Looking Within: Sermon for the Feast of the Ascension C (7th Sunday after Easter, tr.)

This week, I don’t know about you, but I have been thinking a lot about good-byes.

I have thought about this being Memorial Day, the day we give thanks for and honor those who have laid down their lives in defense of this country in our armed services, our Coast Guard, and our Merchant Marine; those who have been willing to give up their lives to protect others, which is particularly poignant this week. I've thought about their departures from their families to defend our country and other countries, and for their families' farewells to them after giving their lives for others.

I have thought about the feeling you get as you are getting ready to be parted from a loved one—maybe for a few days or weeks, or maybe longer. It’s the time of year for it, isn’t it? It’s graduation season-- a time when we acknowledge achievements but also the huge changes those accomplishments place upon our horizons, with some of our graduates getting ready to move to college or into careers that may take them far from us.

In our house, there have been lots of changes, just like in many of yours. Our son is getting ready to start his career next week, and he is getting ready to go back to Kansas to get ready for that today. Our middle daughter moved to Florida this spring for a new job. Our eldest changed jobs but thankfully is still here living in town.

It’s a time of vacations and journeys—as I have been enjoying my friend Maria’s travels of the Camino de Santiago in Portugal and Spain for these last several weeks, and thinking about how sometimes the journey IS the education rather than just a means of getting TO an education. I have been getting ready for my second summer at Sewanee for the month of June, and so getting ready to keep things running smoothly around here and so thankful for everyone who is helping me to do that.

I have been thinking about the way that these transitions and departures change us. Watching friends I love move to different places, and hoping that our friendships will still endure across distances and the lack of daily presence, hoping that we will still be able to maintain the depth of connection when the whir and demands of life might make it easy to move our friendship more to the periphery, regardless of all the ways technology can keep us connected. Even when friends leave after a visit, the bittersweet feeling of parting.

Our relationships shape us, for good or for ill, and even the difficult relationships have much to teach us, and with God’s help, offer us a chance to practice grace—this much I have learned in my years on this Earth.

Our relationships change and grow throughout the time we have them. Some are fleeting. Some endure, like our relationships with friends and spouses and parents and siblings and cousins. There are great songs about this tender subject, like the Finn Brothers’ “Disembodied Voices,” where they remember talking to each other up and down the hall from their separate bedrooms at night as boys, or the song “Won’t Give In,” where lead singer-songwriter Neil Finn imagines a best man speech in which he talks about the promises we make to those we love to hold fast to “the people we call our own.” 

In her song, “Only a Dream,” the beautifully gifted singer-songwriter Mary-Chapin Carpenter remembered growing up with her elder sister and how she protected and comforted her even during their parents’ unhappy marriage, assuring her in the night that the things that scared her were “only a dream.” In the final verse, she remembers the day her sister left for college:

The day you left home you got an early start
I watched your car back out in the dark
I opened the door to your room down the hall
I turned on the light
And all that I saw
Was a bed and a desk and couple of tacks
No sign of someone who expects to be back
It must have been one hell of a suitcase you packed.

Twirl me about, twirl me around
Let me grow dizzy and fall to the ground
And when I look up at you looking down
Say it was only a dream.(1)

How often have we too stood staring sadly after the beloved ones as they drove around a corner, taillights and turn signal a final blaze goodbye; or watched their suitcase disappear around the corner of the jetway (before we had to say our goodbyes at the security gate); or settled the teen into the dorm room and almost started a fight just to make the leaving easier?

We accept that children from the moment of birth will continue to draw away and recede from us—even eventually recognize the good in that, remembering our own declaration of independence from parental hovering years ago.

I think about that as I hear these stories today about Jesus’s ascension. I think about how traumatized the apostles must have been over the whirl of the past forty days—they had watched their teacher be arrested, crucified, and buried—only to have him return to them after three days, resurrected. Of how they must have rejoiced at having their beloved friend back. But now here he is leaving again—and yet assuring them he will always be with them.

Is it any wonder they stand, gazing up at the sky, afraid to break the connection and tear their eyes and hearts away when all that means is that now, they truly do not know the way forward through their loss? We’ve all done the same. Change is hard, especially changes to the relationships that define us and protect us.

Biblical scholars believe that the same person who wrote the Gospel we call Luke also wrote the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. So it is interesting that today, as we celebrate Jesus’s Ascension, we have as our gospel the closing verses of Luke and the opening verses of Acts—and that they both recount the same event. Luke’s gospel closes with Jesus opening the apostles’ minds to the meaning and fulfillment of the scriptures, his final blessing upon them, and, in the midst of that blessing, his ascension to heaven.

We then hear Acts begin with the same event—but with some different details. The one that jumps out at me is the two angels appearing after Jesus has ascended. They bring the apostles back to earth, so to speak, with a forthright question: “Why are you standing around, staring up at heaven?”

Jesus promises the apostles the power of the Holy Spirit, and then he ascends into heaven, and that’s often where we get distracted. Right there with the apostles, we tend to focus on the image of Jesus flying up into heaven rather than think about what that leave-taking means.

It’s a scene that has been depicted in art thousands of times over the centuries, in icons, and paintings, and reliefs and stained-glass windows. One of the weirdest ways to depict the scene shows only Christ’s feet dangling at the top edge of the scene, as if he were doing an Olympic high dive in the wrong direction.

But even the angels who suddenly appear at that moment remind us that focusing on looking upward is pointless, a hindrance to getting about the holy charge that Christ has placed upon us of witnessing to his truth in the world. It’s an awesome responsibility and an honor. It's a sign of how very much Jesus loves us that’s every bit as breathtaking as his laying down his life for us on the cross. Jesus loves us so much that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, he commissions each and every one of his followers to be his ministers and to be his Body, to carry on his holy work of redemption, reconciliation, and healing into the world: to carry him and bear his image within ourselves for the sake of the world. And if we want to be worthy of bearing his name, we have to take up that holy responsibility with steadfastness and hope, with action rather than mere words.

It’s so easy, I know, to look to heaven to solve all of our problems. We will especially hear about people talking about “thoughts and prayers” this week as people of conscience are rocked with grief at another horrific school shooting, this time in Uvalde, Texas, and nineteen precious small children and two teachers murdered with weapons of war in neighborhood school--a place that is supposed to be a sanctuary and place of growth. I have wept as I thought about the goodbyes, the final chance to be with each other, that all those families have experienced—and all the thousands of families who likewise have been parted from their loved ones by the scourge of gun violence, and by our pretended helplessness to do anything about it except claim to look up to heaven and offer “thoughts and prayers.”

And I’ll be honest with you: I wore this orange gun violence stole last week, after the Tops Supermarket shooting in Buffalo and the shooting in Orange County at the Taiwanese church. And here I am again, but this time wearing it for 19 precious children and two teachers who put their bodies on the line, all massacred, and the husband of one of the teachers dead mere hours later from a literal broken heart. Twenty-two dead victims and their dozens of classmates wounded either physically or psychologically, and their families, and their town. I would give ANYTHING to not have to wear this stole and to have to preach about this. But the gospel demands it. The Christian life is one of engagement with the world in Jesus's name.

Memorial outside Robb Elementary in Uvalde Texas from The Guardian (UK).

Because we’ve been here too many times, watching these terrible losses with hearts breaking and demands for change that fade once the going gets tough and sacrifices are called for. Every single time, we hear people with a financial and partisan interest in the status quo murmur about praying to heaven, and then shrug off any responsibility or any intention to actually work for the common good to help prevent these horrors from being so easy and so common and so horrifying. It’s easy to claim free will when it suits us, but when times like these call for sacrifices for the common good, we can’t simply turn our eyes to heaven and shrug and claim such things are out of our hands. It’s easy—and it’s wrong.

That’s why I hope you think about what the ascension of Jesus means for you and me—whether you literally believe in it or not. I mean, it sound fantastic—Jesus being bodily carried into heaven, when there’s so much here on earth that still needs to be fixed! So we join with the apostles in our grief and cry, “How could he leave us? There’s so much here that still needs to be healed! Why doesn’t God do something?” And Jesus asks us, “There’s so much that needs to be healed! Why don’t they do something?”

The fact is, we are all in the same situation, those apostles 2000 years ago and us, right now. We can realize that Jesus’s ascension places the responsibility for witnessing to the resurrected life Jesus offers to us squarely on OUR shoulders. The responsibility to act is now OURS.

The story told in Acts is meant to build up our courage so that we may joyfully take up the mission he loves us enough to entrust to us: to take up our call not as observers but as disciples; to actively proclaim Jesus’s gospel of love and reconciliation in the world.

It’s about hearing that question directed at us: “Why are you standing there, looking up at heaven?”

This is a question posed in love and in encouragement. With Jesus’s ascension, WE are Christ’s Body in the world. It is up to us to literally embody Jesus’s gospel in our lives, our attitudes, our words, and our actions.

Being a Christian is NOT a spectator sport. Being a Christian calls us to not only transform OUR own lives, but to make visible to the world the possibility of its transformation and restoration. Being a Christian is a social and political act in the very best sense of those words. Politics isn’t a dirty word—it simply means our commitment to the body politic and its well-being. The foundation of politics, just like the foundation of the gospel, is not mere personal advantage but the common good—the same common good Jesus calls us to when he reminds us that the greatest commandment is to love God, and to love each other as much as we love ourselves, NO EXCEPTIONS. Politics is the heart of our lives together in groups big or small-- the commitment and the love we are called to practice and offer to each other and act of hope, bravery, and enduring willingness to see the potential and the beauty within this Earth and within every inhabitant of it. The gospel absolutely is political-- intended for our flourishing as one community of the children of God. It should NEVER be partisan.

As we grow in our relationship with God, we are empowered and loved by God to take up our own ministry in the world. To remember that we are now the face, hands, and healing heart of Jesus out in the world—to remember and to look within ourselves, where Jesus has been all along, and find the courage to tear our eyes away from heaven, to give thanks for the love and grace that God continually shows us, and take up our call to witness to the love that reaches out to the world, this hurting, wounded, beautiful world, through our own discipleship and gratitude for all that God has done for us, in times of joy as well as sorrow, in times of meeting as well as times of parting.

The Ascension of Jesus reminds us: it’s time to look within rather than toward heaven. Look within, and locate the beating heart of God placed inside of us at our birth—given to us not just for ourselves, but for those around us, friend, family, or stranger. And then act, for the good and protection and flourishing of those around us. Why do you stand looking up into heaven? Look within, instead. That’s where Jesus is—all along.

Amen.


Preached at the 505 on Saturday and the 8 and 10:30 am services on Sunday, May 28-29, 2022, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.


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

Citations:

1) Mary Chapin Carpenter, "Only a Dream," from the album Come On, Come On, 1992.