Ascension
By Stephanie Paulsell
May 20, 2007
Ascension Sunday
Lessons: Ephesians 1: 15-23, Luke 24: 44-53
Several summers ago, during my first and only trip to Ireland, I visited the early medieval monastic site of Glendalough with students and faculty from a seminary in Dublin. The site dates back to the sixth century, when, led by an angel, St. Kevin founded a monastery there. Nestled in a valley between two lakes, Glendalough still boasts the remains of a beehive hermitage, a round stone tower more than a hundred feet high and a church that people come from all over the world to admire. I saw it on the kind of day the Dubliners call a “soft day,” with a gentle misty rain falling. Glendalough was exactly what I had imagined Ireland would look like: wet stones; lush green grass; quiet, ancient ruins.
The soft day began to turn aggressive, though, and when and the mist changed to driving rain, our group reluctantly headed indoors to look at the exhibits. I fell to talking with a Nigerian student who had come from Africa to Ireland to prepare to become a priest. We walked through the little museum, looking at gravestones and bits of masonry that had once been a part of the monastery. One artifact in particular made us stop and stare in admiration–an intricately carved stone cross, with a circle sweeping gracefully around the point where the arms of the cross intersected. It was beautiful, and it’s possible it might once have stood along the pilgrim road, where travelers would have paused to pray as they made their way to ground made holy by St. Kevin’s labors and his prayers. As we stood there, admiring it, the seminarian from Nigeria turned to me and said, “Isn’t it wonderful to see where we came from?”
Where we came from? We were both a long way from home, especially him; he was half a world away from where he came from. I murmured piously, “oh yes, it is,” but inside I admit I was startled. If there’s one thing I learned in school and now pass on to my own students, it’s that where we come from matters. Our race, our gender, our class, the families and geographies that shaped us as we grew matter crucially in how we receive and respond to the world. It was startling to hear this young man make such a bold claim to our common ancestry, startling the freedom with which he swept across national boundaries and ethnic differences to claim Ireland as our home.
Startling, but also thrilling. So much of our faith depends upon radical claims to a common ancestry, to where we come from. As Christians, we trace our origins to an ancient covenant God made with a people God loved. We find our beginnings in Adam and Eve, in Moses, in Abraham and Sarah. We come from the garden of Eden, from the desert, from Mount Sinai, from Jerusalem. Why not Ireland as well? Why not claim those monks building their monastery stone by stone more than a thousand years ago as our ancestors? Why not trace our family tree back to St. Kevin and claim his stories as our own–especially the one about the otter who brought him a salmon with which to feed his hungry monks during a drought, or the one about the bird who laid an egg in Kevin’s outstretched hand while he was at prayer.
My seminarian friend and I had been formed by our experiences, our race, our culture, our nationality, our gender, to be sure. But he reminded me that, as important as these factors are, they are not the last thing to be said about us. We were Nigerian and American but we were also more than that, and that more was what made us also Irish, also children of St. Kevin. Isn’t it wonderful to see where we came from? Oh yes, yes it is.
Christians have often understood the story of Jesus’s ascension as a story about crossing boundaries and making radical claims to a new homeland. When Jesus ascended into heaven, St. Leo the Great once preached, he brought our humanity with him. He made a place for us and all that makes us human in the very presence of God. Once Jesus took his place at God’s right hand, countless Christian preachers have proclaimed, we became citizens of heaven.
All of this emphasis on heaven, of course, means that the feast of the Ascension is perhaps not the most comfortable of feasts for us. Protestants–especially progressive American Protestants who pride ourselves on having our gaze fixed firmly on the world around us--have often not known what to do with the Ascension and often don’t celebrate it at all. Congregationalists like us, even if we do observe Ascension Sunday, are usually more eager to get on to the next celebration, that of Pentecost. We’re more comfortable with being Christ’s body in this world than we are squinting into the sunlight with the disciples as Jesus drifts out of sight. We worry that turning our gaze towards heaven means turning it away from the earth and its troubles.
It is interesting that Luke is the gospel writer most concerned with the ascension, because his gospel is a gospel of incarnation, of solidarity with all that is human. Luke’s Jesus lives in ways we recognize. He is born from a woman’s body, he grows and develops, he causes his parents to worry. He hungers, he thirsts; he gets tired and frustrated; he has friends whom he loves. When his body is mistreated, he suffers; and when he is nailed to a cross, he dies, just as we would. Even when he breaks free of death and rises, alive, from his tomb, Luke takes care to emphasize Jesus’s embodiment, the humanity he shares with us. When Jesus appears to his friends after his death and resurrection, he is hungry. “Have you anything here to eat?” he asks them. They gave him a piece of broiled fish, Luke tells us, and he took it and ate it in their presence. Even after death, even after resurrection, Jesus is flesh and bone, body and appetite. I am no ghost, he says. Touch me, and see.
So important is Jesus’s ascension to Luke that he tells two ascension stories: one at the end of his gospel, the other at the beginning of the Book of Acts. They’re not exactly the same, but in both stories, Jesus promises the disciples that he will send the Holy Spirit to empower them. In both stories, he instructs his followers to preach the good news, beginning in Jerusalem, and spreading from there across the earth. And in both stories, the disciples watch as Jesus ascends and moves beyond what their eyes are able to see. We are accustomed, I think, to seeing our own foibles and misapprehensions reflected in the stories of Jesus’s disciples. But when Jesus finally disappears from their sight, when his presence turns to absence, it is the disciples who begin to resemble us: followers of Jesus who cannot hear him preach and teach, or feel the touch of his fingers as he pats mud into our sightless eyes, or watch as he drives our demons into the sea. In that moment, the disciples became like us: followers of Jesus who do not see him face to face.
The disciples have to learn a new way of knowing Jesus, a new way of hearing his voice and feeling his claim on their lives. St. Leo rightly noted that “it takes great strength of mind and a faithful and enlightened heart to believe...in what escapes the bodily eye and to desire...what cannot be seen.” The disciples–who didn’t even recognize Jesus when he fell into step with them on the Emmaus road–are going to need such strong and enlightened minds and hearts. St. Leo, who was also Pope Leo, taught that we would find the presence of Jesus in the sacraments. And five centuries before Leo was born, the disciples seem to know that instinctively: after Jesus was “carried up into heaven,” Luke writes, “they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem, where they were continually in the temple blessing God.” They sought him in prayer, and they sought him in each other, as they shared meals and prayers in their crowded upper room. Indeed it was not until they were “all together in one place” that the wind of the Holy Spirit filled their house, blew through their bodies and gave them their first taste of the ministry they were called to when suddenly they could communicate across boundaries of nation and race and language.
The disciples have to learn a new way of knowing Jesus, and that is why the story of Jesus’s ascension is so important for Luke. This is not a story about turning away from the earth, from each other, from our embodied lives. It is not a story about gazing into heaven and never looking down again. For Luke, the story of Jesus’s embodied life, death and resurrection and the story of the work of the church in the world are one story, and the ascension is the pivot on which it turns. It is the story of the disappearance of one body and the reappearance, gradually and at great cost, of a new body, the body of Christ, the church.
Jesus’s followers were ordinary people with ordinary weaknesses. They could not stay awake with Jesus while he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane. They fought over who was the greatest. One of them denied he ever knew Jesus at all, and they all hid themselves away after Jesus’s terrible death. They were ordinary people, shaped by their language, their religion, the empire that oppressed them, their work. But they were also more than these things. When Jesus no longer walked beside them, teaching and healing, they found that even the most fearful among them had the courage to take up his work. When they could no longer see Jesus’ face or hear his voice, they learned to find him in each other. The Spirit clothed them in power, as Jesus had promised, but it also clothed them in freedom–the freedom to become more than they knew themselves to be.
The feast of the Ascension is a day to remember and celebrate that freedom, a freedom in which Jesus of Nazareth also shared. Seated at God’s right hand, the letter to the Ephesians says, Christ is both the crucified and resurrected Galilean teacher and a fullness so far beyond the reach of any “rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named” that any attempts–including ours–to pin that fullness down once and for all are doomed to fail. Christ is always more than we can say or imagine and certainly much more than we can control.
And we, we are also more than can be defined once and for all. We are more than our jobs, more even than our vocations. We are more than our anxieties and fears, more than the narratives that rule our lives for good or ill. We are more than our parents, more than our children, more than our siblings and spouses. We are more than our successes and more than our failures, more than our virtues and more than our sins. We are more than what others think of us and more than what we know of ourselves.
There is more to us than even we can imagine, and no wonder. We are the sons and daughters of Abraham and Sarah who became our parents in their old age. We are the children of St. Kevin and his passionate prayers. We have brothers and sisters all over the world--in Nigeria, in El Salvador, in Palestine, in Spain–from whom we have much to learn. We come from Eden and from Egypt and from vast nameless deserts. We come from Bethany and Jerusalem, from County Wicklow and from Rome.
We belong to this spinning earth, and we are citizens of heaven. On this ascension day, let us rise to meet one another in all our uniqueness, all our particularity, and all that is still hidden and waiting inside us, and remember that it is, indeed, wonderful to see where we came from. Amen.