May 20, 2007 Sunday of the Ascension

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.