day forth.
It is difficult to envision from whence such joy might arise in the midst of our collective circumstances. In a world of mass shootings and natural disasters that wipe whole towns of the map. In a world of brokenness and pain from illness and hunger. At a time when the cohesion of our collective nation seems inexorably shattered. We need the gospel that is found in Christ all the more now. We need there to be an almost supernatural ascension in our souls that will transport us out of the darkness and into the light. We need to know and to believe that joy is possible—a joy that brings the peace that surpasses all understanding into our lives afresh and anew.
Now, joy, as it has come to mean in our world, is an exuberance, an unrestrained happiness. And, at least for me, I find myself just stuck on that word in the passage, that emotion, joy. Because if you look over the story that I just recounted, there are lots of emotions that I imagine might creep up at the end of around an 80 day period of time in their lives. In our tradition, we mark Jesus’s turn towards Jerusalem and his eventual death, with a 40 day period of solemnity and somberness. It isn’t exactly sadness, but it is darkness, a time to prepare ourselves for the impending days of struggle that come with Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Dark Saturday. And being intimately connected with Jesus, I imagine that the disciples felt something of the same emotion as they moved towards Jerusalem with a growing fear gnawing at their guts. I wonder if it was difficult to sleep at night during that time, knowing that leaders of the religious order and the Roman authority were looking for any excuse to arrest your leader, any excuse to end the movement of which you were now a part. And then to arrive at Jerusalem and have the crowds turn out to welcome you all the while knowing that this really was just the calm before the storm. Then the last supper, the flesh of Jesus broken before you, the blood of Jesus spilled on the table. The arrest, the trial, the lashing, the crucifixion, the resurrection. The appearances in the locked upper room, in the garden, on the sea. The last few months must have felt like a never ending roller coaster and the toll on their psyches must have been overwhelming, and so when we read that they leave the spot after watching Jesus lifted up into the clouds, following him, tracing his ascension into the sky until he disappears, it is hard to imagine how the overarching emotion is joy. Surely, they were exhausted. Even more so, confused. And they knew full well the uncertainty that dominates all our lives. And yet, we are told that they left that place immersed in joy. Moreover, they began to go to the Temple each day to worship God, to pray to God, to give their whole selves over in service to God, to rededicate themselves to the work of God in this world. And in all this, they were undergirded by joy. Their lives got no better following the ascension of Jesus back to heaven. Tradition holds that they were beaten, scourged, and each met an untimely end to their earthly existences and yet, they each remained grounded in the saving knowledge that in Jesus one’s life is forever and always held in the hands of a loving God, in whom all things are eventually made holy and new.
In our own time it is not difficult to become overwhelmed by either the state of the world or our individual lives. We each, all of us, carry the burden of shames that have been part of us for as long as we can remember. We each, all of us, bear secret sins in our souls that we think would kill us if they ever saw the light of day, and so we keep them buried. We each, all of us, can struggle with cynicism and apathy. Even on our best days, there remains a hidden doubt, an enigmatic fear, a struggle to be the person that we know we are created to be and all that weighs on us, all that holds us down, all that keeps us from living into our divinity, that part of each of us made in the image of God. Too often we let the brokenness of the world hide from view the reflection in each of us of God. Of the Christ. Of the hands and feet of Jesus called to serve and strive and work for peace, love, and justice. We are held down. But to follow Christ is to go up!
It is no accident, no mistake that our eyes are drawn up to the top of the wall when we walk into this holy space. We are called to always seek the appearance of God around us, to not cast our vision down to the muck and the mire of our world but to look for God up and around us. But our eyes can’t stop there, just as our souls cannot remain here. We are all called to cast our vision up higher and know that that is where we are each called to be. An eternal invitation from the Christ that dwells in each of us, from the Spirit that enlivens us and fills us with love, and grace, and power to go up and to take others with us. To not be conformed by this world and its struggles and its fear and its violence but to be transformed by the renewing of each of our minds. To be transformed into the faithful of God, called into this community of the followers of Jesus. To begin, from this moment forward, an ascension, as a church, towards Godliness and away from brokenness, to begin an ascent that we can do together, that we are called to do together. Each one lifting up the one who can’t lift herself. Each one, going out into the town to find those who are to join us on our ascent, each taking her place in an unbroken chain of people being brought back to God.
Sisters and brothers, ascendance is not easy and the ascension from brokenness to holiness is long. But we do not do it alone. We only join in the chain that was begun at the beginning of time. We only join in the chain that carried Elijah to heaven. We join the chain that carried Jesus to heaven. We join the chain that eventually carried the disciples, and Paul, and the earliest Christians, those who died for the faith. It is the chain that carried the desert fathers, and the mystical mothers of our faith. It is the chain that carried Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Hildegarde of Bingen, and Julian of Norwich, and Teresa of Avila. It is the same chain that carried, Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Fannie Lou Hamer. It is the same chain that lifted people out of oppression and gave them strength to stare into the face of the junta in each time and place and courageously declare, ¡No Mas! It is the chain that unites the faithful in every time and place as we, with one voice say, “All who hunger, come. All who thirst, come. All who are naked in the streets, rotting away in prison, blinded by hatred, held captive by brokenness, come.” Because here in this place, at the cross is found the great chain of being which calls all people eventually back to God, and up out of the mess of the world. We are called to go up.
Friends, what would it look like for all God’s children to begin to go up, begin to ascend with Jesus, not out of the world, but above the brokenness, the sinfulness, that so often defines our existence? What would it look like to view every day as a gift from God—an opportunity to do the most good we possibly could with the time that we are given? To spend your life, each one of us choosing to leave our one grain of holy sand on the scales of justice, peace, and love? What would it look like to live as if we knew that whatever we did to the least of these among us, we did to Jesus? We are a community of faith in a world desperate for a faith they can cling to when the storms of life overtake us. We are a community of faith in a world desperate for someone, anyone, to care just a little about its plight. We are a community of faith, following the one who never, ever turned anyone away. We are a community of faith, broken and imperfect, but called to be better tomorrow than we were today. We are a community of faith, called to rise with Christ. To. Go. Up.
Friends, look around you. Look at the folks with whom you have gathered on this morning. Look at your brothers and sisters in the faith. Each a child of God, beloved, redeemed, and being called to grow closer to Christ. Look around you, each of these people are here to walk with you, to carry you when you grow weary, to lift you up when the guilt and shame and darkness of life makes it so you can’t see the light. Look around you, because it will be these people, it will be us who will continue to rise from the muck and the mire together. No one in front, no one left behind, but a single line, a single chain, a single movement of people, finding their place in a line with no beginning and no end. The circle remains unbroken. Hope remains eternal and the dream never dies. And we are always, only ever called to go up. Thanks be to God and Glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace amongst all God’s peoples. Alleluia, Amen.
Image: The Ascension by Rembrandt, 1636