Luke 24:44-53 and Acts 1:1-11

Last week, after announcing Brian Hess’ graduation from college, one of our children marched up to me in the back of the church and announced: Mommy graduated this week too! I looked up at her mother, Marielena, who, before I could apologize for missing her event, demurred, no, no, I didn’t, I was only walking. I still have to defend my dissertation this summer and then I’ll let you know that I have really graduated. As I secured her promise to let us know so we could celebrate with her in the right time, I flashed back to a dream I used to have, my last semester of college: I am walking down the long aisle at the college chapel as my name is called. My proud parents sit watching, cameras at the ready. I shake the president’s hand, reach out for my diploma, flip it open. It is empty, I am a fraud. Frantically trying to understand, I remember that I forgot to attend my one credit ROTC class all spring. I am not ready to graduate, I am a fraud. I am only walking.

There are two different stories that describe the event the church calls “the Ascension of Jesus Christ.” One of them ends the gospel of Luke, and the other opens the book of Acts. Oddly enough, though they were written by the same hand, they are strikingly different stories, both in content and in feel. In the last verses of Luke, in his first “take” on the ascension of Jesus, the risen Christ take great pains to thoroughly prepare his disciples for their new life as leaders of the church following his departure. He opened their minds to understand the scriptures; he reminded them of everything he had taught them; he led them out; he blessed them. There is a satisfying feeling of completion in this story– as if, despite the fact that Jesus must go, he has taken great pains to adequately prepare them for their new life: fitted them so well, in fact, for their graduation that even as he disappears (though, actually, in Luke he more tactfully "withdraws") the disciples are so filled with strength, with conviction, with resources for the future, that they scarcely seem to mind his departure–I mean, his "withdrawal" at all: and they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the Temple blessing God. God has gone up with a mighty shout– and, it seems, everyone feels wonderful about the entire thing.

But in the beginning of the book of Acts, our writer seems to have had a change of heart…and the disciples, again poised to repeat the scene of Jesus’ Ascension into heaven, have had a definite change of mood. The joy is gone. The blessing is gone. The soft lighting has given way to the harsh glare of an unforgiving sun, into which the suddenly bereaved disciples are squinting as they struggle to get a last, good look at the disappearing Jesus. His last words to them were not blessing, but almost a rebuke–it is not for you to know the times or seasons, he said, and just as they were preparing to ask yet another of their important, pressing questions– he disappeared from their sight–snap–just like that.

There’s almost a fed-up kind of sense in this re-telling, as though the narrator has run out of patience with the neediness, the vulnerability, the incessant dithering of Jesus’ disciples…has run out of patience, and decided that it is high time the baby church relinquish its absorption with what used to be, and get on with making a new creation. In Acts, Jesus doesn’t merely "teach," he doesn’t "open their minds," he doesn’t “bless”, not at all: rather, he instructs, he orders, he rebukes them for their endless, pointless questions, and then, as if in a huff, he is taken up, and disappears. This time around, Luke doesn’t bother to suggest that the disciples were filled with joy, or that they went anywhere worshipping– anything but! These disciples, abandoned literally in mid-sentence, stand right where they are, rooted to the ground, eyes fixed on the heavens and mouths agape– as if freezing the frame of the picture will somehow make everything all better.

What makes these two stories so different?

I read again Luke’s twenty-fourth chapter, the first Ascension story, and I think: the apostle realized that learning, understanding and remembering are an important part of feeling ready to graduate, to take one’s adult place in the world. Looking back at who we were, at the old stories of our lives and our ancestors and our faith—this isn’t mere sentimentality, nostalgia for a vanished way of believing and knowing the world; but a powerful evoking of what used to be, in the service of what is to come. A child needs a past to face the future. A faith needs the foundation of well known stories and a common ground of shared spiritual values in order to be a practical resource for a young adult leaving the church family nest. Every time we baptize a child into the community of Riviera Church, I wonder what they will believe when they leave here, and whether what we have taught them will be a part of how they contribute to the world. Whenever one of them comes home or calls, to let us know that we have made a difference in the adult they have become, my heart soars. Brandon Bestard, who came here years ago with his mother an occasionally angry, often frustrated boy, grew in our sunday school, youth group and congregation to be a thoughtful, loving person who credits Riviera with being a big part of the man he has become. He calls me, Barbie, and Jeanine Hess every two or three weeks, from Uganda, where he is serving in the Army. How is everyone? Tell Michele and Robbie congratulations on their baby. Tell Brian I’m glad he graduated. Tell everyone I love them, and can’t wait to come to church when I’m back stateside on leave.

At the closing of the book of Luke, Jesus takes great care to make sure his friends have taken all their classes, not forgotten even ROTC, and reminds them of what they know and who they have become. Before he leaves his disciples behind, he tells stories. Reads the scriptures. Points out the connections. Reminds them. Weaves about them a shimmering web of memory and power and and love, so that when he is gone, and they are on their own, they will know in the midst of absence, where they come from, who they are, and how they have been, and always will be, beloved.

But the retelling of the story in Acts cautions us that it is not only how we have been prepared, but who we understand ourselves to be that makes the difference between walking, and really graduating. When I graduated college, my best friend from childhood sent me a gift: a tee shirt on which was printed one large, ugly word: UNEMPLOYED. I think it was a joke. It didn’t feel like a joke. It probably wasn’t. I stuffed it into a back drawer, worrying and wondering whether that would in fact, be who I was to become. I needed to work, I needed to be off on my own, contributing.

I was terrified. Was I ready? Did I know what I needed to know, or would everybody know I was an empty vessel, a folder without a diploma?

At the opening of the book of Acts, Luke needs to tell the disciples’ story in a different way. The time for memory is past. The time for grieving is gone. The need to comfort, to recall, to celebrate, to look backward, is past. Now, there is a job to do. A church to grow. A group of people who have been trained and fitted for their new work in the world… but who don’t yet quite believe that they are ready. Now, before the bickering begins over what to pack and what to leave behind, before the arguing commences about who is an adult and who’s making the decisions about how late to stay out and when to hit the road, now, before the uncertainty and the fear of what may be on the horizon entirely paralyzes the future, now it is time to tell the story in a different way. And so Luke does: he shows them how unflattering it is, to be a disciple locked in the past, a child who won’t grow up, an older person who can’t let go of the past, a broken family consumed with bitterness and recrimination and grief. He shows them as they are, or as they could become: mouths agape, hands extended, reaching or something they don’t remember they already have, breath caught on a final, frozen, No! and he says: it doesn’t have to be like this. The past is a foundation, not a prison. You are ready to move on. What you have been given before, will never leave you entirely. You are ready to move on. You believe you are alone, but there are angels beside you, pointing the way. You are ready to move on. You are uncertain, and more than a little afraid, but look, you will receive power after the holy spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses. You are ready to move on. It is graduation: you’re not just walking, you’re on your way. You did the work, you learned everything you need to know, and more than that, you have mastered the skills to keep on learning and growing. It is Ascension, the Holy Spirit is just around the corner: Jesus has gotten himself out of the way because we are the body of Christ now, ready to do his work, that is, our work: we are ready to move on.

Revelation 21:1-4

Two days after the Virginia Tech massacre of 32 students and the hopeless, angry suicide of their killer, I was driving in a rental car toward another campus, the University of Maryland, where my daughter attends school. I already knew from talking with her that two friends there had lost a friend or family member at V Tech… I was thinking how close it felt, suddenly, and realizing that, uncharacteristically, I had avoided most of the news coverage of the shootings. NPR was playing softly in the background but when I heard the voice of a young man identifying himself as a survivor of the shootings at Columbine High School nearly a decade ago, I turned up the radio and listened. The young man was Brooks Brown, the boy who was sent home from school that day by the words of his friend, Eric Harris. Get out of here, Brooks, I like you and don’t want anything to happen to you. His words were a plea aimed at the survivors and witnesses at V Tech to pay attention to those who were not gathered up in the mercy of candlelight vigils and huddled groups of friends, or parents, holding on for dear life, but rather stand alone under a tree in the field nearby, trying not to cry. I was that young man, he said.

Brooks went on to speak about the dreadful cost of grief denied, the sheer impossibility of finding a support system brave enough to embrace an outcast whose lost friends were murderers, and the bewildering journey of himself and his classmates to find their way through sorrow back to some semblance of wholeness, or grace. He told the survivors of Virginia Tech that there are no rules to surviving and recovering from such traumatic loss; that they, like him, must trust and find their own way back. He hoped, as they did, that they might notice the solitary boy under the tree, trying to be stoic, but fighting back tears: might notice him, and this time, not pass by.

Unaccountably, the words of a pop song from my own high school years began playing in my mind: it is the evening of the day/I sit and watch the children play/smiling faces I can see/but not for me/I sit and watch as tears go by…

As tears go by. Remembering my own numbness in the face of the images from V Tech, and considering that our public preoccupation with the details feels more voyeuristic than substantive, I wonder about our capacity for compassion: I am looking for a weeping that touches the lives of the wounded as it touches our hearts. I do not wish to be counted among the numbers of those who sit and watch as tears go by.

In all walks of life, we are deeply resistant to acknowledging our vulnerability, our lack of control over the deep forces of life and death. We are worn out with the persistence of sorrow: a culture, even a church, in the grip of compassion fatigue. We do not want to weep. But still, there is weeping to be done…weeping that cannot be hidden behind a wall of indifference, a sheen of placid acceptance or the impotent invocation of platitudes about the afterlife; weeping that does not show our weakness, but rather reveals our strength, our knowledge of the way things should be, but aren’t, weeping that unleashes our hope for a better future. And we must not permit this weeping to pass unseen, or unheard.

In the story of the raising of the widow Tabitha in the book of Acts, Peter goes when he is called, but it seems that his visit to Tabitha’s grieving friends is more style than substance; a visit of condolence accomplished by rote. Peter is building a church, he is a busy man; he does not have time for the grieving women, their hands full of the things that made Tabitha real, important, a woman of flesh and blood rather than a name on a list. Impatiently, he brushes them aside, banishing them from the upper room so that, alone, he can kneel and pray. It’s the easy way out to push our way past his praying to the miracle that follows, the rising of Tabitha from death into life. But I wonder about Peter’s prayer: whether he wept, or asked for mercy because in his hurry and importance, he had run roughshod over the women who were trying to show him who Tabitha was, what her life meant to them; how deep a hole her passing would leave in the fabric of their community. It seems to me that the miracle of Tabitha’s rising was as much about how Peter’s heart came to life again with passion and pity as it was about the woman herself.

Grief and loss are powerful forces in us: too important to treat with covert haste. By taking our weeping seriously, we acknowledge the bittersweet gift of life, and we claim that both in life and death, God will give us comfort, and make us whole. God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

The bible is full of weeping….weeping that begins in the waters of chaos that the ancients feared, and prayed that God would order and transform. Weeping that flooded Noah’s world of wickedness and depravity, destroying life, and with it, the illusion that human ingenuity could master the unpredictability of divine whimsy, or fate. Weeping that acknowledged the wrongness of a mother’s inability to protect the life of her child, weeping that sent fleeing slaves into the terror of the Reed Sea and flooded over their enemies with waters that roared and raged. The bible is full of weeping that feeds evil’s hunger for human pain, that expresses the prophets’ sorrow at justice unfulfilled, that speaks to a people’s deep yearning for comfort, for power, for peace, that cries for the dam of God’s mercy and the Spirit’s kindness to channel an ocean of human suffering into a manageable river, a river that does not destroy us, but instead nourishes our community, our people, our lives.

It’s not that we don’t need to cry: it’s that we need to cry differently.

We do not weep as those who are without hope. This is what the apostle Paul said, and I take him to mean that the weeping of people of faith should not serve to fill the ocean of hopelessness and chaos, but should instead fuel the wellspring of mercy. We do not weep as those who are without hope: so we do weep like Hagar, who cried to a god who alone could see her, and for the wrongness of the abandonment of her son. We weep for the children and families of the lost at Virginia Tech, for the death of a friend, for a bomb exploding in the midst of a busy marketplace, for Haitian refugees who braved the chaos of the sea only to die, their ship and lives foundering on unyielding rocks in the Turks and Caicos. We do weep like the prophets, for a world numb and indifferent to human suffering, for the passion to let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

It is the love of God around us and the passion of God within us that invites us to make of our weeping, something good, something strong, something powerful. When the Israelites fled Egypt and wandered in the wilderness, they came at last through their season of terror and weeping to the River Jordan. Into that River the priests and the hopeful, hapless community of Israelites waded by their own free choice, fleeing no one, walking gladly toward their promise of a future of goodness, plenty, a land of “milk and honey.” They had cried a river and fled a raging sea—and here, in the midst of Jordan, with the glory of God in the ark at last their constant companion, they entered the land of promise, centered in the presence of God, sure of a future. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God…and when God shall wipe away every tear, the book of Revelation tells us, the sea will be no more. The oceans of useless pain and evil’s suffering will be drained once and for all, and our tears channeled into the River of the waters of Life. Our crying, our mourning, our relentless exposure to human suffering will fuel in us in us a passionate belief in the God who said, the sea will be no more. That is where our weeping must lead us: away from the sea, and on to the River. Blessed are they that mourn…said Jesus, for they shall be comforted.

Let our sorrow fuel a river full of healing intention, a nourishing, cleansing shower of justice, a rain of mercy, a fountain of love. Let us turn our mourning into dancing: not just because our tears are played out, but because our tears are the waters that slake our thirst for the presence of God in the world, and for the River of Life, our source and our future.

Like a river glorious is God’s perfect peace

Over all victorious in its bright increase

Perfect, yet it floweth fuller all the way.

Perfect, yet it groweth deeper every day.

Stayed upon Jehovah, hearts are fully blessed.

Finding, as God promised: perfect peace and rest.

Mark 16:1-8

We had already been in church all day —

    all our life, it seemed

tracing the well worn pat down from Bethlehem to Calvary,

    from Creation to Apocalypse

        the way of redemption, our Life-story

like the women, we had been warned of resurrection

    but were almost too weary to credit it.

Besides, it was not April, or March, but mid-July

        it was cold and green and wet, not like Easter at all….

        playing at Easter for academic purposes

we were far from home and sanctuary

Still, habit and hope won out

And when we were told to Rise and Go Forth,

    we did

    singing our simple songs

    following the scent of flowers and myrrh,

    following the faint sounds of tinkling bells in the distance

In our hour,

reversing the path the women had trod in the hard darkness of early day

    that first easter.

Light carried them toward the dawn of an unexpected day

but we, so many years later,

    were merely a people a memory—out of place as well as time—

        re-enactors looking back, as in a play

Our path lay through gathering dusk…our candles, not needed at first

    as we lit them in the season of bright remembrance

    became essential tools of our survival

as we wandered away toward the threatened resurrection and the empty tomb

the light around us fading as memory faltered,

and darkness fell

We clutched our small lights before us like talismans,

signs proclaiming that, because we belonged,

we would find our way through night to Easter’s dawn.

We were three hundred strong, sure at last of our lines,

    marching toward resurrection.

In another world, there was a car

        at cross purposes

    Idling at the crosswalk we had commandeered on our

        headlong rush toward new life.

Four people sat in the soft darkness of ordinary time,

    Accompanied by the quiet hum of the engine,

    the murmured conversation of friends in front and back,

        the radio tuned to a classical station.

Who were they? Where were they going?

It seemed evident they would be late, wherever it was:

    the procession that passed, one or two at a time,

        was mostly slow and measured.

We were three hundred people on the verge of new life…

    almost, it could be said, sleepwalking toward resurrection

What were they thinking?

Were they irritated by our religious display? Impatient?

Worried?

On their way to the nearby hospital to visit a sick friend,

    their first grandchild,

        a newborn son?

Were they, in the ordinary time world,

    trying to make a curtain at the theater?

    Gliding toward a valet spot near that hot new restaurant?

Did they have reservations at eight? Too bad.

Who among us knew (or even wondered) about them?

We were,

    like the women at the tomb, those disciples in the gospel of Mark,

    Amazed and Terrified.

Fear—or holy reverence—was upon us

And we said nothing to anyone

not even those four in the quiet, dark sedan

    who waited, their faces in shadow,

        while our procession passed by.

What were we thinking?

    We who marched by on the way to our own private Easter,

        absorbed in our liturgy

            surrounded by our friends

        intent upon our learning

        our loving

    our leaving behind the long hard days of holy week

    of passion and betrayal and death?

We had neither time nor inclination to pause

    on our headlong march toward the empty tomb

        to consider the strangers

who were stopped in their very tracks

    stuck on the edge of whatever new life awaited them

because of our imperative, impending resurrection…

No reason, we thought, to consider how they were stuck

stopped in their tracks

    because of us.

Unthinking, we flowed on,

    more than one hundred of us

        if we noticed the car at all it was to cry

    Happy Easter! as if they should have known.

As if their world should of course have yielded to our own.

We were too busy, we thought.

    We might we late to the Vigil, we said.

Stay with the group, we muttered to ourselves,

    tightening up the spaces between our small clumps of light and music,

lest the driver get some inkling he might break free,

    move through, get on with his life.

They can wait, we thought, if we thought at all.

And we said nothin’ to nobody,

    as the scripture says,

Because Awe was upon us

    And that is not a bad thing.

We all need holiness.

We all are seeking our own salvation.

But is it enough?

From one side of the road to the other

There is a white line that marks the edge of the path

    That separates our path from theirs

And it is as if those slender strips of white paint, made by men,

delineated all the world to us:

It was our bridge to new life across the awful, yawning chasm of

the secular the ordinary, the profane, the everyday

Our Chance at God.

We were clearly at Cross-Purposes.

The gospel of Mark tells us that it is hard for people of faith to cross that chasm

    To make the leap of faith

from the ordinary to the holy

    from death to life.

Even when we know better.

When the women of Mark, who had, like the men,

    been warned of resurrection

got up on Easter morning to go to the tomb

    it was not to meet a risen Lord,

but to anoint his dead body.

It was the day after the Sabbath,

Ordinary Time.

For the sad work they had come to do, they brought spices:

    Forgetting that one of them had already done

        what was needed

Breaking jar of costly nard,

    washing Jesus’ feet with her tears,

        wiping them with her hair.

He had said: leave her alone, she has done what is needful

    She has anointed me beforehand for my burial.

So the things the women have brought cannot be used as they were intended

    for the holy purposes of sanctifying death.

They cannot perform the ritual of sealing up the body

    Because there is no body.

What can be done with the spices? All the important, expensive things

    we have gathered to make our mortality bearable,

        to cover the smell of our inevitable descent into death?

Mark and his readers knew something important that most of us do not:

    that Jesus and the women, in their time after the Sabbath,

Had a use for those spices that had nothing whatsoever to do with death

    And everything to do with Life.

When the holiness of Shabbat was over

Jesus and his friends would have celebrated Havdalah,

The liturgy that each week marks the end of Shabbat,

And the beginning of the work-week,

    By erasing the white line between them.

With spices, sweet wine, with songs and a braided candle flickering light,

    The Jewish people sweeten the ordinary time to come

        With the memory of sabbath peace.

With spices such as the women carried to the tomb,

    The liturgy for death becomes a ceremony for hallowing ordinary life.

And the cross-purposes vanish as though they had never been.

As long as we remember what to do with our candle and our spices.

Mark knew that the women remembered.

And when they meet the young man in white who tells them that

    They should not be afraid

    Because Jesus is risen

    And he has gone before them into Galilee

    Just as he said.

Their silence is not the silence of terror.

But the silence of memory and ecstasy and awe.

The ordinary horror of death has been drowned in sweet wine

    And spices

That are not just for once a year,

    but for everyday, and for everyone,

        who needs to know that life is holy, that their life belongs to God.

We were poised in the middle of the street, I think it was James Way

    And the car was idling above us on the other side of the white line

    And we were marching toward resurrection with our candles

And in our silence there was a question:

    What was the purpose of the Cross, after all?

    Why are we here, marching from cross to empty tomb,

        after all those years?

It is to sweeten the hardness of life

    And to hallow our work in the ordinary

to break down the dividing walls of hostility

    with which otherwise we will have come to terms

to overcome betrayals with love.

To say a final, definitive NO to the powers of dominion

    The voices that urge us to believe that

        Violence is a way to peace

        Poverty is the collateral damage necessary to an affluent culture

        Separation between haves and have nots, us and them

        Believers and unbelievers, me and you is the way of things,

            the order of life.

Didn’t Jesus’ death put all that to shame?

We have forgotten so much, so soon, in our eagerness to escape

    The cross and achieve this Easter day of joy

        Of eggs and bunnies and life eternal and the Feast

            that is prepared for US.

And our cross-purposes are not what we think they are.

There’s an old, simple song, attributed to Reb Nachman of Breslav,

        He sang: all the world is just a narrow bridge, just a narrow bridge, just a narrow bridge…the important thing is, not to be afraid.

These are the Cross-Purposes of Easter,

    the reasons for resurrection

        the heart of the good news.

This is why we cross this narrow bridge,

    balancing our hopes, our dreams, our fears and our losses

        gripping the neighbor’s hand tightly as we

            maneuver how to stay in the Center

        how not to fall off.

This is why we keep our heads down, focusing too often only on our own small candle

    Lest its flame be blown out if we fail to protect it, and we fall off the path

        Into the chasm of darkness,

            Because we cannot see the way.

This is also why at last we look up,

    and let go…and pass the flame from hand to hand,

    noticing the people in the stopped car, idling nearby

        on the other side of the white line.

All the world is just a narrow bridge…

AND the important thing is not to be afraid.

On James Way, the stream of small flickering lights flowed on toward resurrection.

When the darkness on the street had almost been restored

    the narrow bridge cleared,

    the happy murmuring procession fully on the other side and

        our exodus at last complete

I looked back:

    the car was dropping into gear,

        preparing to resume its passage through the world

    Ordinary time was restored.

But not altogether.

For behind the breath-fogged windows of the passenger side seat,

    Cupped carefully in the hands of the driver’s companion

        One of our candles—Christ’s errant light—

            Shown

Someone had stopped.

Someone had understood what to do with the spices, the silence, the awe.

Someone had stepped off the path,

    Knowing that all the world was just a narrow bridge…

        And the important thing was not to be afraid.

At their approach, a window rolled down silently, and an arm was extended

    A candle passed from hand to hand

    Two strangers from different worlds touched,

The bearer of Easter stepped back,

    Her face now in shadows, as he turned to rejoin the procession.

But in the car, there was a flicker

that cast a warming glow

        over the faces of the four strangers,

            Suffused with joy

As they rolled on quiet wheels back into the world of the ordinary,

    Bearing Light.

Christ is risen, alleluia.