Scripture: Acts 1:1-11
I jokingly asked Ava what I should preach on this Sunday and she, I think jokingly, said, “Well, the last two Sundays you’ve preached on ‘Learning To Say No’ and then ‘Learning To Say Yes’. Seems like it’s time for a sermon on maybe.”
I was tempted. “Learning To Say Maybe” is probably a preachable sermon topic for me and for you, and it’s probably a thought worth exploring from a Christian perspective. And there could be lots of angles to it, subjects that are similar, but not exactly the same. Learning To Say Yes and No. Learning to say “it all depends”. Learning to say “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure”. Learning to say nothing at all, as in learning when to keep your mouth shut, and the companion topic, learning when not to keep your mouth shut even though you don’t know what to say. There were lots of possibilities. But, I decided that I’d been down that road far enough for now and that I’d come back to the maybe idea another time. So this is not a sermon on learning to say maybe, at least not exactly.
I decided instead to focus my thoughts on the scripture reading that is often read on this Sunday before Pentecost, which is known in churches that keep track of church days as “Ascension Sunday”, the Sunday we recall Jesus taking leave of earth and as the creed says, ascending into heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. The next event in this scheme of things is the gift of the Holy Spirit, which is celebrated next week—Pentecost.
Why, you might ask, would you decide to focus a sermon on the ascension of Jesus? Or maybe you wouldn’t ask, but I might, because this is not an obvious choice for me. I’m not sure actually, quite why I’m choosing to focus my remarks around the story of Christ’s ascension, except that it is the reading for today and I know sometimes when I have trouble with a reading that it’s good for me to struggle with it rather than just dismiss it, and I just have a hunch that there’s something in this reading for me, even though it may not be immediately obvious what that is.
It’s a hard reading in some ways for me to relate to. The picture that’s being presented in the scripture is, I guess, that Jesus rose from the dead but at first didn’t rise very far, that he sort of hovered around earth for a while in his resurrected state, having little pastoral chats here and there, inviting himself to breakfast, and in general just showing up at different places to make sure that the disciples and others were getting it about the resurrection. He did this for forty days and then decided to rise the rest of the way, the rest of the way into heaven, while the disciples stood there on earth and watched him go.
I’m sorry if I’m sounding irreverent about this, but I have to be honest with you and say that I have a hard time relating to this, as I think probably some of you do too. And it’s not just Jesus. It’s all the talk or the kind of thinking about things like “the rapture” where people imagine or expect that Jesus will return and that the believers will rise into heaven much as he did, with the non-believers being left behind looking up wistfully into the clouds like the disciples apparently were in the scripture. You’ve seen the bumper stickers that say things like, “In case of rapture, this car will be driverless”. And then there’s the last verse to the hymn “Sweet Hour of Prayer”, or what in older hymnals used to be the last verse. It said, “This robe of flesh I’ll drop and rise to seize the everlasting prize and shout while passing through the air, farewell, farewell sweet hour of prayer.” I confess that I could hardly keep a straight face when I used to sing those words, and I discovered as I was looking through my hymnal collection to find them, that most hymnals of the last twenty years that are in my possession don’t include that verse. Again, my point here is not to be irreverent or cast aspersions on beliefs of others, but simply to say, as a personal matter, I don’t know how to relate to such things, visions of people, even of Jesus, floating up into the air. I don’t know what to make of them. They have never played a real big role in my sort of every day spiritual life. That’s all on one level.
On another level though I relate rather easily to this story. If I enter the story rather than just viewing it from the outside, if I put myself in the place of the disciples, I come to a different view of what the story is about. Instead of being about Jesus ascending to heaven, it’s about very human things, like feelings of separation, about saying good-bye, about grief, or loneliness maybe, or abandonment, how it feels to be without a dear friend, or a life companion, or without God. Trying to imagine what we would be feeling if we were the disciples in this story probably, certainly, will say more about us than it will about the disciples. But then that’s the point, isn’t it? That this is a story not about someone else, but about us. The point is not to come to some conclusion about how the disciples must have felt. If there is truth to this story it has to do with the truth of how you and I sometimes feel, perhaps how at some level we feel all the time.
I was talking last week about the theologian Dorothee Soelle, and I had gone back to look at some of her writings as I was preparing for last week’s sermon. Something she wrote in a recent book touched me, especially in light of her recent death. I didn’t include it last week because it didn’t seem to fit, but I still have the gist of it inside me and it seems to fit now. She was talking about Jacob in the story where Jacob ends up wrestling with an angel, or maybe with God, all night long in a kind of lonely, mystical struggle. She was saying that she understood Jacob very well. His loneliness. His vulnerability. She said she remembered very well a day fifty some years earlier when just like that she had stopped being a child, and how she had felt sad, and afraid, and alone. She said she was feeling the same things now (meaning a few years ago) as once again she was facing a time of transition. “Quite naturally,” she wrote, “I have deep anxieties as I face the dark river before me: growing old, being left alone, accepting this frailty which slowly but surely crawls up inside me.” Those words were particularly poignant to me, since I was reading them just a few weeks after she died.
But not just poignant. I identified with them, which is to say they were true for me too, maybe even more true than what she was saying. What she said was that she felt particularly vulnerable and alone in times of transition where the security of what has been is being left behind and the future doesn’t hold much promise of security. I feel that vulnerability and aloneness too, except that I would want to add that it’s not just at times of transition, unless you consider all times times of transition, which in a way they are. We are always leaving something comfortable or comforting behind, and/or anticipating the loss of something important, and if we aren’t (I say to myself) we probably should be. We’re always losing things. We do lose our childhood, or maybe the childhood of our children. We lose our youth, and middle age, and vigor, and eventually (though we try to delay it as long as possible) our health, and for many of us, long before we lose our actual health we lose our ability to count on it. We lose, maybe, our sense of having people count on us. We lose people—to death, to just life, as people move into our lives and then out of them again, or partly or mostly out or away. We lose jobs, specific jobs or maybe the whole world of work which once did but no longer defines the way we spend our days or even the way we think about ourselves. We constantly are losing ourselves, or parts of ourselves, becoming, for better or worse, different people from what we used to be. We lose…but I don’t have to go on, do I?
We are constantly on a threshold, in a time of transition, leaving something behind, including things that make us feel secure. And I don’t want to make this sound like it is some heavy, sad story that we are all involved in. People who want to see the glass half full will want to suggest that there is a gain with every loss, and although that may not be true all of the time, it is certainly true some of the time, and some of the time it is even pretty clear what that gain is. Still I believe there is that ever-present uncomfortable feeling that is there all the time for us as human beings, and when we are done being busy, done being entertained, done being sedated, done being distracted there we are alone with God in some way wondering, “what next”.
That’s where I tie in to the story of the ascension. Jesus leaves. The disciples sort of stare after him, the way you do when you don’t want someone to leave and they do anyway, and I can almost hear them say, maybe to each other, more likely just to themselves, “now what”. Everything was clearer before, when he was around. He could do our speaking for us. He was good at it, speaking words that somehow got to the heart of things. He was good at lots of things that we’re not very good at. And we don’t have him to lean on any more. He’s gone. Looks like he’s not coming back. So now what?!
It’s a question, as I say, that I believe is there all the time for us. We can’t afford to let it come to the surface all the time. We can’t afford to be constantly throwing our lives into question, can’t afford to be re-thinking things all the time. We don’t get up every morning and ask ourselves, well “what now”. We’d drive ourselves crazy doing that. We have places to go, or things to do, or some established routine, that more or less guides us through each day. But neither should we mistake our places to go, or our things to do, or the various routines we fall into, neither should we mistake them for anything more than temporary answers, if they are answers at all, to the question “what now?”. It’s never really answered, certainly not for good, and it’s always there if we want to pay attention. What now?
It’s a kind of an unsettling question really, presuming as it does that our lives are unsettled, not given, not neatly laid out for us, and that there is a certain bewilderment about our living that we can never really escape from. As I say, few of us can afford to live in a constant state of bewilderment, but then again this is not a kind of heavy, woeful view of life where we live in a constant state of confusion. It also suggests to me that if I were to ask myself more often “what next, what now” that it would not necessarily be a matter of giving in to a constant state of bewilderment but also of putting myself in a place of wonderment, recognizing in some positive way that there is a not-givenness to my life, that my life is not a matter of routine repetition day after day, that although I may not choose to take the question seriously, each day in a way does begin with the question, “well, what now?”
For me this story that is usually referred to as the story of Christ’s ascension is sort of like an x-ray that asks us to see beneath the surface of our lives to the reality that is always there even though it may constantly be re-shaping itself like a kaleidoscope, shaping itself into constantly changing patterns of loss and gain, of vulnerability and loneliness and bewilderment and wonder and trust and delight.
There is one more way in which the story has both a positive and negative aspect. On the face of it this is a story about Jesus leaving and about the disciples being left without that immediate sense of divine presence, of clear direction, where inspiration is close at hand, and you can’t help but sense the powerful presence of God. It is a story about the reality of being without God, of feeling God’s absence, being left to our own devices which may not be adequate. But of course that is not the whole of our reality, nor is it the whole of this story. For although it is our human condition, and the divine condition too for that matter, that we are not in perfect possession of God, that God is never fully present for us, and that at times of unsettledness and vulnerability and times when we experience loss we may feel the absence of God very keenly, it is also true, paradoxically that it is precisely at those times too that we may feel God’s presence most keenly. We are people for whom God is imperfectly but truly present as well. Maybe this is after all a sermon about maybe, in the sense anyway of being about the ambiguity of our living. That is what I believe this scripture to be about, notwithstanding those who would make it into something else. In addition to much else, it is a story both about the absence and the presence of God, both of which we carry in our bodies. In addition to describing Jesus going off somewhere leaving the disciples to figure an awful lot out on their own, I believe I read another message too, a message that says to the disciples and to us, don’t stand there looking up into the sky or off into space somewhere. If you want to know God’s presence, you will need the eyes of faith to see it, but if you want to know God’s presence, if you want to see God, look around you. Look around. Amen.
Jim Bundy
June 1, 2003