Ascension  |  Acts 1:1-11, Luke 24:44-53

Jesus just took off, didn’t he? Just flew on out of there. 

I’ve often compared this moment to the Midwestern Goodbye, which involves standing there and waving and waiting as the loved one drives away, out of sight. It feels a little like that, doesn’t it? The disciples are left there, watching, waving, maybe crying a little. But if they’re good Midwestern stock, you save the tears for private, inside, when they’ve gone. You’ve got to be strong for them.

This also highlights a kind of logistical curiosity that is hard to imagine physically without it feeling like a cheesy movie. And really, that’s a shame, I think. Because cheesy movies can reduce incredible images and moments to cheap sentimentality. And in that, I think we, too, can cheapen this moment through scientific literalism and rhetorical certainties.

This is how the prophets leave the world — entirely, bodily — providing a counter for our own sense of the physical, material character of existence. That the whole of the person is drawn out of the world and plucked from time and space allows the prophet, the messiah, and perhaps the God-Bearer, a kind of separateness from the life and death of human existence. That the material form of our bodies restricts us to the material world, but the presence of divinity makes existence itself too limiting.

Vindication

Ancient Christians regarded the Ascension as a vindication of Jesus for the Crucifixion. This may seem like an odd word, vindication, because it seems to imply an associative guilt for Jesus that he would need to be vindicated. The gospels, particularly Luke, work incredibly hard to demonstrate a lack of guilt on Jesus’s part. But this isn’t what our ancestors had in mind. It is a physical, public lifting up of Jesus with language of exaltation and heavenly session that undoes the crucifixion and expresses the mystery of the resurrection. That this was the universal view of the ancient church makes it so notably significant we must render it essential.

We might also, as ancient followers did, see this as the balance to the Incarnation — of Jesus being fully embodied as a human, born of a human, to live a human life and ultimately die a human death. His resurrection breaks the curse of death, right? But it produces a new problem of immortality, not just eternal life. No, we need to draw the experiment to a close. So, as life came into the world in a divine spark, it exits in a divine extraction.

A Goodbye Feast

Ascension Day has been one of the principal feasts of the church for centuries, first dating to the 4th Century and it has theological and rhetorical significance for followers of Jesus. But I think it is an underutilized resource for modern followers, who may be influenced by the scientific method and the culture war reactionary response. Birth of Jesus, yes. The wise men following a star, got it. Passion, empty tomb, resurrection appearances, we are down for that. But Jesus flying into space? Well…most of us can’t prehend it with grace. At least without a lot of skepticism and questions about how it works.

But I think this is too certain a response; too fixated on the singular physical element and not on the story, the moment, the experience of Jesus going away. And not leaving them in death, but in physical permanence. And we get that difference, don’t we? This is the purpose of the vindication — for he was stolen from us and murdered and restored to us in the resurrection — but he must still depart.

Doesn’t this recast the sequence of stories, of Jesus preparing his followers for his departure, in a new light? The last supper before his first goodbye and then Resurrection stories rearticulate and recontextualize goodbye. And then, in the Ascension, we get the full goodbye.

Return, again

The gospel which most fully utilizes this vision is the gospel we attribute to Mark, which ends in confusion and fear, but leads us back to the beginning, where we can reread the gospel through eyes of new conviction:

“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

We return to these words with knowing belief and anticipation. Like the apostles, whose eyes were opened to the Scriptures at the Ascension. Yes! we say. Because we see it now.

Preparing For a Hello Feast

As much as the Feast of the Ascension of Christ is a goodbye feast (and a reminder of all that is feast), it is also a preparing for a hello feast in just ten days. It is the church’s way of saying that there is a lot more that needs doing and this isn’t the end, so get yourselves ready for the Holy Spirit to make her appearance. Because, unlike Jesus, she gets loud. She has an attitude. And she won’t be denied.

The promise of the Spirit is comfort. But not that kind of comfort — the too-comfortable kind. The wrap up in a snuggy and binge a show on Netflix kind. No, it’s the you’ve-got-a-big-thing-to-do-and-I-know-it’s-alot-right-now-but-I’ve-got-your-back kind of comfort. The kind that rubs your back because it’s tight and tense but doesn’t let you pretend like junk isn’t about to get real kind — she’s coming to help us face this junk so we don’t feel alone.

She will help put flesh on our prayers, bite in our calls for righteousness, and hope in dark nights like a voice on the other end of the phone.

We get to say hello to someone just as committed to the divine project as Jesus but with the capacity to do this stuff for two thousand years.

Leave-Taking and Embodied Devotion

This Ascension Day is hitting funny because I’ve been preparing the congregation for my own leave-taking ten days from now. And there is always a tension for the priest to embody and avoid embodying Jesus for the church. There are parts where our tradition wants us to be Jesus to people and yet never dare to do so. It is a paradoxical vision of conflicting priorities in pastoral theology. 

Take, for example, in the Eucharistic Prayer, the priest elevates the bread during the words of institution, quoting Jesus, who was inviting his followers to eat this bread this way in the future. And the priest isn’t play-acting Jesus but inhabiting the ritual, the place, the position of convener of the feast, of disciple and apostle, of priest in the present and we will feast. And yet, if we aren’t careful, we will try to be Jesus, to confuse and tempt and make ourselves messiahs.

We are shepherds and not the shepherd, priests and not the high priest, but we are taking on the role, the relationship, the commitment to the learning community that embodies that leadership. This stuff is complex and interconnected, friends! 

And what is at the heart of Jesus’s teaching, which must be at the heart of my teaching as priest, and at the heart of the teaching within this community is that Jesus’s Way of Love is an embodied active learning model. That we continue the learning and teaching. Which means that we aren’t supposed to be passive receivers of information. We aren’t the end of a three or four-person line of info dissemination where Jesus tells his followers who tell a priest who tells us in the pews and we go Wow! Great! Now I know! We aren’t the end — we’re the middle.

We are active learners!

Which means we learn by doing stuff and teaching it and embodying it with other people. Jesus taught his disciples, like, three things and kicked ‘em out and said, Go heal people and proclaim the Good News. Take a buddy. They learned by doing from the beginning. And then, when it was time, they got their own disciples who learned by doing, too.

That’s us. Two thousand years of active learning, rabbis and disciples all the way back. And we come to church to learn from a teacher so we can go out and be teachers. Not someday. Today. 

We embody our devotion by being. So no wonder this feels timely, right? Like a story that is for us. That we might learn and teach and be in the time-between, as a summer of Sabbath — of rest and devotion, of learning and becoming, of dreaming and freeing our neighbors from the toil of working their fingers to the bone — as a time apart. As a time of hope and joy. A time of grace and new life. A time of play and exploration and making things new. 

Let us learn and remember what we’ve been taught. Remember who God is. Who we are together. Let us be full of contagious hope and obnoxious grace. And may our hearts be refilled and renewed by laughter and compassion and true joy for all that may yet be ours to do.