Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Ascension 2006
Luke 24:49-53
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Jesus said to his disciples, "See, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high." Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.
In the movie “Sunshine” actor Ralph Fiennes plays three different characters, in three different generations of the Sonnenschein family, a Jewish family in Hungary struggling with political and religious oppression. Ivan, the last of these three characters, lives through a very difficult time. Having watched his father’s execution at Auschwitz, he decides to abandon his Jewish identity and to embrace politics as a way to avoid further persecution and suffering.
But this doesn’t work. After a series of mishaps Ivan comes to the conclusion that being a political operative won’t protect him from suffering. It also won’t replace the emptiness he feels in turning his back on God. And so muses out loud about God’s existence and his own experience of emptiness.
“If there is no God—if there never was a God, why do we miss him so much?”
One of possible dimensions of the Feast of the Ascension (and there are many dimensions) is our getting in touch with our own experience of missing God—being separated from our source of strength, and our beloved who has gone away. For we might imagine that this is what the disciples felt when Jesus, who had been palpably near them after the resurrection, vanished from their sight entirely, leaving them alone to carry on without him.
Some of the dynamics that surround such a predicament are similar to what happens when we lose someone close to us, when we experience the death of a family member or friend and in the face of this separation, have to ask ourselves who we will now be and how we now will live. These questions are, of course, very much on our minds and hearts these days as a parish in the face of what Christie Hammond is going through after losing her husband, Frank.
For these reasons, then, it’s quite odd that in the Ascension story from Luke, nothing is said about the disciples’ grief or anxiety as Jesus disappears above them enshrouded in a cloud. Instead, Luke remarks that in response to Jesus’ ascension, “they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.”
What does this say to us about what’s going on in the Ascension? What does this say to us about the time when God seems absent and the times when we must live our lives in the absence of the ones we love?
I guess the first thing to say is that I believe the disciples’ joy is less about the human response to loss than it is a statement about something important from a theological point of view that happens in the Ascension. From this theological point of view, the Ascension accomplishes something important in and of itself. In it, Christ has not only come down from heaven and shared our human life but Christ has taken our humanity into the very heart of God. This then in a way that completes the work of salvation and opens the way for us to share in the divine life. And so as fantastic and even odd as the story may seem to us, from a theological and spiritual point of view the Ascension is an occasion for the celebration of the completion of God’s identification with our total humanity—with our experiences of joy and loss, of failure and triumph. And so our liturgy for tonight is all about our being lifted up with Christ, being in the presence of the one who takes us to himself, experiencing the divine life with him.
But for me, there is another dimension to the story, a dimension that offers us some wisdom about living with loss and absence in our lives, whether we feel that absence in terms of longing for a Holy One who has left us behind or longing for the ones we love but we must learn to live without. Within this understanding, the Ascension is not an isolated moment in the life of God and the church but sits in a series of experiences and theological insights that must be taken together.
In short, Ascension can’t be understood without the waiting for Pentecost. Loss cannot be understood with out the twin experience of an energy and empowerment that comes from on high.
In both our reading from Acts and our gospel from Luke, the disciples are told to wait or to stay until something else happens—until as the gospel says, they will be clothed with “power from on high.” This is a power that comes from someplace other than themselves. For us I believe that same waiting, that same openness to something we had not imagined for our lives is the place where new energy and new perspective will be given us after our loss.
Episcopal Priest Barbara Brown Taylor tells a story about her husband, Edward who was devoted to hawks, and especially to the golden eagles that were coming back to their part of Georgia. As she tells the story, “driving down the highway with him (had become) a test of nerve as he crane(d) over the steering wheel to peer at the wing feathers of a particularly large bird.” He would ask: “Is it an eagle? Or just a turkey vulture?” Her husband just had to know, “even if it meant weaving down the road for a while, or running off it from time to time.”
"Keep your eyes on the road!" she would yell at him. "Who cares what it is? I'll buy you a bird book; I'll buy you a bird. Just watch where you're going." Then a couple of summers later, Taylor and her husband spent two months apart. She thought she would get a break from hawks, but instead after a period of time she began to see them everywhere—looping through the air, spiraling in rising thermals, hunkered down in the tops of trees. Seeing them, really seeing them for the first time in her life, she said, “I understood that I was not seeing them with my own eyes but with Edward's eyes. He was not there, so I was seeing them for him. He was absent—or was he? He was present in me.”
And so tonight we celebrate the glorious mystery of the Holy One who comes to us and who takes all of who we are into the heart of the life of God. We celebrate this and move and sing and pray—all movements that are a part of the divine life available to us here and now. But we also wait, we also stay, knowing that we yearn for something that has not happened yet and that we cannot give to ourselves. We wait for the power from on high, for God’s recreating and surprising presence to come to us and to make us new.
AMEN
