May 4, 2008

Ascension Sunday
Luke 24:44 f & Acts 1

Above and Beyond

An Episcopal priest named Ed Covert remembers an episode from his seminary. Forty days past Easter, one year, on Ascension Day, the entire school, in academic robes and full high church regalia, gathered in the chapel for the big celebration. Quite an event... deans, processional marshals, bishops, faculty, seminarians, extended family members - all suitably dressed for the occasion - to commemorate the holy mystery of the Ascension of Our Lord.

Ed says the service ended with clouds of incense, and the congregation marched solemnly from the chapel, singing one of those great ascension hymns. Unknown to them, an enterprising student had taken one of those life-size Christmas figures from an outdoor crèche - the tacky, plastic, painted kind - and stuffed it with fireworks and skyrockets. As the procession of overly-dignified and properly-sober clergy entered the courtyard, the student lit the fuse.

And the statue soared out of the shrubbery, through a cloud of smoke and smells and sparks, zooming past the now-fleeing crowd, finally dive-bombing onto the roof of a nearby dormitory.

Ed says, the dean was not amused - we are, but he was not - nor was the dean impressed with the student's explanation that he was "simply dramatizing his belief in the ascension of our Lord." [1]

OK, now that I have your attention, I imagine that's what we all could think of this old Biblical story - Jesus on a hilltop launch pad, lifting his arms and without a visible source of power, propelling into the heavens.

But this isn't, as they say, rocket science. This is Scripture. When the ascension story was recorded for the Bible, it was not about physics; it was metaphysics, a leap or two beyond. The ascension is not rocket science; it's an experience of faith, intermingled with relationships of love, hope for us and those we love, and a delightful mix of Easter, Pentecost, and the here-and-now.

While you and I puzzle over the physics of how this ascension of our Lord took place, we really have little trouble understanding it emotionally. We know a lot or probably too much about loss, absence, and last goodbyes. Loved ones of ours are suddenly taken from us, and the way they leave fills us with awe, fear, sadness, and with an odd confusion of senses. They were just here, they're gone, but often it sure feels that they're still with us.

Aside from my cheeky humor, I think the stories about Jesus' ascension are about death and our hope and life in spite of it. A writer and pastor, in the clergy journal Christian Century, gave me this idea. Here's the hard reality, he said. "Jesus is gone. He is not here. He is risen not just from the dead, but right up and out of our world... Yet where was he going? Seeing him rise toward the sky confirms that he is going to heaven. His disciples saw with their own eyes that he wasn't heading down. He went up to see and live with God."

Jesus lives, so here's more evidence - this ascension is more evidence - that maybe our loved ones still live, too. Maybe death is not the end of us. Listen to this story of the ascension and I know you can think of others in your life who were just here... now they're gone... but by this evidence, they will be back someday for those they loved and left behind.

As you learned today, St Luke tells two stories about the ascension. In Version One, Jesus walked with his disciples "as far as Bethany," it says. Mary and Martha lived there, you know. Bethany was where he raised Lazarus from the grave. The family were friends of his. So this was a special place for Jesus. He had comforted those sisters and had given them back their brother from the tomb. Bethany, where, in Version One, he also ascended into heaven while his disciples watched. Metaphysics, you see. St Luke tells the story of the ascension seamlessly with the story of Easter perhaps because he feels that the ascension is the final chapter of the Easter story - and it takes place where there was a death and a resurrection for a family of those he loved.

In Version Number Two, Luke doesn't mention Bethany but says that Jesus told the disciples not to leave Jerusalem right away. They should wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit. And when the Spirit came, well, the story of resurrection went from "Jerusalem... to the ends of the earth." In this way to look at it, the ascension is the first chapter in the story of the Christian church which, of course, still goes on today. In the Book of Acts that scene on the hilltop ends with angels telling disciples to get to work down here, because, "Jesus - now taken up from you into heaven - will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." Metaphysics again.

We don't worry too much about Jesus' absence, partly because his Spirit is so alive and present with us, and partly because we're busy - ideally, busy with doing and being the Word. Jesus may have ascended, but in another sense he remains here on the ground..." - here in our Bethany where sisters must weep over death, and brothers have to say goodbye, and those who have faced death and lived will face it again someday and be gone.

Maybe gone, but the ascension points us beyond the physics. We don't know much about heaven, not even, really, if it is 'up there' - but down here Jesus sure has changed the way we think about death and the dead. Because he is with us in his resurrection and ascension and he's returning, so are all our dead, resurrected and returning.

We live as the last ongoing-chapter of Easter and the first ongoing-chapter of the Church. His leaving - but with us nonetheless - and his absence and promise of return - puts us into the metaphysical company of the very ones we miss the most (people we love, gone but not forgotten) - as well as all the others we've never met (that great cloud of witnesses whom no one can number) - all those unseen and unknowable made quite real by the quite physical reality of this company of disciples right here, right now, this church.

So, no, it's not rocket science. It's something else much better. I miss... a number of people dear to me, and I'd love to meet Nancy's father (Roland Abraham) who died before she and I met. But here and now is not the place for Roland Abraham. He is not here. He is risen.

Nathan Castens
Chanhassen, Minnesota

[1] From William Willimon in Pulpit Resource, April/May/June 2002

[2] Lawrence Wood, "Above and Beyond," in "Living by the Word," Christian Century, May 17, 2003. Tooting my own horn, the last chapter/Easter, first chapter/Pentecost is my insight today, not Wood's, though I think that is a logical extension of his thought.