May 1, 2008
Ascension Day (Year A)
(Preached at Trinity Church, Concord, MA)
Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 93; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53
I was fortunate to have a conversation with a young parishioner recently. He was working on his religion badge for cub scouts and had to spend time with his pastor talking about God. And we had a wonderful conversation! He told me he did believe in God, and told me several reasons why. But then he looked at me earnestly and said, “But I am not so sure about the guy putting his finger through Jesus’ hand – you know with the holes in it after he was crucified.”
Out of the mouths of babes. Sometimes faith asks us to believe the absurd, the absolutely absurd, like holes the size of nails in the body of a man who has been dead, like feeding five thousand people with two fish and five loaves, like virgin births, and now Ascension! Makes you wonder, if God did all the miraculous, supernatural things two thousand years ago, why God doesn’t seem to now. Now it seems such things only happen by means of trick photography and computer technology, tricks to make things look as though they were the way we read in the bible.
Or perhaps it could be that people then told the truth of our faith in different ways from what we do now. They didn’t seem to have any problem telling the truth about what had happened in the context of a story. Today we are so concerned about the facts, and just the facts, that we often lose the truth, the pearls of wisdom, where the truth of God and God’s profound love for us is found.
I would say that we are not smarter than the people of the first century, and certainly, if anything, they had a more closely aligned sense of the limits and realties of the earth and nature and the natural than we do. They were far more respectful of the earth and moved spiritually with its rhythms and seasons – which we note more as inconvenience than profundity. So why these stories that seem to defy science? And why do we claim the absurd as a key tenant of our faith?
I think it is because these things, nail holes, and virgin births, and feeding five thousand, and, yes, even the Ascension, contain truth so profound that we would rather focus on the unlikely absurdity of them than come to grips with living in the truth they call us toward, the kind of discipleship they call us to be part of.
Wouldn’t it fair to say that the Ascension calls us, demands of us, that we take up the work that Jesus left behind? Wouldn’t it be fair to say that without God being right here, right present in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, that we become far more responsible for the good work, the peacemaking and healing and reconciliation that Jesus brought to us with his teaching and his life?
And if that is the absurd truth of the Ascension, I can imagine why the disciples stood there looking up at the sky and needed to be reminded to get their acts in gear and go do the work God was giving them to do. They were hoping Jesus would come back and do it for them!
The absurd stories of our faith are absurd, not because they defy scientific proof, but because they require us to be more than our comfortable human selves. They require us to get outside ourselves. The absurd poking of a finger through the palm of Jesus required Thomas to act by faith, to trust his own deep relationship with Christ even when times were bleak and seemed to be death dealing. How absurd that we should live by such faith! Far more absurd than a little finger poking! That faith could overcome doubt. That faith is stronger than fact or proof. Absurd! The virgin birth points out the almost unfathomable love God has for us humans by becoming one of us, like us. Absurd! Gods are powerful and mighty, and yet our God is a God of LOVE first, relationship first. Absurd truth, that!
And today – the absurd Ascension! Jesus vanishing into thin air, or as artists have drawn it over the centuries, floating into the clouds with out benefit of hot air balloon or helicopter, feet dangling in the sky until astounded disciples can see nothing but clouds, and are left wondering, hoping that the truth is not that they are now the ones left “in charge,” hoping they are not to be the witnesses, the true “left behind!”
And we, too, are the left behind, not as the popular books would describe, but as this gospel teaches us. The truth of our faith is that we have been given everything we need to do the work that Jesus began. We don’t need facts; we need faith to do it. We need to be willing to go the next step because Jesus trusted us enough to disappear into a cloud and leave it for us to do.
In the conversation I had with the young cub scout we talked about faith, about the difference between fact and faith, and how maybe the story is important, not because we can prove it, but because we can live it. Stories, like music and experiences and faith, connect us to truth because they are read not just with our eyes and minds but with our souls.
I think the early church writers knew that too. Stories were the way to tell the truth about God. They sink into our souls more easily than cut and dried facts. Certainly Jesus loved to tell stories to explain God’s truth, and his followers did the same. They explained the truth to us with stories (based on reality of course), but stories whose framework was God’s truth, the truth of God’s love, the truth of Jesus’ life, resurrection and ascension, and the truth of our call as followers.
When we think about what is absurd this night, might it not be that we live in a world where we could end poverty, but we do not? Might it be that we need to take better care to the earth God has entrusted to us as stewards, but we do not? Might the absurdity be that we have been given the truth, and we fight over semantics and parcel out which parts of the God story that we call the bible we take literally and which we do not? Might it be that we spend time arguing over the reality of the Ascension instead of the truth of it? Might it just be that God is just fine with us having a good laugh at those wide-eyed disciples staring at bare feet in the sky as long as we accept the truth of it, and get on with the work of being the disciples that look to the resources God has placed within and among us instead of longing for the Savior to reappear in the sky and do it for us?
I think a smile, if not a laugh, is in order when we think of those feet – but only if we accept what they mean for our lives. How absurd is that?
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd