Easter 7A Trinity Searcy Ascension
May 28, 2017 Acts 1:6-14
This is the last Sunday in the Easter season, the Sunday after Ascension. The excitement and enthusiasm of Easter Day is receding in our rearview mirror. The lilies are faded, the music is toned down, the congregation is smaller. Ascension is a little like the day after the party, the day after all the visiting family packs up and drives away. It’s the day to wash the sheets and put away the special dishes. Barbara Brown Taylor describes Jesus’ ascension as the most forgotten event of the church year. Who wants to celebrate being left behind? Who wants to mark the day that Jesus goes out of this world? We are daily so hungry for the presence of God. The one thing we do not need is a day to remind us of God’s absence.
Today’s question is how do we continue as resurrection people after ascension?/ In Acts today we hear about the simultaneous presence/ and then absence of Christ. Where does Jesus go? Tradition has it that he goes to heaven, which may not be up, as much as it is beyond. Jesus goes there to finish what he liturgically starts with us six months ago. Jesus’ Christmas present to us was being born into the body of this world. His ascension gift is that through him/ the body of the world is borne back to God. Jesus presents his own ruined risen body to be at the right hand of God. Jesus imports flesh and blood into those holy precincts. He paves the way for us, so that when we arrivelater, everyone will not be so shocked by us. Jesus restores the goodness of all creation and ours in particular. By ascending bodily into heaven, he shows us that flesh and blood are good, not bad; that they are good enough for Jesus,/ good enough for heaven,/ good enough for God. By putting on flesh and blood and keeping them on, Jesus not only brings God to us; he also brings us to God.
Absence always does hurt the most when we remember what presence was like. Absence is the arm flung across the bed in the middle of the night into the empty space where once was a beloved sleeper. Absence is the child’s room now empty and hung with silence and dust. Absence is the overgrown lot where our old house once stood, the house where people laughed and believed happiness would last forever. Absence is the body parts which no longer work.
You can not miss what you have never known, which makes our sense of absence and especially our sense of God’s absence the very best proof that we knew God once, and that we will know God again. There is loss in absence, but there is hope.
It is our sense of God’s absence that brings us together to this place today in search of God’s presence. Former Bishop Porter Taylor of Western North Carolina describes a liturgy conference where people discuss their most important part of the Eucharist liturgy. I know you are shocked to know it was not the sermon. For the majority, including the bishop, it is the moment in the Eucharist where each of us holds open our hands to receive the bread of life. It is the moment that we acknowledge our dependence on a reality that we have known, that we search for, beyond us that has the power to nourish and sustain us.//
Like the band of forlorn disciples, you return to this sacred space in Searcy again and again. It is the last place you saw him, so of course it is the first place anybody thinks to look for him to come again. You have been coming here a long time now, but even in his absence this is a good place to remember him, to recall best moments, argue about the details, to swap the old stories until you begin to revive again, life flowing back into you, as you retell the stories of God’s presence here in this place in your lives.
“Men and women of Galilee, men and women of Searcy, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”
That is what two well dressed men in white robes say to us and to the disciples on the mount called Olivet as they gaze openmouthed into the sky,/ and the disciples most probably would have stood there like that all afternoon had their attention not been directed back to earth. These angels may have been sent to remind us that if we want to see Jesus again, there is no use looking up. More likely we should look around /at each other,/ at the world,/ at the ordinary people in our ordinary lives, because that is where we are most likely to find Jesus, not the way we used to know him, but a new way, not in his own body but in our bodies, your bodies. The risen, the ascended Lord is no longer in a particular place on earth. He can now be everywhere on earth, especially in each of us./
If the disciples had it their way, they might have tied Jesus up with their fishing nets so that he could not get away again, so that they would know where to find him forever. Only that is not what happens. Jesus is taken away as the disciples stand looking up toward heaven. Then they stop looking up toward heaven, look at each other instead, and get on with the business of being the body of Christ on this earth.
And once they do this, surprising things happen. They say things that sound like him. They do things they have only seen him do before. When two or three gather together,/ it is as if there is someone else in the room whom they cannot see, the abiding presence of Christ, as available as bread and wine, as familiar as each other’s faces. It is as if he has not ascended but exploded with all the holiness that once was concentrated in him alone, flying everywhere/ with the seeds of heaven now sown in all the fields of the earth.
We gather here this morning to worship in this historic church with the many memories of so many of you, to acknowledge God’s absence, and to seek God’s presence, to sing, to pray, to be silent, to be still, to hold out our empty hands to be filed with bread, to drink wine, with the abiding presence of the absent Christ until he comes again. Do you sometimes miss him? Do you long for assurance that you are not left behind? Why do you sit or stand looking up toward heaven? Look around you, look around you! There he is! Here/ is the light of Christ.
Bradley, Schmeling, “Reflections of the lectionary,” Christian Century, p. 20, May, 28, 2014.
Barbara Brown Taylor, “Looking Up to Heaven,” Gospel Medicine, pp. 72-78.
Barbara Crafton, “Almost Daily Email from Geranium farm,” Ascension, 2004.
Joseph Harvard, III, “Preaching the Easter Texts: Can I get a Witness?, Journal for Preacher, Easter, 2014, p, 10.