Sermons

Snap Out of It!

June 5, 2011
The Ascension of the Lord
Acts 1.6-11; Ephesians 1.15-23; Luke 24.44-53
The Reverend Javier A. Viera

Over the years you’ve heard mystified preachers from this and other pulpits bemoan the fact that on Sunday mornings some people go to church while most people stay home or go to brunch. From this marbled lectern I believe and hope these musings have not been reproachful or congratulatory in nature as much as they have been genuine attempts to understand why people come here and what it is they have come in search of.

Barbara Brown Taylor concludes: “Those who stay home are not taking a week off; church is simply not part of their lives. As far as they are concerned, houses of worship are little more than pretty antiques, fussed over by wishful thinkers who do no know when to admit they are wrong and go home. It is one of the most peculiar things twentieth-century human beings can do, to come together week after week with no intention of being useful or productive, but only of facing an ornate wall to declare things they cannot prove about a God they cannot see.” [1]

Taylor is on to something, and not simply about those who stay home. There was a time not so long ago when I would have stood before you on a Sunday like today and apologized for the archaic language and images of this primitive story we call Ascension. I would have argued that the modern mind and sensibility could not seriously accept the things this story asks us to believe, and that our task was to modernize the story so that we could rescue some semblance of meaning from it.

But time and lived experience do funny things to youthful arrogance and modern rationality. It’s not that I’ve adopted a more literal reading or understanding of the story. It would be more accurate to say that time and lived experience have made me a more humble interpreter of texts, and a more daring, hungry spiritual seeker.

We make a monumental mistake if we hear today’s story and reduce it to something we either believe or reject. That is what modernity has taught us we should do with any proposition, reducing reality to a two-dimensional world devoid of subtly, or of layers of truth and wisdom and experience. Again, what time and lived experience have taught me is that this is a terribly impoverished way to live, and for the Christian this bidimensional reality stifles faith while trying to choke it of its power, relevance and truth.

What exactly does this story claim, and what exactly does it have to say to us? Although we’ve already read two versions of it, I’ll summarize it yet again. Jesus and a group of his followers are on a mount called Olivet just outside Jerusalem. There he teaches them one last time, and then disappears inside a cloud. One moment he was there, and the next moment he was gone. Those are the facts of the story as told to us by Luke in his gospel and in the Acts of the Apostle.

But in order to appreciate the brilliance of this story, and to make any sense of it for the living of our days, we have to enter the story, to become as one who was there, rather than looking on from a distance skeptically, dubiously. Place yourself there if you can—and rather than approach the story as one to believe or disbelieve, as one to prove or disprove, enter the experience by asking what Luke wanted his readers to know and to experience.

If you were standing there, I imagine, the first thing that comes to mind is not euphoria or a sense of victory, as in “Yes! We were right all along!” No. Instead you probably felt something like, “Wait! What’s going on? We thought we had lost him, then he came to us, and now we’ve lost him again.” Luke wants us to confront the reality of Jesus’ absence. The euphoria of Easter has passed, but now we confront once more something many of us know too well—the absence of God; the silence of God. On that mount, those witnesses not only experience Ascension, they also experienced departure and its attending reality: absence and silence. Imagine the small crowd 2 or 3 minutes afterwards. You can envisage a profoundly disturbing disquiet settling in—the wind howling, the bushes rustling, feet and eyes shifting, all accentuating the absence, the silence, the uncertainty.

Oh my, what were they to do now? Again, Taylor has some wisdom to share on the matter: “Sometimes I think absence is underrated. It is not nothing, after all. It is something: a heightened awareness, sharpened appetite, a finer perception. When someone important to me is absent from me, I become clearer than ever what that person means to me. Details that got lost in our togetherness are recalled in our apartness, and their sudden clarity has the power to pry my heart right open.” [2] With absence comes clarity. In some cases that clarity provokes longing and desire; in others it elicits gratitude and relief that something is no longer. Where the relationship was false, absence provides corrective and new possibilities. “Where the relationship was strong and true, the absent one has a way of becoming present—if not in body, then in mind and spirit.” [3] Absence has a way of enlarging our perspective, allowing us to see truthfully what before nearness clouded.

You know exactly what I’m talking about, and even as I speak someone, not just anyone, but someone comes to mind and heart for you—a grandparent or parent, a lover, a friend, a child. You cannot miss what you have never known, and what makes absence hurt, what makes it ache, is the memory of what used to be but is no longer. [4] That is what the disciples and others were facing in the moments after Ascension. This is what they were grappling with in the days and weeks afterward. Is it any wonder the story reports that they stood there in awe, staring into the clouds, lost for words or for any sort of adequate response? “Now what?” they must have thought—perhaps like you when you consider the absence of the someone who comes to mind and heart. How do I go on? How shall life now be constituted? What did I do wrong? What did I overlook? How do I go on?

This is precisely why Luke ends his story with the yet another mysterious encounter. Two men dressed in white (read: Angels) suddenly appear to them. They ask, “People of Galilee, why do you stand here looking up toward the heavens?” It wasn’t a real question as much as it was a reprimand. “Snap out of it!” they seem to say. What good is it to stand here frozen by his absence when now it is time to live the life to which he has called you? Paul later expresses it by saying, “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.” (Ephesians 1.17-19)

And did they ever snap out of it! We’re not told how, but they seemed to understand something new in that moment. They understood and accepted that in the same way that Jesus brought God to us, now he has taken us to God. The gap that had previously existed has been closed; the chasm has been healed; and now the work of being God’s people can begin afresh.

In his absence, they gained clarity. In what they feared would be an interminable silence, they heard his voice anew with greater lucidity than ever before. They stopped looking to the heavens, they stopped being frozen in time by the uncertainties of life, and instead looked at each other. When they did so they realized he wasn’t absent, he wasn’t silent; he was near, he was present. And they got on with the business of being the church. They began to sound like him. They began to do the things he did. They became courageous and capable in ways that prior to his absence they had not dared to be. Whenever two or three of them were together, it was always as if someone else was in the room—present to them in simple things like bread and wine, and visible in each other’s faces. [5]

They began living in that moment what Paul would later pen: “For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8.38-39)

You see, friends, the Ascension is as much about Jesus’ absence and departure as it is about his constant and enduring presence. The two go hand in hand. When we waste our time trying to prove or disprove such richly textured and beautiful stories, we miss this deeper truth, and we miss how it is at work not only in our relationship to God, but in all of our relationships and in all facets of our lives. Yes, it may seem to some that we gather in this precious antique of a place, not intending to be useful, but upon closer examination nothing could be farther from the truth.

Luke ends the story with these words: “And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.” That was useful work. It changed the course of human history. If we’re anything like them, we might too. It changed their lives, and if we’re open, daring, spiritually adventurous, it can change ours too.

1 Barbara Brown Taylor. “Looking Up Toward Heaven” in Gospel Medicine. (Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 1995) p. 72.
2 Ibid. p. 75.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid. p. 76.
5 Ibid. p. 78.