VII Easter – June 5, 2011 – Year A (RCL)
Last week I got an email message from a retired colleague in Bloomington, Don Jones, who has substituted for me here on several occasions, stating that he was looking forward to attending the farewell festivities planned for next Sunday, but expressing surprise that I had picked the Day of Pentecost to be my last Sunday to preside and preach.
“Ascension Day would have been a lot more appropriate,” Don wrote.
Needless to say, I fired back: “Afraid not, Don. It’s a weekday; nobody would come; besides, levitation has never been my strong suit!”
(Be sure to give Don a hard time about that, if you run into him next Sunday.)
A little levity about levitation, I guess, as well as a little levity about the Ascension.
The Ascension is something about which we really have few details, though it’s a popular image in religious art—Jesus kind of lounging on a cloud while he’s floating up to heaven.
If I close my eyes I can remember years ago seeing the advertisement on the back of the Sunday paper for a set of porcelain figures you could buy that depict the very same thing.
All it says about it in this morning’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles is this: “…as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”
Not an awful lot to go on.
But it really doesn’t matter all that much.
What really matters—what is at the heart of this particular passage of scripture—is not the way he makes his exit, but Jesus’ parting pronouncement to the apostles: “…you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
This is the farewell address that Jesus had been preparing them to hear for some time.
And it was perhaps a little more straightforward than some of the things he had said to them before his death and resurrection, when he had been physically with them.
Did they remember those things, when they left the mountainside and went back into the city, as the writer of Acts describes it, “to the room upstairs where they were staying…[to devote] themselves to prayer,…”?
Did they remember Jesus praying to the Father on their behalf, in words like those recorded in this week’s lesson from the Gospel according to John: “…now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them…that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”?
Did these strange words make more sense to them now, reminding them that the Jesus who was “no longer in the world” was still with them and would always be with them, but in an entirely different way?
And what are you and I supposed to make of all this—we, who have inherited Jesus’ mission and ministry from the apostles, but who really have no idea what they saw when Jesus disappeared into the cloud, let alone what Jesus meant when he stood among them and claimed that he was no longer in the world?
They had the promise—the promise that they would receive power.
And they had time—time to get themselves ready for their coming baptism, the deluge of God’s grace that would thunder over them.
So they prayed—the writer of Acts tells us that it was a group of men and women, including Jesus’ mother—doing everything they could to open themselves fully to God’s empowering presence, until it finally happened.
“…you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,” is the promise that Jesus had made to his disciples.
It is a promise that Jesus has made to you and me as well: “You will receive power.”
We will receive power.
We have the power.
But power to do what—walk on water, move mountains, leap tall buildings with a single bound?
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, in a sermon he preached on Ascension Day, may have a way we can answer that question.
For forty days after his resurrection the disciples had been privileged, from time to time, to see the risen Lord with their own eyes.
“…the resurrection of Jesus is really like a light going on, … [and] just as first thing in the morning it is the light you’re aware of, dazzling and disorienting, so with the Easter stories,” Archbishop Williams writes. “…For a bit, the disciples see Jesus, they see the light going on and they experience all the strange, exhilarating, and frightening sensations involved. But after a while there are no more reports of people seeing Jesus, as at first. The light has ceased to be something that draws our attention in its own right. [The light is now] something we see by.”
From now on, Archbishop Williams points out, though they would no longer see Jesus, the disciples would begin, empowered by God’s Holy Spirit, to “see the world in a new way”: to see the world “with [Jesus’] eyes”.
“Men of Galilee,” the men in white robes, whoever they were, had said to the disciples, “why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”
Like those disciples, the Archbishop reminds us, Christians often “try to hold on to the vision of Jesus when we ought to be letting the life of Jesus change our vision of the world. …ultimately, to have faith in Jesus is to let your life, your way of relating to the world, be transformed into the pattern of Jesus’ life…. [This] means” the Archbishop concludes, “that we think about Jesus not as someone completely outside us, but as the power in us gradually setting us free to see the world with clarity, hope, and love.”
To see the world with Jesus’ eyes: This was the power that the disciples, who would become ambassadors of the Good News of God in Jesus Christ—on the Day of Pentecost this was the power that the disciples would discover that they already had.
And this is the power that you and I have been given as Christians: the power to see the world with Jesus’ eyes.
All we need to do is to discover it—to discover that we have it: the power to see the world with Jesus’ eyes.
Then, like the disciples become apostles, once we’re discovered that we have this power, all we need to do is use it.
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