There’s a cartoon I really love that I saw years ago, I’m not sure where. It is one of Sidney Harris’s great cartoons depicting something about science—in this case, physics. It depicts two male professors standing in front of a blackboard. One professor has obviously spent hours working on some sort of physics problem, with formulas and scientific notation to the left and to the right. But it’s in the middle that he is stuck. He has now called in one of his colleagues to help him. In the middle of all the notation, there's a single phrase in English in all caps. “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS.” The second professor points at that phrase, and wryly comments, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.”
I thought of that cartoon as I was thinking about our readings for Ascension Day and as I was doing my research, which is called exegesis, as I prepared this sermon. Here at the end of the Easter season, we preachers get a lot of really hard stories to try to explain or make vivid in our preaching. To be honest, the entire span of Easter can be really hard to make relevant to people who live in such a secular, supposedly scientifically flavored world. Actually I feel like I should put asterisks around that last phrase given the refusal of a good chunk of the public to believe in even the simplest scientific things like, you know, medicine. And the scientific method. And logic.
But anyway. For a preacher, the whole sweep of Easter is like that cartoon, especially step two. I mean, think about the events we hear about that just do not make ANY sense on their surface: Resurrection. Jesus being unrecognizable by even his closest friends, popping up in locked rooms all the time like a ghost, which itself isn’t a very reasonable explanation either. And now Jesus zooming around on clouds.
Telling important truths about how to live one’s best life, how to treat others ethically and justly and end up actually benefitting from it, trying to keep people from being turned off by the word “sacrifice,” is hard enough already. But tell those truths while they are all wrapped around “and then a miracle occurs,” and everyone becomes all skeptical about that detail and completely tosses aside the real point of the story.
Let’s take a look at the story of the Ascension as an example. The action here may possibly begin on Easter Day in Luke’s telling--- but that strips out all the post-resurrection stories from John, so best not to dwell too much on that. It’s clear he changes his mind by the time he writes the Acts version, and states that it is 40 days after Jesus’s resurrection, which is why Ascension Day always falls on a Thursday in actuality. Our reading from Luke answers the questions many of us had at the beginning of Acts: what was Jesus doing to those 40 days after his resurrection? He was opening the apostles’ eyes to the scriptures, just as he had done to the disciples he had met on the road to Emmaus earlier.
I mean, what? Really? THAT’S what you are going to focus on? High school physics?
The “how” of this event can be a distraction. But when people keep trying to pop the balloon of wonder when it comes to faith, it sometimes gives me a pain in the neck. It also shows that for all their supposed sophistication, they do not understand, as Jesus did, that we live our lives by scientific laws, yes, but we TELL our lives through the power of story, which is more powerful and influential than the power of a thousand supernovas. Stories are the most powerful thing in the human imagination. People have laid down their lives for the sake of a story. Story is about the meaning we make of our lives. And it seems awfully easy to completely mishear and therefore misinterpret this story we receive in two complementary forms today a story that is in service to a bigger story.
Here’s the deal. The apostles and disciples in Luke’s telling saw a vision of Jesus ascending upward. In their understanding of the universe, there were three important places: Earth; below the Earth, and above the Earth. God’s realm existed above the Earth, which is pretty vague. It’s like someone asking you how to get to Clayton from Wildwood, and you pull out a map of North America and wave in a general rightward direction around over it. Not helpful.
And the ascending wasn’t the first time scripture had recorded such an event: the Prophet Elijah had ascended as well, had been lifted bodily to heaven, and he was provided a really impressive chariot of fire. Talk about theatrics! Talk about tearing apart the heavens! This thing is so amazing that the rock band Journey wrote a song about it, and they are hardly known for their production of Christian pop music. In the story we hear from the person who wrote both Luke and Acts today, Jesus simply steps aboard a cloud and up he goes. AFTER, one last time, reminding his beloved friends what is really important. After reminding them what the scriptures really mean, and what they are to do, which is to proclaim the good news of God’s love and care for creation to all the nations on the earth. To not just stay where it is comfortable, but to go out and witness to strangers about who God is as revealed through Jesus.
The brief account at the end of Luke has the disciples rejoicing and worshiping at this sight, and then going to the Temple. In Acts, it’s more subdued. Up Jesus goes, and the disciples just stand there astonished. They’re left standing there with their jaws sagging open. They’re rooted to the spot—until two men in white robes, meaning angels, basically tell them to snap out of it and get on about their business. Top stop being spectators, and to start being witnesses.
It’s the “getting on about our business” part that we, as Jesus’s disciples in this time and this place have inherited as our solemn obligation and, I would say, even our joyful work.
What is the business they—and we—are supposed to be getting on about?
It’s about telling the story. To be witnesses, not spectators.
Telling and living out in our own lives, proudly and without shame, the story of what really matters.
Not a discussion of particle and wave and energy equals mass conversion squared. But the story of God—a God who I believe set up all those natural laws and often bent down and whispered into Einstein’s ear to give him a nudge in the right direction, seeing as how he was a prophet in the way he shook physicists loose from a whole lot of what they thought they knew for certain.
Don’t just stand there, looking to see what other parlor tricks God has up God’s proverbial sleeve. Go out and tell the story. Go out and tell people WHY Jesus matter. Start with in your own life. What has Jesus done for you? And please don’t start with following him means you have a great place to hang out with your friends on Sunday mornings. That’s NOT the story either.
What has Jesus done for you, and for the whole world, and why does it matter? Because once you tell THAT story, you become a PART of the story.
After we pull ourselves out of the weeds that these ancient stories can lead us, especially when we don’t think about the overall picture, we remember that the Christian life is NOT one of passively sitting around and singing hymns, as great as those are, or looking at stained glass windows, as beautiful as those are, especially around here. No the Christian life is one of witness. It’s one of evangelism – oooh, that scary word again. Evangelism we can accomplish by words, or by actions in living out the love of God in our lives every single day as if God was watching us, as that Bette Midler song repeated.
What’s the truth of the story we are called to tell and more importantly be a part of? Some people want to make it about sin and shame. But that’s NOT the story. That’s the setting of the story, not the story itself.
Jesus came to show us how to be fully human and yet fully holy as the way of getting the absolute best out of life—the most peace, the most satisfaction, the most happiness, the most justice.
He did this by reminding us of the importance of compassion, as he went about healing, and he healed people because he truly saw them and the burdens they carried, and didn’t turn away but instead stepped forward to help lift the weight of those burdens of every stooping shoulder.
He came to remind us of the importance of humility as a virtue, and of repentance and forgiveness in healing up all the broken relationships we encounter: within our current selves and our childhood selves, between our families and friends, among our neighbors and even with the strangers we encounter. Our gospel states our call straight out: “Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in Jesus’s name to all nations” and “You, as my disciples, are witnesses of these things.”
Repentance and forgiveness
to be proclaimed in his name.
Salvation in the restoration of creation
to the beauty and balance breathed into it
at its dedication as good.
Jesus did not leave us bereft,
but clothed us in power from on high--
not the power of compulsion,
or fear-mongering
but goes to bring our joys and sorrows
into the very center of the Triune God.
What a glorious opportunity we have! What a joyful, hopeful message we have to share! The heart ascends with Christ.
Jesus goes because his work is complete. He now turns it over to us. And our work is ongoing. We share with Jesus the ongoing work of creation, of healing, of love in a world that sorely needs it. We can walk away from this story today, and walk into being part of the healing of all the world’s pain, by both telling the story, and then LIVING OUT its principles of compassion, of hope, of generosity, of reconciliation, of justice.
That’s when the miracle occurs.
AMEN.
Preached at the 10:30 Online Eucharist in Time of COVID19 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.
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