May 20, 2007

Ascension Sunday - Awe

Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53

The Reverend Richard E. Allen, Jr.

 

 

One of my earliest memories is of a morning in the swing beside our house.  It’s a summer day, and the large oak nearby casts some shade, but as I lean back in the swing, I look up at the vastness of a blue sky broken only by piles of cottony white clouds.  Even as I recall it from the distance of more than 50 years, I remember feeling small in a large world.  If you ask me to define the word “awe,” I begin there.  And, if you ask me to think of formative experiences in my understanding of God, that experience of sky and clouds stands out as well.  Though I understand sky and clouds differently now, at a primitive, emotional level, my heart still goes to that touchstone of holy awe.

 

But my sense of awe continues in the present, with a sense of awe coming in the strangest of places.  When I lived in the city, Lynne and I sometimes sat in Riverside Park to watch the sun set over the Hudson.  As the sky turned from yellow to orange and then from blue to purple and finally to black, even the people on the benches and the sidewalks faded away, and I felt something like the breath of God’s Spirit.  In the grand beauty of such a night, I could feel life return, with it awe and gratitude.  “Just to be is a gift,” said Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who also lived in the neighborhood, and who surely saw similar sunsets in his life.  “Just to be is a gift;” he said, “just to live is holy.”  I often felt the holiness of the moment as I found myself in that spiritual place while saying goodbye to the day at the edge of the Hudson River.   In that place, at that time of day, looking across the river, even New Jersey seemed transformed in the glow, a kind of Eden in the dusk.  Some might say that in itself is a miracle.  Surely those in New Jersey think similar thoughts watching the sunset over Manhattan.

 

Awe of a different kind is rekindled for me in another landmark on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is a human construction, but the overwhelming capacity of its magnificent space, enclosed by carved stone and stained glass, always lifts my eyes, my heart, and my spirit.  It’s the largest Gothic cathedral in North America, 601 feet long, from the back of the chancel to the two-story tall bronze doors at the entrance.  Six hundred and one feet:  or, as I heard a guide say once, “It’s two football fields, plus the football.”  Begun over a century ago and still unfinished, the

 

Cathedral of St. John the Divine serves my soul as a place to remember the grandness of God as compared to our own largest accomplishments, our best dreams, or our highest human pretensions.  It is a place that puts me in awe of human ingenuity, giving an awareness that human minds and human hands assembled this pile of stone and sand, transformed into pillar and colored glass.  That is an awe-inspiring thought in itself.

 

Being aware of the holy in such places or such moments might bring to mind, if I had more of the Bible memorized, the first verses of Psalm 47 that we read earlier:  “Clap your hands, all you people; shout to God with loud songs of joy.”  As it is, my task is to start with the texts for the day, and see what they evoke.  This week, those and other images came to mind as I read the texts given us for this Sunday, the last Sunday in the season remembering Easter.  Every year on this Sunday before Pentecost the church gives us a chance to remember the Ascension of the Lord, and stand with the first disciples as Jesus rises to heaven while our jaws drop in surprise. 

 

Still, this moment of the ascension doesn’t often stir our souls.  Possibly we find the story of Jesus rising into the clouds a bit quaint.  We don’t imagine the world literally thus any more.  Maybe we never did, but since we have entered space we see ourselves as more sophisticated, come of age, and sufficient.  But though the Bible speaks in such terms, I think we have grown accustomed to a different cosmology:  God is not “up there.”  God is both “up” and “down,” both “here” and “there,” both “beyond” and “within.”  During the space race with the Soviets in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, when the cosmonaut reported that he had looked out into space and saw no sign of God, most of us were nonplussed.  Even the faithful who imagine God and heaven as “up there” never expected to find the Lord somewhere in earth orbit.

 

But we do a disservice to our faith to merely dismiss the ascension as an anachronism, when it might be more helpful to reflect a bit and discern the story’s deeper meaning.  In a world where a mentally ill young man can so easily shatter a sense of peace on college campuses and in our own hearts, and at the same time destroy his own life, the lives of the innocent in his path, and the lives all their families, perhaps it will do us well to pray to a God whom we believe is both one with us and very much beyond (not to say above) us.  And when we find our country stuck in a conflict we don’t understand, with enemies whose motives we clearly don’t yet comprehend any more than our own, dependent on leaders of any political leaning who seem to have little control of the situation, we look up, in the hope of finding someone who understands, who knows.  Left with little choice but to throw up our hands, this ascension story offers a bit of hope that at least someone “up there” notices.  Theologically, therefore, throwing up one’s hands in surrender may just be an act of faith.  And that, I suggest, is precisely the point.  This Sunday’s lessons remind us that we are not in control at all.  But God is.

 

 This is, after all, the last Sunday of the season of Easter, itself a reminder that God has the power to redeem even our most tragic attempts as death and destruction.  We didn’t know what to do with Jesus, so our world killed him.  But God gave him new life, and offers that life to the world through him and his followers.  We live in that message of hope; we stand in the hope of that resurrection.

 

So today we find the resurrected Jesus about to leave his disciples again.  Jesus message will now be their message.  “You will be my witnesses,” Jesus says to them in both Luke and Acts.  Yet he knows what the disciples know:  they don’t have a very good record of either understanding or acting.  So Jesus gives a promise.  In Acts, Luke tells us, Jesus says to them, “… you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit….” (1:5)  It is a promise given in the gospel in different words:  “… stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”  Then Jesus ascends into the clouds.  Remember, in the world to which Luke is writing, that’s where the power is:  on high, in the clouds.  So this is a story about power.  It’s about God’s power, first and foremost.  That power will be given to the world through the disciples.  But not yet.  Here, in today’s lesson, we are called simply to stand with the disciples and watch, in awe, as God’s power of life is revealed. 

 

Watching thus, we are glad.  Or, as Luke says in the gospel, “And they worshiped [Jesus], and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.”  What is the source of their joy?  It’s simple:  what happened on the cross was not the last word.  The world is a mess, but God is in control. 

 

As the author of Ephesians says in the epistle lesson, we Christians have a rich inheritance:  “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 as 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….  God put this great power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion….” (Eph. 1:17-21a)

 

What a holy word for us, God’s people.  Even as our world and our lives spiral down, out of our control, God has raised Christ.  Even death’s power is not final.  And better yet, the rising on Easter culminates in this:  Christ is raised again, finally and fully in charge of everything.  Everything.

 

Week after week I find myself challenged by the scriptures to love my neighbors and to love myself.  This week we hear the higher call:  to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength.  This week I find myself called back to the places where holy awe is born.  Awe in the presence of the goodness, the majesty, and the power of God.  This week I remember that no matter what else happens, Jesus is alive, enthroned as the Lord of life.  Jesus is alive.   It is enough to notice, and be thankful.    Amen.