Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City
May 1, 2008, Ascension Day, Year A
The Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell
Acts 1:1-11
Ephesians 1:15-23
Luke 24:44-53

     It=s wonderful to welcome the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen Drumming Circle here to the service tonight and to be able to celebrate the Feast of the Ascension all together with different members of the Holy Apostles community.  And Ascension is really a strange feast, isn=t it?  It=s rich and full of paradoxes, but in order to get to them we have to get past the pictures that we have in our heads: pictures of Jesus levitating into heaven, of feet disappearing into a cloud.  I was actually reading about one preacher who thought that for her sermon on this evening she would hang a pair of Birkenstocks from the ceiling.

     Some, and there are not very many of us left now, but some of us will remember that before the fire there used to be a picture over the altar on the east wall of Christ ascending.  It=s loss in the fire was perhaps not tragic!  It was affectionately known as ADisco Jesus.@  That association is not why we have drums tonight, and no new iconography has come for the east wall since we=ve been back in the restored church.  There are lots of reasons for that, but it occurred to me as I was thinking about the service for tonight and about the ascension that perhaps this empty evocative space is in its own way an image of the ascension.

     Christ is not where he was before.  He=s not were we might expect him to be.  He=s not present in the same way.  There is, in fact, an absence, an emptiness.  And yet, as the writer to the Ephesians says, the ascended Christ is present everywhere and notably in the church, which is his body, the fullness of the one who fills all in all.  Who fills all in all.  Just breathe into that for a moment, feel it B both the intimacy of it and the vastness of it.  Christ is hidden in a cloud, vanished from the sight of his friends, but also known in a new way: in the faces around us, in our daily life as a community, as we feed one another, as we play together, as we pray and work with one another.

     The ascension is part of the larger experience, the larger theology, of the resurrection- of Jesus= victory over death and evil and his return to God in order that he might pour out his spirit on believers.  In the creed we say AHe ascended to the right hand of the Father@ as a way of expressing in the ascension the closest possible identification, Jesus= full presence, with God the source of all, as well as filling all in all.  This ascension then is the fulfillment and culmination of his journey, and it is also the fulfillment and culmination of ours, because in the ascension Christ was fully human as well as fully divine.  Our human nature is also raised to God=s right hand.  It is the ascended Jesus who will pour out the Spirit at Pentecost and fill the whole world with divine breath and the energy of change and healing and new life.  Liturgically, we celebrate individual aspects of this one larger movement: Easter Sunday, then forty days later Ascension, and ten days after that Pentacost.  But in a sense, they=re all aspects of one thing.

     In the lessons that we read for tonight, the disciples haven=t quite grasped this.  They stand, staring up, wondering, bereft-and yet blessed as well- in Jesus= last action.  The way that they have known Jesus in the years of his ministry among them has vanished forever.  They=re disoriented, as we all are, by big change.  It=s not devastating in the way that the crucifixion was, or the Saturday following that Friday.  These disciples who stand looking up to heaven, have been opened by the resurrection to a far deeper trust in the risen Christ, in the power, love, and mystery of God.  But, it=s as if they=re continually being asked to let go of what they have known.  They don=t ever quite get settled into the Anew normal.@  They=re facing a future they can=t yet imagine.

     As Jesus vanishes into the cloud, they only know him by faith and love, and no longer by sight.  They have to wait for what God will do next, trusting that the Christ they have known so well is still with them in this new and mysterious way.  I don=t know about you, but I certainly resonate with that this evening.  All of us at Holy Apostles are certainly facing transition as Father Bill plans his retirement.  Bill himself is facing transition too.  We may be feeling bereft, but also blessed B also blessed.  We have this experience in so many of our endings that are also beginnings.  Like the disciples we are called to wait and to wonder what God will do and to trust in the power of the risen Christ who is among us, but perhaps not in the way that we=ve come to expect exactly.

     We trust God, and we live into the realization that God has also trusted us, also trusted us with work to do in living out that presence of Christ, being Christ=s body in the world, carrying Christ=s mission of healing and love and forgiveness and feeding one another into the world around us.

     As I thought about images for Ascension Day, about that space on the wall, what came to me was not so much a visual image.  Indeed it comes from this service and it is the image of how we open to the mystery of love in times of transition: the image of rhythm.  Not a disco beat, but a heartbeat.  My experience with Marion and the drummers when I=ve sat with them is that often they begin with the simplest pulse, which is the beat of one=s own heart.  And the drummers follow one another picking up that beat, and something happens that=s called Aentrainment,@ in which people come into the same rhythm, and their life rhythm begins to flow together.  It=s really a remarkable thing to experience in a drumming circle.  It reminds us that, in fact, the very first thing we humans experience is that pulse in utero, with our whole bodies rather than with our ears.  We come to know our mother=s heartbeat.  We have sound and silence and silence and sound, opening and closing, beginning and ending, fullness and emptiness, absence and presence, and that pulse sustains our whole lives- but we rarely think about it because it=s so fundamental.

     When we say that Christ ascended to God=s right hand, we might instead say, AChrist ascended to God=s heart@- to that dynamic pulse, an intimate union- to a perfect entrainment with God the source of all.  And we might say, in the ascension, that we are held there too, with all our human questions and struggles and fears and possibilities.  We are held in the tenderness of divine love, we are alive in the pulsing energy of God=s heart.  So again, the ascension speaks to us of intimacy and vastness.  The Christ who has vanished in the cloud is as close as the beating of our own hearts, and we are drawn with him into the living love of the heart of God, the one who fills all in all.

     So, how shall we live into this, this Ascension evening?  Muse on the paradoxes, breathe, feel the pulse in us, in the community here, and in all creation.  Take the advice of those men in white who might be angels. (We don=t really know.)  They say: ADon=t stand there, staring up into heaven. A Look for Christ in the community, in your neighbor, in the one sitting next to you, family, friends, even enemies.  Be open to the surprise of how he comes, and finally, join in the community of faith just as we do tonight, like the disciples in the temple blessing God B blessing God on this feast of the Ascension for all that has been done for us, blessing God in trust and openness, blessing God with song and word and food shared around this table, with prayers and with silence and with drums.

     Amen.

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