Scripture Acts 1:1-11
The truth is: I have had a little trouble coming up with a topic for the sermon this morning. For quite a long time now sermon topics and worship themes have seemed to come rather easily and in the natural course of things, being suggested by seasons like Christmas and Lent and Easter and ideas from a variety of people inside and outside the congregation and events going on in the world and just things that I happened to have on my mind. And I have some things in mind for coming weeks. But when it came to today, I really didn’t have anything that was grabbing me and telling me what I needed to preach about.
That’s been rare for me since coming to Sojourners. I have not generally had a problem in finding things to talk about. Quite often I have found that what I end up saying is different from what I thought I was going to talk about, but at least I had a starting point. But as this Sunday came nearer and nearer, I found I didn’t even have much of a starting point.
I am aware, of course, that today is Mothers’ Day. That’s a starting point. For some people that would be enough. There would be no problem. We would have a Mothers’ Day worship service and I would give, maybe because I was moved to do so or maybe because I was expected to do so, a Mothers’ Day sermon. I have given my fair share of those, some because I was moved to do so and some because I was expected to do so. Eventually, I have to confess, I gave enough sermons because I felt I was expected to that I began to resent it when I preached a Mothers’ Day sermon, or I felt guilty if I didn’t. And I increasingly resisted the sugar-coated approach to Mothers’ Day. I also began to be troubled that Mothers’ Day rhetoric so often ignored certain people or certain realities. How do you celebrate Mothers’ Day in a way that takes account of families with single mothers and families with single fathers and families with two mothers and families with two fathers (and no mothers)? How do you recognize those who have wanted to be mothers but were unable, or those who are mothers who didn’t want to be, or those who have chosen to terminate pregnancies? And how do you acknowledge the failure and difficulty and sometimes abusiveness of the parent-child relation?
I found over the years—and I know this is my problem—that Mothers’ Day for me has been a difficult time for acknowledging the rough fabric of our lives. Of course that life is sometimes complicated and never perfect does not mean that people should not be recognized or love celebrated. Still if we are to acknowledge mothers—and fathers—it seems important to do it honestly and in recognition of all sorts of families, all sorts of situations, all sorts of feelings that may be involved in being a parent—or a child. Someday I will try again to give what I will think of as a Mothers’ Day sermon. Today I was not prepared to say more than what I have just said. Even though I know some of you came today with the expectation of hearing a Mothers’ Day sermon, I’m afraid it will have to be for another year.
This year Mothers’ Day also happens to fall on a day less well known to the general public and not so well known even in the church, unless you’re well versed in your church calendar. Today is Ascension Sunday. It’s the day that is based on the scripture that was read this morning where Jesus takes his final leave from the regions of the earth. For forty days after the resurrection, Jesus is reported to have moved among his disciples, engaging them in meals and conversation and engaging in a ministry of presence with them. Then, one day, he left, rising up into heaven, ascending to God, leaving his followers gazing upward after him, sort of forlornly, not yet realizing that the Holy Spirit was soon to descend upon them.
Now I’m not real big on these liturgical holy days. Christmas and Easter are pretty solid in my brain, and Pentecost is nice, though how much we make of it depends on when it falls and what else is going on. Pentecost next Sunday is going to having to compete with Molly’s baptism, though the two are not inconsistent. Days like Ascension Sunday don’t generally command my attention. Besides, as one person has pointed out, it’s really no wonder that the ascension is not a really popular occasion. It celebrates Jesus going away; in other words it celebrates human beings being abandoned. Who wants to celebrate that? Some human beings spend a whole lifetime of psychological struggle trying to overcome and live creatively with their fears of being abandoned. Here is a story about abandonment and we’re supposed to celebrate it in worship and sing joyous hymns about it?
Now to be fair, there are many people who would not describe the story of the ascension this way. There are many who would see it as a story of Christ’s coronation, a story about Jesus going home to God and assuming his throne where he shall reign forever and ever. I tend to read stories from a more human point of view, and the people I identify with in this story are those who are left behind and left alone with no one to lure them by his words or example into doing courageous things they wouldn’t otherwise do, no one to make their hearts burn within them, no one to make them feel as though their lives were of infinite value. This is a story, to me, about people who are faced with the prospect of leading their lives without the presence of some powerful, vivid, immediate source of inspiration. This is a story about me, trying to prepare for this sermon without that powerful source of inspiration. It’s a story about me actually most of the time.
I think it’s a story about us, though I always hesitate to make assumptions about other people’s experience. There may be some people who live in a sort of constant state of inspiration and who have a well that never runs dry. There may be some people who are passionately motivated and “up” pretty much all the time. There may be some people who wake up in the morning receiving the new day as a gift from God and giving thanks for it, eager to embark on the adventure that awaits them every single day.
I do not wake up like that. If I do, it’s either an accident or a miracle. And I suspect I’m not the only one. And it’s not just a matter of who of us are “morning” people and who of us are “night” people. It’s a matter that for a great many of us, I suspect, life tends to the ordinary and even those who have a well they can drink from that never runs dry may find that it’s hard to drink from it all the time. It’s hard to approach every task with enthusiasm. It’s hard to be overflowing with passion or with the Holy Spirit all the time. What’s the saying? Is it writing that’s supposed to be 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration? Or is it something else? It could be almost anything. Mothering, or parenting, for example, to revert for a moment to Mothers’ Day. As my thoughts about Ascension took this direction, it also occurred to me that good parenting often takes place without the benefit of direct inspiration. Of course inspiration is always nice, but when a child gets sick in the middle of the night, it’s best not to rely on inspiration.
And of course we don’t generally require inspiration to go shopping, pay bills, or attend a Sojourners committee meeting. There are lots of things we can do more or less happily, or at least quite adequately, without being particularly inspired. But sometimes the absence of the spirit takes more serious forms. A nagging sense of smallness, maybe, or unimportance. Gnawing questions that threaten our peace of mind. A sense of emptiness that says something, we may not be sure what, is missing. The ache of a certain hollowness about so much of what we do. The spirit can be missing from our lives in relatively benign ways, or in profound and troubling ways.
I don’t know how to assess how widespread any feelings of the spirit’s absence may be. I don’t know how many people feel God’s absence or the spirit’s absence in their lives. I don’t know how many people have that feeling but deny it or repress it. I don’t know how many people go through life every day with an ache inside that may result from the spirit’s absence. I don’t even know how to describe my own sense of God’s presence or absence because it’s never really all one or the other. In the ebb and flow of daily life the spirit feels to me most of the time to be both present and absent at the same time.
But what I do know about myself is that that sense of emptiness is never very far away. The ache in fact is always there, though I may choose to pay more or less attention to it. And that is why I identify with the disciples in the story. We can forget about the physics or the metaphysics of the story, wipe away any pictures we may have of Jesus rising so that all you could see was his feet hanging down from a cloud. What the story is about is that feeling of emptiness or abandonment that I can’t help but feel is, and has always been, common in the spiritual life of disciples, people who want to be or are trying to be Christian. The story is about me not because that feeling is the whole of my spiritual life, but because it sure is a part of it.
What I have also come to know, however, is that this is all not quite so simple as feeling the spirit or not feeling it, being with it or without it. This may sound a little bit like doublespeak, but I have come to believe very strongly that God can be very much present even in those times when we are keenly feeling her absence, perhaps especially in those times when we are feeling very much without God. We do not miss what we do not know. And so in a strange sort of way, and maybe not really so strange either, missing God, feeling God’s absence or the spirit’s absence in our lives, can be a way of having the spirit be present for us. If I am feeling a sense of emptiness and know that I need to be filled, if I am feeling spiritually hungry even if I can’t quite put a name to what I am hungering for, if I am acutely aware of an ache in my soul, it may all be as much a sign that God is present as much as it is a sign that God is missing.
In the story there were some angels who, as Jesus was disappearing, asked the disciples why they were looking up into the sky. I’ve always thought that in one sense it was sort of a silly question. Of course they were. Their center, their source, was being taken away, vanishing right before their eyes. I understand why they looked after him. I need a well to drink from. I need a place to turn. I need something to inspire me, to give me some sense that I am about something more than getting through the day. I am not surprised that the people stood looking into the heavens. In a way we all are, aren’t we. It’s part of our being human. Something tells us that our eyes and spirits are not meant to be completely earthbound.
But then again in another sense the angels’ question made a lot of sense, implying as it did, that if you want to know the spirit of God, there are other places to look than up. Sometimes the spirit of God will inspire us, fill us with passion, enthusiasm, excitement, adventure. But God also dwells, more quietly perhaps but also truly, in our aching, our longing, our emptiness even. These parts of our humanness after all, when we allow them full life within us, are not so very far from passion and adventure. And God does, I believe, truly dwell within our longing for her.
And, of course, there are other places to look for the spirit of God when we are feeling abandoned or empty. It requires us to raise our eyes just far enough to find the eyes of another. There we may find another soul who has also known the emptiness. There we will surely find a soul who bears to us the image and heart of God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 12, 2002